Telling Border Life Stories

Four Mexican American Women Writers

By Donna M. Kabalen de Bichara

Texas A&M University Press

Copyright © 2013 Donna M. Kabalen de Bichara
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60344-804-8

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Chapter 1. Memory and Historical Remembering: The Art of Autobiography and Theoretical Perspectives,
Chapter 2. Narrative and Descriptive Discourse: The Autobiographical “I” and Cultural Preconstructs Concerned with Space,
Chapter 3. Recovering Cultural and Historical Memory: The Dynamic Quality of Semiotic Structures,
Chapter 4. The Female Subject and Expressions of Life Experiences: Social Practice and Imaginary Formations,
Conclusions,
Notes,
Works Cited,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Memory and Historical Remembering

The Art of Autobiography and Theoretical Perspectives

The corpus of texts created by Jovita González, Cleofas Jaramillo, Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce, and Mary Helen Ponce are heterogeneous in terms of their narrative form, and all of the narratives involve life writing by a female subject who writes from a border position. That is, the autobiographer presents notions of her ethnic self as situated within the symbolic border space between Mexico and the United States. In addition, these texts also involve references to common sociocultural practices as well as a historical past, which involves the present-day states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, geographical areas that were at one time under the rule of New Spain, Mexico, and then the United States.

As pointed out by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in Reading Autobiography, “[W]hen ‘life’ is expanded to include how one has become who he or she is at a given moment in an ongoing process of reflection, clearly the autobiographical story requires more explaining.” Because these texts involve complex form and content, they certainly require an extensive explanation, one that is related to the following questions: In what way do theoretical notions regarding autobiography evolve, and how do these various perspectives contribute to a more thorough understanding of the group of texts considered for the present project? What particular autobiographical elements are evident in these texts and in what way do these elements open windows into understanding the meaning of these works? Is it necessary to determine a definition that is more specific with regard to the type of literature that comprises the present corpus? As a means of addressing these questions, the present analysis will focus on the history of criticism of autobiography based on the theoretical criteria of a number of key writers, with special emphasis on the contributions of Chicana/o perspectives.

Three Phases of Critical Perspectives concerning Autobiography

One of the most important aspects of the autobiographical form of writing has to do with memory as it is registered within the text. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur asserts that a distinctive feature of memory is the presence of those “marks” or “sémeia, in which the affections of the body and the soul to which memory is attached are signified.” Because autobiography is a type of self-referential writing that signifies different types of memory, it is pertinent to consider two questions that Ricoeur sets before the reader: “Of what are there memories? Whose memory is it”? (3) These questions, I believe, are especially relevant as we try to comprehend the various perspectives concerning autobiography that I review here. I would like to point out that my goal is not an exhaustive survey of theory concerned with the genre. Rather I have chosen those sources that highlight a variety of definitions of the genre and how these might be related to the concept of border autobiography that I define later in this chapter. As we shall see, each phase of criticism suggests a shift in emphasis that varies from an early focus on the memories of “great men” and the historical significance of the exceptional life, to the creative aspect of memory, and finally to new notions on memory as it is related to self and collective invention in the borderlands.

Autobiography as a Historical Document and Basis for Knowledge

Early notions of the genre of autobiography refer to the writer as someone involved in a process of self-discovery and who is deemed an outstanding figure within society. In traditional studies of autobiography, elements such as history and subjectivity are seen as “stable elements in the story of one’s life. Texts that affirm this stability, or that can be construed as affirming it, form the ‘tradition’ of autobiography.” For example, the traditional autobiographical text conforms to what Gilmore defines as the “Augustinian lineage,” where the autobiographical subject would be a man who is white, probably heterosexual and of an elite status.

The ideas of Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Misch provide a framework regarding early perceptions of autobiography. In his work on autobiography, “The Historical Relevance of Autobiography and Biography” in Pattern and Meaning in History, Dilthey gives autobiography a preponderant position within history as it is related to the development of society. For example, he suggests that autobiography can be seen as “the germinal cell of history” and as the “highest and most instructive form in which the understanding of life comes before us. Here is the outward, phenomenal course of a life which forms the basis for understanding what has produced it within a certain environment.” Of importance is Dilthey’s use of the word “phenomenal” and the idea that a particular autobiography is of interest because it presents us with the course of a life that serves as an outstanding example, a model to follow, within the context of a historical period. In fact, as a historian, Dilthey proposed the use of autobiography as a means of writing about history, as “the root of all historical comprehension” (86).

