The Autobiographical Triangle

Introduction

The Theory of the Autobiographical Triangle as Work in Progress

The theory of the three autobiographical stances, witness, confession and challenge, took shape gradually as the outcome of interpretative studies of literary phenomena situated on the border between the novel and various forms of non-fiction prose. Although it is Polish literature that has supplied the vast majority of the material considered, my study is not limited to this alone. I also make reference in many places to European literature as an essential context for the particular literary pieces and genre forms analysed in this book, which are connected with a variety of aesthetic trends. If European tradition is understood more broadly than it was by Ernst Robert Curtius in his monumental study European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, in other words if it is not confined to the culture of Western Europe, then Polish literature undoubtedly belongs to this tradition. In this matter I stand firmly with Czesław Miłosz as the author of Native Realm,¹ that is to say I understand the West as including the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as well as Russia, because the culture of this whole area arises from Mediterranean roots (though we should remember that Russia’s origins are connected above all with the tradition of Greece and Byzantium). I see the particular differences between the literatures of individual nations and languages in the context of history, while literary theoretical conclusions (including the theory of the autobiographical triangle) are tested with reference to a variety of different literary phenomena which are all to be found within one cultural sphere, understood as European in the widest sense.

The literature of the twentieth century saw a series of experiments which went beyond the genre forms still practised (more or less distinctly) by prose writers of the nineteenth century. The rebellious experiments of the avant-garde in various fields of art during the first decades of the twentieth century led to a search in literature for new thematic areas and new forms of expression. Writers found material for their work in the sphere earlier defined as the border between art and life. This gradually turned out to be fertile soil for the development of autobiographical writing, which in any case had a tradition in European culture almost as long ←13 | 14→as that of literature itself. My studies, at first devoted to individual phenomena such as the relations between the letter and the novel, the intimate diary and the novel, or the novel and autobiography in its various versions, set me travelling along a road that led to the formulation of a literary theoretical hypothesis: that there is a phenomenon common to all written expressions whose origin is in the area between fiction and direct accounts of oneself and one’s own life experience. Many years of thought led me to the conviction that this phenomenon is universal in European culture; it is not dependent on the literary historical period or the language in which a work is written. Of course works that arise on the border between fiction and literature of personal document are subject to countless individual modifications along with changes in artistic trends and styles. But the thing that they all share, that is their functioning in that intermediate space between the freedom of fiction and the document that claims to be a faithful presentation of reality – this I named the autobiographical stance. To begin with I was persuaded that it appeared in two opposed versions: witness and confession. Further study, however, directed my attention to the existence of a third stance, which played a smaller role in the literature of past ages, but which was discerned even by theoreticians of ancient times, as can be seen in ancient rhetoric. I called this third stance “challenge”: challenge addressed to the reader. Since the modernist era, this stance has continued to evolve, and it now plays an increasingly important role.

Before I arrived at the theory of the triangle, I concentrated particularly on the paradoxes connected with the presence (obvious or concealed) of the reader in various forms of autobiographical texts. As an epilogue to this book, I decided to ←14 | 15→include two studies devoted to these questions, because distinguishing the problem of the reader was a very important factor in the process by which I was able to discern and describe the stance of challenge, which is less obvious than those of witness and confession. These two studies, of epistolary writing and of diary writing, were a kind of laboratory in which I observed the way that the stance of challenge took shape. The third part of the epilogue, in turn, is the most recent of all the texts in the book. It was written after the theory of the autobiographical triangle had been completely formulated and made public. I nevertheless include it in this version of the book out of a sense that it grew out of my earlier work, although it opens on to new territory. The triangle holds firm (or so I hope), but work on the problem of autobiography continues; it is still “work in progress”.

Part One Three Autobiographical Stances

1. The Field of Non-Fiction Prose

What became of literature in the twentieth century? What became of the stories for which listeners and readers have always longed, the tales that, by the mouths of their bards, their novelists and storytellers, people from time immemorial have always told?

