TWO TYPES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1

Abstract

Based on the idea that autobiography is increasingly more attractive to the Romanian writers in the present times, this study tries to demonstrate that there are some differences between the autobiography practiced today and the autobiography used by the 20th century writers. Starting from the hypothesis of Ortega y Gasset, which speaks about the intimacy with oneself and about the intimacy with others, we connect the intimacy with the autobiographical discourse because writing at first person is the more appropriate and adequate way to speak about the intus and to show some parts of the hidden dimensions of the self/ego. In the second part of this paper, we agree the theory of F. Pirjol, who says that before 1989 Romanian literature witnessed the pure autobiographical discourse and after that it has been seduced by autofiction. Despite her's ideas, we believe in an époque of bildungsroman autobiography, specific tot the 19th and 20th centuries, and in an era - which is the contemporary era - characterized by an mock-autobiography.

Headnote

Abstract: Based on the idea that autobiography is increasingly more attractive to the Romanian writers in the present times, this study tries to demonstrate that there are some differences between the autobiography practiced today and the autobiography used by the 20th century writers. Starting from the hypothesis of Ortega y Gasset, which speaks about the intimacy with oneself and about the intimacy with others, we connect the intimacy with the autobiographical discourse because writing at first person is the more appropriate and adequate way to speak about the intus and to show some parts of the hidden dimensions of the self/ego. In the second part of this paper, we agree the theory of F. Pirjol, who says that before 1989 Romanian literature witnessed the pure autobiographical discourse and after that it has been seduced by autofiction. Despite her's ideas, we believe in an époque of bildungsroman autobiography, specific tot the 19th and 20th centuries, and in an era - which is the contemporary era - characterized by an mock-autobiography.

Keywords: autobiography, contemporary literature, mock-autobiography, intimacy discourse.

Although there are many other approaches of the concepts of intimate and intimacy - the studies in this area being on the increase in contemporaneity - the closest of what this paper intends to demonstrate is that belonging to Ortega y Gasset, presented in his two already very well-known essays: the first one presented at the Conference in Valladolid, on 20th May 1934, entitled El hombre y la gente and the second having been written as a part of a series of lectures held in Buenos Aires, in 1939, entitled Ensimismamiento y alteracion (in Romanian, included in the book entitled Omul si multimea, translated by Sorin Marculescu, published in 2001). By making the distinction between an individual and the collectivity, in other words between the intimacy with oneself and the intimacy with others, J. Ortega y Gasset defined intimacy as "a hidden facet of the self", which "is never present, but is co-present, in the same way it is the hidden facet of an apple"2. This facet of the being makes man substantially different, first from the animals and then from the other people, adds Ortega y Gasset. In order to gain access to "the essence" of the human being, a withdrawal in oneself is required, a flee from the world, so as to live only in one's own shell, idiom, by applying what the author called ensimismarse3. Through this, the author wants to say that there is another world, real, true, but that can only be individual, personal, like the deepest states that a man is able to experience: pain, suffering, love (those can be experienced only in the single mode). This world is the inner world, the 'space' from that the individual may withdraw from the world outside. This space is definitely one of solitude. In art and literature, human loneliness and intimacy are closely related to the personal and subjective art/writing - how else? - as it is already known. Ensimismamiento is - Gasset says - the human capacity to take refuge in yourself, to meditate, to do nothing, concretely. Autobiography is nothing else then this state. Autobiographical discourse is therefore the most strongly linked to the ensimismamiento and to the forms of expressing intimity. The autobiographical discourse sets in motion only the absolute being, the inside ego, the multiple self. Therefore, this is requiring sustained and general effort of the psyche, memory and imagination. Ensimismamiento is a form of looking in/on himself/s, which is a very special type of communication with the intus4 and also a form of hasten into intimacy for the purposes of rediscover of self. Autobiography explores the intimacy, the memory and the psyche filters it, the imagination makes it more pleasant and more spectacular or it simply adds the secret ingredient that makes the subjective writing a growing attraction since the last century. That is the connection of this study with the theory of J. Ortega y Gasset. He is also acknowledged for highlighting that the most relevant quality of intimacy is meditation, reflection with/upon the self. That being said, it appears that intimacy is an area which cannot be addressed otherwise than through a confession, a contemplative, especially autobiographical discourse.