For Dilthey, then, autobiography provides insight for appreciating the historical past: “The power and breadth of our own lives and the energy with which we reflect on them are the foundation of historical vision. It alone enables us to give life back to the bloodless shadows of the past … it makes the great historian” (87). Thus, it is by examining the individual life, and those historical elements that were responsible for its formation, that we are able to understand the human world. Because it is the “phenomenal course of a life” that interests Dilthey, his theorizing focuses on autobiographies that present different phases of the lives of Augustine, Rousseau, Goethe, and Bismarck as “typical forms.” He suggests that by tracing the development of their lives, one is able to find the “particular combination of characteristics common to them all” (94); these characteristics would be of interest to future generations who presumably would model their lives after this type of man. The importance of the autobiography for Dilthey, then, is its informative function; that is, society would achieve instruction by reading about the life of a great man whose life portrayed those characteristics that were “common” to other great men.

From this viewpoint, the great feat of the autobiographer is his capacity to find the “threads” of his life and set them down in writing as a coherent whole. Insight into the individual subjectivity of experience, however, is considered by Dilthey as narrow. He instead suggests that the autobiography of the prominent individual is of importance in terms of the way it relates to universal history. Man looks back on his past and links together the different parts of his life, and it is the way that this life is linked together with other “great” lives throughout history that is of interest to Dilthey. It is by analyzing “individual contexts,” especially those related to experience in areas such as religion, art, and politics, that the historian is able to delve into the structure of the world of history.

Also in line with Dilthey’s thoughts are the perceptions of German philologist Georg Misch regarding the history of autobiography, which he defines in terms of the meaning of the word itself, that is, “the description (graphia) of an individual human life (bios) by the individual himself (autos).” Misch’s History of Autobiography in Antiquity presents autobiography as a genre in literature that is “special” and which “defies classification” (3–4). Indeed, for Misch, this type of literature is seen as a subcategory of biography. Just as Dilthey points to the connection between autobiography and history, Misch too argues that autobiography provides “documentary value for knowledge of the world and of man” (1). He also suggests that this type of writing involves psychological and moral perspectives of a particular period as “an original interpretation of experience” (4).

Like Dilthey, Misch refers to the “great” or ancient autobiographies that are considered models. For example, he particularly emphasizes Plato’s “Seventh Epistle” as well as Isocrates’s autobiographical “oration in court,” and the records of deeds evident in the documents of Emperor Augustus. Misch also sees the writings of St. Augustine, Rousseau, and Goethe as exemplary, and he praises Augustine’s Confessions as the writing of an “homme supérieur,” in which “the concentrated expression of the nature of an individual, an age, a race” is found (3). Once again, we find an exaltation of the great individual whose writing is a “manifestation of man’s knowledge about himself” (8) as well as how his life is lived during a particular epoch in connection with the world that surrounds him. Misch, then, is concerned with “human life as actually lived by individuals, and … the social and historical ‘world’ in which they live” (8). Thus, autobiography is perceived as “always” representative of the period in which it is written; therefore, its function is as an “instrument of knowledge” (10), and not simply a medium through which self-awareness is expressed. Furthermore, Misch asserts that any autobiography that deals with the average way of life is considered to be inferior in quality.

It is clear that according to the definitions of autobiography presented by both Dilthey and Misch there is no room for the voices of those who do not contribute to the accumulation of historical knowledge within a particular (and we must assume hegemonic) society. For example, because autobiography must be “representative” of the sociocultural period in which it is written, the subject of this type of life writing would necessarily reflect a way of life that is considered to be superior; thus life writing was not to be concerned with the “average life.” On the basis of these notions of exclusion, it becomes obvious that the female voice of the autobiographer who writes from a doubly marginal position, as a woman and as a Mexican American, would not be considered as worthy of study from the perspective of Dilthey and Misch. As we shall see, it is the next generation of critics who offer a more creative perspective regarding the autobiographical form, as they consider elements other than those which point to the “representative” life of a “great man” who contributes to knowledge of a historical period.

Autobiography as a Literary Text and as Art

As we have seen, early notions of the autobiographical form were concerned with the autobiographer’s experience as the basis for understanding a particular world; that is, the written word of the text was important because it reflected the expressions of an exceptional individual within a given historical time period. With the second phase of criticism, there is a notable shift in emphasis from the historical, or the “bios,” to that of individual consciousness of the subject of the autobiographical text, which is now perceived as a literary form and therefore as art.

