Landscapes of Distance or Landscapes of Intimacy: Language Construction, Voice, and the Narrative "I"

Abstract

Writers of autobiographical narratives are constantly balancing on the high wire of liminality, simultaneously situating themselves on the inside and outside of cultural manifestations of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. The personas created in autobiographical narratives are authenticated primarily through the negotiations of autobiographical memory, and both the emotional and physical landscapes in which they reside. Using autobiographical scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s work on the emergence of an author’s voice as a critical attribute of the narrating ‘I,’ this paper will explore the blurred areas of intimacy and distance created between the reader’s felt experience of the narrator’s personhood and his/her experiential history. The critical nature of the narrative voice then, becomes the primary lens in which meaning-making occurs. As both readers and writers of life narratives, we make sense out of experience, history, truth, and memory through the complexities of visual, spoken, and/or written language.

Because life writing is so incredibly personal and interwoven with historicity, memory, and experience, the successes and failures, I argue, of autobiographers like Alfred Kazin, Janisse Ray, and Will Self rests in their ability to create a narrative intimacy or a narrative distance through the spaces in which they occupy and interact. Both the physical and psychological landscapes in which they situate themselves become the primary locales of emotional attachment or detachment for readers, thus their ability to create a believable and authentic narrative persona hinges on their rhetorical capabilities. In this paper, I will specifically focus on the texts of Kazin, Ray, and Self for critical analysis.