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Chapter 2. Family Memoirs in the Context of Auto/biographical Writing: Mediating History, Promoting Collective Memory
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9 Chapter 2 Family Memoirs in the Context of Auto/biographical Writing Mediating History, Promoting Collective Memory “So, why are you calling this a me-moir?” Ken asks when I sit him down to read pages, still warm from the printer, in which my versions of events often mixes with the voices of others in my family: “It’s a we-moir.” —Kirin Narayan, My Family and Other Saints In his book, Oneself as Another, Paul Ricoeur explains that identity is partly bound up in identification with significant others, which is the reason why, especially in autobiographies, writing the self implies writing the other. This idea resounds with one of the key insights in autobiography theory in the 1990s, namely that identity—for both men and women—is essentially relational , formed and defined in relation to others. As Laura Marcus points out, “Recounting one’s own life almost inevitably entails writing the life of an other or others; writing the life of another must surely entail the biographer’s identifications with his or her subject, whether these are made explicit or not” (274). Relational approaches to life writing complicate notions of self-representation by privileging the intersubjective rather than the merely individual. This perspective challenges the uncritical notion of the autonomous self—the idea that one alone defines and creates him/herself—traditional to Western theories of life writing. And indeed, the proliferation of family memoirs only proves this point. The Asian American challenge to the pervasive Western notion of the individual as the prime subject of autobiography began with Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975), which illustrates how the first person in autobiography is, as Eakin argues, “truly plural in its origins and subsequent formation,” as it addresses “the extent to which the self is defined by—and lives in terms of—its relations with others” (How Our Lives 43). Several recent critical studies on autobiography have emphasized this new discernment in inscribing the self-in-relation, noting how the relational configuration of autobiography also controls the shape of the text, leading to 10 Chapter 2 originative formal choices. The writing subject therefore views and inscribes his or her story from the prism of intersecting lives. Susanna Egan, defining her eponymous operative term, “mirror talk”, argues that this process begins “as the encounter of two lives in which the biographer is also an autobiographer . Very commonly, the (auto)biographer is the child or partner of the biographical subject, a relationship in which (auto)biographical identity is significantly shaped by the processes of exploratory mirroring” (7). These perspectives require us to revise our perceptions about identity and strategies of self-representation on diverse levels, as well as the possibilities of signifying for the writer of the autobiography, specifically the formal remembering and reimagining of intersecting lives.1 Eakin considers the most common form of the relational life as “the self’s story viewed through the lens of its relation with some key other person, sometimes a sibling, friend, or lover; but most often a parent—we might call such an individual the proximate other to signify the intimate tie to the relational autobiographer” (How Our Lives 86). In some cases, the writer presents the biography of the other as part of his or her own life-writing exercise, occasionally to the point of writing the “autobiography” of that other. When this happens, the narrator’s authority must be established for rhetorical reasons, based primarily on the validity of the autobiographical pact. We also need to consider the role of the writer in relation to that of the subject. In the relational lives I consider here, “the story of the self is not ancillary to the story of the other, although its primacy may be partly concealed by the fact that it is constructed through the story told of and by someone else. Because identity is conceived as relational in these cases, these narratives defy the boundaries we try to establish between genres, for they are autobiographies that offer not only the autobiography of the self but the biography and the autobiography of the other” (Eakin, How Our Lives 58). Relational life writing challenges the fundamental paradigm of the unified self of traditional autobiography, as well as the concept of monologic representation. Philippe Lejeune suggests that “a life (that is, a written and published story of a life) is always the product of a transaction between different postures” (197). In a sense, this form of autobiographical inscription corresponds to...