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The Body in Biography
Abstract
This paper takes as point of departure current attempts at understanding what the notion of an embodied subjectivity might mean for life writing. It begins by providing a psychoanalytic perspective on how subjectivity is related to the body, describing the processes by which subjectivity emerges out of bodily drives and showing how the emergence of the subject is coterminous with the emergence of language. Having identified the processes by which subjectivity, language and body are related, the paper examines the writing of the body in the poetry of Arthur Nortje, drawing attention to the stylistic means by which bodily drives are configured. It concludes by suggesting that because the body is present in writing not as substance but as a system of articulation, the only way in which the biographer is able to convey the embodied life of the subject is through what Nietzsche calls the ‘felt text’.
This article argues that the seemingly disparate affective and corporeal sensations of abjection and compassion significantly inform the fiction of Australian modernist, Patrick White. Focusing in particular on White's early novel The Living and the Dead ([1941]1977), a work often sidelined in critical discussions of his writing, it maintains that the dialectical tension between abjection and compassion that fascinates White informs his representations (and troubling) of subjectivity from the beginning of his oeuvre. Accordingly, the article identifies the importance of corporeality within White's fiction, an aspect of his work that has often been occluded within critical readings committed to his transcendentalism. With particular reference to Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection and various recent theoretical conceptions of affect, it suggests that White's characters’ sublime, recurring and transient forfeitures of identity may be profoundly imbricated with their surrender to – as opposed to their transcendence of – embodiment. Finally, the article argues that White's persistent elaboration of affect as corporeal suggests a physicality of literature that evokes the reader's own embodied sense of compassion. Altogether, the article explores the ways in which White's fiction reclaims a focus on corporeality that he perceived as lost to an inherently narcissistic modern consciousness.
Roman Jakobson is probably the last homo universalis in the human sciences, who both developed a theory of the mind and applied it to a panoply of disciplines. Jakobson sees the metaphoric and the metonymic poles as the two basic modes or ways of thought reflected in general human behaviour and in language. The metaphoric is based upon substitution and similarity, the metonymic upon predication, contexture and contiguity. These two ways of thought are linked, though not in this paper, but in several other papers of his collected works, to the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axes of linguistic expressions. The metaphoric and the metonymic poles do not only underlie metaphor and metonymy in language, but, in alternative ways, phenomena in all possible fields, such as language impairments, especially aphasia, child language acquisition, literature (similarity in poetry, contiguity in the novel), Freud’s psycho-analysis, literary and art schools, the history of painting and art movements, folklore such as folk tales and wedding songs. In fact, Jakobson holds out a research challenge not only to linguistics, but to all areas of semiotics. [R.D.]. © Copyright 2002, 2003 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
It is suggested that biography is essentially, and by its very origins, disreputable. The four problems (ethics, authenticity, celebrity, and empathy) that do not devalue the modern form of biography are outlined. But they make it complicated, provisional, and to some degree perilous. If biography is to have a future, it has to face up to the problems it has inherited. All these seem to express the original, underlying tension found in its genealogy: invention marrying truth. It is remarkable that the shadow or projection of a fictional form would in other hands become Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It is possible for a good biography to tell the truth, and to enlighten and encourage. © The several contributors for individual contributions 1995. All rights reserved.
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