More recently, Romanian theorists had expressed their interest in autobiography. In 2002, Eugen Simion gathered his personal essays and articles about the biographical writings - memoirs, autobiography, diaries - in a volume intitled The Genres of Biography (texts were written since 1986). His study has the merit of having done - among the first in the Romanian literary space - the distinction between memoir, biography, autobiography and diary. However, he does not insist on autobiography, as it was desirable. Instead, Mircea Mihaies, for instance, a few years earlier, (first time published in 1995, second edition revised in 2005), expressed in a more focused and attractive way the importance of the personal writings, but he focuses only on the structures and purposes of the intimate diary. Anyway, Mihaies, not very far from the perspective of Gasset, evaluated the intimacy with the self, that one mirrored in diaries, through its relationship with the secret and the obscurity, an interpretation which allows the penetration into the meaning or into the core of things or of beings, despite the vague and provisional character of the ways of expressing the self, through the elucidation of the so-called "un-told" of the inner side of a human being, which is of that "priviledged place" where "the author projects his identity"5 without veils or masks, that interior space of an indescribable depth. In 2014 it appears finally a long awaited Romanian poetic on autobiography. We are talking about the study of Florina P?rjol, intitled The Book of Identities, a study that does not hesitate to distinguish clearly between autobiography and autofiction, the first being that characterizing the ante-December period, the second being specific to the prose written since 1989, according to the author's opinion. In fact, the author does not insist on defining the two categories of biographical writings (neither it was the case, that has already been done by Lejeune and Doubrovsky, and also by others less known, whom we will remember below), but on how those are reflected in the Romanian literature. His creed is that the autofiction is the most promising solution of the postmodern personal writings and it subscribes without doubt to the fashion of spectacular, so characteristic to the consumer society. We can deduce now that Florina Pîrjol considers the autobiography somehow a purer genre, closer to the conditions of the individual inner or of the self, by comparison with the autofiction, which is its impure and faked - not in the pejorative sense - measure. But we will come back to her theory at the right time.

On the other hand, the autobiography is a confession, a subjective discourse, which has been used ever since St. Augustine. A quick observation has to be done regarding contemporary literature, for it brings an interesting, but not very surprising change, in autobiographical writing. The latter seems to have been left in the hands of the female authors lately, both at the level of our culture and in terms of the overall European literary image, bearing in mind that "young men and women have a propensity for introspection and confession"6. Less tempted to publish their diaries, memoirs, letters, impressions or any other form of autobiographical antum discourse, Romanian authors and authors from everywhere as well had really had a moment which corresponds to the '80s7 and in our country as soon as Calinescu launched the 'trend' of biographies - when they were seduced by autobiographies, biographies and monographs. In recent years, the first-person-singular discourse became more disinhibited, more expressive in the sense of unmediated exposure of both intimacies and intimacy, and women writers - by nature more shy - started to feel more at ease with it. Of course, this is not a rule, but just an observation. Autobiography is also a special feature of the certain humanism which postmodernity contains, taking into account the expected connections of autobiography with a return to the Topic in the present age. Autobiography, as a discourse on the intimate, is the closest expression of the postmodern Topic, but also the most popular writing `techniquè. Of course, people have been writing autobiographies from ancient times, so nobody claims that this genre belongs to the postmodernism or that it is the actual foundation of the recycled humanism of the present. However, it can be noted that barely in our times the autobiographical discourse is about to irretrievably mark its way to legitimacy8, while, until recently, it has been situated at the periphery of literature, among the 'borderline' genres. Either way, for the present paper, it is significant the fact that the autobiography is the most honest discourse of the self about the self, contemplative volubilis about the subject as object.

