Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

Prologue: What Is “Space”?

I first thought about space in life writing when I participated in the research group “Self-Narratives in Transcultural Perspective” focused on “Raum” at the Free University in Berlin in 2006. I knew from years of study in Germany that the connotations of Raum differ from those of its English cognate “room” and are not identical with the general term “space”; Raum, with its focus on co-constructed social space, is more philosophical and metaphorical than related English concepts such as place and landscape. But thinking between languages and life writing traditions about what “space” connotes can be productive for reading life narratives.

Interestingly, space in Anglo-American autobiography has not been theorized in a systematic way.[1] The two-volume Encyclopedia of Life Narrative has no entry for “space” or “landscape,” “site,” or “zone”—and, of course, not for “Raum.” American literary history, for example, focuses extensively on differentiating between the concepts of place and space in discussing locale or region, particularly in studies of the South and the West. Lawrence Buell argues that there is no unmediated access to place because “nature has been doubly otherized in modern thought,” symbolically reinforcing the subservience of disempowered groups (21). Buell argues that the sense of place is necessarily always a social product and not simply a notion of unmarked space as what is there (77). Space, as the natural environment on its own terms, cannot be articulated outside the history of cartographies that have assigned it place-names and boundary markers. Place is “felt space, space humanized, rather than the material world taken on its own terms” (253). For Buell, space becomes place when one is conscious of where one lives and develops a “sense of place” through life of various sorts that inhabits a locale. Space, in American studies, then, is often the locus of place, landscape, and myths of a promised land.

Kathleen A. Boardman and Gioia Woods, in their introduction to a collection of women autobiographers’ narratives of the American West, read place as spatial network, asserting: “One marker of autobiography produced in and about the North American West is a preoccupation with place, along with a focus on identity issues directly related to place: rootedness, anxiety, nostalgia, restlessness. . . . For some autobiographers, place is a problem to be solved; for others, it is the basis (or “ground”) for a claim to authenticity” (3). Boardman and Woods assert that the performance of identity can be observed at the intersection of three kinds of location—physical, rhetorical, and political—and that it is never reducible simply to geography (19). Situating a life narrative in space, then, means specifying multiple coordinates that bring the discussion closer to the implications of Raum as co-constructed social space.

Ethnic American studies throughout the nineties interrogated the space of the border, the “borderlands” of identity, employing Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of la frontera. Anzaldúa stresses the ambiguity and anxiety of location along the border, which becomes a site of encounter between different cultures that may configure local inhabitants as “aliens” in both. Their acts of crossing, translation, and inventing new hybrid languages and practices, which Anzaldúa calls “linguistic terrorism,” are ways of navigating a geopolitical space that can never be called “home” (58). Similarly, José David Saldivar’s study of border writing discusses zones of encounter, contestation, and negotiation between subjects whose access to power and authority in one history—Mexican—are subordinated to colonial practices of a dominant American other. The rich conceptual vocabulary generated around thinking about space through its borders and zones of encounter thus offers critical terms for texturing the representation of place.

Essays in a special issue of PMLA on urban lives and the city assert that displacement is the other side of place. For multitudes of urban peoples in the twenty-first century—in post-Katrina New Orleans, in Beirut and Baghdad, Grozny and Mogadishu—Patricia Yaeger discerns a new formation, the “tragic mobility of space” in the wounded city. Traditionally viewed as both “shelter and economic flow,” the city is now often a site of crisis, marked by migration and production zones that structure and complicate the experience of daily life (10). Thinking about the space of the city not as an autonomous metropolis, but as the intersection of multiple populations, redefines some connotations of space, although that discussion is beyond the purview of this essay.

