Gilmore's 'Limits of Autobiography'
Gilmore’s ‘The Limits of Autobiography’
Gilmore’s main argument is centered on the relationship between trauma and self representation. She argues that autobiography “constrain[s] self- representations because of its legalistic definition of truth telling, its anxiety about invention, and its preference for the literal and verifiable…As a genre, autobiography is characterized less by a set of formal elements than by a rhetorical setting in which a person places herself or himself within testimonial contexts as seemingly diverse as the Christian confession…� (3)
Her concern is that the scrutiny and judgment that these testimonies open themselves to (as the private becomes public) can be as equally damaging as the trauma experienced by the writer. It is this “fear that threatens the writer into continued silence�, thus retreating the writer to the very silence she/he is trying to escape through autobiography. (This reminded me of an essay I recently read through which art historian Benjamin Buchloh launches an attack on a German artist Joseph Beuys. He accuses Beuys of a falsified autobiography which he sees as symptomatic of a dangerous cultural tendency of disavowing a traumatic past and a retreat into myth. He therefore discredits Beuys’s work based on this ‘falsification’ – in the same way that Stoll discredits Menchu.)
It appears to me that it is this fear and awareness of a sympathetic but judgmental audience that pressurizes Leonor Lopez de Cordoba’s into a Christian like confession at the beginning of her melancholic autobiography. It is as if she’s swearing under oath in a courtroom, to tell the truth and nothing but the truth: “Therefore may all who see this testament know how I, Dona Leonor Lopez de Cordoba…swear by this sign †that I worship, that all is written here is true, for I saw it, and it happened to me…It is my intention that it be left as a record: I ordered it written as you see before you.�(21) She is definitely aware that as her private story becomes public, it invites judgments and she is actually appealing to her audience to treat it as a record of her experience (though Joan Scott would argue that even personal stories of experience are still subject to questioning, in her essay ‘Evidence of Experience’). She cushions her narrative with very strong Christian beliefs, which I read as a technique of safeguarding her narrative against harsh judgments.
Leonor seems desperate to legitimize her story by substantiating it with evidence of her lineage, particularly her father’s aristocracy as she says “And he rose very high in rank, as can be found in the Chronicles of Spain.� (22) This confirms Gilmore’s view of autobiography’s nature to base its authority in the discourses of truth and identity.
Gilmore further argues that although telling the traumatic stories is beneficial, there are a lot of obstacles. She sites alternatives that some writers resort to, “some writers move away from recognizably autobiographical forms even as they engage autobiography’s central questions� and I wonder if perhaps this is the reason why Molloy refuses to label her story an autobiography and creates an anonymous narrator? (Although this is clearly autobiographical). It seems that Sigea was also trying to avoid these harsh judgments that come with recognizable autobiography – by resorting to implied and unconventional autobiography. She seems interested in telling her story “without subjecting it to a literal truth test or evaluated by certain objective measures.� (Gilmore, 14) Aware of the scrutiny that might befall her song (if it gets published), Sigea writes in the last lines “As other folk may doubt all that you say, my song, stay here with me, and I shall harbor you while yet I may.� It looks like she was not writing this for an audience, but just to release her pain – to contain her trauma in language with the hope of getting healed as Gilmore believes.