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INTRODUCTION
Genre and Narrative in Life Stories
Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson
Any life story, whether a written autobiography or an oral testimony, is shaped not only by the reworkings of experience through memory and reevaluation but also always at least to some extent by art. Any communication has to use shared conventions not only of language itself but also the more complex expectations of âgenreâ: of the forms expected within a given context and type of communication. How far do the expectations and forms of genre shape different kinds of autobiography and influence what messages it can convey?
Genre is not an easy matter to discuss; on the one hand the term is relatively new for social scientists, while on the other it has a very long and at times confusing history in literature and the visual arts, which continues to yield many helpful insights on autobiography. Our objective in this volume has been to encourage a creative interdisciplinary approach to genre issues which brings together current thinking in both the humanities and social sciences. But because the use of genre as a concept goes back much further in literature and the visual arts, yet has undergone a somewhat tortuous history, it will be most helpful to start by briefly clarifying the evolution of this thinking.
There have certainly been some fundamental difficulties with the traditional conceptualization of genre in the humanities. The first is a surprising confusion in the meaning of the word âgenreâ itself. The concept goes back to the basic distinction made by the Greeks between the dramatic, epic and lyrical forms of literature: that is, a distinction made partly in terms of mood and theme, and partly of mode of presentation and the relationship with the audience. And although later genre came to be applied almost entirely to written forms of literatureâthus from our perspective seriously reducing its value for understanding autobiographyâwe may note that for the Greeks the three major forms were all primarily expressed in their spoken form.
The current meaning of âgenreâ, which dates from the nineteenth century, is âa style or category of painting, novel, film, etc., characterized by a particular form or purposeâ. In the visual arts, however, its use later became more narrowly confined to a style of painting depicting scenes from everyday life. However, in practice, historians of art and architecture have nevertheless focusedâsome would say overfocusedâon developing, although without using generic terms, an elaborate and agreed taxonomy of styles, formulaic elements and elements of design, of precisely the kind which is so strikingly absent in literature. Of course, too rigid a taxonomy, which does not allow room for the evolution of forms in changing historical contexts, becomes a straitjacket in itself: but with literature the problem with genre categorization was not so much of overprecision as of vague generality. A further impediment has been that in literature a genre can be defined by form (such as drama, poetry, proverbs, letters), by mood (as comedy, tragedy) or by content (as history, memoirs, autobiography); even though certainly these are usually closely tied together.1 Genre may also refer either to a type of text, or to an element within that text. Because all these definitions cut across each other, it has been impossible to agree on any settled definitions of genres, or to group them convincingly as major and minor genres and subgenres.
The problem of definition has indeed seriously concerned some of the most influential literary critics. Thus Northrop Frye wrote in 1957 in his classic Anatomy of Criticism that âthe critical theory of genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it.â Contemporary critics had neither standards nor even a name equivalent to âdramaâ or âpoetryâ with which to identify prose art:
Thanks to the Greeks, we can distinguish tragedy from comedy in dramaâŚ[But] when we come to deal with such forms as the masque, opera, movie, ballet, puppet-play, mystery-play, morality, commedia dellâarte, and zauberspiel, we find ourselves in the position of the Renaissance doctors who refused to treat syphilis because Galen said nothing about it. The Greeks hardly needed to develop a classification of prose forms. We do, but have never done soâŚ. The circulating-library distinction between fiction and non-fiction, between books which are about things admitted not to be true and books which are about everything else, is apparently exhaustive enough for critics.2
Yet paradoxically the important new perspectives which Frye himself heralded did not lead to an elaboration of genre analysis. This was because, although there was to be a radical new use of genre by âstructuralistsââwho emphasized the importance of the form rather than the individual creativity of the authorâwhich in itself constituted an attack on the high literary tradition, concepts of genre in the main continued to be associated with old-fashioned conservative formalism. Hence the focus of critical innovation was much more on new attempts to break beyond its conventional boundaries of genre and to reject the constrictions of focusing on a âcanonic literatureâ of great âworks and old-fashioned generic typologies.3 Settled definitions and agreed taxonomies thus became taboo. Genre now seemed to many radical critics an unacceptably superficial and external way of categorizing works of literature, especially for âphenomologistsâ, with theirconcern for what they called Reconstructionâ and âtheoryâ, for exploring ideology, values, individual âsubjectivityâ, feelings, the subconscious and the irrational. Turning their backs on genre was helpful in allowing them to extend the whole arena of literary criticism and to analyse numerous texts which until then would not have been considered works of literature at all. On the other hand, perhaps more surprisingly, even those who still concentrated on major creative works had become uncomfortable with genre, for it seemed increasingly clear that the less original a work the more likely it was to fit comfortably into a genre category, while the greatest creative works defied such easy formal categorization.
