Translated memories: autobiography and the surrender to literature

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiography
• biography
• Freud
• Wittgenstein
• Woolf
• Yeats

From her first published article of 1987, memorably titled ‘Enough about You, Let’s Talk’s about Me’, a review of contemporary feminist and socialist autobiographies, autobiography remained the central interest and focus, the consistent motif of Laura Marcus’ life and writing.¹ In the review, she voiced ahead of its time the possibility that autobiography could be articulated with questions of the lost archives of subaltern histories and their structures of subjectivity, already mapping out the powerful and important intellectual landscape that would flourish for the next decades. Beyond that, her interest in autobiography also had more creative, personal aspects. She had an extraordinary ability to turn her own life, particularly her problems in dealing with some of its practical and technical aspects, into a constant source of preposterous comedy and entertainment for others. The inspiration was essentially cinematic. She narrated and portrayed her experiences in a manner that made you feel as if you were watching her on film, battling with a fundamentally belligerent and uncooperative material world. Her interest in autobiography as a form of imaginative writing was in some ways similar if less comic – for Laura autobiography was simultaneously fascinating and non-cooperative, resistant to theorising and provocatively undefinable, compelling in its impulsiveness. Autobiography as a subject was never accommodating, not just in terms of its notorious difficulties as a genre and not just because autobiography in its very form and medium stages and performs irresolvable contradictions, the deep disjunctions between biography and writing, life and death, but because in literary terms it refuses to collaborate, refuses to lay down its arms and enter the house of proper literature, its ragged borders always messy with bits left out littering the street. The act of autobiography always produces its own resistant forms.

I. Yeats, Wittgenstein and autobiography

The first entry in Yeats’ 1909 notebook, written when he was 44, runs as follows:

To keep these notes natural and useful to me I must keep one note from leading on to another, that I may not surrender myself to literature. Every note must come as a casual thought, then it will be my life. Neither Christ not Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do that is to exchange life for a logical process.²

Yeats’ caution did not prevent his notebook being gathered up and published with other writings in 1965 as The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. His point, though, was precisely that he was not writing an autobiography, because to write any kind of narrative would be, as he puts it so memorably, ‘to surrender myself to literature’. Autobiography must always be resisted. To keep his notes as ‘natural and useful … as a casual thought’ he must prevent them falling into any kind of sequence at all, even that to be found in poetry, any signifying chain in which the thought of one note follows logically from another. The entries must have no coherent connection between each other, they must be left to come by chance, each one a ‘casual thought’ placed randomly after the last. Only by preserving the spontaneous form of its original irruptive expression in this way can each note, as Yeats puts it unexpectedly, ‘be my life’, his non-literary being, preserved for future use. Being, life, and the literary are put in opposition to each other. Yeats senses that to allow his thoughts to form into a language that falls into any kind of narrative would be to lose his inner being and existence to literature that exists somehow outside of himself. For Yeats even his own literary creation does not, as we might have expected, define his self, or create it, capture it, produce it. Following the example of the greatest human figures – Christ, Buddha, Socrates – who refused to write a book, ‘that is to exchange life for a logical process’, he must prevent himself from dying into the literary. A fundamental antimony exists between life and logic, being and connectedness, existence and rational sequence, between the ‘natural’ unconstrained irruptions of life and any form of literary narrative that many would more conventionally assume to be able represent a form of his life, such as autobiography.

Yeats here identifies his ‘I’ with Yeats the living being, whereas the Yeats who writes loses his life and very his self. Autobiography, however impossible and undefinable as a genre-that-can-never-quite-be-a-genre it may be, will at first sight at least always share one defining feature with biography, one that inserts both genres into the literary, namely that if you are going to write a life, whether your own or someone else’s, you will always face a demand for a connected narrative written in grammatical sequence. For Yeats any such capitulation will necessarily involve a loss of the self to the literary – even in poetry, you can create yourself only by losing your living self. To turn my life into literature through autobiography will always incur the death of the very me who is writing myself. To stay alive in his thoughts, to capture and retain his life in language, Yeats must keep literature eternally at bay precisely in his writing: ‘then it will be my life’. To do that, he must follow Pascal’s Pensées, not Saint Augustine’s Confessions. The paradox of autobiography therefore is not just that it involves defacement as Paul de Man suggested but that that defacement itself comes as the mark of autobiography as autothanatography, because to write your life as autobiography will always mean that you have already surrendered your being to literature.³ Only the note, the essay, l’essai, the try, the unfinished attempt, experiment, trial run, founded in the provisional mode of the casual unresolved thought that stands in solitary isolation by itself, can keep the life alive that autobiography will always eliminate with its deadly demand for sequence and logical process, for a life arbitrarily divided into the literary form of chapters. Can you, could you though, write a narrative that artificially preserves the life for which all sequence is toxic? If autobiography threatens the death of the self who writes, how can the storytelling of biography bring its subject back from the dead and make them alive?

