Engendering a Little More Truth: Gender and Genre in Shared Lives

Abstract

In debunking the possibility of ‘an all-powerful theory’, Julia Kristeva argues that we need to pay attention to ‘the art and literature of our time, which remain alone, in our world of technological rationality, to impel us not toward the absolute but toward a quest for a little more truth, an impossible truth, concerning the meaning of speech, concerning our condition as speaking beings’. Shared Lives, Lyndall Gordon's biographical homage to three of her friends, is a principled engagement with the problems of generic certitude. The careful re-definition, by means of autobiographical examination, of the genre of biography is propelled by the gender of the biographer and biographical subjects. As a woman writing about women who are, by definition, ‘outside Power’ (Barthes) Gordon uses the ‘languages’ of biography and autobiography in order to undermine their authoritarianism so as to find collaborative truths. Shared Lives employs ‘an aesthetics of the ruse’ (Lionnet) to evade the male-biased discourses that are intent on effacing women.