I am helping Jack Hibbard a little bit with his course on renaissance literature, and yesterday had the luck to meet a visiting professor who went through our graduate program in the early 1990's. Among the interesting remarks she made was one on autobiography and literature; she said there is a fine line between the two.
Probably because I am writing my own self-absorbed memoir to finally earn my MA, I find this worth wondering about. Borges famously says that no one is the literary Adam, but Augustine really did invent the autobiography sixteen centuries ago with his Confessions; it feels like literature to me, as does a more modern example, Nabokov's Speak Memory. When I read the memoir of poets I adore like Charles Simic and W.S. Merwin, I get the same feeling, that a real life story is aspiring to something more.
I am wondering if my colleagues find this worth wondering about tomorrow evening. What precisely are the points of intersection between autobiography and Literature? Does Wright achieve this with Black Boy?
In regard to autobiography, I think Wright is successful in writing about his formative years. Linking his self-identity to the power of writing is especially convincing. Growing up separated from others, either because of his "Intellectual" status or by his hestiation in letting down his guard, I think his lonliness is palable when he includes short anecdotes of the violence associated with self-defense (the gang of boys, the fight with his uncle, the arranged fight with Harrison).
ReplyDeleteI don't think he's as successful in merging his autobiography with Literature. His supporting characters are only somewhat developed and the action doesn't seem to follow a traditional plot action (rise and fall). Do the other memoirs of poets - Simic and Merwin - use similar techniques as Wright does?