The Work of Life Writing
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The Work of Life Writing

Essays and Lectures

G. Thomas Couser

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eBook - ePub

The Work of Life Writing

Essays and Lectures

G. Thomas Couser

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About This Book

Life writing, in its various forms, does work that other forms of expression do not; it bears on the world in a way distinct from imaginative genres like fiction, drama, and poetry; it acts in and on history in significant ways. Memoirs of illness and disability often seek to depathologize the conditions that they recount. Memoirs of parents by their children extend or alter relations forged initially face to face in the home. At a time when memoir and other forms of life writing are being produced and consumed in unprecedented numbers, this book reminds readers that memoir is not mainly a "literary" genre or mere entertainment. Similarly, letters are not merely epiphenomena of our "real lives." Correspondence does not just serve to communicate; it enacts and sustains human relationships. Memoir matters, and there's life in letters. All life writing arises of our daily lives and has distinctive impacts on them and the culture in which we live.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2021
ISBN
9781000367379

1 Prologue: Death and Life Writing

Reflections on My Morbid Career*

The editors of this special issue honored me greatly by citing early work of mine in their call for papers: “The Embodied Self,” my introduction to a 1991 special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies on “Illness, Disability, and Lifewriting”; and “The Shape of Death in American Autobiography,” which appeared in the Hudson Review in 1978.1 Their doing so has prompted me to reflect on my long-term interest in the complex relations between life writing and death.
When I published the Hudson Review essay, I was in my early thirties, a recently minted PhD in American Studies and a beginning professor of English. The essay grew out of my dissertation, American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode, which traced a distinctive mode of autobiography from the Puritans to (then) contemporary life writers like Norman Mailer and Malcolm X. Although it discussed many of the same texts as the dissertation, the essay’s focus was different; it explored the vexed relation between the limits of autobiography as a form of life writing and the limits of life itself—i.e., a relation between a medium and mortality.
The sole distinction, by definition, between (allo)biography and autobiography is that the former can be written by anyone other than the subject, while the latter is written only by the subject. That distinction entails another: autobiography is inherently incomplete. No matter how long or comprehensive, an autobiography can never contain the whole chronological extent of a life: it cannot include the death of its subject, much less conclude with it, as biography often does.
But the fact that autobiography cannot “contain” the death of the author literally, as its final event, does not mean that it is not shaped by death—not “about” the death of the subject in some way. Indeed, one might argue that thoughtful, reflective autobiography (or memoir) is often haunted, even impelled, by the authors’ awareness of the inevitability of their own deaths and of the genre’s inherent incompleteness. Even when it is not written in the expectation of imminent demise, then, it may be written in the (fore)shadow of death. To demonstrate this in my essay, I explored ways in which a selection of well-known American writers—Jonathan Edwards, John Woolman, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Malcolm X—addressed their own deaths in one fashion or another in their life writing: rehearsing it (as Edwards did, by seeking to be “swallowed up in God”), substituting for it (as Woolman did, by using the death of another Friend to stand in for his own), embracing it (as Franklin did, by playfully characterizing writing his life as re-living it), transcending it (as Thoreau and Whitman did, by dissolving themselves in nature and others, respectively), pre-empting it (as Adams did, by narrating his story in the third person as history), and memorializing himself (as Malcolm X did, by accelerating his narrative to register a Muslim persona to survive him). To probe beneath the surface of a serious autobiography, I argued, is to expose the author’s recognition of mortality.
As I wrote at the time,
Many classic American autobiographies betray the pressure of a profound concern with death. The expectation of death may impel the writer, as though the composition of an autobiography might help him to compose himself in the face of death. Or he may hope that the finished narrative will endow him with a kind of immortality. More importantly, the form and content of the narratives are often significantly shaped by the writer’s preoccupation with death, even though the event itself eludes direct treatment. Two problems overlap here in an interesting way. As a mortal, the writer may seek to come to terms with death. As an autobiographer, he may want to write a conclusion which, in its finality and significance, will somehow be equivalent to his own death.
