- 1 Philippe-Jean Catinchi, ‘Des nouvelles de l’‘Homo biographicus’’, Le Monde, X, 19 février, 1999.
1E.M. Forster once playfully created a system of classification consisting in three categories: homo sapiens, homo fictus, and homo biographicus,1 to which for the purposes of this study we could perhaps add homo biografictus. We can certainly say that homo biographicus is older than his cousin homo fictus, for life writing, like writing itself, goes back to Antiquity, to the life it is said of the tyrant Heracleides set down in Greek in the sixth century B.C. Biography, autobiography and history were almost synonymous in Antiquity, concerned as they were with recording and celebrating the deeds of the powerful, from Suetonius’s The Lives of the Caesars to Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. The Middle Ages appropriated the biographical genre for its edifying lives of the saints, conforming to the paradigm of exemplarity setting up the anecdotes of a particular individual to evoke general events, wider socio-political dynamics, and universal truths. Coming very much into vogue in the 17th and 18th centuries with the works of Walton, Pepys, Johnson, and Boswell, life writing, like the nascent genre of the Bildungsroman – embodied by works like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – originally laid emphasis not on individuals but on the surrounding culture and on the social forces that shaped them, recording in essence certain moments in time. In the wake of the Romantic movement, the accent on social rhetoric was to give way to a focus on the individual subject, and the modern acceptation of the autobiographical portrait.
- 2 Susanna Moody, Roughing It in the Bush, Editor’s Introduction, Carl. F. Klinck, McClelland and Stew (...)
- 3 Elizabeth Thompson, Editor’s Preface, Susannah Moody, Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada, (...)
2But in the meantime, in the 1820s and 30s, emerging from a British empire in economic and political expansion, there was an explosion of travel literature and immigrant literature accompanying the huge tides of emigration, first to Australia in the late 1820s, and then from 1830 on to Canada, ‘the great landmark for the rich in hope and poor in purse’,2 to borrow the debunking parallelism of Susanna Moody, one of these early emigrants. Susanna Strickland Moody, who belonged to the English gentry, came from a highly-educated family well-known for their literary attainments: her sisters Agnes and Elizabeth had won renown in Great Britain for The Lives of the Queens of England, and Catherine Parr Traill, who also emigrated to Canada, published in 1836 the highly successful The Backwoods of Canada that became a handbook for English gentlewomen wishing to emigrate. Already well-known for her sentimental but edifying instalment fiction, the young Susanna Moody followed her husband to Canada in 1832 to avoid the poverty and loss of social standing that otherwise awaited younger sons who could not inherit any of the family property. Elizabeth Thompson, editor of the 1997 Canadian Critical edition of Moody’s Roughing It in the Bush, described the relocation as both catalytic and cataclysmic. Catalytic, in that it triggered the writing of a seminal text in Canada’s historical, political, and cultural history, in the form of the autobiographical sketches first published in Canadian magazines and later expanded and compiled in the 1852 English publication of Roughing It in the Bush. Cataclysmic, in that ‘like any nineteenth-century emigrant, Moodie suffered a number of shocks to her understanding of the world’.3
3On top of the harsh, alien geographical environment, there was the double sense of loss: the loss of home, of friends and family, and the loss of social status, with not so much its economic resonances as its cultural, intellectual, and ethical dimensions. In the sketch entitled ‘The Charivari’, Moody relates her reluctance to emigrate:
like Lot’s wife, I still turned and looked back, and clung with all my strength to the land I was leaving. I could bear mere physical privations philosophically enough; it was the loss of the society in which I had moved, the want of congenial minds, of persons engaged in congenial pursuits, that made me so reluctant to respond to my husband’s call. (p. 138)
- 4 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in P (...)