Theorizing Location and Position in Life Narrative

Because the autobiographical is in part a retrospective act of narrating earlier moments of self-experience from the position of a present-time “I”, it has been analyzed primarily in temporal terms. While this focus in some way informs nearly all thinking on self-representation, it is inescapably concerned with the problematics of experience in time. The self represented in narrative must in some sense be a moving target, since both the narrated “I” or I-then and the narrating “I” or I-now are embedded in a temporal sequence.[2] An autobiographical narrator, in telling a coming-of-age story, typically traces the movement of the I-then at different ages from the perspective of an adult I, which is constituted in the writing of the text. In such a process, temporal tropes of mobility and instability, and the marking of narrative junctures or “turning points” become critical tropes for autobiographical discourse.

Prior to the 1980s, the autobiographical self was often treated as a static monument that attested, by its achieved status, to the superiority and permanence of Western culture, a point of view articulated in Georges Gusdorf’s 1956 definition of autobiography as the creation of an edifice of self. His tropes are architectural, emphasizing static monumentality. For example, when the writer adds consciousness to nature through autobiography, “The historic personage now appears, and biography, taking its place alongside monuments, inscriptions, statues, is one manifestation of his desire to endure in men’s memory” (31). Creating an autobiography of the individuated life is seen as a transpersonal monument to life and humanity, the highest and distinctive achievement of Western civilization.

Needless to say, this concept of the static monument, predicated on the works of aristocratic, white “great men,” is not the sense of autobiographical space I am tracing, and it has been redefined in recent critical thinking. Now critics emphasize mobile and flexible versions of subjectivity embedded in social relations that both individual and collectivized subjects take up in their autobiographical practices of self-narration. As Judith Butler asserts, “the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation—or set of relations—to a set of norms” (8). Theorists now assert that life narrators are situated in relation to others, often at cultural margins or intersections, and deploy autobiographical discourses for a wide range of purposes: to chronicle, to justify or exculpate, to negotiate communities of membership, to memorialize, to testify and to bear witness in ethical acts of disputing or reframing dominant narratives, and so on.

Thus, the focus on both the location and the position of an autobiographical narrator has importantly reshaped thinking about autobiography. The concept of location emphasizes not just the geographic, but the national, ethnic or racial, and gendered, sexual, social and life-cycle coordinates at which a narrator situates her- or himself. Location, expanded to include what Susan Stanford Friedman terms “the geopolitics of identity within differing communal spaces of being and becoming,” has become central to debates in feminist, multicultural, postcolonial, and cultural studies (17).[3] The concept of position, by contrast, implies the ideological stances—multiple and heteroglossic rather than single and unified, despite the narrator’s values—adopted by a narrator toward both self and others. Both concepts are inescapably spatial in their stress on emplacement, the juncture from which an articulation issues. Yet this spatial focus is often implied rather than explicitly specified in discussions of autobiographical texts.[4]

To return briefly to an American discussion of space, the extended borders north and south of both the United States and other nations in the Western hemisphere have generally led critics to emphasize the geographical aspect of spatial location over other coordinates of situated subjectivity. An exception to this is the work on avant-garde autobiography of William Boelhower, who draws on notions of spatial surround to emphasize the fluidity and fragmentation of modernist locations and to situate the self as a network of the functions of habitare and a desire for spatial fixity that is disrupted in the metropolis. Boelhower asserts, “the avant-garde autobiographer, in his attempt to create a coherent grammar of the self out of the spatial vocabulary of the metropolis, ends up with a loosely bound inventory of fragmented forms.” In his view the life narrator is “both cause and structural effect of the system of constructed spaces to which he belongs” (275). Boelhower’s rich analysis suggests that autobiographical writing serves as a map not so much of place as region or ground, but as the site of spatial dislocations that structure a deeper layer of “topological encoding” (277). Mapping the coordinates of particular cities as different systems for structuring the self, he suggests that the narratives of modernist figures—the artist, the immigrant, the architect, attempting to find an orientation to the city’s dense grids—are cut loose from a former synthetic view of the self. Montage rather than chronology becomes the form taken by a modernist self that is fragmented and shattered, but available to the literary anthropologist reading for signs of “the crisis of habitare” (275).

