Tom Brick of South Dakota, Irish Emigrant Life Writing, and the Dynamics of Storytelling

Recent years have seen a boom in studies of Irish autobiography. Personal life narratives—both popular and obscure—have been reviewed, anthologized, and, invariably, classified within an Irish cultural framework that attempts to put thematic order to the infinite subjectivity of individual life writing. Liam Harte's Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society (2007) mines life narratives specifically for the "symbolic refraction of the life of the individual through the lens of nation and society."¹ Harte's subsequent anthology of "Irish in Britain" autobiographies recognizes that the loss of nation and society through emigration was an equally prevalent Irish autobiographical trope. The Irish reality of dual ethnic identities and indeterminate state positioning is, at last, being duly attended to by interpreters.²

This thematic and nationally framed investigation of Irish autobiography has, however, progressed with little or no engagement with key philosophical and operative theories that intersect at the genre of modern autobiography: specifically, those relating to modernity, memory, and typologies of life writing.³ As a result, we see, within the publications by Harte as with others, that memoirs are interchangeably labeled as autobiographies (and vice versa), and popular writers' autobiographies are positioned side by side with those of obscure novices. "Modernity" is employed as little more than a chronological device, and oral narration is muddled together with the written forms of the genre. Borrowing from Philippe Lejeune's critical terminology, Irish autobiography has emerged into the intellectual sphere as a genre without a fixed theoretical address. This creates three distinct problems: the creation of ambiguity around the diverse functions of life narrative; the perpetuated isolation of the genre of Irish autobiography from its universal counterpart by a restrictive national boundary; and a failure to interpret the genre as a problematic of modernity.

Because current research in the field has attended primarily to thematic patterns in Irish autobiographies, it has thus far failed to take up the tantalizing methodological opportunity to engage with the mental processes of the narrator under review. The existing scholarship has repeatedly searched for what the ordinary life narrator is telling us, without first considering why he or she has put pen to paper. To move beyond this inadequate framework, scholars would do well to adopt the approach of the "history of mentalities." Paul Ricoeur's treatise on memory, and Robert Mandrou's and Robert Darnton's scholarship of early modern French worldviews, illustrate the particular capacity of such an approach to illuminate the inner logic at the heart of personal, folkloric, and civic documents.⁴ The history of mentalities proposes a deliberate, historical treatment of collective "ways of feeling and thinking" that puts aside the singularity, chronology and grand politico-economic narratives favored by more conventional forms of historiography.⁵ There is a particular merit, even a necessity, in grounding the study of ordinary life narratives in a history of mentalities; such a perspective facilitates artistic autonomy and the narrativization of metacognition. In the end, we gain increased access to the mental processes at work for the autobiographical writer.

The unpublished ordinary life narrative written by Tom Brick, who emigrated to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century—which he titled "Tom Brick, Memoirs of an Emigrant to USA, Spring 1902," provides an excellent example of the usefulness of such an approach.⁶ The use of the term "ordinary life narrative" rather than "autobiography" is deliberate, and is grounded in a theory of autobiographical literature summarized by Lejeune in "The Autobiographical Pact."⁷ Within this framework, Lejeune defines autobiography as "a retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular, the story of his personality."⁸ As such, autobiography is delineated along the lines of language form, subject, author situation, and position of the narrator; these characteristics distinguish it from other genres closely related to autobiography. Journals and diaries, for instance, do not fulfill Lejeune's definition of autobiography—his "autobiographical pact"—because they are not retrospective. Likewise, a self-portrait or essay falls...