The Question of Autobiography

June 20 2009

How relevant is the question of autobiography? First off, I’ll let Aleksandar Hemon, author of Love and Obstacles, a collection of short stories, do the talking. In an interview in the New Yorker, he was asked to what extent his latest novel was autobiographical (the stories followed the life of a Bosnian writer who moves to Chicago – a journey similar to Hemon’s own). His answer was this:

‘Here’s how it works: Last night, on my way to give a reading, I hurt a ligament in my right hand while putting my shoe on. As I was driving this morning and talking on the phone with my sister in London, I lost my grip and sideswept my neighbor’s car. Being honest, I went to their house to tell them what I had done. When I rang the bell nobody answered. I knocked and went in anyway, thinking they might be in the backyard. The house was empty, and as I walked through I noticed a vase in the shape of a monkey head. The light angle made it somehow seem that the monkey was winking at me, so I picked the head up to examine it, but then, dropped it, what with the weak hand ligament, and it shattered in a thousand pieces. For a moment, I considered cleaning up or waiting for my neighbors to show up, but then decided to sneak out. Now I dread hearing the door bell. I could go on and turn this into a story. I did hurt my hand last night and I did get into the car this morning, but I did not cause any damage, nor did I trespass. I did not talk to my sister yesterday, but she does live in London. And I’ve never seen a monkey head like that. So, how much of this putative story is autobiographical? Similarly, I did spend a few weeks in Africa some time in the eighties, just like the narrator in the story ‘Stairway to Heaven’. But my father was not a diplomat, there was no Spinelli, no Natalie, and most of the things that happened in the story did not happen to me. For some reason or another, I compulsively imagine scenarios alternative to what happens to me. To my mind, my stories are not autobiographical; they are antibiographical, they are the antimatter to the matter of my life. They contain what did not happen to me.’

To what extent a work is autobiographical seems to be the perennial question at writers’ festivals and interviews. When the novel Candy became a hit and was later made into a film, the Sydney Morning Herald went so far as to ‘meet the real Candy’, despite the fact that Luke Davies constantly stressed that the book was more fiction than memoir. I’m not saying that this question doesn’t need to be asked – it does, and the answers can make for fascinating results. But does it need to be asked so much? Or better yet, can we ask this question in different ways?

I find that the point at which my interest peaks is when the nature of autobiography itself is taken apart – as Hemon says, the idea of the antibiographical. The first story of Nam Le’s collection ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’ is a good example of this. The main character, also called Nam, shares many traits with Nam the writer – both have left careers in law to study at the prestigious Iowa workshop, both have Vietnamese backgrounds and both their fathers have spent time in the re-education camps. But there are differences too. Unlike in the story, Nam Le’s parents are hugely supportive of his writing – in the ‘Love and Honour’ his father destroys his son’s work, in real life he asked to translate them. It is impossible to tell where fiction fades and where the ‘truth’ begins, and to me this is really besides the point. What you have at the end of the day is a story that is brilliantly executed and points exactly to the grey areas between inspiration and exploitation, autobiography and imagination, embellishment and reality. As Hemon says, the antimatter of life.

You can also read Hemon’s story ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on ‘that which did not happen’ in the New Yorker here.

JA

Aleksandar Hemon