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

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In the last essay in the volume, Marcel Arbeit looks into Reynolds Price’s autobiography A Whole New Life (1994) and Tim McLaurin’s Keeper of the Moon: A Southern Boyhood (1991) and The River Less Run (2000), as southern examples of autobiography that centers on disability and illness narratives. In fact, this type of personal narrative has become a sub-genre of life-writing. Arbeit analyzes the strategies Price and McLaurin adopted “to overcome their tribulations” during the different stages of a life-threatening disease, emphasizing the therapeutic value of writing to cope with the side-effects of illnesses and to confront death. If the southern autobiographical impulse, according to Berry, emerges from a constant “conversation with the self,” Arbeit situates these illness narratives as “the dialogue of an afflicted self” with a healthy audience while hoping for recovery. Inherent in this type of narratives is a sense of rebirth, reconstruction and restoration of self. While Price expresses his metamorphosis through the visions and spiritual revelations he experienced, McLaurin uses his own body as an autobiographical text by having the tattoo of a phoenix on the exact spot on his chest where he received radiation. These memoirs illustrate that our bodies have an autobiographical textual narrative to show not only the passage of time—with disfigurement, marks of disease and even victory over it—but also our own fragility as we approach the end of our life journey and story.