The Autobiographer as Family Archivist: Relational Autobiographies and the Many Modes of Writing a Life

Anne Rüggemeier

Justus Liebig University Giessen, Giessen

Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of recording, the visibility of the image. (Pierre Nora 13)

Thinking about autobiography, people usually expect the story of an autonomous self, telling his/her personal story from a backward perspective, focussing on the development of his/her own personality. However, contemporary autobiographies often concentrate on somebody else's story. Apart from being the autobiography of the self, they are, at the same time, the auto/biography of the other(s).^[1]

In My Ear at His Heart: Reading my Father Hanif Kureishi reflects upon the construction of his book and thereby formulates a preliminary definition of this new way of life writing:

"Among other things, this has been a story of generations, told through the males, from my grandfather Colonel Murad/Kureishi, via my own father, his brothers, myself and my own sons, three British boys called Kureishi. Out of my reading and others' writing I have made a story of the past, imagining around their imaginations." (238)

This intermingling of life stories is already hinted at in the title and also in the cover photograph which shows the author as a little boy leaning against his father's chest. The father's black suit offers a contrastive background for the little boy who is dressed in white. The complementary quality of the two figures presented in the photo well foreshadows the dialogically structured outline of the book, telling of a grown-up man trying to make sense of himself while reading his late father's autobiographic manuscripts. However, the material he consults while writing his own autobiography is by no means only textual. Apart from the integration of photographs that show the author in different periods of his life, along with his uncles, his father and his sons, Kureishi also refers to pop songs, films and TV programmes to trace back and reveal in how far his way of narrating a life is influenced and inextricably bound up with other people, other narratives and other media.

In the same way, Vikram Seth's Two Lives features the telling of a personal life via the ostensible examination of other people's lives. The fact that he mainly concentrates on his relatives' life stories and has to search through a vast amount of non-verbal material inspires him to describe himself as a "family archivist" (52). Seth tells or rather investigates the lives of his great uncle Shanti and that of Shanti's German wife Henny. The young Seth had lived with the Indian-German couple when he had left India at the age of seventeen to further his studies in London. Seth himself describes his book as both "memoir as well as biography [...] a double biography, an intertwined meditation, where the author is an anomalous third braid, sometimes visible, sometimes not" (491). The image of the "third braid" embodies the interwovenness of the autobiographical self with the life stories of others. Researching their lives, Seth draws on lots of multimodal materials, including interview transcripts, photographs, letters, passports, professional cards and certificates of naturalization to name only some of the official and personal documents, which are reprinted in the book.

Obviously, the two texts by Kureishi and Seth cannot be regarded as fulfilling Philippe Lejeune's definition of autobiography as a "retrospective narrative in prose that someone makes of his own existence when he puts the principal accent upon his life, especially upon the story of his own personality" (Lejeune quoted in Smith/Watson 1). Instead of putting the principal accent upon their own lives, these authors set their autobiographical selves in an ongoing dialogue with their relational others. Apart from that, narrative meaning-making is presented as a negotiation between different modes and media, including poems, letters and interviews and, therefore, is not just a "retrospective narrative in prose."

My Ear at His Heart and Two Lives mirror Paul John Eakin's argument in How Our Lives Become Stories, where he states that the self is "truly plural in its origins and subsequent formation" and that it "is defined by - and lives in terms of - its relations with others" (43). Eakin also points to the fact that "[n]arrative structure in these cases is thus telling us something fundamental on the relational structure of the autobiographer's identity, about its roots and involvement in another's life and story" (60). Eakin suggests the generic term "relational autobiography" (55) for these texts. In view of this claim, this paper aims to demonstrate how both the polyphony of voices and the plurality of multimodal 'material' work together to put forward a shift in the conception of autobiographies, and the models of memory as well as identity on which they are based. I will argue that the notion of a relational self as it is represented in texts like My Ear at His Heart and Two Lives, reflects an experience of selfhood that cannot be mediated within the conventional forms and frames of autobiography, but asks for the integration of various modes and media. To back up this argument the following sections will offer a more detailed analysis of the two texts to show the various forms and functions which multimodal narrative practices can have in relational autobiographies.

