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ABSTRACT
In an exploration of the problems of writing autobiography and biography articulated by Laura Marcus, I show how Yeats, Wittgenstein and Woolf, identify the note as the form that keeps alive the life that autobiography and biography are always paradoxically in danger of making absent. The promissory note written for autobiography’s impending realisation suggests that the past is best retrieved by means of a structure of permanent postponement for the future. Proust’s invocation of memory through the device of sliding metaphors, analogies and comparisons, by contrast, involves a translation of moments of the past through deliberate paramnesia, operating according to the translational structure of displacement articulated by Freud in his analysis of dreams. Once put into narrative form, an autobiography will never tell the story of the self alone, of the individual life, for to write an autobiography will always mean to fabulate one’s own ‘family novel’ (Freud’s ‘Familienroman’) in the terms of a romance in which the writer acts out their own desires as a character within a drama whose script has already been written by others.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Laura Marcus, ‘“Enough about You, Let's Talk about Me”: Recent Autobiographical Writing’, New Formations, 1 (1987), pp. 77–94.
2 W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 312.
3 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as Defacement’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 67–81.
4 Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Jeanne Schulkind (ed.), Moments of Being (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), pp. 72–3.
5 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), p. 89, 113.
6 Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (London: Bodley Head, 1964).
7 Sergei Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage, Selected Works vol. II, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor, trans. Michael Glenny (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).
8 Jean Rhys, Smile Please. An Unfinished Autobiography (London: André Deutsch, 1979).
9 Viktor Shklovsky, The Third Factory, trans. Richard Sheldon (Chicago and Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002).
10 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 4.
11 Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990).
12 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Private notebooks 1914–1916, ed. and trans. Marjorie Perloff (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2022), p. 45.
13 Wittgenstein thus belongs, along with Walter Benjamin and Frantz Fanon, to the distinguished club of those whose academic theses were rejected by their universities.
14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Revised 4th ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 3e.
15 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 65.
16 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Bert G. Hornback (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 143.
17 Lee, ‘Biography’, in Virginia Woolf, pp. 3–20.
18 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 70.
19 Laura Marcus, Autobiographical Discourses. Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 98; Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 116.
20 Woolf, cited in Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 13.
21 Toni Morrison, ‘The Site of Memory’, in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2nd ed., ed. William Zinsser (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), pp. 83–102; Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: Norton, 2019).
22 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 75, 136, 95.
23 Ibid., p. 100.
24 Ibid., p. 64.
25 Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), p. 158; Journal de deuil (Paris: Le Seuil, 2009).
26 Woolf, cited in Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 11.
27 Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 19.
28 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 65, 116.
29 Sigmund Freud, ‘An Autobiographical Study’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. James Strachey, with the assistance of Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), XX, p. 72.
30 Jane Brown, Trinity College: A Garden History (Cambridge: Trinity College, 2002).
31 Hermione Lee, Biography. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 6–18.
32 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 142; Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 20.
33 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 140, 142.
34 Woolf, ‘Reminiscences’, in Moments of Being, p. 36.
35 Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, Préface de Bernard de Fallois (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1954), p. 157, my translation.
36 Gérard Genette, ‘Proust’s Palimpsest’, in Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), pp. 204, 214.
37 Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises. Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), p. 126.
38 Jean Laplanche, Seduction, Translation and the Drives, ed. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton (London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992). In the ‘Roundtable on Translation’ in The Ear of the Other, Patrick Mahoney remarks that he has
done a thorough inventory of the word “translation” -- Übersetzung-- in all of Freud’s texts. While he considers repression to be a rift or fault in the translation, on several occasions in his writings he implicitly conceives all of the following to be translations: hysterical, phobic, and obsessional symptoms, dreams, recollections, parapraxes, the choice of the means of suicide, the choice of fetish, the analyst's interpretations, and the transpositions of unconscious material to consciousness. (Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), pp. 96–7).
39 For an extended discussion of Freud’s use of the metaphor of translation in psychoanalysis, see my ‘Freud on Cultural Translation’, in Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee (eds), A Concise Companion to Pyschoanalysis, Literature, and Culture (Oxford: Wiley, 2014), pp. 367–84.
40 Sigmund Freud, Interpreting Dreams, trans. J.A. Underwood (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 293.
41 Roman Jakobson, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in Reuben A. Brower (ed.), On Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 232–39.
42 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). The final title chosen for the book implies a translucency of memory in the service of autobiography that correlates perfectly with Nabokov’s hostility to Freud.
43 Freud, ‘Screen Memories’, Standard Edition, III, p. 315, 322.
44 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 108.
45 Karl Marx, Capital A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 9, 872.
46 Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1975).
47 Rita Kothari, Uneasy Translations. Self, Experience and Indian Literature (New Delhi: Bloomsbury India, 2022), p. 2.
48 Laura Marcus, Autobiography, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 28.
49 Robert J.C. Young, ‘Phantom Threads’, Oxford Literary Review, 44.1 (2022), pp. 17–26.
50 Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, trans. Ann Wright (London: Verso, 1984).
51 Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019).
52 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 78.
53 Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, The First Well, trans. Issa J. Boullata (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995); Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1982).
54 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 64.
55 Woolf, ‘Reminiscences’, in Moments of Being, p. 40.
56 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Cf. Derrida, The Ear of the Other, p. 113.
57 Yevgeny Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography [1963] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 137.
58 Vikram Seth, Two Lives. A Memoir (New York: Harper Collins, 2005).
59 Isobel Armstrong, ‘Laura Marcus, 1956–2021’, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/memoirs/21/marcus-laura-1956-2021/ [accessed 12 January 2024].