In his Social History of Art, written in the mid-twentieth century, Arnold Hauser described his times as the age of film. From today’s perspective, we can surely see that he was right: the twentieth century was indeed the age of film and television. Electronic audiovisual media have come to eclipse literature, yet they nevertheless still need it; they continue to draw on its heroes and on shreds of its storylines. For the literary scholar, the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth is the era of the novel. After that, rivals enter the stage and as time passes they become increasingly dominant. The documentary appears in large circulation press and subsequently enters the book market, where it competes successfully for readers’ attention, along with other genres of non-fiction prose such as biographies and memoirs. In the system of connecting vessels that is culture, it is impossible not to notice the pressure exerted by these so-called border or paraliterary forms on the traditional centre where the genres of high literature are concentrated.¹ The novel, undoubtedly the leader among prose genres, is undergoing deep inner transformations which are partly linked with what is happening on the fringes of literature.

The need to examine non-fiction prose more closely, with regard to both the mutual relations with traditional literary genres and the instrinsic worth of this kind of writing, has long been acknowledged. The English distinction between fiction and non-fiction is one of the most basic, as much in academic textbooks as in the practice of literary life. A similar dychotomy is assumed in film theory and criticism, which distinguishes between documentaries and feature films (with a tacit identification of the “feature” aspect with fictionality).

How is one to find one’s way in the domain of non-fiction literature? Is it reasonable to consider it as a whole, given that we have no positive term to describe its characteristic features? The expression we use is a negative one, telling us what this kind of prose literature is not: it is not fiction. One might of course recall ←21 | 22→that nothing unites so well as a common enemy, an adage which proves its relevance not only in relation to the name, but also in explaining the history of the thing itself. As far as this is concerned, there is almost universal agreement: non-fiction prose in the twentieth century is defined in a certain sense in opposition to the novel. Its success is connected with “the crisis of the novel”; it is nourished by “the death of the novel”; it is read “instead of the novel”.² Equally, studies of such prose frequently define themselves in relation to the theory of the novel (including the general generic problem of narrative forms) and theories of fiction and fictionality. Indeed, there is perhaps no real need for one single definition conceived in such a manner as to cover the whole multiplicity and variety of phenomena that go by the name of non-fiction prose. Undoubtedly, rather than attempting to provide an all-embracing definition, a more important thing is to describe the field in question and the varieties and distinctions within it. In the field of non-fiction prose, we can discern three areas that border on one another, but differ in character and in the way they function in literary communication. These are literature of fact, literature of personal document and essays.

Literature of Fact

This term, which first appeared in the interwar period, initially had a kind of manifesto character, being connected with the proletarian literature agenda drawing on ideas proclaimed by “Nowyj LEF” in Russia, by the “New Objectivity” (“Neue Sachlichkeit”) programme in Germany and by the “authenticity” movement in Poland. While this tendency had its consequences for the poetics of the novel, the definition itself (“literature of fact”) came gradually to be associated with documentary. Later, in post-war journalism, literary criticism and subsequently literary theory, the term was applied to documentary writing of various kinds, as well as to other forms of a documentary character, such as chronicles and reports.³

Where historical events are concerned, it is not uncommon for documentary writings to become embroiled in some entirely independent drama not invented by the writer but caused by the extraordinariness of the situation in which he or she is involved. In such circumstances, the tension vested in the events can impart a social importance to the text, making it capable of functioning among a wider public audience. Examples of this phenomenon would include Emmanuel Ringelblum’s Kronika [Chronicle] (a collection of records documenting life in the Warsaw ghetto, which were hidden within it and fortunately survived), Władysław Bartoszewski’s 1859 dni Warszawy [Warsaw’s 1859 Days] (reconstructed after the war from documents chronicling daily life in the city during the Nazi occupation) and Kazimierz Moczarski’s Conversations with an Executioner. (As an officer of the Polish underground army, Moczarski was imprisoned by the communists after the war. He found himself in the same cell as SS general Jürgen Stroop, the “executioner” of the Warsaw ghetto, and after his release he wrote a record of his conversations with this war criminal.)⁴ Accounts collected by sociologists or ethnographers concerning everyday life could also become attractive as literature, if we look at social processes not from the point of view of public history, but in relation to the story of ordinary daily life.⁵ Above all, however, the extremely dynamic and distinctive development of documentary,⁶ which shaped a range of new varieties, attaining at its best a remarkable ←23 | 24→literary level, powerfully affected the situation of the novel and assured an increasing role to literature of fact.

Literature of Personal Document