There are many textual instances of nostalgia in the form of optatives or the ubi sunt motif that illustrate Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s observation of the clash in settler nations between the backward-looking helplessness of exile and the ‘forward-looking impetus to indigeneity’.4 We find multiple recurrences of the ubi sunt motif lamenting a vanished past that is one of the identifying markers of literatures of exile. In the passage quoted below, we can note the affective use of personification and the abundant rhetorical questions, as well as the multiple rhetorical devices of interjection and exclamation which all – like the optative – serve the emotive or expressive function of language centred upon the locutor and which invite, or rather presuppose, on the part of the receiver an attitude of acceptance, which in this case amounts to recognizing the superiority of the culture of the imperial centre – the true ‘home’ – over that of the local and peripheral:
Dear, dear England! why was I forced by a stern necessity to leave you? What heinous crime had I committed, that I, who adored you, should be torn from your sacred bosom, to pine out my joyless existence in a foreign clime? Oh that I might be permitted to return and die upon your wave-encircled shores, and rest my weary head and heart beneath your daisy-covered sod at last! Ah these are vain outbursts of feeling – melancholy relapses of the spring home-sickness! (p. 56)
Roughing It shifts constantly between narrative and non-narrative modes, often moving into the essay with its interpretive commentary. It combines autobiography, which subordinates its narration to a logical sequence of events, with portrait or self-portrait, characterized by description and absence of plot. Portraits such as that of Tom Wilson, who first emigrated to North South Wales, returned to England ruined, then emigrated to Canada, only to meet up with the same patterns of obstacle and failure, illustrate the socio-economic reasons for the waves of immigration offered in the preface. Through the rhetorical devices of concretization and equivalence, this portrait establishes a parallel between Canada and Australia, between the open, overt thievery of the Australian convict and the covert, disguised ruses of the ordinary Canadian resident:
Ah! such a country! – such people! – such rogues! It beats Australia hollow: you know your customers there, but here you have to find them out. (pp. 59-60)
Tom’s experience in New South Wales, where his convict servants robbed him of everything and burned down his dwelling, is an exemplum, as is his parallel experience in Canada. Set up as a precursor of Dunbar Moody, Tom’s plight is a foreshadowing of what will befall the Moodies: as Canada is the same as, yet worse than Australia, this establishes a paradigm of degradation and entropy that accompanies any spatio-temporal distancing from England. Similarly, the self-portrait that Tom draws of himself and of gentlemen immigrants like him serves an anticipatory narrative function, as well as didactic and dramatic functions, in that it illustrates and consolidates the warning that Moody gives in her introduction and conclusion to ‘refined and accomplished’ gentry (p. xiv) to reconsider their prospects and not emigrate. Tom’s admirable structural manipulation of modals, beginning ‘Gentlemen can’t work like labourers, and if they could, they won’t’ (p. 54) is echoed in the final paragraphs of Roughing It, in which Moody directly invokes her upper middle-class English readership, denounces the industry of myth-making, and bids them beware of the pamphleteers and other manufacturers of illusion persuading them to emigrate to what is fundamentally a ‘prison-house’, as the gentleman, unaccustomed to manual labour, ‘can neither work so hard, live so coarsely, nor endure so many privations as his poorer but more fortunate neighbour’ and should leave the colonies to the working class who can submit ‘with a good grace, to hardships that would kill a domesticated animal at home’ (pp. 237, 236 respectively).
- 5 Michael Peterman, ‘Roughing It in the Bush as Autobiography’ in Reflections: Autobiography and Cana (...)
4Interspersed among this hybrid material we find moreover the anecdotes or running narratives common to the travel and immigrant literature of the period, that were designed to enliven the factual accounts and generate readerly interest. They were often test cases of sorts illustrating what Michael Peterman has termed the uneasy post-revolutionary meeting of English principles with American notions of ultra-republican liberty.5 These anecdotes, often constructed in a mode of seriation that allowed anticipatory reader response, were the writerly sites that housed the imagination and invited a certain fanciful invention. In turn, the space provided for fanciful elaboration and variation was to lead to the mode of anecdote evolving into sketch, that Haliburton in Canada and then Mark Twain in the United States honed into the North American indigenous tradition of the tall tale.
- 6 Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, p. 143.
- 7 Peterman, ‘Roughing It in the Bush as Autobiography’, p. 507.
- 8 Her depiction of the Irish especially as dirty, ragged, barbarous creatures is not remarkable in an (...)