Hanif Kureishi's My Ear at his Heart

Before he found his father's manuscripts, Kureishi had planned to write a book about himself narrated through a commented rereading of the writers he once liked:

"I would look at, for instance, Kerouac, Dostoevsky, Salinger, Orwell, Hesse, Ian Fleming and Wilde again, in order to see whether I could reinhabit the worlds they once made in my head, and identify myself in them. [.] Each book, I hoped, would revive memories of the circumstances in which it was read." (1f.)

The quote underlines Kureishi's awareness of the influence stories have had on his understanding of himself and his perception of the world. He could probably have written a relational autobiography centring on writers and texts that form part of his identity. The discovery of his father's unpublished manuscripts, however, directs his narrative focus more toward the stories and myths that constitute a family and, connected to it, the media that participate in forming them.

As it has already been hinted at in the introductory sentences, the combination of text and photography plays a decisive role in My Ear at his Heart. Resulting from its deictic quality, photography might be regarded both as a tool to bestow reliability on the autobiographical author and as an attempt to provide evidence for what he claims to have seen, experienced and lived through. However, Kureishi does not make use of the pictures as evidence but, rather, presents them as riddles. Apart from making short references informing the reader whom he sees in the pictures, the author neither contextualizes nor interprets the photographs. This practice of inserting photographs serves two functions. Firstly, the reader is made aware of the text's gaps and distortions. She is confronted with its incoherency and feels the need to actively engage in the construction of narrative sense. As a consequence, she herself becomes a biographer as the 'text' she tries to understand and put into order is somebody else's life. Secondly, the reader - who is not interested in segmented snapshots, but in coherent sequences - begins to identify with the auto/biographer. Both reader and the first-person narrator are confronted with the graphic or textual fragments of a life and try to make sense of it.

It is, therefore, no coincidence that Kureishi describes his efforts to read and understand his father's identity through his autobiographical manuscripts in the style of a detective story: "It is here, for a while, that I lose my father. [...] If I am to locate him again it will have to be in Omar's second volume of autobiography" (85). This observation is also reflected in Roger Porter's use of the term "epistomaniacs" when he describes "these autobiographical children" trying to make sense of their fathers' lives (101):

"These writers, tracking their past via external sources, regard themselves as detectives, public or private investigators researching their past by amassing evidence; they are sleuths of selfhood, gathering and sifting clues in the documents in order to establish conclusive evidence." (Ibid.)

As the combination of the media text and photography in My Ear at his Heart contributes to the reader's awareness of ambiguity and contingency in the telling of a life, the text questions conventional generic expectations of linearity and coherence. It becomes clear that 'truth' in autobiography is also an effect of narrative meaning making. This observation is echoed in Hanif Kureishi's meta-autobiographical commentary:

"It annoys me, as it might any novelist, to have my own work reduced to autobiography, as though you've just written down what happened. Often, writing isn't always a reflection of experience so much, as a substitute for it, an 'instead of' rather than a 'reliving', a kind of daydreaming." (18)

Kureishi's autobiographical practice can be called truly relational, because he writes his own autobiography against the foil of his father's manuscripts. In this way, his father's unpublished work is finally published as part of the son's autobiography. Simultaneously, the father's life - his memories and his imaginations - become part of the son's life. In this way, the text privileges the intersubjective over the individual perspective. Both the idea of a closed text and the notion of a closed autonomous self are discarded. Instead, textual meaning and personal identity are shown to be result of mediation - both between media and between different subjective positions.