It was when I first read Yeats’ note of 1909 that I understood why I’ve always found it hard to read a biography, despite my great respect for many biographers whose historical erudition and Orphic ability to conjure up their biographical subjects de profundis I greatly admire. A well-known biographer once said to me, ‘I don’t suppose you read many biographies?’ To which the correct answer, my neighbour beside me at the table murmured, is ‘oh but I do!’. Yet I could but answer honestly and said ‘I tend not to read biographies sequentially. I like to dip in and read certain sections at different times. I find myself more interested in the moment than reading the life as a whole’. That was the end of the conversation. What I was trying to suggest was that for me the narrative in biography is problematic, the distended sequence that joins together all the unforeseen and momentary instances of experiencing, that in many biographies what escapes is precisely the fragmented always undetermined potentiality, the promise of futurity, in the writing of the person that is what has caught and engaged me in the first place, exactly what Yeats in his notebook entry feared he would lose. All the baggage of who the parents and grandparents were, the endless accumulation of detail and ponderous extended descriptions that make biographies such literally weighty tomes, are one thing: but the grafting of the writer into the slow and certain narrative that runs from birth to death with the thickets of impenetrable forgettable life-events wedged between the two, those for me have always proved a bridge too far, a long road on which I’m reluctant to travel. It’s not that I’m not interested in the detail. In fact I love the detail and I’m always dipping into biographies to find it. It’s accommodating it all into a deliberate, deliberating, connected narrative that unfolds through the dense undergrowth of hundreds of pages that I find less than compelling.

For when an author ‘passes away’, as we say discretely, or if we are American just ‘passes’, as if the deceased were overtaking us in the act of death, which perhaps they are, or perhaps passing us by, no longer recognising us, that passing imposes a form, a closure, a narrative chain that can’t be escaped. Death inserts the subject into a structure that must immediately resemble a work of art – no longer open-ended, there each person acquires a specific aesthetic shape within which they are, in a sense, no longer humanly human. The hapless biographer is stuck with it, the plot already has its own dénouement and end point tied up before they’ve even started. Death congeals the unpredictability of life into an ice-like solidity, freezes the biographical subject into the rigour mortis of literary form. Nothing will be left to chance any longer. Everything becomes significant. Biography can’t escape the almost endless metonymic accumulations of a lived life even as it risks losing the history of its dialectical relation with unmeaning as the irruption of chance moved in and out of life. You can only try to isolate some and transform them into metaphors that translate the life into meaning, into larger patterns hidden behind the obscuring cotton wool of day-to-day life that may hold a clue to a biographer’s overarching questions (such as ‘why did Dickens spend his entire life writing stories?’).⁴ While offering an answer to such questions is infinitely attractive – we want to know! – its effect can only be to distance the subject further since the biographer will typically be supplementing the subject’s life with a meaning which was not articulated by the person themselves and was never there at the time. Unless the person happens to be a Sartrean like Frantz Fanon who in his autotheoretical autobiography Black Skin, White Masks (1952) relates his frustrated attempts to make his life meaningful by organising it around a specific project. Even here though the point is that Fanon never gets to create his own meaning because he finds that the stereotypes of racism generate a meaning for him that has always already been constructed.⁵ In biography and even autobiography, the infinite, day by day accretions of experiential moments, each one lived out in the stasis of Zeno’s arrow, monadic instants frozen in time, cannot be re-experienced in the uncertain and unpredictable conditions of their own temporality. How to conjure one or more into meaningful metaphor, to make it unlike itself and set it off on its journey out of space–time into linear narrative?

For the autobiographer it is always possible to attempt to refuse the temporalizing demands of literary form. In the case of Chaplin’s extraordinary My Autobiography (1964), ignored in most academic discussions of autobiography, for example, he presents us with a series of self-contained scenes that are organised and performed like his own shorts, not dated according to the historical narrative of his life but sequentially numbered 1–31, so that we are presented from the first with a life without a table of contents.⁶ Chaplin here creatively restages the montage techniques of his friend Sergei Eisenstein so that the time sequence is not that of any overarching story, which it manages to escape entirely, only the arc of the time that you take to read it.⁷ Or more simply, as in the case of Jean Rhys’ Smile Please (1979), her strategically unfinished autobiography takes the form of interleaved crystallised episodes, ‘vignettes’, offered without connection in an unfinishable accumulation of short stories that merge indistinguishably into everything else that she wrote.⁸ Or in the playful strategy of Viktor Shklovsky’s Third Factory (1926), a novel that turns out also to be an autobiography, including letters posted through the medium of the book to his Russian Formalist friends such as Jakobson, Eikhenbaum, Tynyanov, recounting in real time the three stages (factories) of his recent theoretical life.⁹ Perhaps after Mallarmé the biographer too might chance an attempt on the life left unmeaningful even if it means risking arrest. Is life writing dependent on the idea of producing a meaning, a narrative with an ending, in their mutual dependency, or can it rehearse life as we experience its unbecoming and retain the fractured ‘life’ of the note?

