Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing (review)

Abstract

MLR, ioo.i, 2005 191 twenty-five essays, with even the unwonted pleasure of some colour plates by way of illustration. Art history, and in particular stained glass, and music, though all too briefly,occupy the place to which they are fully entitled, enhancing a gratifyingsense of purposeful interdisciplinarity. The volume is a product of what must have been a particularly stimulating conference that Joelle Prungnaud organized on behalf of the Literature Departments of Lille 3 and Clermont 2 in spring 2000. Hugo, an abiding presence, if here a contested one, is taken as read in enquiries that, after an initial comment on the remarkably minor place occupied by cathedrals in French medieval literature, range from Goethe and Chateaubriand across the nineteenth century not only to Claudel, but also into other lands to take in Kafka, Mandelstam, and even Alejo Carpentier. Though exploring Hume, as might perhaps have been foreseen, did not yield very positive results, the British contribution is generally shown to have been significant too, with studies of Ruskin, Woolf, and, all the more welcome for being less expected, Montague James. An overt homage in the title of one ofhis entertaining Gothic ghost stories is, however, the nearest the collection comes to Trollope. This is a pity,for some account of his novels would have provided a valuable complement, bringing out personal considerations that appear characteristic of deans, chapters, and the inward-looking society ofwhat are well called closes. Besides, Philip Barrett's Barchester: English Cathedral Life in the Nineteenth Century (London: SPCK, 1993) would offer support to speculations and fictional developments by providing valu? able details about what was happening in the Anglican sphere, in buildings, religious practices, and ecclesiastical organization. A certain amount of similar information would have been useful in La Cathedrale. Fascinating and varied though the flights of metaphorical fancy unquestionably are, they might have been even more inter? esting if their basis in reality had been interrogated with more determination. The Gothic, privileged above other styles for reasons that are not made entirely clear, is generally allowed to stand as a unified concept, despite art historians' insistence on a series of stages. Often glimpsed from afar with nostalgia rather than discrimination, architectural spectacle is in many instances taken to represent the totality of cathedral experience, which then blends into individual visions reflectingmore or less heterodox quasi-religious sentiment. Comparisons with what is regarded as outmoded are pressed into service, with only an occasional saving sense of irony, in praise of what is newer. In one sense, the responses are so many gestures of annexation; in another, they pay tribute to what they would displace. As is usually the case, imagery reveals what is mushrooming down there in the creative penumbra. University of East Anglia Christopher Smith Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing. By Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2003. viii + 294 pp. ?60; 871. ISBN 90-420-1145-9. This study,often insightful, locates and investigates what itdefines as the 'borderlines' between autobiography and fiction in the past thirtyyears or so. Gunnthorunn Gud? mundsdottir compares works by French, English-language, and German-language writers based on her contention that autobiography in the West follows similar pat? terns, all of which are influenced to some degree by postmodern literary practice and theory. This sometimes has the effectof collapsing cultural boundaries to an excessive degree. It certainly elides problems oflinguistic differenceand, speaking as an ltalian ist , I was disappointed to see that ltalian writers?who have contributed much to this kind of writing?are ignored, save for a brief consideration of one work by Calvino. The study is fascinating in its consideration of overlapping features in autobiogra? phy and postmodernism: the role and treatment of memory and its necessary effects 192 Reviews on considerations of the past and how it relates to the present, issues of gender, of crossing between cultures, the presence of biography or history (for instance, the common search for the parent(s) in autobiography alongside the search for the self), and the use of other forms of representation, such as photographs. Gudmundsdottir ranges widely in her discussion (from Nabokov to Frank McCourt), but chooses to concentrate especially...