2The papers collected in this issue of Commonwealth offer a penetrating and wide-ranging analysis of (auto)biographies and fictional life-stories coming from South Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Australia and Canada in which writers, by resorting to an impressive range of narrative and discursive devices, try to cope with the arduous and ambiguous task of authenticating the self .

3With J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, Sheila Whittick analyses the author’s adoption of the autobiographical mode by turning to his theoretical writing. She focuses in particular on the problematic and ambivalent choice of a third-person narrator which can nevertheless be easily identified with the author since the text is about his childhood. She shows that the narrative strategy chosen by Coetzee raises fundamental questions about the nature of autobiographical writing especially in relation to the status of truth in discourse and to the reliability of memory. She accounts for Coetzee’s deliberate choice of a reduced perspective as a short-cut to express some final truth about the self and to preserve the past in itself. She also suggests that a third-person narration is for Coetzee a way of neutralising the shame of self-exposure and maintaining a boundary between the two parts of his life, childhood and adulthood. She concludes by pointing to the blurring of boundaries between fiction and life in this autobiographical venture since the truth of the young Coetzee, the main protagonist, can be equally adduced to facts of life as to literary devices and raises the question of whether truth can ever be attained through autobiography.

4In the following paper, Vicky Briault Manus analyses how another South African writer, Bessie Head, tries to express the truth of the self in her fictionalised autobiography, A Question of Power. It is a dense a complex narrative which elicits from the reader an ambivalence response. Vicky Briault Manus analyses the third-person narration which thinly hides the identity between the implied author and the protagonist through shifting perspectives. She further shows how Bessie Head’s narrative constantly undermines the reality effects it purports to convey by instilling elements directly borrowed from her personal experiences as an oppressed person in South Africa and an exile in Botswana. The life story of the protagonist breaks under the strain of painful experiences whether sexual abuse, madness, or hallucinations with the result that the narrative seriously undercuts the truth value of what is represented. As the reader seeks for elements of verifiability, he simultaneously becomes aware, as Vicky Briault Manus remarks, that if fiction serves to mask the real life of the author, conversely autobiographical elements feed an allegorical scenario – a journey to hell – thus illustrating the point that identity can best be reconstructed through fictional devices.

5In her paper, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré examines how Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days, A Memoir sits between genres and how the narrator gropes towards self-expression while trying to cope with the memory of her father and of her country Pakistan. Her narrative is further compounded by the covert objection to the way feminism is treated in postcolonial studies and an attempt at liberating it from facile concepts. Geetha Ganapathy-Doré focuses on how Suleri’s writing is a kind of therapy which combines dreams and metaphors in an attempt to present her life story in the terms of the culture and of the people of her country. She writes about herself and her country from the point of view of an exile in a language which is stripped of its colonial undertones and ‘colonised’ by her mother tongue Urdu. She shows how Suleri’s oblique approach to self-definition involves a deconstruction of the central authority which the autobiographical act implies. Not only does she refuse the reader the pleasure of getting inside her life, but she also adopts a rhetoric based on metaphors, metonymies, symbols and her narrative is shot through with borrowed discourses and intertextual allusions. The final paradox, as Geetha Ganapathy-Doré points out, is that this narrative mixes both the private and the public.

6With Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Cynthia Carey explores the inner workings of what is considered as a ‘postmodern family’ in the context of new life writing initiated by Roland Barthes in the mid-seventies. Cynthia Carey focuses on the genesis of life writing in Ondaatje’s text predicated on the absence of a central authority. This absence has repercussions on the composition and organisation of the book. It is a fragmented narrative which makes referentiality problematic and which dynamically combines elements of biography, autobiography and fiction. Cynthia Carey’s analysis lays bare the mechanisms whereby Ondaatje deliberately subverts the fallacy of representation and the conventional pattern of temporal linearity. She points to how he opens up a new space of indeterminacy located between fiction and non-fiction in which the differences between past and present, fiction and truth are blurred. This new space generates alterity whereby the reader is forced to recognise the presence of an Other through the fusion and confusion of genres and voices. Through the overt fragmented structure of his book, Ondaatje renders visible the hidden dislocations of the textual order of authoritative biography or autobiography while creating its own inner coherence. The outcome of this new creation is the discursive construction of identity whereby the gaps and dislocations of the text leave the readers perplexed as to how they can ascribe a clearly recognisable identity to the multiplicity of voices they hear. This general move is sustained by the inclusion of poetry and photographs into the text and the symbolic interplay of colours thus creating new continuities and echoes within the text. Cynthia Carey’s analysis predicated on the semiotic notion of ‘lost signifieds’ and on the paradoxical confrontation of the mimetic and anti-mimetic situates Ondaatje’s book within the framework of postcolonialism and postmodernism forcing the reader to redefine his reading strategies.

