The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. By Leigh Gilmore. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001. x, 163pp.

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

In The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, Leigh Gilmore
aims to examine the nature of autobiography by analyzing several specific texts that lie, as some would say, outside its boundaries or, as Gilmore would say, at its "limits." Specifically, Gilmore explores the distinctions between autobiography and fiction, autobiography and biography, and autobiography and history. Her goal, however, is not to reinforce these generic distinctions but rather to arrive at a fuller understanding of autobiography by analyzing how other kinds of texts treat the concerns of autobiography (the construction of the self, the nature of memory, the social position of the subject, etc.) within narratives that somehow permit a writer to speak what cannot be spoken in a conventional autobiography. The theme that links the texts under consideration is trauma, which Gilmore links in her introduction to violence. For the traumatized speaker, Gilmore argues, resisting autobiography with its truth claims and juridical poking and prodding "can be an achievement" (15). Traumatized speakers, in other words, who adopt the "autobiographical mode" outside the "autobiographical genre" achieve greater agency by creating their own rules and standards than they would if they simply surrendered to the strictures of autobiography proper (10). The specific texts Gilmore examines include Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina; Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart; Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, Lucy, and My Brother; and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body.

In her introduction, Gilmore both explains and justifies her project: "conventions about truth telling, salutary as they are, can be inimical to the ways in which some writers bring trauma stories into language. The portals are too narrow and the demands too restrictive. Moreover, the judgments they invite may be too similar to forms in which trauma was experienced. When the contest is over who can tell the truth, the risk of being accused of lying (or malingering, or inflating, or whining) threatens the writer into continued silence" (3). While not all readers will accept this statement simply because it is asserted, most readers, I believe, will be persuaded of its legitimacy by Gilmore's readings of particular texts in the subsequent chapters. Following her introduction, Gilmore maps the theoretical ground upon which she stands in a chapter titled "Represent Yourself." After briefly rehearsing the paradox of the autobiographical unique representative individual, Gilmore defines

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

trauma as naming "an unprecedented experience," though she does not clarify whether this experience is unprecedented in the life of an individual, a culture, or history. (Such a clarification would be most useful in her discussion of Winterson, which I will address below.) Nevertheless, this chapter does present an astonishingly clear explication of the intersections of trauma and autobiography in the work of several contemporary critics and theorists, including Sidonie Smith, Janice Haaken, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser.

In chapter two, Gilmore examines Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina; rather than simply asking the (to my mind uninteresting and futile) question of which details in the text are founded in the real and which are imagined, she suggests that the obsession with which many readers approach this question permits other, implicitly more significant questions to remain unasked. For example, how does the legal notion of legitimacy affect what can legitimately be revealed within an autobiography? To what extent can the traumatized narrator be defined as a representative subject? The trauma in this novel is undeniable: the protagonist is illegitimate, poor, and violently abused. Gilmore concludes this chapter with the suggestion that Allison rightfully chooses the "bastard form of autobiographical fiction" because a quest after legitimacy is necessarily a quest through a system that, despite its promises, "has required violation of [bastards and women]" (69). Allison, that is, can tell the truth only within a genre that does not subscribe to conventional rules of evidence.

Next, Gilmore turns to Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart, a book that presents Mikal Gilmore's family history and particularly the execution of Mikal's brother Gary within a particular western American context in which violence characterizes not only the private family but also the public nation. Presumably, the reader's acquaintance with violence influences the construction of this text: "Mikal Gilmore explores not only how his family's violence shaped him, but how violence, and identification with it, shapes autobiographical reading broadly, how it compels and repulses identification, and how voyeurism is catalyzed by the spectacle of pain and violence" (71). Leigh Gilmore situates this text at the boundary between biography and autobiography, a boundary she understands inevitably to evoke the psychological act of transference. The biographer, that is, experiences transference in writing of the subject; Mikal Gilmore, in writing this book, seeks to comprehend not only his brother and other family members, but also himself, to understand a context that creates killers but did not create a killer of himself. Gary and Mikal aren't the only central figures, however: "At the heart of this durable subject is an inescapable figure, a principle of family narratives, psychoanalysis, and violence, and, arguably, the subtext

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of any discussion of auto/biographical transference: the father" (75). When this story is superimposed upon the historical story of violence common to the American west, the result illustrates the degree to which trauma can be expected to characterize American narratives of identity in general.

In chapter four, Leigh Gilmore discusses Jamaica Kincaid's "serial autobiography" (96). She defines these texts as at the limits of autobiography precisely because they are texts rather than a text. Citing several other writers who have committed more than one autobiography, Gilmore asserts: "It is somewhat heretical to structure the autobiographical scene such that it is one to which one may, or even must, return when for most writers autobiography is a one-shot deal. In its extension of autobiography beyond a single text, the practice of serial autobiography challenges the limits of the genre by raising the specter of endless autobiography. That there will always be (another) autobiography means there will be no last words and autobiography is a genre of last words" (96). Part of the assumption behind these statements rests on the definition of "serial." If by "serial," we simply mean that the autobiography, like the life it attempts to narrate, will be continued, that the next volume will be analogous to the next volume of an encyclopedia, revealing different events and different times, then no generic limit appears to be broached. Hypothetically, such serial autobiographies ought to be quite common; once a person, after all, begins to interpret the past as narrated in addition to lived, it would seem a small step to interpreting the present that way also--and subsequently or simultaneously, composing another volume. If, however, as occurs in many of the autobiographies Gilmore cites, the same events are narrated again, but both narrated and interpreted differently, then those texts do indicate that there will be no "last words" until the author's life reaches its own limit. In more conventional autobiographies, the subject is unstable; the autobiographical "I" is not identical from one chapter or volume to the next. Kincaid addresses this problem, according to Gilmore, through fiction, by applying different names to the apparently autobiographical protagonist. In this chapter, rather than relying on transference as a mode to understanding, Gilmore foregrounds the idea of the abject as a means of analyzing the protagonist/narrator/author's relationship with her mother rather than with her father. Gilmore concludes this chapter with an analysis of the conclusion of Kincaid's My Brother, in which Kincaid asserts her awareness that understanding occurs through writing, an assertion Gilmore interprets to mean that there's surely more to come.

Finally, Gilmore takes on Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, a novel that Gilmore acknowledges "least resembles autobiography in

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

the context I've developed here" (120). Yet, in this novel "Winterson engages autobiography's central issues without reproducing its formal conventions" (120). Gilmore offers a convincing argument in support of this idea; the novel does, after all, take identity as its central motif. And since Written on the Body can be read autobiographically, many critics and other readers are determined to do so, to treat the unnamed and ungendered narrator as Winterson herself. Having read this chapter, I am absolutely persuaded that Written on the Body lies at a limit of autobiography, yet I missed the connection to trauma. After falling in love, the narrator is deprived of the object of the narrator's affection, but the wound the narrator suffers as a result simply doesn't seem comparable to the traumatic wounds suffered by the narrators of the other texts Gilmore discusses. If this narrator experiences trauma, then so do all of us who have loved and lost--that is, I would expect, all of us. Any category that includes the whole would seem to make a discussion of limits unnecessary or at least paradoxical.

Anyone who has read Gilmore's earlier Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation (1994) will not be surprised to hear that The Limits of Autobiography is an engaging read. Gilmore's writing is refreshingly clear. She relies on a range of contemporary theoretical methods, choosing her tools appropriately for the particular task at hand. Most often, her arguments are both persuasive and provocative--and applicable to a variety of texts beyond those she specifically analyzes. Virtually any scholar of autobiography will find this book interesting for the questions it raises and, perhaps, key to much future work.