Contrast the laborious scholarly biography to the incisive intensity of reading a writer’s own diary or notebook entries, with which we encounter directly what Hermione Lee characterises as the ‘extraordinary sense of intimacy with the voice that is talking there’.¹⁰ Take Wittgenstein’s wartime notebooks, for example. They are written in the present so that the past becomes vividly alive and immediate as soon as you begin to read. Intensely private, literally written in code, Wittgenstein’s thoughts are unmediated by any other intrusive voice from our own time, a voice that by introducing the caesura of temporality would inevitably separate him from us. He is alive, literally alive as he writes from day to day, thought following thought, harrowing experience following trivial experience without him having any inkling of what is going to happen from entry to entry. Each time he writes he knows nothing of what even the immediate future will bring. Tomorrow is unknown and cannot yet be written. And because he was writing as a soldier during war time, there is a constant awareness that each diary entry might be his last, that everything he writes is a fragment shored up not against his ruin but against the unknowable experience of an anticipated mortality. To write each sentence in the face of death, in full awareness of the cruel knowledge that it might be your last, in a notebook that begins by giving information about the people and their addresses to whom it should be sent in the event of his death. How can a biography even as first-rate as Ray Monk’s give me a Wittgenstein that is anything like the voice that I encounter in the Notebooks?¹¹ For there he is right there, alive, living his life in front of our eyes as we read the entry of each day:

15.9.14

No work, yesterday and day before yesterday. Tried in vain, the whole thing was alien in my mind. The Russians are at our heels. We are in immediate proximity of the enemy. I’m in a good mood, worked again. I can think best right now when I am peeling potatoes. Always volunteer for it. It is for me what grinding lenses was for Spinoza. My relationship with the lieutenant is much cooler than before. But give me courage!¹²

This Wittgenstein, ‘working’ (i.e. thinking), peeling potatoes and still alive, was writing in his notebook just ten years after Yeats was writing in his. Jotting down these coded diary notes was his more urgent way of preserving his life in the face of the felt danger not of literature but of its immanent end. On the facing page of his coded notebook, indelibly infused with it as in de Saussure’s metaphor of the signifier and signified inseparably bonded together as the two sides of a sheet of paper, Wittgenstein was simultaneously drafting his revised and extended version of his Cambridge BA thesis (which had been rejected on the grounds that it had no footnotes).¹³ Though he would complete and publish (with some difficulty) what he himself would not name the Tractatus, it would be his first and last book. Later pronouncing it to be nonsense, Wittgenstein would thereafter refuse the antimonies of philosophical and semantic logic in the name of forms of life (Lebensform). He too, like Socrates before him, was unwilling to ‘exchange life for a logical process’. He left fragments, drafts, notes. Even the book that he (characteristically) left unfinished at the time of his death, contains instructions on how to read its sequentially numbered paragraphs, not via any logical sequence but across transversal entanglements:

my thoughts soon grew feeble if I tried to force them along a single track against their natural inclination. — And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For it compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought. — The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and meandering journeys.¹⁴

II. Woolf and autobiography, biography

Most if not all of my reservations about biography, along with many more, were already articulated long ago by Virginia Woolf. Woolf put the central problem and paradox in a nutshell when she complained that biography, autobiography, memoir ‘leave out the person to whom things happened’.¹⁵ Her comment recalls Dorothea Brooke’s response to Will Ladislaw’s gushing definition of what it is to be a poet: ‘But you leave out the poems’, said Dorothea. ‘I think they are wanted to complete the poet’.¹⁶

No one, as Hermione Lee relates in a beautiful essay, thought more than Woolf about biography and autobiography, or life-writing as she called them neatly bringing the two together, not just in her voluminous essays and diaries, but also in her fiction.¹⁷ She capitalised on the freedom fiction offers to rewrite, to rethink, to work through her life, its insistent memories and unforgiving, unsettled absences repeated and restaged in what she described as her ‘so-called novels’ such as To the Lighthouse or Jacob’s Room.¹⁸ As Marcus argues, Woolf’s unending struggles with the tyrannical ghost of her father, Leslie Stephen, the rationally-minded great biographer of the DNB, proved endlessly generative for her, the relationship at once combative, inspirational and even at times restorative: ‘just as a dog takes a bite of grass’, she observed, ‘I take a bite of him medicinally’.¹⁹ What Lee shows us as she charts Woolf’s constant rethinking and experimentation was that whilst the modes of autobiography had no limits, biography on the other hand was ipso facto much more constraining in terms of the framework of its possible forms. Woolf’s innovative moves into creative biography, of writing fictional or fictionalised accounts of ‘women’s as yet unnarrated lives’ and what she named, after Thomas Hardy, as the ‘lives of the obscure’,²⁰ has provided the inspiration for many later invocations of this symbiotic form for writing minority histories that supplement the absences in the archive with imaginative recreation of wayward lives, for example in the work of Toni Morrison or more recently Saidiya Hartman.²¹ Though Woolf was never to write the finished autobiography that she had so often envisaged, throughout her life she produced a limitless array of alternative autobiographical forms – diaries, memoirs, sketches, essays, and of course fiction that were never in some way not autobiographical. She was, in a sense, always writing her autobiography. It was irrepressible.

