Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto biography

115 Pages·1999·1.04 MB·English

by  Mary Evans

Missing Persons
Auto/biography is currently one of the most popular literary genres, widely supposed to
illuminate the study of the individual and his or her personal circumstances. Missing
Persons suggests that auto/biography is, in fact, based on fictions, both about the person
and about what it is possible to know about any one individual.
Organised into chapters which consider particular kinds of auto/biographical writing,
such as work on the British Royal Family and auto/biographies of twentieth-century men,
this book demonstrates the absences and evasions—indeed the ‘missing persons’—of
auto/biography. It will provide invaluable reading for students of women’s studies,
sociology and cultural studies courses.
Mary Evans is Professor of Women’s Studies and Head of the Department of Sociology,
University of Kent at Canterbury.
Missing Persons
The impossibility of auto/ biography
Mary Evans

London and New York
First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York,
NY 10001
© 1999 Mary Evans

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Evans, Mary Missing persons: the
impossibility of auto/biography/Mary Evans. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Biography as a literary form. 2. Autobiography. 1. Title. CT2IE83 1999 808′.06692–dc21 98–
19232 CIP

ISBN 0-203-00971-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-30178-1 (Adobe eReaderFormat)
ISBN 0-415-09975-7 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-09976-5 (pbk)
Contents