The city, as a troubling and provocative site of self-representation, has provoked other speculations about shifting conceptions of the spaces of self as well. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the focus on borders as a means of making contested terrain visible takes on new significance in mapping historical contestations about ownership and citizenship. The attention to borders, as markers of translation and exchange between people who are unequally situated as social subjects, puts an emphasis on negotiating social space and the need to challenge or revise the codifications of identity that they legitimate. If in the United States autobiography studies has tended to privilege temporality and to fix on spatial binaries—such as urban-rural, north-south, or margin-center—that occlude the complexity of constructed intersubjective spaces, these binary tropes of location are now being reformulated in more nuanced ways.

While Anglo-American and Australian theorists of settler colonialism have emphasized encounters across borders, postcolonial theory has importantly emphasized another sense of the location of colonized subjects as a “third space,” in Homi Bhabha’s term. For Bhabha the third space is a zone or “place of hybridity” produced at the moment of colonial encounter, a site at which communication, negotiation, and cross-translation may occur. In the third space, “the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other,” produces a changed form of recognition (25). Both colonizer and colonized are implicated in the dynamics of this encounter, which may enable the colonized to claim a new political identity through mimicry and innovation, if not always to produce change, at the site of in-between spaces. Situatedness in a “third space” is crucial for theorizing the postcolonial life narratives of writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Condé, and Wole Soyinka. Similarly, Steven Pile and Michael Keith have suggested that locations of diaspora around the globe should be read as shifting political spaces: “Spatiality needs to be seen as the modality through which contradictions are normalized, naturalized and neutralized. . . . Spatialities represent both the spaces between multiple identities and the contradictions within identities” (224–5). Hence the geopolitical may be understood as a space both of negotiation and of cancellation.

That is, concepts of personhood are often directly tied to particulars of location and position. While my discussion cannot provide a comprehensive overview, I want to propose some categories based on spatial coordinates in order to suggest ways in which we might employ spatiality as a reading practice in life writing to examine the networks of social relations negotiated across differences of location and position.

What differing contexts and limits of space, place, and zone may be specified when reading in the Anglo-American intellectual tradition, given the slippage between “space” and “place” in American theorizing? Our critical practices might investigate some contexts of life narrative that invoke “space”; consider issues of genre, readership, and the ethics of self-presentation that are not obviously linked to place; and map some autobiographical sites at which, literally or metaphorically, a spatial vocabulary is mobilized. In the rich ferment of contemporary work on life narrative, cataloguing these terms, tropes, and contexts may serve as a space-clearing gesture, as Sidonie Smith and I suggested in calling for more study of spatiality.[5]

1. Space as Material Surround

First, there is a literal, geographic specificity of “place” as region or immediate material surround, which has been richly contextualized in national literature studies—for example, in narratives of immigrants writing within American, Canadian, Caribbean, and Australian contexts, as well as in the focus on region and the history of struggles waged by both indigenous peoples and settlers to claim the land as place, to become emplaced. This emphasis on place as conferring or shaping identity has been a defining characteristic of regional autobiographical narratives. For example, Mary Clearman Blew asserts in All But the Waltz, “I am bone-deep in landscape” and links her sense of space as formative of her subjectivity to particulars of the northwest Rocky Mountain region and the social interactions enabled or impeded among local Euro-Americans, Native Americans, and the Hutterite community of Montana (7). Similarly, another western American writer, Terry Tempest Williams, argues that our relationship to place must become subjective, a “Pansexual” one. Williams asserts, “we are lovers, engaged in an erotics of place . . . acknowledging, embracing the spirit of place” (84). Engaging space as place, these life narrators transform it into a resonant, responsive network called “the land.”