Biography of others, on the other hand, as she discovered when writing her biography of Roger Fry towards the end of her life, was much more difficult. While she tried to think through all sorts of different possibilities for biography, writing it backwards, for example, or offering a series of ‘specimen days’, among many others imagined ideas for reworking the form, in the end she acknowledged that the demands of any more regular, as it were biography proper simply did not allow similar kinds of freedom to the other genres in which she wrote. It was, however, to be the very difficulties in producing the Fry biography that generated her own most sustained autobiographical sketch which she began to write as a form of relief whilst labouring to compose the life of Roger Fry. Just like Yeats, she chose to write this memoir in the shape of intermittent dated diary entries that took the form of provisional throw-away ‘notes’ that recreated the life of the past in the context of the spontaneous felt life of the present. These ‘rapid notes’ were always conceived as remarks that would be there for a future point in time in which she would finally surrender herself to literature and write her autobiography proper, ‘I will write down some of my distracted and disconnected thoughts; to serve, should the time come, for notes’.²² She wrote her convertible promissory notes for a future without collateral as she sat in her garden lodge at Monk’s House, hearing the German bombers flying so low overhead they grazed the tops of the trees, waiting for the German invasion that was expected to arrive at any time – the port of Newhaven was not even five miles away – wondering all the time whether, should the British surrender as the French had done, writing would altogether cease:

June 8th 1940. I have just found this sheaf of notes, thrown away into my waste-paper basket. I had been tidying up. […] Shall I ever finish these notes – let alone make a book from them? The battle is at its crisis; every night the Germans fly over England; it comes closer to this house daily. If we are beaten then – however we solve that problem, and one solution is apparently suicide (so it was decided three nights ago in London among us) – book writing becomes doubtful.²³

Woolf herself thought of life in terms of ‘a bowl that one fills and fills and fills’,²⁴ whereas biography will always demand that the life be converted into the currency of some kind of narrative form that, as Roland Barthes remarks in the course of his biographical foray in which, as Woolf herself had proposed, he separates the known facts from the life as fiction, will always be subject to the demand of ‘logico-temporal order’ (Barthes would later write the entries of his own incomparable Journal de deuil (Mourning Diary) as dated notes on individual cut-up pieces of paper).²⁵ The result of biography’s required sequential form, as Woolf noted, will always be a contradiction between the opacity of the casual chance incidents of everyday life as it is lived, and the logic of meaningful sequence that a biography must produce. ‘Why are all one’s events so perfectly irrational that a good biographer would be forced to ignore them entirely?’²⁶ One way to resolve that problem of narrativization, which is what Lee herself does, is to imagine the life according to the long-established metaphor of a journey (‘the life’s journey which I am about to trace’), that is sequential but not necessarily linear, potentially full of surprises and unexpected turns of events.²⁷ The motif of the journey though must always imply that the central figure is going somewhere. Woolf’s voyage out through life would end abruptly in the cold, bleak waters of the River Ouse that still flow through the unforgiving dyke cut across the water-meadows just below Monk’s Gate. In choosing to make this abrupt, blank ending to her life, it was as if Woolf was returning to, re-enacting the cul-de-sac of 22 Hyde Park Gate, ‘the cage’ trapped in a dead-end, its rampant Virginia creeper that embodied her very name hanging down like bars over the windows at the back of the house, keeping out the light so that she felt as if her life was lived lying inside a grape.²⁸ Woolf offered this unexpected surreal analogy no doubt in full awareness that Virginia creeper, Parthenocissus quinquefolia, a species of flowering vine, belongs to the grape family, Vitaceae.

Wherever it comes to rest, pulled up short or extended long, for some autobiographers life’s journey must take a progressive form to the celestial city as in Bunyan, or for others end perhaps with the moment of self-realisation as in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or with the Odysseus-like eventual homecoming as in the necessary ‘detour’ of Édouard Glissant. But the person who finally returns home will not necessarily be the same person either that left or that they were at other moments of their life, so they may feel impelled to set off again, like Tennyson’s restless Ulysses. In a late 1935 postscript to his ‘Autobiographical Study’ Freud remarks that he has made few recent decisive contributions to psychoanalysis, the reason being ‘connected with an alteration in myself, with what might be described as a phase of regressive development. My interest, after making a lifelong détour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking’.²⁹ Regressive development: what you finally become may be what you were at the outset, not the meaning that you have at last achieved. But a journey, even if it be one of Bachelard’s journeys that are not journeys to anywhere, or even if it follow the tortuous undulating paths designed by Wittgenstein for the fellows’ garden of Trinity College, Cambridge, that seem all the time to be leading you away from your destination whilst interweaving you like Clarissa Dalloway with the walks of others, will in the end take you somewhere that will be where you were therefore always fated to arrive.³⁰ And the biography cannot avoid it, no more than Oedipus.

As a biographer in the face of these impossibilities, Woolf contented herself with certain rules, a mantra that Lee herself follows in her formulations for biography writing in general.³¹ In her biography of Woolf herself, Lee invokes Woolf’s own ideas of ‘scene making’ or ‘representative scenes’ or painted portraits, always anchored and embodied in particular places, as the best organising mode for telling the journey of her life.³² ‘I could sum it all up in one scene’ Woolf remarks confidently: such scenes, moments, portraits, places, like the daily circular walks around Kensington Gardens, can catch the rare moments of being rather than the extended drudgery of narrative non-being, moments in which the bowl was filled, a series of Bakhtinian chrono-tropes, placed alongside each other, each one ‘making a knot of unnumerable little threads’.³³ This enables a mode of organisation that can allow the biographer to create a plot whose scenic form offers successive tableaux juxtaposed against each other so that the relationships between them can be read not simply sequentially but according to complex patterns of transversality as in Wittgenstein. In this way, Lee’s biography presents Woolf to us not just through the chronological content of her life but by invoking Woolf’s ideas for biography in turn as staged scenes for her own biography, an extraordinary accomplishment. By creating an immanent, always imminent portrait of Woolf drawn through her own concepts and terms, Lee avoids giving us a Woolf left standing amidst the alien corn of distant rationalised landscapes in which the emotional intensity of her life has been exchanged for routinely connected chronicle.

