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Interview
2 April 2017 2.00 h

teresa rosell

The purifying function of writing

Life-writing can be said to have begun with Saint Augustine's Confessions, but the literary exploration of the self has undergone many transformations in the following centuries

In ad­di­tion to bi­og­ra­phy, there is also what is known as life-writ­ing, in which the first per­son sin­gu­lar is used to nar­rate a se­ries of per­sonal rev­e­la­tions. The first ex­am­ple in west­ern lit­er­a­ture is Saint Au­gustin's Con­fes­sions, a philo­soph­i­cal mem­oir writ­ten in Latin be­tween 397-398. Yet, over the cen­turies, this con­fes­sional writ­ing has un­der­gone a con­stant trans­for­ma­tion, and in­cludes works such as Mon­taigne's Es­sais, from the 16th cen­tury, and Michel Leiris' The Age of Man (1939). We talk about this topic to Teresa Rosell, pro­fes­sor of com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture at Barcelona uni­ver­sity, and a Samuel Beck­ett spe­cial­ist.

What is life-writ­ing?
It is a wide term, but from the per­spec­tive of lit­er­ary the­ory it deals with the re­la­tion­ship be­tween an au­thor and the text they pro­duce. There are com­plex in­ter­re­lated worlds: re­al­ity, sub­ject, text, writ­ing, read­ing. The com­bi­na­tion of all these el­e­ments makes it to­tally prob­lem­atic and im­pos­si­ble to de­lim­i­tate a genre. Saint Au­gus­tine and Mon­taigne did life-writ­ing, but we can't say they were writ­ing au­to­bi­ogra­phies. Life-writ­ing refers to re­flec­tions on the con­di­tion of the sub­ject.
How did life-writ­ing change with the cri­sis of the sub­ject in the 20th cen­tury?
That's right, the sub­ject, as un­der­stood by Saint Au­gus­tine and Mon­taigne, did change. James Olney made a study of au­to­bi­og­ra­phy and di­vided it into in bios, autos and grafé.Bios is the con­tex­tual his­tor­i­cal re­con­struc­tion, autos deals with the need to ex­plain one­self and tell the truth, and grafé shows the im­pos­si­bil­ity of recog­nis­ing the au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal covenant. This ex­poses the com­plex­ity of the lan­guage it­self. Paul de Mann deals with all of this in his Au­to­bi­og­ra­phy as a De­face­ment. From here we enter a cul-de-sac. Pos­si­bil­i­ties? Out of the novel came aut­ofic­tion.
The term aut­ofic­tion is very fash­ion­able right now. What are the lat­est trends in this genre?
It has been a very suc­cess­ful genre in France, but now it is on de­cline in favour of ex­ofic­tion, which es­tab­lishes a re­la­tion­ship be­tween the writer and the out­side world. The writer cre­ates fic­tion based on real life events or fig­ures, like Yas­mina Khadra get­ting in­side the head of Colonel Gaddafi in his book, La derniere nuit du rais.
In life-writ­ing we de­tect the au­thor's need to ex­pose their ego, but also to sat­isfy the reader's in­ter­est in true sto­ries.
In the Age of In­ti­macy, Nora Catelli deals with this change of par­a­digm. In The Age of Man we sense Michel Leiris' need to ex­pose his pri­vacy and let out the truth. He finds an al­most pu­ri­fy­ing func­tion in writ­ing, while read­ers act a bit like voyeurs. All this move­ment is in­flu­enced by psy­cho­analy­sis. Writ­ing means re­flec­tion and ex­po­sure of all your prob­lems, and this was rad­i­cally new and rev­o­lu­tion­ary in early 20th cen­tury so­ci­ety, where every­thing pri­vate was hid­den and la­belled as taboo.
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