A Fiction of the Truth

Sydney Morning Herald, 27/11/99

By J.M. Coetzee

I take an autobiography to be a personal narrative distinguished from narrative fiction by the assumption on its readers part that it adheres to certain standards of truthfulness, and perhaps distinguished as well by an inspiration on the part of its writer to tell the truth. For that reason I take auto-biography to be at least an intention, a kind of history rather than a kind of fiction. The kind of verifiability to which autobiographical narratives are subject is limited, however, since much of the time, perhaps most of the time, they will be concerned with events, thoughts and feelings that are known to one person alone in all the world. For that reason, the element of trust on the part of the reader has to be strong: there has to be a tacit understanding, a pact, between autobiographer and reader that the truth is being told. Such a pact is, I would guess, rarely observed to the full. There are many reasons why the writer should lapse. There may be actions or thoughts which he feels it is simply too shamefull to make public, or which he feels could destroy the readers good opinion of him. There may be things he decides against putting down on paper because (as he rationalises) they are not important enough (when in some sense they really are important). There may be things he simply does not understand about himself, or has forgotten, or suppressed. There are also more complex and interesting reasons for surreptitiously breaking the pact. The autobiographer may decide that the ultimate goal of the work, the truth about himself, can be served by inventing stories that encapsulate that truth more neatly, more pointedly, than strict adherence to the facts ever could parables, so to speak. Or he may break the pact by deciding, from the beginning never to adhere to it. He may invoke the pact by calling his book an autobiography or memoir simply to create a positive balance of credibility in the readers mind that will be extremely convenient for him in his storytelling, and which, in the case of his

more naive readers, may not be exhausted even by the time the story ends, so that these readers will go away thinking they have read a true history when they have read nothing but a fiction. All of which can be done in no particular spirit of cynicism. The purest examples of this last procedure are to be found in the writings of Daniel Defoe. Most children who read Robinson Crusoe think it is the autobiography of a man named Robinson Crusoe. And, I believe Defoe would say, where is the harm in that? Most fiction writers, or at least most fiction writers with serious pretensions, go along with Aristotle on the subject of truth, that history tells one kind of truth and poetry (that is to say, works of imagination) another kind of truth. Secretly they may even agree that poetic truth is in some sense a higher truth, or at least a truth with more general applicability. The history of Alexander Selkirk and the years he spent shipwrecked on an island off South America tells us more about Selkirk than about us, we say to ourselves; the so-called history of Robinson Crusoe tells us more about ourselves than about Crusoe, if only because Crusoe never existed. So, along with Defoe, we conclude it is no bad thing to invoke the autobiographical pact for our own fictional ends, and break it, even if we must recognise that the act of invoking and then breaking the pact time and again cheapens the currency and has a diminishing-returns effect that cannot be good for autobiography in general as a mode of writing. There is another angle from which we can approach the question of autobiographical truth, an angle that I associate with Freuds paper Therapy Terminable and Interminable. The intellectual roots of autobiography, at least in the West, are bound up with soul-searching and the confession of sins. The ultimate reader of ones autobiography is God, from whom it is idle to try to hide the truth. In fact, there is no point in hiding the truth, since the autobiographical endeavour is ultimately for ones own benefit, as confessing subject, rather than for Gods benefit or that of the confessor priest who acts for him. Whether or not somewhere in the history of Judaeo-Christian religion there is a pessimistic heresy that questions whether the confessing subject can ever know about himself all that God knows, I cannot say, but let me, for my present purposes and in the spirit of the great Jorge Luis Borges, postulate such a heresy.