7Colette Selles, in her analysis of some of Frank Moorhouse’s writings also deals with the subversion of conventional autobiography. She stresses how in his narratives he plays with the conventions of genres and reverses the reader’s expectations. The ostensible verifiability of the biographical material, such as actual events or photographs, is undercut by obvious fictional procedures, or, conversely, fictionalised characters are in fact based on real-life models. The upshot of Moorhouse’s strategy lies in the by now familiar postcolonial paradox that one gets to truth through fiction or that truth is fictionalised. The sense of truth, as it appears, is no longer rooted in some transcendental instance but is dependant on textual or discursive procedures with their ironic interplay between the real and the invented, continuity and disruption. The definition of identity is likewise problematic and Colette Selles, starting from the postmodern questioning of the humanist notion of identity, shows that in Moorhouse’s narratives biography, autobiography and fiction ambiguously interact and project the bemused reader into the elusive gap that separates the narrating I and the narrated I, the real self and the fictionalised self that is the ambiguous in-betweenness of constructed identity.

8In his article on Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, Xavier Pons analyses the paradox of how the use of hyper-realism in this narrative serves to deconstruct the reality effects the conventional discourse of realism is supposed to convey, thus neutralising the boundary between facts and fiction. Xavier Pons shows how the author, in his treatment of a mythical national figure, Ned Kelly, manages to generate patterns of perception in which the two antithetic notions of authenticity and illusion coexist in the reader’s mind. Here, as in the previous papers, the core issue which underpins Carey’s strategy is the question of truth, the idea that truth like history is co-substantial with language and discourse and that the boundary that separates history from fiction is purely conventional. By foregrounding the narrative and thematic artefacts of nineteenth-century storytelling in his treatment of the Kelly saga Carey sets off to show the limitations of autobiography in its claim to authenticity and questions the metaphysics of presence. Xavier Pons shows, however, that Carey’s intention was not so much to question the accepted historical truths about Ned Kelly but to point to the heuristic function of an imaginary narrative in which the country can recognise itself thus pointing to the ambiguous relationship between fiction and history.

9Charlotte Sturgess’s paper on Evelyn Lau’s Other Women also deals with a similar ambiguity by adopting a different approach leaning on the Lacanian theory of subjectivity. Through her analysis of linguistic and discursive features, she focuses on how Lau’s narrative undermines the assumption of a stable presence behind the narrated discourse. Charlotte Sturgess predicates her analysis of Lau’s narrative on the semiotic disconnections between the signifier and the signified, the word and the world or, as she puts it, between code and reference. The shift from first to third person or the splitting of the I determines rhetorical positions within the text which generate tension, dialogue and in-betweenness and elicit the elusive presence of the Other. This strategy whereby the self does not correspond with the self problematises the conventions of autobiographical writing in its aims to unity and harmony, intimating the ambiguous blurring of the conscious/unconscious boundary in self-writing. In this perspective, Lau’s text can be taken as a textual performance whereby the dislocations registered in the text as against the coherence and continuity which the autobiography implies refigure the site of a problematic Canadian identity which cannot be conceived in terms of continuity but rather of discontinuities.

10Paper Shadows by Wayson Choy also deals with the elusiveness of the self trapped between fact and fiction. In his memoir the Chinese-Canadian author tries to recapture what defines the identity of his community. Christine Lorre analyses Choy’s paradoxical approach to the construction of personal and collective identities. She points to the underlying irony of his venture rooted in his personal story of adoption. He was impelled to recapture the history of his family and his community by the urge to write an alternative history based on individual reminiscences and testimonies. Through his narrative quest he tries to encapsulate the vanishing memory and culture of the Chinese community with the ironic result that his narrative, for all its loopholes, secrets and complexity, rings with the authority of truth. But of course, as Christine Lorre points out, the truth is only apparent or provisional: it is the effect of a tension between the personal and the collective, history and fiction and thematised by the cultural allusion to ghosts which operates both as a cultural signifier and a subtle reminder of the inevitable element of imagination that goes into the shaping of life writing.

11Marta Dvorak’s title to her paper ‘autobiografiction’ concisely sums up the theme that cuts across through all the previous papers: the intermingling of fact and fiction in the writing of a life story. Her analysis of strategies of self-representation bears on three narratives, Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moody, Burning Water by George Bowering and Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje. She uses the first narrative, published in 1852, as a paradigm of autobiographical writing set in a colonial context, analysing the procedures and criteria that go into the construction of personal truth. She shows how the necessity of having to filter a surplus of information or, on the contrary, of imaginatively filling in the information gaps in order to abide by the conventions of the genre, implies that autobiographical fiction or fictional autobiography easily tail off into each other. Autobiographical (or biographical) writing thus defines a liminal space of generic ambivalence which pre-empts the possibility of ever acceding to a pre-existing truth and makes it co-substantial with the very act of writing. Marta Dvorak further illustrates this paradox with George Bowering’s fictional documentary and Michael Ondaatje’s memoir which explore this hybridity by combining fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, textual and iconographic elements with the result that such narratives baffle generic classification and elude arbitrary interpretation.