Endlessly sketching and postponing the writing of her own autobiography, it was when Woolf came to read Freud for the first time in June 1940 that she realised that she had already written it, that her ‘so-called novels’ had involved the writing of her own family romance. From Woolf we learn that while autobiography and biography are both modes of life-writing, autobiography seems to be the freer spirit, unconstrained, the intensities of ‘the event of the moment’ best caught in the chance wastepaper of casual notes or fiction,³⁴ while biography must always transgress its own generic modalities if it is to traduce the form’s tyrannical reductionism – and nowhere more so than in Orlando.

III. Proust’s primitive accumulations

“Can I use the word ‘I’ in my paper?” a student asked me after class. “Of course. As long as you make it autobiographical” I answered. Or should I have said, “as long as you don’t make it autobiographical”? Would it have made any difference? Without a moment’s hesitation, she responded “I’m not one of those people who live for the sake of having books written about them”. “But now you are” I said.

As Woolf was acutely aware, another contemporary novelist just ten years her senior was also spending much of his life thinking about biography and autobiography, his most intense ecstatic writing similarly focused on his mother – Marcel Proust. Proust shared with Woolf the impulse to shift autobiography into fiction, my ‘so-called novels’, displacing himself not merely into a fictional ‘I’ but in a more complex way dispersing himself and his desires obliquely into different characters and their relationships in a work that, like the autobiographical note if hardly comparable in length, is always promising the future of its self-realisation. Proust’s method, as has been observed, represented his answer to his own critique of the biographical criticism of Sainte-Beuve, and his insight that ‘a book is the product of another self than the one we exhibit in our habits, in society, in our vices’.³⁵ Here Proust distinguishes between the me that writes and the I that is publicly evident in his social being: this surreptitous separation means that biographical criticism will necessarily always miss its object unless it can give us two Prousts existing simultaneously in their own disjunctive temporalities; for autobiography, in which the writer casts back retrospectively to an earlier self, this means that it would have to amount to three, one reason no doubt why Proust eliminates the writing self who is perpetually postponed to the end of the novel, for how can you write a biography of a separate self who exists only momentarily in the act of composition? Has anyone ever written a biography of a writer in this sense? If Émile Benveniste reformulated Proust’s conviction for linguistics in general, and Jacques Lacan would premise his whole psychoanalysis on the disparities of a dialectic between the two ‘I’s, the living self and the grammatical self or the self seen in the mirror, Proust comes close to Woolf in his belief that both autobiography and biography are premised on a dialectical disjunction between the writer and their life whose impossible connection it is their fate to try to resolve through the toxic instrument of narrative.

Despite all their differences, it is here also that we can see the profound connection between Yeats’ insight about the danger of surrendering himself to literature and Proust’s account of memory with which he finally yielded to fiction. For Proust, memory cannot be brought alive by being wilfully conjured up from the recollected reminiscences of the past. While Proust’s poetry of remembrance also emerges from the contradictions of the spontaneous overflow of feelings recollected in tranquillity, the deliberate invocation of such memories will never be enough. Only the casual irruption of the momentary note, or in Swan’s case suddenly catching the musical notes of ‘the little phrase’ of Vinteuil’s sonata, have the chance of bringing back unexpectedly the life of the past, make it momentarily come alive again – just as with Yeats’ unconnected casual notes that will preserve his life. Proust’s method raises a question that must always form the kernel of any theory or practice of autobiography: how do you produce and narrativize memories from the past so that they embody the altogether unexpectedly intense qualities of mémoire involuntaire, the potent energy of the unsought encounter with your own memory? Not, as it were, Hamlet’s mourning thoughts of his father, but the dramatic moment of his abrupt traumatic confrontation with his father’s ghost? Proust’s own solution, so artfully analysed by Gérard Genette, of the deliberate synthetic invocation of unpredictable metaphors and alien analogical comparisons forced together in painful alternations of likeness and unlikeness, ‘the stylistic equivalent of the psychological experience of involuntary memory’ whose demands mean that the memory and thoughts of the narrative keep pressing and pressurising one form onto another in successive ‘phantasmoric superimpositions’ that are constantly sliding sideways across the page, could also be understood as a form of translation in which remembered events are being brought into life through the labour of negativity, forever being wilfully translated into something else, a montage accumulating before the reader like the debris of Walter Benjamin’s fragments of history.³⁶ Beneath their Greek and Latin etymologies, metaphor and translation describe the same process of transference and traversal. Proust calls back the revivified intensities of the past by immersing us in the surplus value produced through the accumulation of his uncontrollable analogies, translations that keep taking us on deflective detours from the sequential narrative, forever prompting an almost endless wandering disambulation amongst the fragmented unpredictable juxtapositions of correspondences generated from historical memory.

Writing will always require a kind of transference and transformation when the writer seeks to translate memories, themselves already a translation in their instantiations of the past, into the resistant forms of autobiography. Translation, whose dialectical impossibility forms its time-honoured constitutive character (traduttore, traditore), elides with autobiography that is similarly founded on a contradictory structure of desire in which the narrative recapture of the life of the past can only be realised by the loss of the breathing life that is being sought, perpetually re-enacting the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, just as Woolf could never stop herself writing all of those versions of autobiography whilst never producing her autobiography.