My Ear at his Heart actually confronts the reader with an endless stream of references to writers and books, but also to movies, pop songs, actors, screenwriters and theatre plays. Kureishi thereby awakens consciousness for the omnipresence of stories that form our experience and, consequently, generate our reality. Audio-visual media like film and pop songs are especially emphasized not only as producers of great dreams, but also as schemata to adapt one's view of life to. Especially Hollywood movies and sitcoms are shown to exert a strong influence on the characters' perception of reality and the workings of their memories. The father's manuscript contains hints that his youth in the Bombay upper class was highly influenced by the movies of the 1940s. While male Bollywood stars function as role models for Indian boys (50), female Hollywood stars are greatly in demand as sex symbols ("Shanti's recent sexual adventure has also been a triumph over his brother Mahmood, who still sleeps only with pictures of Betty Gable and Rita Hayworth." (76)). As a consequence, the father's memories of events taking place in his youth are very much seen through the lens of contemporary movies. As an example, he adapts the description of his own love story to the plot of Casablanca and, connected to it, compares the Indian 1947 upheaval against the British with the North African resistance against the German occupation during World War II (76-78). These observations demonstrate that Casablanca serves as a template for the autobiographical stories of Hanif's father and offers a frame for both his reception and interpretation of reality.

While the father's account of his youth unmasks the high impact of movies on his generation, the son's memories are much more influenced by TV programmes and pop music. Kureishi reflects on the different roles and functions TV has played in his family life:

"[M]y parents had enough in common, both wanting to lead a controlled, peaceful life, following the suburban model of contented housewife, heterosexual father at work, and children learning well at school. This was a paradigm we saw often on television in British Sit-coms, as well as in I love Lucy, The Dick Van Dycke Show and Bewitched." (99)

Kureishi debunks the TV shows of the 1960s as one main source for people's concept of a normal life in the suburbs.  With their circular plotline (normal day - special event that evokes chaos or misunderstanding - solution and return to normality) sitcoms strengthen and support the cognitive frames defining "normal" family life, secured by the reliable performance of its main actors, namely "contented housewife" und "heterosexual father at work." Thus, Kureishi shows that the characteristics of suburban family life are very much oriented along the ideological constructs of decent middle-class life, which are transported via the vehicle of sitcom plot structures. While his parents' generation unconsciously adapt their views of a good life to sitcom ideology, young Hanif and his friends choose Pop as a provider for an alternative concept of life:

"For a lot of kids, Pop was the only hope for a creative unpredictable life [...]. Otherwise we were locked into the postwar version of a controlled - married, of course - and secure life, the life my parents wanted to live [...] [T]his is partly what it meant to be lower middle-class: unless your parents have more expansive ideas, the notion of who you can be is severely limited." (158)

The quote emphasises that both the older and the younger generations derive their ideas about life from the frames and schemata offered by TV, music and various other multimedia forms. It seems that life is felt to be so complex for the individual that the simplified reality versions offered on TV function as an orientation for the perception, telling and living of a life. Thus, the close relation between societal reality and media-imparted ideas of a good or normal life becomes obvious. It seems that lending significance to (personal) life is not so much an individual, as it is a social process. Films like Casablanca, as well as sitcoms become the vehicle through which the reality of life is generated. Film and music in this case work towards an understanding of "stories we live by" that absolutely transgresses the textual or literary sphere. Individual persons' self-conceptions are shown as highly influenced by media-imparted life stories narrated through songs, movies, pictures or online blogs. This notion strongly supports the idea of relational selfhood. The ubiquitous presence of multimedia forms and their influence on individual people's forming of a sense of self backs up the argument that "the traditional concept of individual selves is fundamentally problematic. What have served as individual traits, mental process or personal characteristics can promisingly be viewed as constituents of relational forms" (Gergen and Gergen, Narrative and the Self 18), which, among other things, are developed and transported via the new media. 

References to movies, TV shows and music demonstrate that both self-perception and self-construction are not only grounded in verbally mediated narrative schemata, but, rather, function across modes and media. In this way, the integration of media-related forms of narration into contemporary English autobiographies has the effect of revealing traditional notions of the autonomous self to be inadequate and puts forward the idea of relational selfhood instead.