A second difficulty arises from the anomalous position of autobiography within traditional genres. How far should it be read as a narrative of real experience, and how far as a form of fiction? Traditional literary criticism of autobiography did reach a position which seems on the surface to accord reasonably well with that of current researchers using oral life stories. Thus Roy Pascal wrote in 1960 that autobiography is indeed a story, but âthe story of a life in the worldâ. But a good narrative âhas to have a shape, an outward shape in the narrative, and this shape is the outcome of an interpenetration and collusion of inner and outer life, of the person and society. The shape interprets both. This is the decisive achievement of autobiography.â4 Ironically, however, just at the moment at the end of the 1970s when oral historians and life story sociologists were accepting that interviews were as interesting for their subjective as for their informational content, the main current of literary criticism was dividing, and some of the paths taken then looked much less helpful to sociologists or historians. Perhaps the least rewarding perspective proved to be that of the small butâat least until the late 1980sâinfluential group of radical critics who moved from Reconstructionâ towards a âpostmodernismâ in which there was no longer a biographical self capable of reflection, or a biographical reality upon which to reflect. Hence reflection itself was merely ideology; and autobiography totally fictional.
There were, however, more positive ways of getting out of an increasingly arid debate about the differences between fiction and non-fiction. It was evident that other literary forms besides autobiography, and most notably the novel, also drew on a mixture of experience, observation and imagination. For many critics indeed, it seems better to treat both autobiography and the novel, alongside biography and other types of historical works, as particular forms of the major genre of narrative. From this perspective the study of âthe narrative construction of realityâ has been a sustained concern of the influential Chicago literary review Critical Inquiry, and it is an approach which has brought literature increasingly close to history.5 A different path, but again a fruitful one, has been taken by the âreader responseâ school, which took special account of audience perceptions, and the âcultural materialistsâ, who sought to examine texts within their cultural context. Most recently, all these groups have converged into the cultural studies approach.Under these influences genre has come increasingly to be understood not as a rigid form of classification but more akin to language, with its fundamental flexibility, but at the same time its common assumptions between writer, speaker and audience of conventions, manner and tone, forms of delivery, timings, settings, shapes, motifs and characters.
An equally serious difficulty has been that until the early 1980s most literary discussion of genre in autobiography was conducted from a very exclusive perspective.6 Autobiography was conceived in terms of a high literary tradition of the lifetime reflections of great men, from âthe first great autobiographyâ by Saint Augustine, through Benvenuto Cellini to Benjamin Franklin, Gibbon, Rousseau, Goethe, John Henry Newman and Edmund Gosse, mirroring the classic concerns of Western conscience and individualism. Inclusion in the canon and exclusion from it were primarily questions of art;7 but almost equally strongly, of class and gender prejudice.
As a result, even the published autobiography of the lower classes was almost entirely ignored. Despite the pioneering lead given by David Vincent, As a result, even the published autobiography of the lower classes was almost entirely ignored. Despite the pioneering lead given by David Vincent,As a result, even the published autobiography of the lower classes was almost entirely ignored. Despite the pioneering lead given by David Vincent, 8 there has been little more recent work addressing the genres of or within European working-class autobiography. Most historians have been too preoccupied with questions of factual accuracy. One suggestive exception, however, is the work of Mark Traugott on nineteenth-century French workersâ autobiographies, which he divides into five âcommon conventional formsâ or subgenres: the legacy to posterity, the picaresque adventure, the success story, the plea for defence and the conversion experience.9
Equally seriously, the canon had no place at all either for the unwritten oral recollections of the majority of the population. Nor, despite the usual inclusion of religious conversion narratives within the genre, was there space within the canon for less total forms of private written reflection which lacked an explicit relationship between autobiographer and audienceâand indeed, were sometimes addressed to God, or a rich patron, rather than to the public. These excluded autobiographical forms, which included diaries, spiritual journals of confession or conscience, travel journals, or letters, were also precisely those most likely to be used by women. Equally seriously, the canon had no place at all either for the unwritten oral recollections of the majority of the population. Nor, despite the usual inclusion of religious conversion narratives within the genre, was there space within the canon for less total forms of private written reflection which lacked an explicit relationship between autobiographer and audienceâand indeed, were sometimes addressed to God, or a rich patron, rather than to the public. These excluded autobiographical forms, which included diaries, spiritual journals of confession or conscience, travel journals, or letters, were also precisely those most likely to be used by women.">Equally seriously, the canon had no place at all either for the unwritten oral recollections of the majority of the population. Nor, despite the usual inclusion of religious conversion narratives within the genre, was there space within the canon for less total forms of private written reflection which lacked an explicit relationship between autobiographer and audienceâand indeed, were sometimes addressed to God, or a rich patron, rather than to the public. These excluded autobiographical forms, which included diaries, spiritual journals of confession or conscience, travel journals, or letters, were also precisely those most likely to be used by women. 10 Breaking out from this straitjacket has proved a long and slow process.
