I was planning to teach this academic year an elective subject on narrative non-fiction of a journalistic type but I will be teaching instead autobiography and memoirs. I have included non-fiction as one of the four categories of contemporary prose students need to read in my Contemporary English Literature subject (the other three are varieties of fiction). The case is that students who have been assigned narrative non-fiction (I’ll mention as an example Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea, 2000) have found it difficult to cope with the substantial amount of information that this type of book carries. And so, I decided to focus instead on 21st century autobiographies and memoirs, perhaps simply because these are the genres I most frequently read apart from novels.
I’ll be following the same method I’m using now in Contemporary English Literature, that is to say, each of my 35 students will be reading four different volumes. The difference is that in the case of the new elective (which, formally, is called ‘English Prose’), I’ve asked students to choose their books from a list of about 200, which I have compiled mixing my own reading list with online lists of the best, or at least, of the most attractive autobiographies and memoirs published in the last 25 years. Through interacting with each other, students will learn about approximately 140 titles. I still don’t know how I’m going to assess the subject, as I’m planning to have students write reviews to collect them in an e-book, but I also would like them to write personal recollections, and I need to offer as well a theoretical framework and a basic history of the genre. As you may imagine, I do have a bibliography and have now started reading from it, beginning with Linda Anderson’s effective introduction, simply called Autobiography (2001), and Ben Yagoda’s truly exciting volume Memoir: A History (2009).
I’m currently reading Paul John Eakin’s Writing Life Writing (2020), a collection of some of his key articles, and I became curious about his many references to the theory of English philosopher Galen Strawson about the Diachronics and the Episodics, which he seems to have formulated first in his article “Against Narrativity” (Ratio XVII, 4 December 2004). With apologies to those who have participated in the intense debates generated by this article and by Strawson’s subsequent amplification of the theories presented in it, I’m not a philosopher, and I was totally ignorant that he exists until literally yesterday. Checking another blog post about Strawson, written last April by another blogger, I see, however, that it’s never too late to join a fun party, and that Strawson’s theories have, if not much coherence, at least the merit of making one think hard about our life and how we make sense of it. This is, of course, the function of philosophy.
In “Against Narrativity,” Strawson attacks the commonly accepted idea that our sense of self depends on the narrative we tell ourselves about our life. Our narrative, psychiatrist Oliver Sacks has claimed (no doubt following Freud), is our identity. If self equals narration, this means that we are fundamentally autobiographical creations, which might explain the popularity that the genres of the autobiography and the memoir currently enjoy. The other generally welcome supposition that Strawson rejects is that this autobiographical, narrative approach to how we build our sense of identity is essential for an ethical life, for only if we cohere narratively can we understand our actions. What Strawson calls the psychological Narrativity thesis (he uses the capital N “to denote a specifically psychological property or outlook”) and the ethical Narrativity thesis, which he believes to be normative, are often combined. Strawson demolishes both, separately and in combination, arguing that “It’s just not true that there is only one good way for human beings to experience their being in time. There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative.”
At this point he proposes the thesis that self-experience can be of two types: Diachronic (when one sees an obvious continuity between a past, present, and future self) and Episodic (when one does not see that continuity and feels “no particular tendency to see their life in Narrative terms”). To begin with, and I’m sure that many other persons have presented the same objection, the opposite of Diachronic is Synchronic; at least, these are the terms preferred when we consider, for instance, a language’s history in contrast to its present. Strawson clarifies, however, that Diachronics and Episodics are not different by virtue of how they relate to the present, but by whether they see the present as part of an ongoing narrative or not.
Using himself as an example of a typical Episodic personality, Strawson claims that although he has memories of his past experiences, “yet I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form. Absolutely none. Nor do I have any great or special interest in my past. Nor do I have a great deal of concern for my future.” He insists that this doesn’t make him a less ethical person, he just doesn’t feel the ethical mandate to see his life as a narrative. “Self-understanding,” Strawson remarks, “does not have to take a narrative form, even implicitly. I’m a product of my past, including my very early past, in many profoundly important respects. But it simply does not follow that self-understanding, or the best kind of self-understanding, must take a narrative form, or indeed a historical form.”
Paul John Eakin, who was entangled in an academic duel of sorts with Strawson, dismisses his arguments, mainly counterarguing that thinking of ourselves as a variety of selves scattered along our timeline with no narrative link to each other makes no sense. Autobiography, which is what interests Eakin (who is not philosopher but a specialist in English Literature), could not exist either as a literary genre or as a fundamental reality in our life. Now we know, however, that only 30% to 50% of all humans regularly think to themselves in internal monologues (the rest think in images or patterns). It might well be that this inner conversation with oneself is more crucial to how we build our sense of self than Strawson’s division into Diachronics and Episodics, or Eakin’s acceptance of Antonio Damasio’s neurobiological theses by which the self is an expression not just of the mind but of the brain. Think of how persons with Alzheimer’s end up not knowing who they are.
I do see my life as a narrative, a fact which I have always attributed to my being career-oriented. My impression is that whatever I thought of myself as a child changed when I became 14 and, because of the nature of the Spanish education system back in 1980, I had to choose between professional training and secondary education. I chose the latter (I myself did, not my parents) and this opened up the chance to attend university. Once in university, I started daydreaming about being an academic. Personal matters, of course, have also influenced deeply how I’ve been shaping my own story; for instance, I knew very early that I wanted to be a in a stable relationship with a man, but that I didn’t want to be a mother, regardless of what profession I ended up having. So, yes, I do believe that we see our lives as a narrative, though I often wonder how persons who are not career-oriented (the majority…) narrate their lives to themselves. At the point I’m now, I worry about how the narrative of my mother’s life will end (she’s almost 83), having gone last year through the sudden ending of my father’s life. And, of course, I’m both curious and fearful about how the next years of my life will unfold, both narrowly considering my own existence and more widely the way the world is going (to hell).
At the same time, despite this basically Diachronic approach to my life, I’m not sure at all about the continuity of my self. The body constantly changes throughout life, and it is clear that the body I have today is not the body I had when I was born, or even last year. Yet, all those other bodies no longer exist (except in photos or film) and I have (and I am) just my current body. Nobody disputes I’m the same person named Sara Martín that I was in my photos as a child or a young woman. With the mind, matters are more complex, and I’m not speaking here of the capacity to remember, which is always very spotty, unlike what autobiographers and memoirists claims. Although I would be totally incapable of writing a minimally reliable autobiography (and it would be, anyway, rather short because there is so much I want to forget, and so much I’ve forgotten), I’m often struck when I read texts I wrote many years ago by how little my writing voice has changed. A few weeks ago I reused for a new article a text I wrote back in 1997, and I found myself totally agreeing with what I’d written 28 years ago. Some days I think this means I must be a very coherent scholar, others days that I have not progressed at all. So, it seems I’m both the same person, but also many other selves. Both Diachronic and Episodic.
I’m beginning to see that this new elective of mine will force me to think hard about how we narrate our self, though I’m also realizing that, despite the current flood of autobiographies and memoirs, we don’t talk enough with each other about how we make sense of our lives.