Gusdorf and Pascal amplify this conception of autobiography in observing, in Gusdorfs words, that “…autobiography…shows us not the objective stages of a career…but reveals instead the effort of a creator to give meaning to his own mythic tale”12. Pascal, possibly recalling the inadequacies of memory as well as its associative character, further clarifies this configurative understanding of autobiography in noting that:
a reconstruction of a life’ is an impossible task. A single day’s experience is limitless in its radiation backwards and forward..[therefore]…autobiography is a shaping of the past. It imposes a pattern on a life, constructs out of it a coherent story. It establishes certain stages in an individual life, makes links between them…This coherence implies that the writer takes a particular standpoint, the standpoint of the moment at which he reviews his life13.
This characterisation of the autobiographical enterprise recalls the protean allusiveness of Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the progression of a single day is depicted as radiating “backwards and forward” in terms of the range of allusions it evokes in relation to individual consciousness and human culture14. This perspective on autobiography implies, in Eakin’s words that the autobiographer endeavours to engage in “…the discovery of the order of a life…by inverting the [conventional] importance and role of chronology and meaning….thus giving precedence to thematic order and relegating chronology to a distinctly secondary level of importance”.15
a reconstruction of a life’ is an impossible task. A single day’s experience is limitless in its radiation backwards and forward..[therefore]…autobiography is a shaping of the past. It imposes a pattern on a life, constructs out of it a coherent story. It establishes certain stages in an individual life, makes links between them…This coherence implies that the writer takes a particular standpoint, the standpoint of the moment at which he reviews his life13.
This characterisation of the autobiographical enterprise recalls the protean allusiveness of Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the progression of a single day is depicted as radiating “backwards and forward” in terms of the range of allusions it evokes in relation to individual consciousness and human culture14. This perspective on autobiography implies, in Eakin’s words that the autobiographer endeavours to engage in “…the discovery of the order of a life…by inverting the [conventional] importance and role of chronology and meaning….thus giving precedence to thematic order and relegating chronology to a distinctly secondary level of importance”.15
12 Georges Gusdorf, Lignes de vie (Paris:Editions O.Jacob,1991)
13 Roy Pascal,Quoted in FR852: Studies in Autobiography 11,European and Comparative Literary Studies,2002-2003(Kent University of Kent,2002).
14 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1990).
15 Paul Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton UP,1985).
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