In winning this change, perhaps the most persistent influence has been that of feminist criticism. The beginnings of a shift can already be seen in Robert Fothergillâs study of diaries, Private Chronicles (1974), where selection is still canonical, but three womenâs diaries are included,11 Meanwhile leading feminist critics such as Ellen Moers and Elaine Showalter in the United States and Juliet Mitchell in Britain were re-examining the lives of famous women novelists and showing how they responded to the constraints of patriarchal ideology by using their fiction to express their own personal experiences and to provide exemplary tales of womenâs suffering and defiance. This approach continues to be vigorously pursued.12 And in the 1980s Julia Swindells and Liz Stanley have broadened the focus through in-depthexaminations of the diaries of nineteenth-century working-class women in Britain. Swindells in particular shows how her diarists borrowed from popular genres such as romance and melodrama in order to express personal feelings on âwomenâs issuesâ which could not otherwise be addressed.13
An especially striking contribution has come from a cluster of studies, initially emanating from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham in the late 1970s with Angela McRobbieâs essay on schoolgirlsâ comics,14 in which the focus has been on popular forms of romantic storytelling and their meaning in the everyday lives of women. The central issue here has been how âthe formulaic elements of popular cultureâ shape womenâs consciousness, and so their lives: how women are socialized into femininity, their own real lives squeezed into the genre of fiction through their identification with fictional heroines.15 The concern is as much with what audiences make of communications and how they identify with and use stories as with literary form. However, the range of forms considered is extremely wide: from Virago fiction, popular romantic novels and girlsâ comics, to talking, kissing, dancingâŚ16 And we should note too that at this important moment of innovation the structural analysis drew not only on literary conventions, but also on ethnographic and folklore forms of analysis, and in particular the much earlier Russian work of Vladimir Propp.17 A particularly good example of this approach at its best, intertwining fantasy with autobiography, fiction with poetry, the contexts of home and school, is Valerie Walkerdineâs Schoolgirl Fictions:18
Feminist critics early pointed out how story forms are gendered, and while women prefer to read love stories orâas Alessandro Portelli suggests, tell hospital storiesâmen go for adventure, science fiction, thrillers, or war stories. Some of the earliest studies of these formulaic male storiesâalthough without any explicit awareness of gender issuesâare by John Cawelti, whose background was in American folklore and literature: he published on the Western and the detective story.19 More recently, studies of masculinity influenced by the feminist work have begun to explore the relationship between fictional genres and auto/biographical accounts of menâs lives and identities, as in Graham Dawsonâs Soldier Heroes. However, partly because not so much suitable material has been identified, the range of masculine life stories covered by critics remains much more restricted in scope.20
It is also from the United States that the first studies have come of âblack Englishâ in storytelling and also in vernacular preaching, although there is still a need for more specific study of forms of black autobiography. It is also from the United States that the first studies have come of âblack Englishâ in storytelling and also in vernacular preaching, although there is still a need for more specific study of forms of black autobiography. It is also from the United States that the first studies have come of âblack Englishâ in storytelling and also in vernacular preaching, although there is still a need for more specific study of forms of black autobiography. 21 Hence much closer to our concerns here has been the important literary critical interest, again chiefly in the Americas, in the Latin American testimonio. This is an autobiographical form which coalesced as a recogn...