5Rather like the Roman god Janus, Moody is caught in a simultaneous double movement, trying to relocate the heimisch or homely even as she laments the lost space and time of the Old World order. Despite the striking gap between the new place and her transplanted language, customs, and values, we can detect a counterdiscursive thread that winds its way through the autobiographical text and strains to incorporate ‘a pre-existing aesthetic dimension identified with the indigenous occupants of the country’.6 Explicitly, the discursive and narrative strategies affirm Moody’s commitment to preserving the class and gender roles she has inherited, and the middle-class values connecting worth with manners, morals, and social class. But implicitly, she undergoes what Peterman terms a ‘radical deculturation’7 in the bush. Surrounded by a bookless society, by uneducated immigrants from the British Isles (‘the Yankeefied British peasantry and mechanics’ (p. 140) that her background has trained her to despise,8 or by uncultured late Loyalists (‘semi-barbarous Yankee squatters’ or ‘low-born Yankee[s]’ (pp. 139 & 140 respectively) whose ‘mangled’ grammar and speech sounds she gleefully transcribes, Moody begins to have new insights that war with her old prejudices, as we can see in the sketch ‘The Charivari’, in the following reflections on class restraint and exploitation infused with tension, in which with ostentatious graciousness she pardons the disrespect shown the gentry by the working-classes:
It originates in the enormous reaction springing out of a sudden emancipation from a state of utter dependence into one of unrestrained liberty. As such, I not only excuse, but forgive it, for the principle is founded in nature; and, however disgusting and distasteful to those accustomed to different treatment from their inferiors, it is better than a hollow profession of duty and attachment urged upon us by a false and unnatural position (p. 140).
Striving to overcome not only her preconceptions with respect to class roles but also with respect to gender roles separating the exterior domain of the fields from the interior domain of the house, Moody finally makes a successful attempt at milking. The cultural comparison chosen to articulate her satisfaction is a most significant one, as it establishes an equivalence between intellectual and physical nourishment, between nature and culture: ‘I felt prouder of that milk than many an author of the best thing he ever wrote, whether in verse or prose’ (p. 129). In a similar vein, in ‘Disappointed Hopes’, Moody vanquishes her pride and tries her hand at field-labour to assist her husband, who cannot afford hired help:
I have contemplated a well-roed ridge of potatoes on that bush farm with as much delight as in years long past I had experienced in examining a fine painting in some well-appointed drawing room (p. 167).
The elaborate parallel structure opposing past and present, inside and outside, production and representation, a functional alimentary act and an artistic artefact finds an echo in the stance of Utilitarianism, which links the beautiful and the good with the concept of the useful, making them convertible and indissociable. We find the Aristotelian marriage of form and matter generating harmony in the formal perfection that produces delight, equating the orthogonal rows of potatoes with the lines of the painting. The ridges and the brushstrokes are sources of pleasure and therefore of moral improvement. Moody’s new reasoning equates art and craft: art – painting but also writing – is craft, requiring labour and not just inspiration, while inversely, craft – farming, weaving, quilting, or ceramics – is art, and consequently doubly valuable.
- 9 Eugene Stelzig, ‘Poetry and/or Truth: an Essay on the Confessional Imagination’, University of Toro (...)
6But readers who seek to understand reality, the culture from which the writer emerges and the culture into which she merges, by searching for the ‘real’ Susanna Moody behind the autobiographical work – the one who tells not the story but who tells herself – cannot know how much of the discourse of dislocation and relocation can be attributed to personal experience and how much to literary artifice. For autobiography involves ‘an imaginative reconstruction of the past’ whereby the autobiographer ‘does not present a pre-existing truth, but creates the truth of the self in the moment of writing’.9 Critics have remarked Moody’s self-conscious strategies of self-representation, identifiable in certain shifts of position between the sketches published in the 1840s in Canadian magazines for a Canadian readership, and the 1852 English edition.
- 10 Among the numerous publications orienting their contents according to ethnicity or gender we can ci (...)
- 11 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge (New York/ London, (...)
- 12 As illustrations of what I have playfully termed homo biografictus, among the countless autobiograp (...)