If, for life narratives of the American West, the vast landscape becomes a horizon against and in terms of which subjectivity is defined, autobiographical writing may also be located on a small, even minuscule scale. Consider the centrality to the scene of narration of such domestic spaces as the writing desk or word processor, the intimate space of the bedroom or bath, the sociality of the dining room table, such gendered spaces as the kitchen and the garage or workroom, and that most prized space of postmodern self-reflection, the automobile. In a renowned essay on confession in autobiography, for example, Stephen Spender metaphorically described the reflexive situation of autobiographical discourse via the automobile: “We are seen from the outside by our neighbors; but we remain always at the back of our eyes and our senses, situated in our bodies, like a driver in the front seat of a car seeing the other cars coming toward him” (116).[6]

In travel narratives, the encounter with material space may occur via a mode of transportation—train, plane, an earlier form of conveyance. Sidonie Smith, in Moving Lives, observes that “Narrating travel . . . the travel narrator negotiates the dynamics of and contradictions in the drift of identity and reveals the ways in which modes of mobility—engines of temporality, spatiality, progression, and destination—are (un)defining” (27–8). This literal understanding of space as the site, emplaced or mobile, from which writing issues does not, however, exhaust the possibilities of conceptualizing it.

2. Spaces of Embodiment

There is also the subjective space of the life narrator’s embodiment. The body is a site of autobiographical knowledge, a site at which memory recovers and reworks experience in constructing a sense of identity through processes that are felt, physiological, neurological, and biochemical, as well as resonant in the body politic. The subject is inescapably embodied, and located in culturally specific ways at a nexus of language, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and historical moment. We have argued that the body may be understood complexly as four kinds of entities: a neurochemical system, an anatomical body, an “imaginary anatomy” that “reflects social and familial beliefs about the body more than . . . the body’s organic nature”, and a sociopolitical body of cultural attitudes and discourses which encode the public meanings of bodies in ways that underwrite relationships of power (Reading 38).

Because space is embodied, the cultural meanings attached to specific bodies at a given historical moment affect the kinds of stories life narrators can tell. For example, the narratives of “skin” that are prominent in multicultural life narratives in many parts of the world—not just the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, but India, Latin America, and many nations of Africa—both mark and contest class positions. In When I Was Puerto Rican, Esmeralda Santiago locates her family’s status as rural and lower-class by positioning their skin color within the nation’s hierarchy of European-inflected color values, and dramatizes the surprise of her own rise as an immigrant New Yorker, given that in childhood her family name was “Negi” because of her particularly dark skin. Similarly, Michelle Cliff in Abeng encodes the social spaces of Jamaica in terms of its colonial history. She situates her light-skinned protagonist Clare as aligned with British neocolonial rule yet awakened to her nascent desire and sexuality through discovering a history of indigenous resistance embodied in generations of native women in the remote highlands.

A different kind of example of embodied space is evident in the life writing of religious women of the European Early Modern period. They could not tell sexual stories of their bodies unless those stories were linked to a critique of the body’s waywardness from the perspective of Christian conversion, as the narratives of Spanish women religious that had to be censored by their confessors indicate.[7] To narrate the sexualized body, as Charlotte Charke did in her Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke in eighteenth-century England, was scandalous, as Felicity A. Nussbaum suggests, because a Christian discourse of the sexualized body underwrote belief in the corrupt nature of female sexuality and the lower-class status of acknowledged sexual activity (195–6). Similarly, until the later nineteenth century much male embodiment tended to be in repressed or encoded stories of the sexual body, sometimes figuring it as the non-rational “ground” to be dominated by the Cartesian mind. Indeed, the practice of reading autobiographies, particularly men’s, as embodied sites of knowledge production about desire, danger, and disease deserves more critical attention. In examining spaces of embodiment we can uncover social norms about the proper uses of bodies, consider their relationship to cultural spaces and behaviors, and note how autobiographers define and situate the normative body in relation to the ab-normative or disabled body. As G. Thomas Couser asserts for “vulnerable bodies,” those “who are customarily on the receiving end of life writing, those who get represented by others, often without their permission” are vulnerable to having their bodily abilities misrepresented and their stories appropriated in ways that life narrative should ethically guard against (198).

