Fictional Fossils: Life and Death Writing in Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries

Abstract

[T]he moment of death occurs while we're still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. 1 C. Shields, The Stone Diaries (Toronto, 1993), p. 342. Further references will be given in the text, as page number. R egarding life and death as ultimate opposites, as two irreconcilable extremes, is a “distortion” 2 challenged by texts, and in particular by life writing. Jeremy Tambling calls all writing “potentially posthumous since it cannot have a punctual relation to a life of writing”. 3 Michel Foucault, too, in his essay “What Is an Author?”, emphasises writing's relationship to death, which he sees as twofold: on the one hand narrativity has always been “intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero”; on the other hand, it is “designed to ward off death”. 4 In Ivan Callus' words, “to memorialise a life in writing […] is to play with death's deferral”: 5 the text assumes eternal life in the place of the protagonist or writer, and thus allows her or him to live on in their stories. (Auto)biography as a genre thus “challenges a life–death distinction” 6 by softening the delimitations between the two, breaking down the seeming opposition between life and death. Life writing preserves aspects of past lives that would otherwise dissolve without trace, but, in the act of preservation, it destroys the very features which make “life” into the activity of living 7 – so as text it constitutes a contradiction in terms: it extracts life from life in order to conserve it. This is the reason why “the language of monuments [and] epitaphs […] pervades biographical and autobiographical discourse and testifies to the tensions between a posthumous memorialisation of a life and the attempt to grasp the ‘life’ as it was lived.” 8 Laura Marcus quotes W. H. Epstein, who asserts that the “cultural function of biography” is to “turn life into text and text back into life”. 9 I. Callus, “Comparatism and (Auto)thanatography: Death and Mourning in Blanchot, Derrida, and Tim Parks”, in: Autobiografictions: Comparative Essays , ed. L. Boldrini & P. Davies, Comparative Critical Studies Vol. I, No. 3 (2004), p. 337. J. Tambling, Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 8. M. Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, in: The Foucault Reader , ed. P. Rabinov (London, 1984), p. 102. Callus, p. 337. Tambling, p. 7. L. Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourse: Criticism, Theory, Practice (Manchester & New York, 1994), p. 100. Marcus, pp. 27ff. Marcus, quoting from W. H. Epstein, Recognizing Biography (Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 27ff.