At a small, let's say salon-ish, party last night, among socially strong and intellectually quick people, I apparently adopted a defensive and submissive posture while rehearsing my graduate project for the hostess. I am told that I sort of wrapped my arms around myself, pulled my wine up near my chest, tilted my head, and rocked side-to-side.
The moment I fell into the abyss of jargon (I must have said something like, "a critique of narrative subject construction"), the subject was changed. Seriously. No transition of any sort; just a new topic. This did not feel like rudeness on the hostess' part at all (the preceding is either the most naive response I've ever had to anything or a happy testament to the unpredictability of conversation among the capable). The point is that none of this is offered as a complaint about the person who listened to a few sentences describing a scholarly project. It's reasonable to think that, had we been talking about physics or accounting or international relations or surfing (the on-the-waves kind), we would've moved along just as quickly. Maybe travel stories or weather would purchase more time.
I don't generally blush and cower when talking about my interests. Or do I? It was distinctly unsettling to hear that I took on the aspect of an uncertain student in that situation.
I study the ways fiction is part of autobiography and biography.
There. That works for wine and cheese, doesn't it? The written version: I'm producing analysis of works that at once tell stories of lives and undermine the telling, most often by overtly making things up. That is, life writing that seems not to trust its own project of reporting on and talking about actual experience. Incorporating that suspicion into the projects themselves makes the work more meaningful, even more honest. If I create a fictional character in an ostensibly nonfiction work, a character who provides a critique of either the story or the way it's told, I take a step towards historiographic transparency. Let's take Edmund Morris' memoir of Ronald Reagan, Dutch, in which an imaginary "Edmund Morris" relates the biography of the President. The work accomplishes more than fun experimentalism: along with a number of unconventional narrative devices, the presence of a fictional Boswell keeps the reader from running away with the fantasy of biographical transparency. If Morris controls one fiction, he might be deploying more. The work is a sort of biographical pedagogy, insisting that readers ought to bear in mind the unreliability of the form. I think that unreliability's wonderful. Of course, Morris can't escape the pragmatism of the political, and his book found a chilly reception among its subject's admirers. A convincing reminder of at least one characteristic of these works: they are not literary exercizes without interested readerships.
Fine. All well and good, but over cocktails...?
At the moment, more than ever, I wish this blog was anonymous.
The trick, here, is that talking about yourself is an autobiographical act. Too much autobiography. The experience of talking about your experience of writing about other people talking about their experiences begins to spin the head. I sort of wish I had a fictional device that walked along with me and started interjecting whenever my version of my work got undigestable.
In the January article on academic blogs, it sort of looks as if the group pointed out to me that I write autobiographically, here, and that so, in a sense, my blog and my work share some native connection. I dunno. It seems like I already got it. I had just explained that the few instances in which my scholarly work had become part of the record, here, had been unsatisfying. Well, once again...
Yeah. Anonymity.
Posted by dave at March 6, 2005 1:05 PM | TrackBack