An additional explanation could be necessary regarding the definition of this supposedly most fruitful discourse of intimacy: the autobiography. In this sense, the paper in 1994, written by Laura Marcus, professor at the University of Oxford, proves to be very ambitious. Bearing the very title Auto/biographic Discourses, her book starts from the definition of the autobiographic as a system of discourse which operates the problematic opposition between biography and fiction, which involves a unilateral relation of dependency between autobiography and fiction - starting from fiction to autobiography, not necessarily the other way around9. This implies that any act of literature must be/is autobiographical to a certain extent10. In this regard, confirming the hypothesis of Marcus, Max Saunders too turns to legitimizing a hybrid concept, 'autobiografictional'11 - to which we will not return because we prefer instead the more appropriate term of autofiction - defining a kind of literary merge between genres or a fictional autobiography, that is those texts with a fictional form, but with an autobiographical content, be it confessed or implied. Autobiography as a discursive system, but also the 'autobiografiction' are, of course, just another way of defining the autofictional pact, which Serge Doubrovsky promoted in the self-review of his novel Fils, in 1977. For example, there are, in Romanian literature, works that reflect the idea of a minimum of autobiography present in any literary text, starting from the notes of Queen Mary to the more recent books, Exuvii, by S. Popescu, Acasa pe câmpia Armaghedonului (Home, on the plains of Armaghedon), by M. Petreu, Fem, by M. Cârneci, Tricephalos, Purgatoriile, by R. Cesereanu, Casa cu storuri galbene (The House with Yellow Blinds) by M. Codrut and so on. In addition, it may be recalled that, in contrast, Laura Marcus also identified a version of the autobiographical discourse, which she divided, in its turn, in pseudo-autobiographies and false autobiographies: "I propose distinguishing between pseudoautobiographies, which just impersonate the form, and mock-autobiographies that actually parody it"12. The first ones operate a subjective masked discourse, impersonating the voice of the biographer (Constantin Stere, În preajma revolutiei - Around the Revolution), others being simple parodies (an example at hand seems to be Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, or Poor Ioanide by George Calinescu).

Once again, carrying forth the question of the two discourses of the intimate mentioned above, formal autobiography and autobiografiction, same Marcus rightfully wonders: "how far is the self presented equivalent to an actual or pre-existent self, and how far is it something created or transformed by the process of its fashioning?"13. This question, restated by Simion, could sound like this: "How far is the biographic self from the profound self recreated in the text and how far is the pure self from the other two?". The "trend of the self"14 changes the relationship between the subject and the object, through the Cartesian principle turned upside down by a dictum belonging to Rimbaud: "I is another"15. Subsequently, the poststructuralists implemented the idea that Self/the autobiographical Self will never be a real person ("a text is not a person"16), but only Word about it. Thus, autobiografiction involves a reversed relation - with regard to formal autobiography, the first one discussed here - between form and content, the greater percentage being in favor of the form. Therefore, autobiografiction is basically a fiction with an appearance of reality, and not the other way around: on the one hand, an autobiographical content brought to light through 'spiritual' and/or 'significant' experiences and, on the other hand, structuring these experiences in a fictionalized narrative scheme. The self created through the process of fictional molding is different and it must stay different from the real self. By becoming another simply because it is thought (not by another, but all by itself), the self doesn't reinvent itself in his actual form, but it recovers a version of the image about itself which he assumes in its adult state and of which he is aware of. In autobiografiction/autofiction, the true identity, which can be retraced using the facts, through a conscious fiction, but also through the artificial identity, assumed to be prolific and intentional, through that which can be called an innocent fiction, usually to be found in diaries, notebooks and lost and found blocks etc., have got clear reasons of necessity, existence and continuity. Thus, the effort of the authors to exit their pupae and live their identities again, seeking to give them an air of simultaneity, is inevitably a call to humanization, through difference. The empirical self will never be another after completing the autobiographical text, but it will be more aware of his identity and of the way in which it can display itself as a Word before the World. Simona Popescu, the one who writes, is not the same with Simona Popescu, the one who is fictionalized in the autobiographical context of Exuvii or Rubik, in the same way Simona Popescu, after these texts, is not the same with Simona Popescu before writing them or the one in the texts. Nora Iuga is not The Sexagenerian (original title: Sexagenara). Ruxandra Cesereanu is not Mesmeea. Mariana Codrut is not Ul Baboi and so on.

