Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. Anna Fisk

that I had a happy childhood, whereas my sister’s was closer to the point as she gently mentioned the poetic, or academic, license involved in my description.”39 This is a reminder that our stories are never just our own: they are also part of the stories of those others whose lives intersect with ours. In putting experience into the public domain of academic discourse, respect for the feelings and privacy of partners, family, and friends will often require that only certain stories are told, in a very certain way. Furthermore, how one chooses to present oneself, in academic life-writing as anywhere else, is shaped by how one wishes to appear; thus behavior and motivations of which one is not proud are likely to be omitted or drastically altered in the telling.

These are issues that apply not only to academic life-writing, but, as “the process and the product of assigning meaning to a series of experiences, after they have taken place, by means of emphasis, juxtaposition, commentary, omission,”40 to autobiography in general. In postmodern critical theory, autobiography does not disclose a life and its historical moments, or a unique individual self.41 Rather, autobiography is “a narrative artifice, privileging a presence, or identity, that does not exist outside language”;42 indeed “[t]here is no essential, original, coherent autobiographical self before the moment of self-narrating.”43

The recollection of life events in the form of a coherent story is constitutive of a “narrative identity.”44 According to Paul Ricoeur, “life cannot be understood other than through stories we tell about it,” thus “a life examined, in the sense borrowed from Socrates, is a life narrated.”45 Richard Kearney takes this rephrasing of Socrates as far as to say that “the unnarrated life is not worth living.”46 Writing of the human desire for narration, Adriana Cavarero describes how, in The Odyssey, Odysseus weeps for the first time when he hears his story told by another, “[n]ot only because the narrated events are painful, but because when he had lived them directly he had not understood their meaning . . . By fully realizing the meaning of his narrated story, he also gains a notion of who is its protagonist.”47 He weeps because he has encountered “the unexpected realization of his own desire for narration,” the desire shared by all human beings, “narratable selves.”48

The narrative identity produced in autobiography is ascribed a redemptive role by thinkers such as Kearney, who claims that “[a] model of narrative selfhood can . . . respond to anti-humanist suspicions of subjectivity while preserving a significant notion of the ethical-political subject.”49 I agree to an extent, but am suspicious of Kearney’s emphasis on narrative “unity.”50 The sense of wholeness upon which rest rationalist accounts of the human subject, undermined by modernist literature and postmodern theory, have, it is argued, long been taken for granted by men, but proved harder to come by for women. As feminist theorists of autobiography have noted, “[n]o mirror of her era, the female autobiographer takes as a given that selfhood is mediated; her invisibility results from her lack of a tradition, her marginality in male-dominated culture, her fragmentation— social and political as well as psychic.”51

Academic life-writing would do better not to reproduce, in terms of narrative, a stable and authoritative identity, “a postmodern, self-help driven subject who coheres around any story she is able to cobble together.”52 As Kathy Rudy writes of her experience of telling her story of leaving the Christian faith because of conflicts about her sexuality,

[t]he “all-or-nothing” problem of unified subjectivity . . . is that it does not accurately reflect the way I feel in losing my faith. It was and is a much more jagged process, an uneven development. I find myself longing for things I no longer believe in, believing in things that seem patently absurd . . . What I need is a theory of subjectivity that would allow me to be two contradictory things at the same time, that would allow me to say “I believe” and “I don’t” in a way that does not require coherent explanation. I need a theory that will allow me to be fragmented . . .53

The recognition that the ‘personal voice’ is neither unified or pre-existent may guard against the temptation to invoke it as authoritative, thus silencing the voices of others. Speaking in a personal voice, but with an awareness that this voice is not natural or innocent, but deliberately adopted for a particular purpose, is preferable to an ‘impersonal’ voice—equally as unified, but denying its own existence. To write ‘in the personal voice’ is actually to employ one of many personal voices—in reading or writing engaged criticism it is usual for several voices to appear in one piece of work. As most of us are not gifted in impressionism, perhaps slightly shifting the metaphor to one of ‘key’ or ‘pitch,’ rather than ‘voice,’ would be helpful. Veeser writes of confessional criticism as “performance”54—we could conceive of this in terms of theatre as well as music. Sidonie Smith describes autobiography as “a kind of masquerade,” and I find helpful the image of the life story as a mask—“an iconic representation of continuous identity that stands for, or rather before, her subjectivity as she tells of this ‘I’ rather than of that ‘I’”55—representative of the self in the moment of performance, but not identical to it. Even more so than ‘story,’ performance is not individuated and solipsistic, but communal, dependent on the audience. It depends upon the forming of a relationship between the self in autobiographical narrative, and “the ‘fictive reader’ created by the autobiographer to help bring that self into existence.”56 In terms of autobiographical criticism, in the words of Nancy Miller, “[b]y the risks of its writing, personal criticism embodies a pact . . . binding writer to reader in the fabulation of self-truth, that what is at stake matters also to others: somewhere in the self-fiction of the personal voice is a belief that the writing is worth the risk.”57

      The Trouble with Narrative

      The research that underpins this chapter thus far was originally undertaken to support my own choice of a methodology of autobiographical reflection. The period of my initial research into life-writing in academic scholarship coincided with the long summer vacation, the first six weeks of my giving up smoking, and living alone for the first time. I came to consider whether these factors had a considerable effect on my reading: without the sense of routine provided by cigarettes, flatmates or term-time activities, my sense of self became rather hazy, and this was exacerbated by reading about the theory and practice of writing the self. At the time I wrote, I’ve been wandering around my flat, bearing sticking plasters. I forget that they are seeping in nicotine; instead I feel that they are patching up leaking holes.

      I was looking for theoretical support and precedence for bringing my self (a self that seemed to be dissolving into the haze of the smoke of the cigarettes that I was not smoking) into my scholarship. What I found instead was that it was more complicated than simply being brave and preparing myself for some of my academic colleagues finding my writing embarrassing, or inappropriate, or—even worse—boring. The above discussions of the personal voice in academic criticism underscored what I was