7Undeniably, we can find a kinship to Moody’s colonial life writing in the contemporary North American impetus of immigrant literature telling the story of displacement and exile, taken up in turn by minority groups gaining access to publishing and distribution, from black and Jewish ethnocultural communities to the voices of natives, homosexuals, and women (who are not technically a minority group but who have been treated as such).10 But the spectacular return to the self, to the practice of a narrator who is simultaneously subject and object of narration, has become a fundamental trait particularly in postmodern writing, in which in Hutcheon’s terms ‘modernist aesthetic autonomy and self-reflexivity come up against a counterforce in the form of a grounding in the historical, social, and political world’.11 The postmodern current blurs the boundaries between the already liminal zones of autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiography12 in the same way as its historiographical novels shatter the borders between history, biography, and story.
8Canada has witnessed these past decades an explosion in historiographical publications that are in essence subversions of traditional acceptations of both history and biography, that re-examine and contest the totalizing master narratives of our Western culture, both ancient and modern, from the Creation stories of Genesis and Noah’s Ark (Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, 1993; Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, 1984) to the 20th century’s world wars and the Holocaust (A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll, 1951; Findley’s The Wars, 1977 and Famous Last Words, 1981; or Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, 1981). More often than not, they more specifically re-examine historico-political events which have become New World myths, revolving around issues of territory, (de)possession, and appropriation, and interrogating the Eurocentric assumptions that have been offered and accepted as objective truth, or even as a given: Leonard Cohen’s ‘hagiography’ of the Iroquois saint and martyr Kateri Tekakwitha in Beautiful Losers (1966), Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) in which he rewrites from the native point of view the 19th century white conquest of the west, as the Mounted Police, railroads, missionaries, government agents, and surveyors poured in and the buffalo died out, or Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers (1994), relating from the native perspective Franklin’s disastrous search for the Northwest Passage.
9In an article on what she terms the ‘biographical novel’, less plot-driven and more focussed on the individual in its revision of the past than is the historical novel, Donna Bennett reminds us that translating lives into narratives involves confronting on the one hand a surplus of information requiring filtering and on the other hand information gaps which must be filled in. She argues that the fictive aspects of biographical construction have long been ignored, and insists that the genre’s primary criteria of truth-telling and accuracy were never unproblematic. In this she joins the ranks of Philippe Lejeune, who was one of the first to signal the subjectivity of the biographical act, insisting that:
- 13 Philippe Lejeune, Je est un autre, Seuil (Paris, 1980), p. 78.
jamais sans doute, personne n’a écrit la vie d’un autre homme dans un pur but de connaissance, le choix du modèle, le parti pris d’admiration ou de dénigrement, la fonction du texte, sont des sortes de présupposés qui commandent toute la démarche de l’enquête et l’ordre du discours.13
- 14 Colette Cosnier is author notably of Marie Bashkirtseff, un portrait sans retouches (1985), La Bolc (...)
French biographer Colette Cosnier14 has an ambivalent stance when discussing the needs of her trade to practise a critical discrimination with respect to the authenticity of raw material such as a diary:
- 15 Colette Cosnier, ‘Les pièges de la biographie’, La Création biographique/ Biographical Creation, ed (...)
Il faut décrypter ce journal, remplir les vides, reconstituer ce qui est présenté avec des réticences et des non-dits, comprendre un fait par un retour en arrière, des commentaires souvent elliptiques; il faut connaître suffisamment Marie Bashkirtseff pour deviner ce qu’elle tait ou pour minimiser ce qu’elle clame.15
- 16 Donna Bennett, ‘No Fear of Fiction: Life-Writing in the English-Canadian Novel’, La Création biogra (...)
All the while admitting Lejeune’s foregrounding of a subjective ordering process, Cosnier describes the biographer’s tasks of filling in or attenuating, even eliding, as so many moves towards a rectification of the (self) censored or partial primary material, an uncovering of the truth, a more accurate picture: she is in essence denying the fictional construct and claiming the role of truth-teller. Her essay discloses a certain resistance to Bennett’s notion that ‘other values covertly packed into biographies, such as national ideals and the notions of the hero [have been] overlooked, naturalized, or treated under the rubric of accuracy’.16
- 17 George Bowering, Burning Water, New Press Canadian Classics, General Publishing (Toronto, 1980), p. (...)
