In this reflection essay, I attempt to relate the autobiography to the photograph, because the autobiography is like the photograph. The autobiography creates an image of authenticity, but it is not reality. There are substantial levels of verisimilitude in the autobiography but it is not life; not real, and this creates the dichotomy between authenticity and reality which is as well inherent in the photograph. Just like the photograph, the autobiography is rehearsed (consciously or unconsciously), it is posed for, it is manipulated, it transits the space of memory and fades with (and in) time, it is rigid and fixated, which is unlike the life it aspires to imitate that has transitory relationship with time, space and memory. The autobiography encapsulates many metaphors just like the photograph.
There is a consciousness which is multilayered as well fragmented in the autobiography. These multilayered and fragmented forms are mostly designed to fit into an image which is frozen in time and space. Life is never frozen. It is continual, until that moment when the subject slips into the realm of mortality. If a photograph is frozen in time and space, how then does it properly account for a subject that is both plastic and continuous? We can ask this question of the autobiography as well. We can readily imagine: one hour after a picture is taken, the subject could have grown a bit of centimeter of hair on the body (biologically speaking), or consumed by some other phenomenon, or come into interaction with a circumstance which the subject has never encountered. All these can alter the configuration of the subject but the photograph cannot document it. This is the same status of the autobiography. What happens to the life of the subject after the autobiography has been published? Or put in another way; how does the frozen autobiography account for the life of the subject after its publication? There is likely to be no complete and comprehensible theoretical and philosophical explanation to this, even if one explores the humanist’s region of narrativity, identity construction and memory. It is exactly this dilemma that Ricoeur attempts to highlight when he states that; “It is precisely the weakness of the criterion of similitude in the case of large distances over time which suggest another notion that is at the same time another criterion of identity, namely, the uninterrupted continuity in the development of a being between the first and the last stage of its evolution” (74).
How does the autobiography capture the ‘uninterrupted continuity’ of its subject? How does it narrate in authentic term, the development of its subject from ‘the first and the last stage of its evolution’? A simple, yet least viable response to this might be the fact that the inventor and the subject of the autobiography is itself—the autobiography. Simply put; the self has chosen to re-create an identity of the self. The problem, however, is that identity is a large domain of construction which takes more than the self alone to create. How does the self account for the important part of the stories left untold in the autobiography? How does the self account for the different sense of the self, different sense of reasoning and perception, in a continuum of mental and psychological differences between a stretch of time and arrays of spaces? In photographic term; how do one account for objects not captured in the photograph, either due to the lack of capacity of the camera lens or the constraint of angle of view of the photographer? The photograph does not document all the true angle of the subject, just like an autobiography does not of the subject. A cripple can take a close shot angle photograph so as to appear like the whole body frame is fine and complete in the picture. That means there is a perceptive dimensionality to the photograph. Given another instance, a subject might pose and smile in a photograph while going through moment of grief. The photograph does not tell the whole story of the subject. The subject decides which angle of the image he/she wants portrayed—whether it is taken as a ‘selfie’ or a full frame image by a photographer (and here, I also refer to the biography). The autobiography compels the same logic as the photograph. It is driven by a consciousness in which the portrayal of self contains some level of manipulation that is projected towards acceptance of personal identity. That is to say, the autobiography, just like the photograph is a means of identity construction. The only difference being that the autobiography explores the relationship between identity and narrativity, while the photograph tilts towards identity and visuality.
The autobiography can be regarded as a narrative, composed from personal experience and memory of an account of one’s life, bringing into knowledge those parts which the autobiographer believes are noteworthy, in a manner which he can recollect or aspires to recollect them. It is usually written by someone of public importance, or someone whose personal testimony about life would naturally inspire public conversation and thus contribute to public record, or become subject of future knowledge and study for the public. The public seems to be a major implication in this respect as an autobiography does not compartmentalize its reader into the critical, the naïve, and the vulnerable. The critical ones consume the autobiography as fiction, the naïve consumes it as a mixture of reality and fiction, while the vulnerable consumes it completely as reality. There is no caveat in an autobiography because it is presented to the public as a truthful portrait of the protagonist instead of a fictional representation of him. Since there is interpretative choice, the critical reader is most likely the only reader who will adequately interrupts his thoughts by the suspicion of the author’s active presence in the telling of the story—a story in which the author is the narrator as well as the protagonist. This dimension can be illuminating as well as disconcerting. The critical reader foregrounds the discourse instead of the story. This inevitably translates to exploring the narrative instead of the narration. Instead of reading and enjoying a story with all its imaginative intrigues, the critical reader becomes a psychoanalyst of a sort; judging the autobiographer not on how the story reflects the protagonist but on how the protagonist reflects the story. The critical reader unwittingly enters a distinctive creative tension, one in which he is more of a judge than a reader. He sees through the trick of employing experiential and historical facts as incentive to knit webs of fiction.
The autobiography is not the real image but a distanced image of the real. It is a fabled space festooned with imaginary characters of its own. The text of the autobiography, just like the photograph, does not get beyond the surface ‘imaging’. How then does it ‘truly’ account for the internal dynamics of the subject? Despite the pressure of authorial sentiment and identification, consumers of both the autobiography and the photograph would have to determine the internal dynamics of the characters substantially by the representation of the imageries, and by their private imaginative and interpretation choices. On both exercises, the end result does not constitute the reality. This is why the adjective ‘fictive’ and its derivative ‘factive’ have been some of the most prominent linguistic denotations of the autobiography in the past decades. The prominent literary critic and theorist, Northop Frye, challenges this matter of fiction in autobiography outright, by regarding the autobiography as a, “…form which merges with the novel by insensible gradations. Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse, to select only those events and experiences in the writer’s life that go to build up an integrated pattern” (307). Following Frye’s opinion (in which I am well pleased), there is the conscious effort in the autobiography to create a protagonist. As with all good writings, there is no problem with creating a protagonist, whether material or immaterial. Perhaps, the problem with the autobiography, just like the photography, is the self-serving motive to enable the protagonist. The protagonist is constructed to wield enormous power which distances it imperiously from critical assessment. This makes the protagonist in an autobiography a fictive self. It aspires a model of the real personae it intends, but, there is a big difference which is situated between the ontological gap of identity and temporality.
The position of this short reflection does not in any way tend to dismantle the autobiographical or photographical plausibility in enhancing the sphere of identity construction. In fact, the opinion is that the autobiography and the photograph are both elements with overwhelming creative resourcefulness to represent the protagonist and its identity. However, the autobiography, just like the photograph, do not have accurate representation of one’s identity. To clarify; both the photograph and the autobiography demonstrate the impossibility of framing our multiple and fragmented selves. They contain levels of authenticity of the subject but not the reality of the subject. Life is an ongoing temporality—the autobiography and the photograph are not.
Works Cited
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Ricoeur, Paul. “Narrative Identity” in Philosophy Today, vol. 35 no. 1 (Periodicals Archive Online), pp. 73-81, 1991.