Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: The Importance of Maintaining the Boundary between Factual and Fictional Narrative

G ood Fences M ake G ood N eighbors:onmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIH The Im portance of M aintaining the Boundary betw een Factual and Fictional N arrative W IL L IA M R . SIE B E N SC H U H Literary generic distinctions exist only in the minds of the community of readers that creates and agrees to accept them. They are valid only as long as that community's assumptions and expectations remain stable. As a rule, changes occur continuously but gradually. Sometimes, however, the process gets speeded up. When fundamental generic assumptions are challenged directly, or made to seem invalid, temporary theoretical confu­ sion, experiment, and reassessment occur. Such confusion, experiment, and reassessment is now occurring among students of the factual genres. If literary criticism were a science, I believe that what is happening might be called a paradigm shift. "A paradigm holds sway in a profession when most of its members share the same values, recognize the same problems, and agree on similar solutions. But in time, unexplained violations of the model, or anomalies, may subvert the paradigm; questions are raised which have no meaning in the old paradigm. Practitioners must then seek new answers, which lead toward the development of a new paradigm."1 Parallels between literary genres and scientific models may not be exact in every point but Kuhn's seems an accurate description of the current state of debate about the generic status of autobiography, biography, and 205 206 / SIEBENSCHUH e ve nhistory .Critics no longe r"share the same value s, recognize the same problems, and agree on similar solutions." Over the past few decades there have been some brilliant "violations of the model," especially by autobiog­ raphers. Reinterpretations of some of the classics have produced "anoma­ lies," because critics have approached such works in new and often contra­ dictory ways. Because critics are asking new questions, they are getting new answers which, it seems likely, will eventually lead to the develop­ ment of new paradigms. Under such circumstances, "sometimes several paradigms compete for supremacy . . . until one emerges preeminent."2 Exactly this sort of competition is happening now, because some of the culture's most basic assumptions about identity, memory, and the nature of language are being challenged — even flatly denied. The implications of these challenges for the factual genres can be de­ scribed best by looking at their impact on theories of autobiography. Au­ tobiographical form is obviously closely tied to an author's and a culture's assumptions about identity, and our assumptions about identity have changed dramatically since the great autobiographies of the nineteenth century were written. As Burton Pike, among others, points out, "History . . . provided the nineteenth century autobiographer with an ideal exter­ nal support . . . [At that time] a whole personality saw itself standing in a firm relationship to a whole culture." Development of the self was viewed as a linear process involving interaction with the culture, occur­ ring in time, and best objectified by common narrative modes. However, as the twentieth century began, Pike continues: "there was no longer a whole person standing over against a whole world, but a human something moving about in a diffuse culture medium. A sense of purpose was no longer to be sought outside the individual consciousness, and became hard enough to find even there. The sense of time, along with everything else, was fragmented and relativized."3 The implications of these changes for fiction, poetry, and painting are well-known and have been much discussed, but the implications for auto­ biography and even biography have been equally dramatic. Taking away the traditional view of identity formation means taking away the justifica­ tion for one of traditional autobiography's most important formal prem­ ises: the validity of traditional narrative structures. Shifting importance away from the social self and onto consciousness itself — the psychic self — means shifting the focus of autobiography onto a subject that many now feel can never be known. Is the self that an individual perceives a reality, or is it a psychic construct changing constantly in response to psychic needs? What is one to make of the obvious discrepancies between an in­ dividual's sense of himself and others' view...