10It is just such overlooking and such naturalizing that George Bowering strives to foreground in his fictional documentary Burning Water. The novel re-relates the story of George Vancouver in a contrapuntal manner that through shifts in perspective juxtaposes reminiscences of the ‘other George’, the ‘realist novelist’17 himself, alongside the deeds of the English navigator who first explored the Pacific coast of North America in the 18th century. Already in his Prologue, Bowering inserts certain constructions containing powerful referential values that point to ‘real’ life. He sets the stage for a superimposition or overlapping of subjectivity and objectivity, personal and national identity, verifiable historical figure and fictional persona, George III and George VI, past event and present gaze, in the manner of an anamorphosis:
When I was a boy, I was the only person I knew who was named George, but I did have the same first name as the king. That made me feel as if current history and self were bound together, from the beginning.
When I came to live in Vancouver, I thought of Vancouver, and so now geography involved my name too, George Vancouver. He might have felt such romance, sailing for a king named George the Third. What could I do but write a book filled with history and myself, about these people and this place? 18
- 19 Ibid., p. 145.
- 20 Ibid., p. 101.
Burning Water blurs event and representation through metaphors fusing book and ship: ‘he knew a book was going well, that is without oars, before a good wind’.19 Bowering makes parallels between voyage and writing, and equates exploring geographical space and the inner spaces of the mind: the readers are the sea keeping the book/ author/ ship afloat. The intrusion of the self in the biography is one of his systematic tactics: he privileges commentary over record, enunciation over proposition, reproducing an extract for instance from Menzies’s ship log only to deflate the lofty style of the period (thus foregrounding the modern gaze which finds it pompous) with the comment – in the manner of an aside, ‘In the eighteenth century they were fond of nouns and Latinate abstractions’.20 Along with the generic and temporal slippages, he self-reflexively fuses the reading and writing processes, creation and consumption, the narrator and the narratee into a fertile, aporetic hybrid, both real and fictional:
- 21 Ibid., p. 10, emphases mine.
So we Georges all felt the same sun, yes. We all live in the same world’s sea. We cannot tell a story that leaves us outside, and when I say we, I include you. But in order to include you, I feel that I cannot spend these pages saying I to a second person. Therefore let us say he, and stand together looking at them. We are making a story, after all, as we have always been, standing and speaking together to make up a history, a real historical fiction. 21
- 22 Ondaatje, Running in the Family, p. 53.
11The postmodern converging of autobiography, biography, and documentary within a single fictional space occurs as intensely, if not more so, in Michael Ondaatje’s fictional autobiography Running in the Family, in which the writer posits the equivalence between story and history, declaring that ‘[t]ruth disappears with history’,22 and explaining that
- 23 Ibid., p. 26, emphasis mine.
No story is ever told just once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgements thrown in. In this way history is organized.23
- 24 Smaro Kamboureli, ‘The Alphabet of the Self: Generic and Other Slippages in Michael Ondaatje’s Runn (...)
Because, as Timothy Dow Adams points out in an article entitled ‘Running in the Family: Photography and Autobiography in the Memoirs of Michael and Christopher Ondaatje’, we think of photographs as operating on a more referential plane than words, and evoking self-reproduction rather in the manner of autobiography, the photographs inserted into Ondaatje’s text label the work non-fiction in the minds of readers, confuse the issues of representation and interrogate our notions of veracity. Running in the Family, having been called ‘oral history, memoir, collection of anecdotes, historiographic metafiction, and biography’,24 is illustrative of the postmodern strategy of hybridization that feeds fiction with fact yet ‘contaminates’ the factual with the fictional, resisting generic categories through the process of slippage.
12Studying life writing from the earnest (self) representations of Susanna Moody to the self-reflexive ones of postmodern writers who choose to function within the modes of ambiguity and liminality cannot but consolidate the notion that all perception and articulation are socially constructed. Colonial writers resisting dislocation from an authoritative imperial culture, or contemporary writers practising systematic displacement away from all central, normative, totalizing forms of production constitute opposite poles on the axis of representation, but they congruently call attention to the constructed – and suspect – notion of a single Truth.
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