Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures

4. Performing Authenticity

135 PERFORMING AUTHENTICITY Edmond Baudoin (1995) starts his autobiographical comic L’éloge de la poussière (“In Praise of Dust”) with a picture showing him sitting on the pavement in war-torn Beirut, drawing a beautiful building opposite (see Fig. 4.1). He is so absorbed by this activity that he fails to notice the car pulling up on the opposite side of the road and the young soldier approaching and looking over his shoulder to see what he is doing. Having previously been warned of the danger posed by the trigger-happy young men who roam the streets in 4x4s, Edmond is initially petrified, but his terror soon turns to astonishment when the man passes him a photo of his fiancée and asks him to draw her picture. A black panel is followed by one that shows a close-up of the photograph, gently held between the soldier’s thumb and index finger. The handwritten text in the final panel reads: “Only seven years have gone by since then. Did this boy survive the war? Does he still love his fiancée? Did he really have this face? This story is slowly sinking into unreality. I sometimes find I’m no longer sure that I really experienced it” (“Sept ans seulement se sont écoulés. Ce garçon a-t-il survécu à la guerre? Aime-t-il toujours sa fiancée? Avait-il ce visage-là? Cette historie s’enfonce doucement dans l’irréalité. Il m’arrive de n’être plus tout à fait sûr de l’avoir vécue”). This example may serve to remind us that life writing has a more complex relationship with the truth than explicitly fictional work. As was discussed in Chapter 1, the question of whether Chapter 4 136 Performing Authenticity autobiography must, and indeed whether it ever can be entirely truthful, has for a long time been a hotly debated subject in literary studies. Under the influence of postmodernism, the concept of a single, straightforward Truth has been dismantled in favor of a view of the “truth” as multiple, fractured, and shaped by each individual’s FIG. 4.1 Edmond Baudoin (1995) L’éloge de la poussière, no pagination. Copyright © 1995 L’Association. 137 Performing Authenticity unique perspective and partial recall. Moreover, memory is generally conceptualized as a constant process of reinterpreting the events of a life in the light of what, with hindsight, is seen to be significant (see Chapter 3). There now seems to be almost universal agreement both among scholars and in the wider community that “there is no such thing as a ‘uniquely’ true, correct, or even faithful autobiography” (Bruner 1993: 39). Readers have no way of knowing, for example, whether the incident involving the soldier really happened the way Baudoin chose to tell it, and the author/narrator himself admits he cannot be sure how faithful his representations are to the historical facts. Indeed, like most other contemporary memoirists, Baudoin does not seem to be particularly concerned with establishing the absolute truthfulness of his account.1 The powerful cultural conventions governing the construction and interpretation of works labeled as autobiographical will nevertheless lead many authors to aspire to—and their readers to expect—some kind of special relationship between a narrative and the life it purports to represent. This “special ” relationship, I argue, is best captured through the notion of “performed authenticity.”2 As I show in the first section of this chapter, authenticity is typically associated with being realistic, genuine, and true to the essence of something. One such essence is the “self”: “An authentic person or self is one who is in touch with his or her real phenomenological and emotional experience and who reveals his or her own true thoughts, feelings, and actions” (Gubrium and Holstein 2009: 124). The concept of authenticity also applies to the visual field, where it can be defined very loosely as any image that lays claim to a privileged, transparent relationship to its object of representation (Wortmann 2003: 14). Visual authenticity can be based on picture-immanent features, but it is more often contextual, drawing its power from the myths surrounding the individual images or types of images or from the “performed” integrity of the image producer(s). However, authenticity is a notoriously slippery concept, and notions of the authentic self, the authentic self-narrative, and the 138 Performing...