vii
Acknowledgements

1 The possibilities of auto/biography 1

2 Lies, all lies: auto/biography as fiction 16

3 Imperatives of deference 31

4 Boys’ tales 45

5 Looking for daddy 66

6 The imagined self: the impossibility of auto/biography 78

Notes 87
References 93
Index 96
Acknowledgements
Many people have helped me in the production of this book. In order to try to prevent
them becoming ‘missing persons’, I should like to thank them here for their support and
assistance. Sue Sherwood, Sally Wilcock and Sally Harris have given endless help to an
author who finds it impossible to write with anything except a pen. I am deeply grateful
to all of them for their grace and patience. Michael Bird read the completed manuscript
with great care; I am indebted to him for his careful and helpful work. In its early stages
this project was supported by a grant from the Nuffield Foundation, and I would like to
thank them for their assistance.
I have presented parts of this book as papers at the universities of Sussex, Lancaster,
Warwick, Manchester and the London School of Economics. I would like to thank all
those institutions for their hospitality, and Celia Lury, Liz Stanley, Beverley Skeggs,
Henrietta Moore and Alan Sheridan for their invitations to speak. Many people have
listened patiently while I have talked about auto/biography; many others have contributed
information about their own biographies and those of others. So my thanks are due to
Anne Seller, Ros Coward, Janet Sayers, Jan Montefiore, Pat Macpherson, Audrey Lane
and Barbara Einhorn for their understanding conversations. David, Tom and Jamie
Morgan have unfailingly demonstrated the rich and rewarding diversity of human
existence.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to quote from the copyright works
reproduced. In particular, the publishers would like to thank the following for their
permission to include material in this book:
The Mandarins by Simone De Beauvoir. Reproduced by permission of HarperCollins
Publishers Ltd.
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, Copyright © George Orwell
1933 and The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, Copyright © George Orwell 1937.
Reproduced by permission of Mark Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the
Late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd.
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. Reproduced by permission of the Peters
Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber, 1958. Reproduced
by permission of Prentice Hall.
French Lessons by Alice Kaplan, Copyright © Alice Kaplan, 1994. Reproduced by
permission of the University of Chicago Press.
How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge. Reproduced by permission of Seeker &
Warburg Ltd (part of Random House UK).
The Auto/biographical I by Liz Stanley, 1992. Reproduced by permission of
Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK.
Chapter 1
The possibilities of auto/ biography
Anyone who visits a public library or a bookshop in Britain will know that
auto/biography is a flourishing literary genre. The shelves are packed with accounts of
the lives of the great, the good, the bad and—increasingly as the democratisation of the
genre has taken hold—the socially insignificant and powerless. The kings and queens are
there, as are the politicians and the statesmen, but so too are the ‘ordinary people’. This
book is thus not about a process of literary or social exclusion—its thesis is not that these
‘ordinary’ people, the Mrs and Mr Jones of social life, have been left out by biographers.
The Joneses do not (yet) have as much space as the Mountbattens and the Macmillans of
this world, but they are there. The thesis in not, therefore, about who is left out, but about
the ways in which the genres of autobiography and biography cannot represent what they
claim to represent, namely the ‘whole’ life of a person. Furthermore, this ‘whole’ person
is in any case a fiction, a belief created by the very form of auto/biography itself. We are
accustomed to classify autobiography as non-fiction, and yet it may be useful to think of
it not as such, but as a mythical construct of our society and our social needs. Central to
those social needs is the compelling wish of many people to experience life as an
organised and coherent process, in which rational choices are made. Critics of twentieth-
century society, from Freud and Weber to Kristeva and Gillian Rose, have all observed
that the fear of inner, individual chaos is all too frequently projected on to the world as a
1
desire for social order.
The conventional expectation about auto/biography is, of course, that in the process of
documenting an individual’s life, something approaching the truth about that individual
will be told. The ‘need to know’ is a priority in the telling of tales about individuals, and
that endless fascination which we all have with the lives of others. From this viewpoint, it
is obviously possible to see auto/biography as the literary equivalent of gossip. Instead of
the verbal exchange of information about others which is a general social characteristic,
the authors of autobiography use print to record and document individual lives. The
difference, of course, is that we tend to view gossip as in some sense partial, while
auto/biography is generally assumed at least to aspire to some version of absolute and
inclusive truth.
If this is one of the general assumptions about auto/ biography, then there are also
others which characteristically inform writing about the genre. The first of these
assumptions is that auto/biography is as old as literacy itself. Although it has now
become conventional to distinguish between ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ biography, there
are assumed similarities in the form which stretch from Plutarch to the latest book on
Princess Diana. Plutarch’s Lives belongs emphatically to me pre-modern; even by the
standards of the contemporary rearrangement of time and chronology, it is difficult to
situate a book written in the first century AD as anything other than pre-modern. But the
The possibilities of auto/biography 2
exact point of the separation between modern and pre-modern remains contentious. In his
biography of King Alfred the Great, published in 1995, Alfred Smyth argues that:
Asser’s Life of King Alfred occupies a central place in English historical
writing, not only because of its acceptance by scholars as the earliest
extant biography of an English king—and indeed of any English lay
person—but because its subject is Alfred the Great of Wessex whom
Asser, the author of the Life, claims to have known as a tutor and a friend.
The immediacy of this extraordinary source is heightened by the author’s
claim to be writing his biography while the king was still living—in
2
Alfred’s forty-fifth year—in AD 893.
Thus we have here the placing of the ‘first’ English biography in the ninth century AD—
later than Plutarch but rather earlier than some of the other commonly aired ‘first’
biographies, such as Boswell’s Life of Johnson or Froude’s Carlyle. But what is striking
about this potential ‘first’ in biography is that the ninth-century biographer is, as Smyth
points out, obsessed with Alfred’s relationship to literacy. ‘He [Alfred] is obsessed with
his own personal need to overcome illiteracy’ writes Alfred’s twentieth-century
biographer. Thus we have a relationship which spans over a thousand years of history: a
desire on the part of individuals to write and to record both their own histories and the
histories of other individuals. Alfred the Great could not tolerate his own illiteracy, and in
this lies an essential ingredient of autobiography: individual terror at the thought of dying
without a written record. In the latter part of the twentieth century, people living in
industrial society take for granted written records about themselves: we acquire a
personal biography whether we like it or not. For many millions of people living outside
the societies of generalised literacy and bureaucratic documentation, this is not the case,
and so autobiography has to be located as a literary genre that is an important part, not of
culture generally but of literate cultures which are motivated by a desire to record.
While literacy and auto/biography go hand in hand, this cannot obscure the sense in
which other cultures (and indeed our own) depend heavily on mythologised accounts of
individual lives for the transmission of moral and cultural values. Nursery rhymes and
fairy-tales in Western cultures are organised around individuals, and their part in
organising auto/biography is an important one to which this account will return later.
Those moral tales which children are told, or learn, about the greedy child, or the boy
who cries ‘Wolf, wolf’, are all part of the cultural values which inform the more
sophisticated form of autobiography. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries there has been a steady production of autobiographies and biographies which
are organised as moral tales: overcoming specific hardships or illnesses, living through
difficult times or finding personal happiness all have much in common with the narrative
of Grimms’ Fairy Tales or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. What is striking about many of
these tales is that the language of Bunyan becomes the language of the contemporary tale
of battles against drug abuse or eating disorders: ‘I picked up the burden of my problems’
is a sentence which can be replicated over and over again in this literature.
But the autobiographies that fill the shelves of public libraries and are bought in large
numbers by the reading public are not, on the whole, the explicitly moral tales about
victories over illness or adversity, they are the scholarly accounts of individual lives