IV. Translated memories

‘Psychoanalysts don’t tend to think of themselves as translating people’ Adam Phillips tells us.³⁷ Yet Freud’s whole practice was dependent on a process of translation and sometimes, as Jean Laplanche has suggested, even detranslation as part of the process of the transference (itself a form of translation) in which patient and analyst engage in a kind of Wittgensteinian translation game.³⁸ Freud’s theory of dreams follows from his initial insight that hysteria was a form of bilingualism, but dreams go one stage further. The practice of psychoanalysis and particularly dream analysis amounts to a form of translation because the analysand’s psyche will have already become an expert in translating their inadmissible thoughts and desires into an unreadable foreign language.³⁹ Psychoanalysis therefore becomes a therapeutic practice of detranslation, for the content of the dream according to Freud is simply a translation into another language of the dream-thoughts ‘rendered into a different mode of expression.’⁴⁰ Except that the dream is not just written in another language but rather consists of distorted translations of the unacceptable original dream thoughts. The dream text will not only be unreadable because the language is foreign but also because it amounts to a deliberately bad translation aimed not so much at conveying an equivalent message in a different code (Jakobson)⁴¹ but at making communication of the original message altogether impossible, turning it into an impenetrable enigmatic cryptogram. The task of the analyst is to decode these strange, fragmented dream texts back into meaningful dream thoughts that will reveal the secreted story that is generating the pathologies being acted out by the patient in the present, a kind of immanent critique deploying negativity into a different modality.

The psychoanalyst is an expert in the language game of back translation; her or his professional skill lies in reversing a translation whose original has been lost, either, depending on your point of view, back into the original language of the subject’s dream thoughts, or, arguably into Freud’s explanatory language of psychoanalysis that amounts to a secondary inter-semiotic translation. Be that as it may, in general back translation in itself is not particularly difficult, for the meaning and sentiments of the original can be easily re-articulated, the problem is only that it is impossible to recapture definitively the actual words of the original text which means that the nuances of the original language used will have been lost. In the case of the analyst, however, the task is altogether more difficult since the original lost dream text has not only been translated but distorted and disguised. Or the original dream thoughts may have been expressed in other obscure kinds of symbol or script, such as hieroglyphs. While all translation involves interpretation, in the case of dream analysis the translation must be nothing but an interpretation, a commentary, to paraphrase and adapt Foucault, that in stating what the original dream thoughts said must say what they never actually said, because there was of course never an original undistorted dream text as such, simply unacceptable dream thoughts manifesting themselves in disguise.

The autobiographer faces an analogous situation in which the life can only be accessed through memories, recollections in which or through which the past has been both preserved but also translated into the present. You cannot access your life straightforwardly through memory in the way that Yeats believed that the performativity of the note would allow him to retrieve his life directly in its living immediacy, just as you cannot simply sit down before the gramophone of the mind and listen to your memory talking to you in the mode that is provocatively staged in the title of Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory (1951).⁴² With memory, you are perennially faced with a translation in the present of an original in the past that has been forever lost, listening to a kind of free indirect speech recounted by your memorialising ego. Autobiographers thus always find themselves immersed in the dark waters of tremoring translation, of the emptying out of meaning, of being left in solitude to face the abyss of an original whose imaginings now tantalisingly hide nothing but silence and vacancy. Memories, as has been observed in many different contexts – courts of law, memory and trauma studies, for example – will always be translated, opaque and distanced, operating in a different language, a different idiom, a different tense, no longer to be caught cavorting in the continuous present. They will be, as Freud remarks with his characteristically suggestive bluntness, simply ‘falsified [… .] almost like works of fiction’.⁴³ While paramnesia guarantees the problematic relation of autobiography to truth it enables its more relaxed relation to fiction, straightforward because invention can never be avoided. For to write an autobiography is to launch into one’s own family romance, or, as Freud actually put it, the family novel (his word was Familienroman). We all write our family novels in one way or another, sometimes in more than one way (that is why, as the saying goes, everyone has one novel within them); and as Freud observed, the family novel will always involve intricate confabulations of fantasy and irrepressible desire. It was this insight that Woolf herself recognised when reading Freud in 1940 whilst jotting down her ‘sketches’, noting that she had already written her autobiography in her family novel, one in which in her case the self was necessarily made up of at least ten people. In writing To the Lighthouse, Woolf remarked, ‘I suppose I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest’. ⁴⁴ Daddy, daddy, you bastard I’m through: the novel in its intensity and freedom obliquely kindles emotions back to life and in restaging them, performs a homeopathic catharsis. Except that, for some, it then has to be written all over again.