3. Social Spaces

Autobiographical narratives are also organized around spaces of sociality, as “Raum” suggests, spaces of relationships and actions that are formalized in communicative interaction and may be ritualized or identified by gesture and bodily positioning, as Erving Goffman explored in Gender Advertisements. In life writing, actors may be situated discursively vis à vis others who are present explicitly, as is the host to the traveler, or implicitly, the warden to prisoners, or a divinity to a religious community. In such narratives negotiations occur across boundaries—of rank, nation, ethnic, religious, and gendered difference—that are both constructed and redefined in the encounter. By articulating these spaces of the self, their dynamics, and the fluctuating positions actors take up within them, critics are able to specify what has often been characterized as “relationality” in life narrative, that is, how a subject’s narration of her or his life is implicated in and impinges upon the lives of others, and may encapsulate their biographies. For example, John Edgar Wideman in Brothers and Keepers refracts the story of his brother Robby, who as a youth was convicted of murder on the streets of Pittsburgh and imprisoned for life, through his own quite different career trajectory as a writer, to create what he calls a “mix of memory, imagination, feeling, and fact” that characterizes the experience of urban American space for many African American men (1).

When collective stories are situated in a social surround, it is often at borders that may be heightened by entrenched asymmetries. Consider two examples. First, there are the narratives of colonized or newly postcolonial subjects, situated in a terrain of colonial encounter that may be understood as a transcultural space. In autoethnographic writing such narrators seek to redefine not only their own access to agency at sites of former dispossession, but to legitimate the subject status of the group to which they belong and on behalf of whom their insider-outsider narratives are shaped, even when they are addressed to international audiences. One might look to such overtly or covertly autobiographical texts as Nafissatou Diallo’s A Dakar Childhood, which charts her coming of age in post-independence Dakar, Senegal, in the 1960s in tandem with the liberation of the city and the revitalization of its local practices and festivals. Or we could consider Manthia Diawara’s In Search of Africa, which interrogates his experience growing up as an expatriate child in the Guinea of Sékou Touré and as a teenager in Bamako, Mali. In different ways both narratives are iconic for a generation of post-independence Africans seeking a “pan-African” connection to African American intellectuals and race theorists at that moment of liberation. Here the story of the “I” is both representative of a larger group’s experience at a powerful moment of change and an articulation of their desire for social transformation.

Consider also the explicit use of “in-between spaces” that link artist and viewer—yet disrupt interaction—in the art installations of African American autobiographical artist Adrian Piper, who presents a range of official identity documents that contradictorily identify her as white and as black in her installation Cornered in order to confront the audience with the arbitrary nature of practices of racialization in the US.[7] Similarly, Carrie Mae Weems, in The Jefferson Suite, interrogates the histories generated by Thomas Jefferson’s children with his black slave Sally Hemmings as indicative of the double legacy of slavery in the foundation of the American republic. These visualizations of social relations as a space of antagonistic difference inflected by the history of racial struggle have implications for both artist and viewers. They call us to self-reflection, often uncomfortably, about differentiated socio-cultural locations and the inequities that they sustain. More broadly, art historians Jennifer González and, later, Mieke Bal have argued that the spatialized concept of visual life narrative as “autotopography” crystallizes a practice of many contemporary installation artists. Defined as “a spatial, local and situational ‘writing’ of the self’s life in visual art,” autotopography situates an artist’s—perhaps oblique—self-presentation within a surround of cultural objects that reference specific times, places, and networks of the past (Bal 163). In Bal’s phrase, autotopographies such as the giant spiders of sculptor Louise Bourgeois “conceptualize metaphor in a hyperbolic materiality” (182).

