Data and Acta: Aspects of Life-Writing (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 331 the strategies of the autobiographer (e.g., Moll Flanders, The Vicar of Wakefield, Henry Esmond, The Ryecroft Papers, The Good Soldier). Is Dawson unable to distinguish fiction from autobiography, autobiography from fiction? The wonder is he ever tried. So, welcome to the club, Mr. Dawson. Imagine how the biographers feel. John Halperin Vanderbilt University Evelyn J. Hinz, editor, Data and Acta: Aspects of Life-Writing. Winnipeg: Mosaic, University of Manitoba, 1987, xii + 156 pp, $20.95 (hardcover), $14.95 (paper). Let me say immediately that Data and Acta contains a number of stimulating and useful essays. The reservations which I discuss below are to do not so much with this as with the claim, enshrined in the subtitle and reinforced in the editor's introduction, that this collection of twelve pieces is about "Aspects of Life-Writing." Of the contributions , all but the introduction and three essays decline the invitation to engage with the theoretical issues about the genre that this suggests, and offer instead individual studies of a variety of life-writing documents, often in a critical rather than a biographical mode. To take an example, J. M. Kertzer, in a dense and interesting essay, pursues the place of control and its absence in Cyril Connolly's TL· Unquiet Grave and makes out a case that these two positions "prove to be the twin spirits of autobiography —the life that attempts to master itself by writing itself." In doing this Kertzer produces a piece that is certainly one of the highlights of the collection. The problem is that this essay would have been perfectly at home in a collection of literary criticism . Kertzer chooses to treat the material "textually rather than biographically," eventually bringing down his extended close reading of TL· Unquiet Grave to "the continual moment of signification," so that "Palinurus" becomes "the acedia within language: the restless, irritable activity of signification," and Connolly's biography, which Kertzer initially seems to wish to use, disappears in the end into the play of language . Likewise, Timothy Dow Adams's piece on "Games in Frank Conroy's StopTime " is straightforward literary criticism, despite its gestures towards biography. There is nothing specific to life-writing here. This does not make Kertzer's essay or the collection as a whole any less valuable, what it does do is raise the question of the status of Data and Acta as a volume about "aspects" of life-writing. A second type of reading—one offered by Patricia Elliot writing on Marie Cardinal's TL· Words to Say It and by Karen Bryce Funt dealing with Freud and Jung's engagement with the Schreber memoir—is psychoanalytical, and, particularly in Funt's case, is more concerned with psychoanalysis than biography. Whatever their merits—and they are genuine —neither these essays nor the majority of the others seem to me to make a contribution to debate about life-writing as such; the mere use of life-writing texts as material for other types of analysis does not amount to such a contribution. Among the remaining essays it is worth singling out Gerald Noonan's piece on the cultural history of biographies of the Canadian painter Homer Watson for its suggestive linking of life-writing to the conditions of its production; while Ira Bruce Nadel, Philip Dodd, and the editor address "aspects of life-writing" directly. Nadel sets out to account for the popularity of biography by contrasting its largely conservative narrative traditions with the "narrative discontinuity, erratic time-shifts, and complex . . . characterization" which the modern novel uses in presenting "a world divorced from 332 biography Vol. 12, No. 4 the empirical experiences of the reader." Nadel covers some interesting ground before concluding with the by now familiar point that life-writer and novelist "are both creative writers whose points of contact are language, fictional paradigm and narrative form." Evelyn J. Hinz in the introduction offers a consciously provocative thesis, suggesting that the production of a poetics of life-writing has been hobbled by the "tendency to liken it to prose fiction when in fact it is drama that provides the most appropriate generic touchstone." There is not room in a short review to engage...