According to Smith and Watson, the theoretical considerations that most affected this change were those concerned with class consciousness as determined by Marxist views, which focused on the relation between individual consciousness and broad economic forces. The authors also note the effect of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, which suggests a struggle between the “self” and “forces occurring outside conscious control.” It is because of this struggle that the possibility of attaining “conscious control” over individual identity or experience is seen as impossible; therefore, speaking “truth” in autobiography is considered unattainable. For example, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud suggests that our everyday usage of language includes errors in speech, reading, and writing as well as “faulty recollections”; these are not coincidences or accidents, but rather they reveal something that has been repressed into the unconscious. It is precisely the subtleties of unconscious purposes evident in language usage that contribute to what is considered the creative aspect of the autobiographical form in this second phase of theorizing.

For example, James Olney suggests that Georges Gusdorf’s essay “Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie” is a key work in the study of autobiography, especially in terms of the genre with its focus on the study of the “I.” As Olney notes, “it was this turning to autos—the ‘I’ that coming awake to its own being shapes and determines the nature of autobiography and in so doing … opened up the subject of autobiography specifically for literary discussion, for behind every work of literature there is an ‘I’ informing the whole.” Gusdorf understands autobiography as a genre that is “solidly established” and “traceable to a series of masterpieces” of the Western tradition (28). Although he suggests that the purpose of autobiography is the achievement of self-knowledge through the interpretation of an entire life, he further notes the importance of the genre as more than a presentation of historical objectivity, or even as solely a literary mode. Rather, it is the anthropological function of the autobiography, where inner consciousness is projected into an exterior space, that is important.

In spite of the limiting aspects of Gusdorf’s definition and his suggestion that autobiography is based on the historical consciousness and individualism expressed in a series of Western masterpieces, he also notes that autobiography involves the possibility of “composing” and “reconstructing of life across time” (38); therefore, he suggests the idea of the reconstruction of a personal history, but one that involves creative nuances. Gusdorf perceives autobiography as “a new spiritual revolution: the artist and the model coincide, the historian tackles himself as object” (31). The change that Gusdorf points to concerns private rather than public history, and it is autobiography that can be seen as “the mirror in which the individual reflects his own image” (33). From this very gendered perspective, each “man” has a history, one that is worthy of narration. The subject becomes his own witness and expresses a “more profound sense of truth as an expression of inmost being … not as he was, not as he is, but as he believes and wishes himself to be and to have been” (45). What becomes evident then is the conception of creativity in terms of the narratives concerned with the possibility of arriving at a sense of truth about self.

Francis Hart considers autobiography as the “plurality of mimetic and formal value,” and he is concerned with three key elements that form what he has termed the “anatomy” of autobiography: a) the mimetic question concerning the way in which there is an interplay between history and fiction; b) a concern with the “purposive form and experimental development” of the autobiographical act; and c) the question of the “elusive” intention of autobiography to present “truth” to a particular audience. He also defines three types of autobiography: the confessional, the apology, and the memoir. All three are seen as personal history, history where “the autobiographer recognizes, interrelates, and attempts to manipulate toward some truth or integrity his relationships with his recoverable past, with his formal or technical options, and with his rhetorical and psychological intentions” (226). However, Hart also notes that although truth telling is an intention of autobiography, it is generally elusive and represents instead interplay between an attempt at truth telling with regard to the past and those options for writing chosen on the basis of the author’s intentions. Hart also suggests that the autobiographer selects the type of “I” to present to the reader; that is, the “I” may be an “inductive invention” or an “intentional creation” used as a means of affecting a particular response from the reader. Therefore, it is important to recognize and interpret the autobiographer’s various intentions as they “interact and shift” within the narrative. This interaction and shifting of intentions is of particular importance for understanding the corpus of texts considered in this book. Indeed, as I discuss in the following chapters, it is precisely the various intentions of the autobiographer that contribute to the creation of a multilayered text.

Karl J. Weintraub’s study of the autobiographical mode focuses on man’s need to understand his own sense of being and life, and he traces this aspect in his exhaustive analysis of autobiography beginning with antiquity through the eighteenth century. As Weintraub points out, he is interested in the “proper form of autobiography wherein a self-reflective person asks ‘who am I?’ and ‘how did I become what I am?'” It is pertinent to note that Weintraub’s perspective coincides with both Gusdorf and Hart who also note that that the retrospective standpoint allows the author to impose interpretative meaning on the past. Thus, all three authors conceive of the creative, plural or interpretative aspect of autobiographical writing, yet there are limits, as the title of Gusdorf’s essay suggests, to this creative or revolutionary type of writing; that is, from all three perspectives, autobiography is connected to historical consciousness.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Telling Border Life Stories by Donna M. Kabalen de Bichara. Copyright © 2013 Donna M. Kabalen de Bichara. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
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