4. Geopolitical Space

While social relations are situated within geographic space, sometimes geopolitical space is explicitly foregrounded, as transnational cultural studies demonstrates. For subjects located in complex spaces of citizenship, or multicultural spaces across nations with histories of conflict, questions of migration and the negotiation of borders or points of transition engage contradictions of geopolitical space. For example, to turn again to the narrative of Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican not only contrasts her experience of coming of age in 1950s San Juan and its countryside with her teenaged years as an immigrant to working-class Brooklyn. The narrative also situates her family story as emblematic of the ambiguous status of Puerto Ricans in the United States, who are citizens for the purpose of military service and the rule of law but cannot vote; rather, they are racialized as a Spanglish-speaking, impoverished minority and stereotyped as an ethnic other in the dominant American narrative. Interrogating the space of the watery border between the island of Puerto Rico and the continental US, as well as the less palpable internal borders of her Brooklyn neighborhood, Santiago emphasizes the shifting valences of particular locations and the irreducibility of these heterogeneous sites to a monolithic place called “America.”

In thinking about geopolitical space, Wendy S. Hesford has employed the concept of “spatial rhetorics” to discuss how human rights documentaries about rape in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s created “a rhetorical space of intersubjectivity” that filmmakers used to engage visual texts bearing witness to violence and violation, and to elicit a situation of “transnational rhetorical witnessing” (121). Similarly, Theresa Kulbaga has employed the notion of “spatial rhetorics of memory” to discuss tropes that [represent] . . . memory as both temporally (historically) and geographically (politically) located” in, for example, Eva Hoffman’s treatment of her Jewish family’s post-Holocaust immigration, first to Canada and then to the United States, in Lost in Translation. In a different way, German filmmaker Ursula Biemann’s documentary film Performing the Border represents the US-Mexico border as a performative space constructed in embodied acts of crossing and constitutive of spatial surrounds that are unstable, conflictual, and vulnerable to manipulation by nations, by transnational corporations, and by violent outlaw practices (as in hundreds of unsolved Ciudad Juarez murders of young women). Spatial rhetorics, then, configure autobiographical subjects as migratory and transnationally situated, rather than as inhabiting a single national identity and citizenship. Reading for how life narratives foreground spatial dynamics across geographic borders and forge new alliances with readers understands geopolitical spaces as sites for transacting or contesting new hybrid identities and global practices.

5. Spatial Figurations

Space may also be invoked in tropes and topoi that represent self-relationship. The Essays of Montaigne, for example, are rife with figures in which he characterizes his self-experience through a metaphorics of space. To cite just a few examples, in the essay “Of Presumption” (II, 17) he uses the phrase, “je me contreroulle” (translated as “I roll around in myself”) to describe the capaciousness and intensity of his self-study (ed. Saulnier 653; Frame 499). In the essay “Of Solitude” (I, 39) Montaigne presents his creative process as occurring in the “arrière boutique” or back room of his mind, a space for solitary self-contemplation that readers are invited to imagine.[9]

In a different way Virginia Woolf, in “A Sketch of the Past,” characterizes the pre-linguistic dimension of relationship to her infant self through a spatial metaphor. She says she has “the feeling, as I describe it sometimes to myself, of lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow” (65). Further, “I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture” (67). Sidonie Smith, discussing Woolf’s “grape” subjectivity in this passage, notes its fluidity, a state prior to the consolidation of the ego when the body is a locus of sensation in immediate contact with the world, in a sense an extension of its space (95–6).

Indeed, an entire autobiographical genre might be established around spatial metaphor, either explicit or implicit. Consider the centrality of the “interior landscape” to the spiritual autobiographies of mystics from Teresa of Avila to Thomas Merton, from Christianity to Buddhism.[10] Such narratives focus on processes of self-examination according to protocols for developing an internal spiritual space. This space of self is counter to and often at war with both the desires and limits of the material body and the social world’s emphasis on wealth and status. The spiritual autobiographer retreats from a hostile external world by creating an imagined verbal landscape in which to express devotion to an otherworldly being or idea. In another genre of life narrative, the apology, the narrator may invoke tropes of the courtroom to create the imagined surround of a trial, and may rehearse opposing arguments pro and contra the speaker in inviting the reader to render judgment. Such implied spatial contexts also come into play in the confessional narratives of Augustine and Rousseau, which juxtapose sites of self-exposure and contrition with scenes of flagrant sinning in intimate or back rooms.