Also, in her latest book, mentioned few pages above, Florina P?rjol distinguishes between autobiography and autofiction, talking about what we call old/traditional autobiography or bildungsroman autobiography and the new autobiography or mock-autobiography (the postmodern autobiography or pseudo-autobiography). To illustrate her theory, P?rjol make use of the writings of Rousseau, considering him the major point of transition from unconscious and nonliterary autobiographic fact to the lucid and conscious nineteenth and twentieth centuries autobiographical discourse, which happened with the contribution of the retrospective memory and in the same time with the media development. More important than that is that the author has noticed the great effort that Rousseau - among the first European writers -, and later Lejeune or Gasset, made it to highlights the link between autobiography and intimacy:

For Rousseau - says P?rjol - to write a retrospective text, in prose, in the first person (to anticipate Lejeune's definition of autobiography) equates symbolically with an attempt to find the root, the essence of the individual, to explain and to understand his inner composition starting from his first desires, first loves, first feelings, first exclusion from paradise17.

French writer's effort is undoubtedly related to the "psychoanalyst mechanism avant la lettre"18. For P?rjol, the autobiography is not only a discursive system, but it converges to the deeper areas, to the "hidden dimensions of the self", whereof Ortega y Gasset was talking about. But the question is whether this should be outsourced and who cares about that? Nobody, seems to be the answer to all theorists from Baudrillard to Lejeune or Doubrovsky. They are those who, since the middle of the last century, opened the way to the "false intimacy", to the pseudo-autobiography and to the autofiction and all this seems to be due to an "ecstasy of communication" as F. P?rjol believed. Because all what it matters appears to be performance, entertainment. In this context, literature could not avoid the contemporary fashion: "in full <ecstasy of communication>, authenticity no longer has any value, it only matters how persuasive (and therefore effective) is this summary, urgent writing"19. In literature, where communication has always been the main instrument, autobiography remains directly connected to the principles of privacy and authenticity, while this two words still means something. Or maybe just these two situations - naked intimacy and faked authenticity - are the only ones possible now or the only ones that the current society has the power to believe in. Related to this, Florina P?rjol closes a long chapter of his very awarded study in a metaphorical key, stating that "with the advent of the autofiction is not the literature who started looking for authenticity, but is the authenticity who's searching for fiction"20.

In the same manner of discussing the identity argument, one can also notice that in today's literature, the construction of the self, of the object of knowledge is no longer graded from the euphoric, the essential or the authentic towards the edges of the flaws of the spirit, but a tendency of a breakaway from the essential through multiplication and dysphoria. In everyday life or in the problems of childhood, things get even clearer; the bildungsroman autobiographies, characteristic to the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, are exceeded, in postmodernity, by the pseudo- or mock-autobiographies, which is published on the actual literary market simultaneous with the pure autofiction and autobiography. Thus, if the first texts written in the form of bildungsroman, characteristic to the past centuries, but without their approach, this demonstration may give the impression of superficiality, were dealing with a description of the ascent of the self, using the first person singular discourse, emphatic, laudatory and positive (see Ion Creanga, Childhood Memories), in the second autobiographical example, characteristic to contemporaneity, there is an evident opposition, which originates in the expression of the individuality crisis, about which Ioana Em. Petrescu talked about, with reference to the positive-elegiac discourses of the bildungsroman. The second form of autobiographical discourse has a weaker fictional character than the bildungsroman text, manifesting itself through a less optimistic and emphatic mood of the narrator (see Simona Popescu, Exuvii, Ruxandra Cesereanu, Tricephalos, Mariana Codrut, The House with Yellow Blinds). The imaginary excess was a reality in the first case, while formal autobiography rather claims an adequacy to reality and simplicity rather than a permanent orientation from reality to fiction, from concealed modesty to visible egotism, like in the bildungsroman. The goals of the two forms of autobiographical discourse are also different. The bildungsroman autobiography (Childhood Memories, Ion Creanga, Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent, by Mircea Eliade) has specific purposes, with moralizing and self-glorifying purposes. While the pseudo-autobiography (parodic, ironic, ludic) does not get caught in the trap of the laughable, the euphoric evocation or the spiritual ascension of the hero; it rather flows into a self-ironic discourse which approaches the shading and the capture of the experiences (not necessarily euphoric) which are significant from a psychological point of view. The difference in meaning between the two is given both by content and form. From the spiritual to the psychological, but also from the self-ironic to the self-glorifying discourse. The older autobiographical discourse is less interested by psychology and more about the essence and consequences of evocation. Instead, the modernist and postmodernist autobiography is concentrated on and very conscious about the psychological implications. For illustrate this is not necessary more than one simple example: The Memories of Creanga are not aware of any psychoanalytic reflexes, their only purpose is making people have fun; instead, the autobiographical discourse of Simona Popescu is, beyond all doubt, very carefully to measure the personal psychology revealed, so there is not place in her book for any unconscious gesture.