(Couser, “The Shape of Death,” 53)
Rather than reexamining those texts further here, I wish to reflect on the preoccupation with death that seems to pervade my academic writing. The origin of this preoccupation is not far to seek, and I was certainly aware of it when I composed my Hudson Review essay; what remained obscure to me for a long time was its lasting effect. Looking back now, however, I can see that my scholarly corpus (pun intended) may seem quite morbid. And I am struck by the fact that over the course of my career, without setting out to do so, I have explored how a number of life-writing genres stand in different relations to death and thus offer quite different responses to what may be the most important of the so-called “facts of life”—that we all die.
The genesis of this morbidity was the successive deaths of my parents in a short period of time: my mother’s, in the fall of 1974; my father’s, the following spring. I was in my late twenties. My mother had survived breast cancer in her fifties only to be diagnosed ten years later with the ovarian cancer that took her life within a year. Though far from painless, her dying was a gradual, graceful decline during which the family had time to say our goodbyes and to grieve in advance. My father’s dying was of a different order. He had become deeply and chronically depressed in his early sixties; one way he coped was to drink secretly and self-destructively—behavior that is known, euphemistically and paradoxically, as “self-medicating.” No treatment, not even electroshock administered at Boston’s acclaimed McLean Hospital, alleviated his pain. His death was the shocking, but not surprising, denouement to his binges.
I found the circumstances of his death not only distressing but shameful. As far as I knew, his drinking had been a closely held secret: how was I to explain to extended family, colleagues, and friends the seemingly sudden death of an otherwise fit and youthful sixty-nine-year old? More than distress and shame, I felt some responsibility—I lived not far away and thought I should have interceded. Worse, I felt guilty: I feared that a frank letter I had written him as an epistolary “intervention” had sent him into a downward spiral. He had told my mother that if I ever found out about his drinking, it would “destroy” him. I did find out; I confronted him, and our relationship was never the same.
Clearing out my family home after my father’s death, I discovered a cache, a trove, of documents stored in a closet behind his bed; mostly personal correspondence from friends and romantic partners, they shed light on aspects of his life that I had not been aware of—e.g., he had romantic friendships with several gay male friends—or gave me intimate access to aspects of his life of which I had been aware, like his service in the Navy during World War II and a stint as a missionary-teacher in Aleppo, Syria, in the 1930s. This discovery, a consequence of my father’s death, gave me unexpected posthumous access to his life, through his and others’ life writing. (The archive, an accumulation of documents, some official—marriage licenses and passports—most not, itself constitutes an ill-defined “genre” of life writing—not quite a scrapbook but a consciously chosen and retained set of documents.) At the time, I was too traumatized by his death to explore them in depth; I was not ready to plunge into his life at the time. I sorted them, boxed them, and stored them, knowing that the time would come for me to reckon with them.
In the next academic year I wrote my dissertation, which gave rise in turn to my essay. Occurring just at the outset of my career as a scholar of life writing, then, my parents’ deaths, particularly my father’s, profoundly affected my approach to life writing, first by prompting my thoughts on “the shape of death” in American autobiography. For the next decade, however, the only evidence of a thanatological orientation in my work was the Hudson Review essay. That changed in the early 1990s, when I began to focus on the representation of embodiment in contemporary life writing. On the conscious level, this turn was a response to an upsurge in memoirs of illness and disability, which foregrounded the body. No one I knew of was studying this phenomenon, and I set out to do so primarily (or so I thought) out of intellectual curiosity: what does it mean that this kind of life writing is appearing now? What are its sources, its implications?
If I had been asked at the time, then, whether this turn to pathology and pathography had a source in my own family, I would have denied it. This despite that the fact that my mother’s diabetic sister had died of insulin shock in her thirties, when I was a child, causing my parents to take in her daughter temporarily; this despite the fact that my father’s mother had been an invalid, due to Parkinso...

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