Vikram Seth's Two Lives

Vikram Seth's Two Lives shows that the multiple modalities of experience that make up a life do not necessarily have to be transmitted via the new media. The book tells the story of Seth's great-uncle, Shanti, and his great-aunt, Henny. Nevertheless, it is not only a double biography, but also includes lots of autobiographical details, thoughts and feelings of the auto/biographer Vikram Seth himself. "The story of the story" (Eakin, How Our Lives 58) can be found in the gathering of the oral, written and multimodal material that Seth goes through to come to terms with his uncle's, his aunt's, and his own life.

The book starts with a description of young Vikram's arrival at his uncle's house in Hendon, North London. The Indian-born boy comes to stay with Shanti and his wife, Henny, to finish his education in Britain. His uncle met his German wife before the war as a dental student studying in Berlin. He took lodging with the Caro family consisting of Henny, her sister and their mother. Shanti lived with the Jewish family for three years, secretly in love with Henny, who was then still engaged to another man. However, after Henny was sent to England as a Jewish refugee from Germany in 1939, her fiancé abandoned her to marry a non-Jewish woman. After the war, Shanti and Henny met again in London, their lives entirely changed by the war. Henny's mother and sister had been killed in the Holocaust. Shanti had to fight hard to get the possibility to work as a dentist because he had lost his left arm in the war. Henny married Shanti, "the sole link to her old world" (181).

Seth starts to work on the book after Henny's death. Urged by his mother, he begins a series of interviews with Shanti ("You don't know what exactly to write about next. Why don't you write about him?" 50) who still suffers very much from the loss of his wife and needs a project to participate in.

I carried out eleven longish interviews over five month, between June and October 1994. [.] Though I had begun by thinking of the interviews as a duty to be performed by me in my capacity as a sort of family archivist, I soon began to look forward to them. (51f.)

Although the story started to be primarily Shanti's story, the two men could not avoid talking about Henny. Nevertheless, it seemed that any book emerging from this interview situation was going to focus on Shanti ("About aunty Henny, my information would of necessity be second-hand. I could not interview her." (51)). However, as the author himself explains "I could not have called the book Two Lives unless her voice played a role as strong as Uncle's" (186).  Fortunately, the book project receives a wholly new framework when one summer afternoon the author's father who is visiting from India finds a cobweb-covered cabin trunk in the attic of uncle Shanti's house in Hendon. The "trove" contains

"[.] books in German, a few photograph albums, some financial files relating to Germany in the fifties. There was a small morocco-and-gilt leather purse containing hand written poems. Most important of all, there was a file of letters sent to her - and even the occasional carbon copy of a letter sent by her - covering almost exactly the decade of the forties." (187)

From this point on, Henny's story outshines the account of Shanti's life based on oral interviews. The letters, many of which are included as copies or transcripts in the book, recreate a sense of her personality and, apart from that, clarify and give details on the matters the author would never have dared to ask her about. Among them are the last postcards Henny received from her mother and sister from the concentration camps of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. The exchange of letters with friends still alive and living in Berlin after the war make it possible to trace back Henny's efforts to get to know more details about the last months of her family and the role their community of friends played in that time. Many of the letters implicitly express the guilt shared by Henny and other survivors, but also reveal treachery and betrayal by former friends, neighbours and colleagues.

Apart from a second biographical focus that concentrates on Henny's life, the discovery of the trunk also works in another direction. While searching his material, Seth develops into a co-detective, sharing Henny's interests in investigating her family's fate until eventually he tries not only to reconstruct her life but identifies so strongly with Henny that her questions become his obsessions.  In an attempt to find out what happened to Henny's sister, Lola, he consults books, maps and testimonies of Auschwitz survivors to reconstruct her life in Auschwitz. He writes part of Lola's imaginative, but also probable autobiography, using the modal auxiliary verb "would":

"After selection, Lola would have entered the electrified barbed-wire precincts of the women's camp. Her head would have been shorn, she would have been made to strip, she would have been disinfected, and a number would have been tattooed on her forearm. [.] Now the clothes she had worn would be taken away and she would be given striped clothing and clogs. This is what she would wear for the rest of her life - a few days." (222)

Seth's attempt to put himself in Henny's position, trying to imagine how it should have felt to ask, to speculate, but never to know for sure results in the biographer's obsession with Lola's story. The borders between Seth as a biographer and Henny as his biographical object become very fluid. He weaves his thoughts into her feelings and creates a narrative that defies traditional borders between biography and autobiography^[2]. Furthermore, the conventional expectations regarding "truth" in auto/biographical texts are discarded. Seth investigates and imagines around the multimodal material he has. Yet, he cannot arrive at any facts or truth(s).

