Collaborative Life Writing: The Dialogical Subject of Carson McCullers’ Dictaphone “Experiments” and Posthumous Autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare

Abstract

Determined to write in spite of physical pain and emotional turmoil in the late 1950s, Carson McCullers began using a Dictaphone, recording her sessions with therapist Dr. Mary Mercer and having them transcribed as literary “experiments.” These experiments, now available to researchers, indicate that these dialogic sessions’ affective content and thematics fueled McCullers’ final projects: her novel, Clock Without Hands (1961), and “unfinished” autobiography. This chapter emphasizes the archived Dictaphone experiments’ relationship to Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers (1999), the posthumous text edited by Carlos Dews and published decades after McCullers’ death. McCullers’ posthumous autobiography is an under-recognized work of women’s life writing that showcases the sociality of being and writing, both at the level of its thematics and material production.