Constructions of Self

The self constructed on paper or through any medium always exists in the past and through the filters of the medium: the brushstrokes, the “blurred lines,” the “flecks” on any page or screen.

A literary or aesthetic representation of a life typically implies a search for a truth, and in the late eighteenth century when the generally recognized first modern biographer, James Boswell composed his climactic work, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), writers focused intensely on the individual as a way or probing society.  The novel, the theatre, and emerging biographical and autobiographical works worked in similar ways to explore human relationships and the way the individual could influence and was shaped by society.

In his essay “Of History and Romance” (1797), William Godwin asserted,

“The study of individual man can never fail to be an object of the highest importance.  It is only by comparison that we come to know any thing of mind or ourselves.  We go forth into the world: we see what man is; we enquire what he was; and when we return home to engage in the solemn act of self-investigation, our most useful employment is to produce the materials we have collected abroad, and, by a sort of magnetism, cause those particulars to start our view in ourselves, which might otherwise have laid forever undetected.”

On the interrelated nature of the human life and the social machine (in a period where public and private boundaries were becoming blurred and troublesome) Godwin also wrote, “But let us suppose that the genuine purpose of history was to enable the machine of society and to direct it to its best purpose.  Even here individual history will perhaps be found in point of importance to take the lead of the general.”

Godwin also argued that the writer of romance (or fiction) could generally provide a better approximation of the biographical subject than the earnest historian, for the former was liberated from the restrictions of history:
“The historian is confined to individual incident and individual man, and must hang upon that his invention or conjecture as he can.  The writer collects his materials from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs; then generalizes them; and finally selects, from their elements and the various combinations they afford those instances which he is best qualified to portray, and which he judges most calculated to impress the hear and improve the faculties of his reader.”

In the 20th century, Atwood’s poem, an aesthetic monument to the process of writing the self, indicates the truths and the obliqueness, the assertion and the elusiveness of self involved in this complex genre:

“This Is a Photograph of Me”

Margaret Atwood, 1939

It was taken some time ago.

At first it seems to be

a smeared

print: blurred lines and grey flecks

blended with the paper;

then, as you scan

it, you see in the left-hand corner

a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree

(balsam or spruce) emerging

and, to the right, halfway up

what ought to be a gentle

slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,

and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken

the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center

of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where

precisely, or to say

how large or small I am:

the effect of water

on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,

eventually

you will be able to see me.)