Autobiography as a stuttering montage scenes of living notes or Chaplinesque shorts heaped up in a structure of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’.⁴⁵ Autobiography as writing the family novel in which the autobiographer is caught up within their own fiction, enmeshed in the knots of the family’s Arachnean threads. Compared to analysis, autobiography involves a much more open-ended transferential structure in which the story will be performed for a reader whose revisionary interpretation will be inaccessible to the writer.⁴⁶ Autobiography in its very form thus creates an inevitable scenario whereby the analyst-reader will often feel compelled to offer their own revisionary back translation of the writer’s fiction. A common situation in which this transferential structure is unconsciously acted out comes when the autobiography is challenged on the grounds of its truth, its correspondence to the facts. When the father of the translation studies scholar Rita Kothari passed away, she suggested to her mother that she try to write a joint autobiography of herself and her husband since their lives had been inseparable from an early age. ‘One day’, Kothari recounts, ‘she called up to say that she can't continue, and said, “Let me tell you, nobody who says maan atamkatha maan sach likhyo aa, sach to galaye.” Nobody claiming to have been truthful while writing an autobiography is truthful’.⁴⁷ Her mother knew instinctively that autobiography will always operate in a dialectical relation to truth, relentlessly true and untrue at the same time, thereby drawing the reader into its own inherent contradictory fictional dynamics. In a discussion of Bruno Grosjean/Dössekker’s controversial autobiography Fragments written under the name of Binjamin Wilkomerski, Laura Marcus observes that ‘its author, who has continued to insist on the truth of his account, translated memories from his own troubled years … into “those images that society offers and accepts for the narration of horrible experiences’’’.⁴⁸ Or to put it in Freud’s terms, if subjectivity is understood as a process of ongoing invention, one recounts the truth of desire, not the historical truth. Fact and affect do not exist in an empirical relation to one another, as in mourning or the experience of a phantom limb, but in a symbiotic one.⁴⁹ The autobiographer cannot avoid inhabiting error – but that error is neither a lie nor without veracity. Of course, there are empirical facts that can be checked. But even here the constitution of the self will not always conform to the isolated individualistic self of liberal western capitalist society as critics sometimes unthinkingly assume. Those who staged the judgemental controversy surrounding the autobiography of K’iche’ Guatemalan human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú missed the point, despite the deliberate generic gesture of its subtitle ‘An Indian Woman in Guatemala’, that her selfhood was always wholly identified with the experiences of her own community for whom she was campaigning.⁵⁰ In a community not made up of individual sovereign subjects privatised into discrete commodified beings, an autobiography can be of more than one person – not a family but a communal novel. Rigoberta Menchú never lived her life as the lone isolated subject of consumer capitalism dwelling in the prison house of her own commodity-desiring subjectivity. Her life was the life of her community and inseparable from it.

Writing one’s own family novel does not even involve a straightforward expression of the truth of desire, if there could be such a thing, for the writer is already caught up in the novel as a character within the family’s already-written script rather than its controlling third-person narrator. You are author and character at once, first and third person, as you undergo the creative process of reremembering. To bring their own life back to life, the autobiographer will try to move fragments from memory into the realm of the performative that will explode them back into the now, which itself already suggests a translation of memories into something else given that those memories themselves will have taken the form of the aftermath, or the aftergrass as they say in Ireland invoking the literal meaning of the metaphor. The experience of an event falls into time and the clutches of memory, continuing to grow into new figurations just like the corn or wheat stubble after harvesting. You can then chew it medicinally. In autobiography as aftermath the punctuated moments of experience will themselves not only enter into the realm of time as they mutate into memories, but the autobiographical representation of them may then reorder them into larger stories, however apparently random or heterogeneous, themselves organised into an arc of some sort perhaps designed to produce or suggest a larger meaning, whether it be that of trauma or desire, or more consciously the identification of a self or a purpose in the life lived, a meaningful or ethical life. But why should a life have only one meaning – why not more? Could a life bear the weight of multiple meanings, like the fourfold meanings of allegory?⁵¹ And in any case, who exactly is doing this organising into meaning? While she was alive, meaning for Woolf was always a threat: she writes of herself feeling ‘as if I were passive under some sledge-hammer blow; exposed to a whole avalanche of meaning that had heaped itself up and discharged itself upon me, unprotected, with nothing to ward it off’.⁵² Meaning threatens from the outside, and must do so as the family novel of autobiography will always tell its own story, not yours. This is why Woolf, who had thought so much about biography and autobiography, when sitting down to write her own long-postponed autobiography simply abandons any attempt at form or conceptualisation and starts, like so many autobiographers, from Jabra Ibrahim Jabra to Audre Lorde,⁵³ with her first memory, the first overdetermined recollected moment of her life. Such a ‘calling to mind’ as we quaintly put it will never for any of us mark the actual beginning of our lives: that first remembrance already opens up a gap between bodily life, consciousness, and the moments of consciousness that have become reconstituted into first memories of irretrievable desire.

