Abstract
My starting place is with two commonplace assumptions, one formal, the other historical. First, then, formally in autobiography we expect to find an intensity of focus on selfhood as a source of meaning, and conventionally see the defining features of the genre as lying in the coincidence in it of subject and object, and of enunciator, enunciation and enunciated (or narrator, narrative process and story). Then, historically, the emergence of autobiography as a significant genre is commonly seen in the early modern period as an aspect of the rise of individualism in western societies, although it is not named, and therefore not fully designated as a genre, until the beginning of the nineteenth century. So the autobiographical impulse, with all that it implies, and modernity are thus commonly seen to be inextricably linked.
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Notes
Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling (London, 1992; 1993 edn) p. 1, quoting John 1:1.
An Evil Cradling, p. 57. For an account of the significance of hunger-striking in Irish history, see David Beresford, Ten Men Dead: the Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike (London, 1987) Ch. 1, especially pp. 14–15.
Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of Silent Majorities … Or, The End of the Social, Semiotext[e] (New York, 1983) pp. 48–53, quoted in Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists. Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (London, 1993) p. 20.
John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1962) paragraphs 311–12.
Barry Reay, ‘Quakerism and Society’ in Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J.F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford, 1984, 1986 edn) p. 147. See this chapter and B. Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London, 1985) for a full account of Quaker belief and the social and political circumstances of seventeenth-century Quakerism.
(a) A.L. Morten, The World of the Ranters (London, 1970) pp. 18–19, speaks of the ‘aggressive radicalism’ of Quakers in the 1650s, although he suggests that this is lost in the 1660s. I would not agree that ‘aggression’ is uniformly diminished amongst all Quakers in the decade after the Restoration, (b) Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (first published, 1972; Harmondsworth, 1975, edn) p. 239.
Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, ‘A Short Relation of Cruel Sufferings’, in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century English-women, ed. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox (London and New York, 1989) pp. 121–3. Further references in the text are to this edition.
Diane Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body’, in Women, Writing, History 1640–1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (London, 1992) p. 45.
Michel Foucault’s enormously influential analysis of the meanings of forms of punishment in Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, first published as Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (Paris, 1975; transl, by Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth, 1979 edn) suggests a transition from spectacular punishments where the theatre of the body in pain prevails to reformative punishments, which begins in this period. The mission of the Maltese Inquisition is to reform and convert to Catholicism, as much as to chastise the prisoner through physical punishment and ultimately death. In experiences of imprisonment such as these, we see a mixture of spectacular and corporal punishments with a diversity of meanings. Foucault’s argument that the body is inscribed in the discourses of the period and is experienced according to these has been equally — if not more — influential and underpins almost all the writing on the body which has proliferated in the past few years. Such ideas are assumed in this essay. See also The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, first published as La Volonté de Savoir (Paris, 1976; transl, by Robert Hurley, Harmondsworth, New York, Victoria, Ontario, Auckland, 1978).
We might turn, for instance, to Kleinian or Lacanian theories. For Kleinians the archaic world of the infant is envisaged through its relation to the good and bad breast. (See Melanie Klein, Love, Reparation and Guilt, and Other Works 1921–1945 London, 1975.) To take food is ultimately to incorporate and physically to introject both good and bad aspects of the surroundings and caretaking environment represented by the m/other. At first the infant is not aware of itself as a distinct being, however. In order to become a ‘self’, with a sense of ‘me’ as distinct from ‘other’ or ‘not me’, it has to separate from its caretaking environment. Such processes of separation from the external other, necessary for the formation of an individual subjectivity, are bound up, thus, with the need to have taken that other into the self, to create a sense of self which can separate. In rejecting food, therefore, the subject may not merely be rejecting an already constituted other, but those very fundamental structures of self established through early processes of introjection and separation. To refuse food is to both purge the self, good and bad, and to explore the boundaries that constitute the self. For Lacan, picking up on Freud’s interest in the circulation of currencies between subject and object (where milk is a primary currency between parent and infant) food is bound up with the subject’s exchange values, through which he or she negotiates his or her boundaries in relation to others. (See The Hunger Artists, pp. 42–3.) The sense of control which Keenan, for instance, identifies in consequence of hunger-striking, emerges, according to such ideas, not just from identification with Irish history, or resistance of the other, or control of one’s own body (although these are important) but from the re-establishment of boundaries between self and other.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (first published as Pouvoirs de l’horreur, Paris, 1980; transl, by Leon S. Roudiez, New York, 1982) p. 10. Further references are given in the main text.
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Graham, E. (2000). Epilogue: ‘Oppression Makes a Wise Man Mad’: the Suffering of the Self in Autobiographical Tradition. In: Dragstra, H., Ottway, S., Wilcox, H. (eds) Betraying Our Selves. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62847-6_14
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