In our post-religious age the corresponding heresiarch would be the Freud of the pessimistic moments when Freud wonders whether the talking cure can be a cure in all cases, whether there might not be cases in which therapy is interminable, in which the therapeutic goal of getting the subject to speak the truth of himself is unattainable, since the time needed to get past all the screens of lies and selfdeception would be longer than a lifetime. I think it may sometimes be necessary to approach an autobiographical project in some such spirit as Freuds: that getting to the core of yourself may not be feasible, that perhaps the best you can hope for will not be the history of yourself but a story about yourself, a story that will not be the truth but may have some truth-value, probably of a mixed kindsome historical truth, some poetic truth. A fiction of the truth in other words. Autobiography is very much about beginnings: how did I come to be? Where do I come from? Serious autobiography reflects upon the question of beginnings, realising that the beginning is a more difficult concept than may at first sight seem. The most thoroughgoing reflections, at least in English, on autobiographical beginnings belong not to true autobiography at all but to a parody of an autobiography, Laurence Sternes Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in which the vexing theoretical question of where to begin the story of his life fills the first third of Tristrams book. A story, says Aristotle, has a beginning, a middle and an end. An autobiography, by definition, does not have an end. As a story it is therefore inherently unsatisfactory. It lacks a shape. How does one give a life story a shape? In practice, giving a shape to ones story and finding a pattern in ones life turn out to be the same thing . Is the pattern really there? Is a pattern something that resides in your life, that you discover by dint of introspection, or is it something that you create in the process of recollecting the past, selecting details, bringing them together, writing them down? Autobiography, as we usually understand the term, has to do with writing and publishing; but there is a wider sense in which we are, almost daily, telling ourselves and others the story of our life, and in the process either discovering or creating a pattern in it. In this respect, autobiography is very much like history: a way of explaining the present in terms of its origins.

Autobiography, talking about oneself at length, requires a huge egoism. In 1892 a book was published in England under the title The Diary of a Nobody. Intended as a humurous book, it is less funny today than when it was written. But the very fact that I am mentioning it today, over 100 years laters, points to an odd fact. Publishing your autobiography turns you from a nobody into a somebody. It makes you into an author, and we should not neglect the immense prestige attached to authorship in Western culture. One way of becoming an author and ceasing to be a nobody is to write and publish the one story that you alone in the world can write: the story of your life. Yet if on the one hand penning ones autobiography may be the expression of a rather pathetic ambition to be a writer, the last and most desperate recourse of a storyteller without a proper story to tell, on the other hand it attests to a certain faith that no-one is really a nobody, that every life story deserves a hearing. I am commencing an undertaking hitherto without precedent, writes Rousseau on the first page of his Confessions, the book that laid down the ground rules for modern autobiography, and in which I will never find an imitator. This is not the first autobiography. It is certainly not the first confession. It is not even the first autobiography called Confessions (Rousseau could not have been ignorant af Augustines Confessions, though he nowhere mentions them). So if Rousseau announces that the book whose first page he is penning is without precedent, he must have a certain slant of meaning in mind that is not obvoius. I will never find an imitator, he goes on. On the contrary, Rousseau has had thousands of imitatorsimitators not only of the project of writing a record of ones life without holding back anything (which is what Rousseau will shortly say he is planning to do) but even imitators who will cite Rousseau himself as the model. The fact is, no ambitious writer, and certainly not Rousseau, would be happy to think that no-one will want to imitate him. So again, when Rousseau says he will have no imitators, his meaning is less than obvious. I know the feelings of ny heart, he proceeds, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen: I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better than other people, at least I am different. Here we arrive at the point where Rousseau is, morally speaking, on the shakiest ground. He is still responding to the unspoken question, Why a book about you,

Jean Jacques? The implicit contrast he draws is between people about whom it is justifiable to publish books, and people about whom it is not. If being different from everyone else is the justification you produce for publishing a book about yourself, then does the idea of publishing oneself to the world not put pressure on one to be different, or exaggerate ones difference? The imperative behind confession is to tell the truth; but is the imperative behind the kind of project Rousseau is undertaking to tell the truth about himself or merely to display what is different about him? In passing over this question without confronting it, is Rousseau not in effect saying that what is most different about him constitutes his truth, that truth is mere difference?