'Either I am writing my body, or my body is writing me. It’s not always clear which way around it goes. Every day I sit down at my desk, and my fingers move over the keys, and they produce text. They produce a piece of writing that is both memoir and theory, speaking and spoken, signifier and signified. Flesh made of paper–not the neat stacks you buy in blocks, so white it is blue, edges like blades. Flesh made of paper the way it used to be made: it is clear that this page was once wood. There are remnants, splinters that make my pen jump. The colour is a softened yellow, plied through with light brown. There is a pulpy smell; organic and full of mountain air, like I am breathing mist, like the words written here are cooling my lungs, then warming to match the temperature of blood, of me. Its edges invite my touch. Its edges are soft, torn things that flake away as I write. Flesh made of paper, paper made of wood; I am interleaved and dreaming of dirt and green things and blood. ' (Author's introduction)
As an almost gluttonous reader of memoir and a scholar interested in just about any form of life writing, I am grateful for the rich set of perspectives, including those on performativity, offered over the last several decades by autobiographical theorists. They have, without a doubt, legitimated my literary gourmandising, as well as helped me refine my critical appetites. Since you can probably hear the caveat coming, I'll just come out and say it : as a practitioner - personal essayist and memoirist - I am somewhat less comfortable with theory in general and not really comfortable at all with what I take to be the most orthodox expression of performativity as expressed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, nor quite at ease with even the more modulated versions as expressed by Paul John Eakin and others. The crispist articulation of perfromativity's essential premise is from Sidonie Smith who, in response to Butler, reiterates her view that the interiority or self that is said to be prior to the autobiographical expression...is an effect of autobiographical storytelling' (qtd in Smith and Watson 214). Eakin's position is slightly more hesitant: 'The self of autobiographical discourse,' he writes in How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves 'does not necessarily [emphasis mine] precede its constitution in narrative' (100). ' (Author's introduction)
'The difficulty of writing as an autobiographer and simultaneously as a literary critic is that one trips the other up. My autobiographical self says I must write. I must follow the images in my mind. I must try to recreate my past, as bet I can, and fill in the gaps from my imagination. My unconscious will lead the way.' (Author's introduction)
'Examining hoax memoirs by James Frey (2003), Dave Pelzer (1995), and Kathy O'Beirne (2006), this paper illustrates how anxieties about the inability of representation to provide a direct access to truth are mitigated via an emotional connection with the text. While the degree of faking varies, each scandal reveals concerns about authenticity and the need to find-or feel-something that can be accepted as unquestionably 'true'. The mimicking performed by a fake unsettles the boundaries between fact and fiction to reveal a public investment in an undisturbed effect of the real, a willingness to accept a blurring of'truth' in the interests of the sensational experience of literature.' (Publication abstract)
'The article reviews the controversial 'Mudrooroo Affair' with reference to unpublished work by Mudrooroo in which he comments on the public debate about his rights to define himself as Aboriginal and, by extension, have his work credited as Aboriginal. Such work makes it pertinent to review Mudrooroo's creative output since 1965 as literary experiments with life writing and to reconsider Mudrooroo's many literary 'performances' from this perspective. They are not only explorations of Aboriginal identity politics over,- the last five decades, but may also be seen as a far more personal investment in exploring Aboriginal identity through a progressively shifting but interrelated series of subjectivities that reflect the writer's own experience and inform his claim to Aboriginality.' (Publication summary)
