Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

33 страница из 129

Taking as a starting point Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact between author, narrator and protagonist, who are identified as one, Part 3 “Authors, Narrators and Fictionalized Selves” deals with the fracture of the pact and the thin line between autobiography and fiction. This section considers the intrusion of fiction and fictionalized selves in autobiographical writings, as well as the inclusion of autobiographical elements in the novels of important southern authors. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw’s article centers on Lejeune’s triad, which she calls “memoir’s characters,” and her discussion of the presence of those characters in different life narratives by southern women serves as a framework for the rest of the papers in this section. Using Mary Karr’s insightful reflections on the issues that usually complicate the task of memoir writers, Prenshaw engages in a discussion about the components of voice and the strategies several life narrators have used to manipulate the interplay of this “trinity” of voices and thus condition the credibility of their life writings. Prenshaw’s characters are the “self-aware writer,” the “created narrator” and the “objectified, characterized self” who acts as protagonist. Prenshaw points to the centrality of the narrator’s voice as the main means of expression of “the interpreted self, the composed self presented to the reader,” and argues that the other two, “the protagonist of the narrative, the younger characterized self” and “the present-moment laboring writer,” function just as dramatic foils to the “transformed self” represented by the narrator. In Prenshaw’s essay, passages from autobiographies written by southern women in different periods of literary history serve to illustrate this discussion, which is further animated by a variety of reflections on related topics such as truth telling, the use of devices typical in life-writing, the contribution of sensory details to enhance a narrative’s credibility, or the effects of the “steady cultural change in what society regards as acceptable for public exposure” on women’s life-writing. Prenshaw notes that “in the works of Mary Karr, Ellen Douglas, and many other southern women autobiographers, we may read memoir’s characters as a trinity leaning toward oneness.”