Why are we so particularly interested in our first memories? Why do they appear so defining? Why are they so meaningful to us without themselves having any meaning? According to Freud writing in 1899, first memories may be regressive screen memories, not so much hiding earlier traumas but rather back projected from a subsequent experience, soothing, mesmerising images invented to hide later trauma. It is not hard to imagine Woolf’s defining first memory of ‘lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives’ as a regressive screen memory for the death of her mother whose presence and absence her evocative imagescape seems to stage at one and the same time.⁵⁴ ‘Where has she gone? [… .] But now and again on more occasions than I can number, in bed at night, or in the street, or as I come into the room, there she is; beautiful, emphatic […] closer than any of the living are’.⁵⁵ However it may be interpreted, recounting the first memory sets up a free-form sequence of detours into associative romances to which an author may be content to abandon themselves as the will o’ the wisp leads them, driven by an elusive, impossible, irresistible desire to recapture more of that past time of early memory, to transport the writing self back to what has been lost and especially people who are no longer reachable, whose absence the autobiographer seeks to conjure up into presence, a presence that paradoxically can only be realised in writing, the very medium that ipso fact signals an absence. The unresolvable romance of the family novel into which and out of which the self is written may be countered or redeemed by the autobiographer in terms of a kernel of interiority to which the subject’s own being can be retraced and with which it can be identified (Wordsworth’s ‘the life within’, Woolf’s ‘soul’, Lacan’s ‘moi’, Morrison’s ‘interior life’, or Heidegger’s Dasein that could be retrieved only by detranslating the temporality of the German language back to the primal life embodied in its original expression by the Greeks⁵⁶), or in the bildungsroman form as a fluctuating fluid process of transformation that the narrativizing autobiography seeks to catch, trace and sometimes judge. Whether your choice falls on the Cartesian or Hegelian options, the inner self of instantiated consciousness emerges from the family novel as a commodity that has to be repeatedly manufactured from the anything but raw materials of memory. Meanwhile the act of autobiography necessarily still estranges the writing self from the language of the written self that is thrown out there discarded and distended across the page, so much superfluous wastepaper, for the remembered self can only be produced by being displaced into writing’s inert, remote realms of temporality from which all bios, all living life, has been expelled.

It’s not easy. But then what is easy?

V. Endings

‘And I want to believe that everything is still ahead of me as for my people’.⁵⁷ How do autobiographies end? For the biographer the final surrender has always already been written, while characteristically the open form of autobiography tends to determine a conclusion in which the writer ends by turning to the future. Formally, if the biography does not finish with the actual death scene, it often closes with some form of a journey back to the beginning, or to the embodiment of the past in the still standing house where it all took place but which is now occupied by strangers who are living there with its doors closed shut oblivious of its past, never to be re-entered. Just as after the death of their father the four Stephen children returned once more together to the grounds of Talland House in St Ives, so at the end of her biography of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee herself returns to the same garden and finds herself denied entry to the house. So too, at the end of Two Lives, Vikram Seth takes the Northern Line to Hendon Central to return to the house where he grew up, and finds himself standing outside, gazing abjectly at its current dismembered state.⁵⁸ Two Lives, as has been observed, should really have been called Three Lives, for here unusually Seth writes his two biographies through his own autobiography. While both of his biographical endings are already written, he closes the autobiographical element of his double biography by himself turning towards the future, a future he views very differently, more humbly and more humanely, from the one foreseen by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the sentence with which he ended what was translated as A Precocious Autobiography in 1963.

That disjunctive moment between the past and the future that we call death often catches us too fast, too unexpectedly. How many, like Woolf, have often thought about writing their autobiographies but never managed to get round to it before they are cut off – dying, as it were, ahead of time, intestate, with their memories and goods then dispersed chaotically to the cruel obliterations of time. If autobiography is paradoxically dependent on the exchange of life for death in literature in the face of a fear or denial of erasure after life, not writing one, like not writing a will, or endlessly postponing getting round to it, involves a reluctance to acknowledge one’s own mortality, the inevitability of the incalculable randomness of the moment of death. For most people, at death or shortly thereafter, our whole self, our ‘estate’, our ‘goods’ and our bads, our life and our value are brutally reduced to the cash nexus, the residue of our life on earth drawn up in pounds and pence or dollars and cents. Dying without an autobiography or without a will involve a refusal to bear witness (in-testare) alike. Seth’s distress at his uncle’s will that cut him off, as we say, has nothing to do with its modest financial worth, rather that his uncle has left a written testament in which he had severed himself from his own family, rejected and refused his place in the very memories to which for years Seth could not bring himself to return. Shanti Uncle’s autobiography had cut Vikram Seth out of his life altogether. But is not this in a way but a literal, actualised version of what we all feel when someone dies, when they pass away and leave us behind, the kernel of mourning itself?

Still caught in their irresolvable grief, the friends and colleagues of Laura Marcus were invited by Isobel Armstrong to help write her biography through individual essays that recreated particular moments of time and place in her life. The multiple authorship and varying styles precluded the invention of a cumulative narrative with an overall framework or argument, merging memoir into biography, for memoir is always about at least two people, not just one, and this was to be one of many, a polyphonic memoir-biography, and testament of a different kind.⁵⁹ So too, Laura’s last book on rhythm can be understood not only in terms of the human refusal of the increasingly impersonal and mechanical demands of the twentieth century upon human beings, but also in relation to the polyphonic rhythms of human life itself that are experienced in life so differently from the extended mediated sequences of linear narrative and story. The whole book turns out to be also about the possibilities of autobiographical form. She invites us to think of ‘rhythm as the fundamental law of life’, of life lived in terms of the diversity of its heterogeneous rhythms, its stuttering notes, its little phases and phrases, its meditative moments of silence, the cadences and measures according to which we choose to organise our lives as we live them, while perhaps aligning ourselves at the same time with the breathing balm of other rhythms circadian or diurnal. But unlike in music or in dance or in literature or in biography, nothing in life’s human rhythms prepares us for the abrupt caesura of its ending, especially of her ending.

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].