‘Life Purified and Reprojected’: Autobiography and the Modern Irish Novel

Abstract

Discussions of the autobiographical novel frequently begin with the difficulty presented by the genre’s characteristic blurring of fact and fiction. For theorists who argue, somewhat wearily, that all autobiography is essentially fiction and all fiction, to some extent, autobiographical, this approach is artificial and pointless, merely leading the reader into what Paul de Man, citing Proust, describes as a ‘tourniquet’ or ‘whirligig’ of speculation. The more significant questions, de Man claims, deal with the horizon beyond the personal: ‘Since the concept of genre designates an aesthetic as well as a historical function, what is at stake is not only the distance that shelters the author of autobiography from his experience but the possible convergence of aesthetics and history’ (1984: 70). De Man’s assertion has a particular bearing on autobiographical fiction, which foregrounds exactly this convergence. ‘Although autobiographical novelists freely plunder episodes from their past’, suggests Michael Kenneally, ‘their concern is with wider, supra-personal goals which have more to do with society than individual history, with aesthetics than the self, with literature than biography’ (1989: 114). To a greater extent perhaps than memoir or autobiography ‘proper’, therefore, the autobiographical novel negotiates the historical through its symbolic extension of the self into the social, or the personal experience into some larger political narrative.