Seth's self-identification as "a sort of family archivist" (52) takes on a new meaning after the discovery of the trunk whose contents bear witness to the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Telling Henny's life, the author uses a very simple and matter of fact language, but he combines it with material that speaks for itself. According to Hallet

"There are phenomena and aspects of the world, then, that can hardly be conceived of as, or translated into, verbal information. The incorporation of visual or graphic information in a narrative text is, in a sense, an admission of the limitations of verbal narration in a visualized world: it is a form of narrative surrender, which is sometimes made almost explicit." (147)

Apart from examining approximately a hundred photographs showing mainly friends and family, the author also approaches the difficult life of his aunt through reproductions of army postcards, Red Cross messages, pages from a Jewish prayer book, passports, Gestapo transport lists, death notices, property declarations, claims for indemnification, statements of earnings, excerpts from family chronicles and, above all, personal letters. In addition to the multimodality of the material, multilingualism (most of the official documents are reproduced in their original German version, while letters are mostly not only translated, but are also given in the original, often handwritten version) contributes to both the authentic impression and the complexity of the text. On the one hand, the incorporation of other modes in the auto/biographical narrative of Two Lives serves to alert the readers to the complexities of life writing by highlighting the often arbitrary (re)construction of meaning from fragmentary and incomplete material. On the other hand, it is the vast amount of multimodal material that evokes a very real impression of the cruelty and the desperation that shaped Henny's life. The possibility to look at the same pictures and documents that both the author of the story and one of its main protagonists have looked at and touched dissolves the barrier between the textual and the non-textual world.

Conclusion

Relational autobiographies like Two Lives and My Ear at His Heart feature the "narratives of narrative making" (Eakin, How Our Lives 58) as their core subject. This is why multimodal storytelling plays a significant role in relational life writing. Multimodal texts make it possible to highlight the processes of autobiographic meaning-making and allow us to realize how auto/biographical texts result from the combination and evaluation of often arbitrary material and, simultaneously, how selves construct themselves in dependence on other people's life stories. The use of multimodal, multitextual and multimedia narrative forms produce open texts that mirror the open identity concepts expressed in relational autobiographies.

The reading and writing of autobiography as an attempt to construct a life from diverse hints and sources is represented in relational autobiographies through family root trips, interviews, the gathering of personal and official documents and the evaluation of diaries and autobiographical manuscripts. These practices evoke the impression that both auto/biographical coherency and unified identities are achieved only through the deliberate and often arbitrary construction of autobiographical meaning. As a consequence, traditional autobiographic genre conventions are dismantled.

Both social psychologists and literary scholars have long been regarding coherency and unity as the constitutive characteristics of self-narration and identity (c. Polkinghorn, Bruner, Lejeune). Relational autobiographies defy both the notion of a unified text and the idea of an autonomous identity. Instead, textual openness, polyphony and multimodality form the basis for a conception of the self that "is defined by - and lives in terms of - its relation with others" (Eakin, How Our Lives 43).

Vikram Seth portrays this fragmentary, dependent and ever-changing self in Two Lives: "Shaken about the globe, we live out our fractured lives. Enticed or fleeing, we re-form ourselves, taking on partially the coloration of our new backgrounds" (403). The quote emphasizes the challenges of self-narration at the beginning of the 21^st century. Relational autobiographies undertake to innovatively engage with these challenges by integrating new narrative modes that contribute to the generic development of autobiography.

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References