6. Memory and the Spatialization of Temporal Distances

It is possible to represent the temporal distance that one traverses in memory by recourse to spatial terms. A narrator may engage history, the surround in which one is located as both actor and acted upon, as the space of “the past.” Memory is invoked spatially when narrators imagine themselves enshrining their personal and collective pasts in a kind of personal archive. Of course memory is itself unstable, tropological, and subject to interpretation. As Andreas Huyssen suggests, what it captures is never a “recovery” but an approximation: “The past . . . must be articulated to become memory. The fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation is unavoidable. . . . This split should be understood as a powerful stimulant for cultural and artistic creativity” (2–3). If articulating the past stimulates creativity, it also reveals much about the remembering subject. Marita Sturken observes, “Memories are narratives that are told and retold, reenacted and reimaged. Memory is ontologically fluid and memories constantly subject to rescripting and fantasy. . . . What memories tell us, more than anything, is about the stakes held by individuals and institutions in what the past means” (689). Both critics suggest that the elusiveness of past experience can only be approximated. Narrative attempts to fix it by a focus on objects—photos, documents—or on personal testimony are scripts under ongoing revision.

The use of spatial practices for remembering is by no means recent. Renaissance mnemonic practices and memory logics, as Frances A. Yates long ago pointed out, were based on spatial practices. The places of memory were conceived in two senses—visualized as loci, as in memory theaters, and localized for recall by a process of assigning a particular meaning to each “place.” This model of memory worked associatively by “emplacement,” making the objects of memory touchable in imagination. And while the technologies of memory no longer invoke such logic, autobiographical narratives may still become repositories for preserving memory against the erosion of history. That is, a narrative may act as a space of commemoration and an archive for retrieving a vanished past.

Consider, for example, the linkage of the geopolitical space of national and ideological confrontation with the space of collective memory and desire that occurs in Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder (After the Wall). For Hensel, writing over a decade after the demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), artifacts such as her Pioneer photos and membership cards, depicted in the book, and recollections of her “Ossie” clothing, holidays, and education, form a textured site for GDR readers’ collective recall and association, despite the impossibility of verifying their accuracy in the reunified German nation. Her “Zone” is now only a zone of memory with artifacts preserved in a personal archive (and incompletely in Berlin’s various GDR museums), a space of memory that will not be available to the next generation, born after the Wall came down in 1989. But Hensel writes as a member of a particular in-between “Ossie” collectivity, too young to have been fully formed subjects of the GDR state yet imprinted with its everyday practices and assumptions, even while experiencing conflicting “Wessie” desires. The location of her generation, Hensel suggests, is itself in a liminal zone that is a “nowhere” between the former East and a new nation that does not reflect their collective past. This in-between zone is a “nowhere” imagined as the material remains of personal and collective memory archives that may be activated by readers who bring their own memories to her story.

7. Peritextual Space—Life Narrative in the World

Finally, autobiographical texts can be situated in a peritextual surround, what we may think of as, collectively, the spaces of publication, reception, and circulation. As Gillian Whitlock’s studies of life narrative have emphasized, the peritext concerns not only who reads whom, when, and to what effect; but also the kind of audience a text may construct at a given moment and the kinds of audiences that subsequently take it up for different occasions and purposes. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s theorizing of paratexts, Whitlock considers how life writing circulates as a product that takes up space on a shelf or in a display addressed to the public, whether or not they become its readers. The material apparatus of the text begins with its book cover or jacket, which situates the narrative within potential markets and makes an appeal to be read in certain ways. Whitlock’s focus on the outpouring of “burqa narratives” with explicit covers, after the New York World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, observes how, in such stories, the cover “images, the titles, and the subtitles are designed to grab the Western eye with a glimpse of absolute difference, of the exotic” (59). As Whitlock provocatively suggests, these life narratives offer the Western reader the fantasy of explanatory stories about Islamic desires and rituals for voyeuristic consumption. In some texts the space of looking may also be constructed as an intersubjective one that establishes a relationship between an image and its viewers. As metropolitan subjects “we are invited to see ourselves seeing” the faces of those we call our “others” (61).

