What’s in an autobiography . . .

“Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.” — Samuel Clemens, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1

Imagine: a life as a famous writer. You can write anything, say anything, in exactly the way you want, and readers will adoringly absorb your writing the way a pancake absorbs maple syrup, maybe even a century after your death.

This is Samuel Clemens, AKA Mark Twain. His autobiography, published 100 years after his death, flows freely through the mind of a literary genius as he relates events from his life in no particular order, but in the folksy, conversational style readers of his fiction would expect.

But . . . . autobiography? As savvy readers, we’ve come to expect a certain formula for life writing, and Samuel Clemens’ life writing does not fit the bill. We want action, a compelling story, originality, life lessons, truth, and authenticity; Clemens gives us a moseying meander through his life, with snippets from his daughter thrown in to give readers a different view of himself and frequent references to his own lack of memory.

In Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson define autobiography or life writing as “self-referential practices that, in engaging in the past, reflect on identity in the present” (1). I would argue that Clemens’ work is autobiographical in the sense that he reflects on his past experiences, but there is little to no reflection on a present identity, and in fact, Clemens seems to deliberately deflect from searching for a present identity by focusing on the “what” of his life rather than the deeper questions of why or how these events have affected him.

Critic Marilyn DeEulis goes so far as to call Clemens’ life writing an “experiment” in autobiography, and a rather unsuccessful experiment at that. Michael Kiskis uses the term “creative drift” to describe Clemens’ writing, and even notes that Clemens’ request to delay publishing until after his death is a way for Clemens to avoid creating any true identity within his work.

Smith and Watson highlight different forms of identity in life writing: the real or historical I, the narrating I (available to readers), the narrated I (separated temporally from the story), and the ideological I, which is the “concept of personhood culturally available to the narrator when he tells his story” (76). In Clemens’ life writing, we get the narrated I, but there is no sense of the narrating I or the ideological I. Clemens purposely chooses to continue to tell us stories rather than let us into the deepest parts of his life, and many readers and critics are left wanting more (or maybe less) from his autobiography.

Then there’s this man:

Barack Obama’s *Dreams From My Father *is much more what a reader expects from an autobiography. Stories move chronologically from Obama’s childhood into his high school experiences in Hawaii and through his college days and community organizing in Chicago. Obama lets us into his personal feelings and concerns; he shows us how he searches for his identity as a biracial, multinational man, which culminates in a trip to Kenya to visit his father’s family. While in Kenya, he states “a circle was beginning to close, so that I might finally recognize myself as I was, here, now, in one place” (377).

Obama’s adherence to the “rules” of autobiography and his search for a present identity based on past experience is what creates a coherent and compelling story. Readers experience his search for the ideological I as the narrating I tells us about the narrated I. Justine Baillie’s postcolonial take on Obama’s life writing and Thomas G. Couser’s theory of patriography provide more insight into Obama’s autobiography, but the upshot is that the search for and finding of identity is crucial to making an autobiography “work,” or at least make it palatable for readers. Obama’s life writing succeeds in a way that Clemens’ autobiography does not.

Works referenced:

Kiskis, Michael. “Dead Man Talking: Mark Twain’s Autobiographical Deception.” American Literary Realism, vol. 40, no. 2, Nov. 2008, pp. 95–113.

DeEulis, Marilyn D. “Mark Twain’s Experiments in Autobiography.” American Literature, vol. 53, no. 2, May 1981, pp. 202–13.

Baillie, Justine. “From Margin to Centre: Postcolonial Identities and Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father.” Life Writing, vol. 8, no. 3, 12 Aug. 2011, pp. 317–29.

Couser, G. Thomas. “Filiation in Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father.” Life Writing, vol. 9, no. 3, Aug. 2012, pp. 259–67.

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.