Finally, "the literature dedicated to the existence of the author"21, the autobiography, has, besides the identity facet, an extraordinary part to play in the recovery of the author as he wishes to be remembered in the history of culture. This seems extremely important, as, if fiction is defined as the set of imaginary forces of an author, autobiography is, through an effort of self-psychology of the author, a mixture of authentic images of the author about himself. More important than biographies, monographs and biographical critique, the autobiographical texts are revealing for the cultural history, as they summarize the assumed and selectively built identities by the biographical selves themselves, by the writers themselves. The biographic critique gathers collections of writer's selves, biographical selves, in second-hand formats22 while autobiographies are precious identity anthologies because they represent the wish of the writer to be perceived in a certain way. Thus, these archaeologies of the self, despite the fact that they "have the colors of that who searches and writes them"23, are the most reliable form of one's own belief about the artistic self (including, of course, a lot of other shortcomings, from the relation of fidelity between the profound self and the real self to the questions on originality and value of this kind of literary texts). We don't argue here that they should totally be given credit, but they must be appreciated at their true value and, certainly, integrated in the genres of literature, not at its periphery.

Footnote

1 This work was supported by the strategic grant POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863, Project ID 140863 (2014), co-financed by the European Social Fund within the Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources Development 2007 - 2013.

2 José Ortega y Gasset, Man and the Crowd, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2001, p. 20.

3 Ibidem.

4 Ibidem, p. 15.

5 Mircea Mihaies, Cruel Books: The Intim Diary and the Suicide, 2nd edition, rev., Polirom, Iasi, p. 87.

6 Eugen Simion, The Genres of Biography, The Encyclopedic Universe, Bucharest, p. 24.

7 See also Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiographiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, p. 4.

8 Ibidem.

9 Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourse, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, p. 7.

10 Ibidem, p. 8.

11 Max Saunders, cited work, p. 8.

12 Laura Marcus, work cited, p. 8.

13 Ibidem, p. 503.

14 Ibidem.

15 I think of myself therefore I see myself as other.

16 Ibidem, p. 504.

17 Florina Pîrjol, Book of Identities. Autobiographic Mutations in Romanian Fiction after 1989, p. 27.

18 Ibidem.

19 Ibidem, p. 64.

20 Ibidem, p. 70.

21 Eugen Simion, cited works, p. 7.

22 See also the formal autobiography in Laura Marcus, work cited, p. 503.

23 Eugen Simion, work cited, p. 3.

References

REFERENCES

Marcus, Laura, (1994), Auto/Biographical Discourses, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mihaies, Mircea, (2005), Cruel Books: the personal diary and suicide, 2nd edition, rev., Iasi: Polirom Publihing House.

Ortega y Gasset, (2001), The Man and the Crowd, transl. Sorin Marculescu, Bucharest, Humanitas Publihing House.

Pîrjol, Florina, (2014), Identity Cards. Mutations of the Autobiography in the Romania Prose, Bucharest: Cartea Româneasca Publishing House.

Saunders, Max, (2010), Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiographiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Simion, Eugen, (2002), Genres of the Biographical, Bucharest: The Encyclopedic Universe Publishing House.