In digital space a narrative is also situated in the midst of epitexts, such as the publisher’s advertising and the reviews posted by customers on Amazon.com, indicating how it was received by readers (Whitlock 61–2). That is, in the consumer culture of late capitalism, our encounters with autobiographical narratives are mediated, whether they occur in material spaces or in digital space. We are required to translate narratives across cultures and, in so doing, may understand our own complicity in the circulation of cultural fantasies that intersect with political realities of domination (Whitlock 67–8). By understanding life narratives as situated not only in the peritextual spaces that surround them, but also in the spaces they come to occupy in our daily lives over time, we begin to locate how we ourselves are addressed within the spaces of the autobiographical.

Conclusion

We encounter autobiographical space in multiple ways: as a site that encloses life writing, as a border of contact and contention, and as a presentation addressing readers and subjects engaged in the creation of narrative worlds. The German concept of “Räume des Selbst” implies spaces of intersubjectivity that may be mobilized in autobiographical encounters to reflect on the negotiation of communicative situations. While such an understanding may seem far from the notion of geographic place with which I began, “space” as a concept within Anglo-American theorizing of life narrative invites us to consider the social and cultural, interactively constructed, and differently localized borders, margins, and centers that mark zones of self-relation, of encounter, and of the discursive networks of the autobiographical.

Notes

1. As this book goes to press, a collection, Life Writing and Space, has appeared that explores how concepts of subjectivity draw on theories of place and space (ed. Eveline Kilian and Hope Wolf, Routledge 2016).

2. See our discussion of the production of the “I” in Reading Autobiography, first ed., 58–64.

3. Friedman asserts, “a locational approach to feminism incorporates diverse formations because its positional analysis requires a kind of geopolitical literacy built out of a recognition of how different times and places produce different and changing gender systems as these intersect with other different and changing societal stratifications and movements for social justice” (5). Her analysis draws on the definitions of locational feminism by such critics as Adrienne Rich in “Notes toward a Politics of Location” (Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 1986, 210–32); Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and the Question of Postmodernity” (in Scattered Hegemonies, 1994, 1–36); and Elspeth Probyn, “Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local” (in Linda J. Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism, 1990, 176–89). Friedman’s essay “Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things” productively emphasizes “a compensatory emphasis on space” interacting with time in the production of narrative, a return to Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope as “time space” (194).

4. For a discussion of space from a linguistic-cognitive point of view, see David Herman’s treatment of spatialization as a “macrodesign” in Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

5. See the discussion of spatiality in “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices,” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, 39.

6. Phenomenologists such as Jean Starobinski have distinguished the proprioceptive sense of being in one’s body from the kinaesthetic sense of the body in motion, occupying space differently in successive temporal moments.

7. See Christine Cloud’s dissertation for a discussion of “embodied authority.”

8. A transcription of Piper’s performance was published in Voicing Today’s Visions: Writings by Contemporary Women Artists, ed. Mara Witzling. When I saw the Piper installation, the spectators, mostly white, were distinctly uncomfortable. See also the discussion by Jennifer Drake of Piper’s installation.

9. The sentence is worth citing: “Il se faut reserver une arrièreboutique toute nostre, toute franche, en laquelle nous éstablissons nostre vraye liberté et principale retraicte et solitude” (ed. Saulnier 241). It is translated by Frame as “We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude” (177).

10. For a memoir of conversion to Buddhist spirituality as a mental “space” of serenity, see Matthieu Ricard, Happiness, Little-Brown, 2006.

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