Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women's Autobiographical Writings in the Americas

Part One: Addressing the Self: Autobiographical Metafiction

part one Addressing the Self: Autobiographical Metafiction . . . I’m going to begin my story. Here, where my body intersects with the space of my images. I have something to say because I’m going to say myself to myself, like anyone face to face with memory or a mirror. No, I’m not going to write my memoirs, or my biography or paint my portrait. I’m a made-up character. I exist only in my imagination and in the imagination of my reader. And of course, I exist for the woman who is putting me on paper. —helena parente cunha, woman between mirrors In On Autobiography, Phillipe 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” (4). With a self called to witness “his” own being, the traditional view of autobiography is grounded in authority, the unique authority of the autobiographer over “his” life story. Acknowledging the difficulty of distinguishing autobiography from the autobiographical novel, Lejeune develops the idea of the autobiographical pact, a form of contract between author and reader in which the autobiographer explicitly commits her/ himself to a sincere effort to come to terms with and understand her/his own life, knowing that a complete historical exactitude is impossible. Lejeune stresses that texts are written for readers and it is readers who make them function (4). Autobiography, then, is as much a mode of reading as it is a mode of writing, a statement echoed by numerous critics of autobiography. The acknowledgment that autobiography is a kind of fiction , its self and its truth as much created as (re)discovered realities has contributed to the boom in studies of autobiography, in particular to the recent proliferation of studies of women’s 12 / acts of narrative resistance autobiographies. In this section, I examine a particular genre within women’s autobiographical traditions in the Americas: metafictional novels written on the borders between autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiography. Luisa Futoransky and Helena Parente Cunha use their fictionalized life narratives to challenge the concepts inherent in auto/bio/graphy, employing a variety of narrative and linguistic devices to explore the possibility and impossibility of writing a coherent self, a coherent life, a coherent text. Their texts foreground the representation of identity, entering in dialogue with autobiography without following obediently the conventions of that genre. These are examples of texts that invoke certain conventions and expectations of autobiography in order to produce and highlight forms of dissonance; texts that “allow reading effects implied by autobiography to remain lively even as they press beyond autobiography’s formal boundaries” (Gilmore, “Anatomy” 227). As narratives more interested in proliferating questions than in providing answers, these autobiographical metafictions are critical to a study of women’s autobiographical writings in the Americas. Metafiction, like autobiography, has been seen as “less a property of the primary text than a function of reading” (Currie 5). Also like autobiography , metafiction is a type of borderline discourse, “a kind of writing which places itself on the border between fiction and criticism, and which takes that border as its subject” (Currie 2). The assimilation of critical perspectives into the fictional narrative, a fixation with language and its relationship with the world, and a self-consciousness of the artificiality of the narrative’s constructions are all metafictional elements that can be traced in these feminist autobiographical metafictions. Since metafiction concerns itself so centrally with the issues of meaning construction , metafictional texts were a vital tool for feminist challenges to the traditional construction of (gendered) meanings in Latin America in the 1980s. The metafictional autobiographical novel allowed feminist authors the space, and gave them the power, to explore not only their own lives, but also conditions of literary production, questions of representation , and constructions of gender and identity. Through the practice of writing autobiographical metafiction, Helena Parente Cunha, Luisa Futoransky, and their counterparts explored theories of autobiography and fiction. Their autobiographical narratives help us to understand the ideological function of autobiographical storytelling. Pressing beyond autobiography’s formal boundaries, Parente Cunha and Futoransky problematize the authority of the signature as that which is crucial to the identity of autobiography. Rather than having addressing the self / 13 an authorial signature that matches the name of the protagonist/narrator in the text, Parente Cunha inscribes a nameless protagonist and Futoransky writes a...