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Tellers and Experiencers in Autobiographical Narratives: Focalization in “Peeling the Onion” by Günter Grass and “The Liars’ Club” by Mary Karr

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Fonioková Z.

Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo

2018

issue 8(11) cz.1

113-128

This article examines the narrative point of view in two autobiographical texts, pointing out the diverse effects the narratives achieve by means of different focalization strategies. After a short explication of the split between the narrator and protagonist in life stories, I look at focalization techniques in Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion (2006), where the perception of the present self continuously interferes in the depiction of the past. The superior knowledge available to the narrator at the time of narration leads to an interpretation of the depicted events that the experiencing self could not provide. I argue that although the book calls attention to the constructive nature of memory and narrative that necessarily affects retrospective accounts of the past, it also states its preference for the lens of the present by employing focalization through the narrating I. I subsequently contrast Grass’s text and its narrative strategies with Mary Karr’s childhood memoir The Liars’ Club (1995) and demonstrate how this narrative attains its realistic effect by engaging the child protagonist as the predominant focalizer. By shifting focalization between the narrating I and the experiencing I, involving either the suspension or application of the narrator’s current knowledge, Karr manipulates readers’ engagement with the narrative, such as their empathy and moral judgement. Furthermore, the text communicates a sense of identity and continuity between the experiencer and the teller, which stands in sharp contrast to the emphasis Grass’s narrative puts on the distance between these two positions. Finally, I briefly address the challenges presented by recent conceptions of identity construction to the distinction between the narrating I and the experiencing I, suggesting that these narratological concepts retain their relevance to discussions of autobiographical texts as literary works rather than stages of self-creation.

Fikčnost ve faktuálním vyprávění : případ fikčních metaautobiografií

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Fonioková Z.

Česká literatura (Czech Literature)

2018

vol. 66

issue 6

841-869

This study focuses on the issues surrounding texts that refer to an author’s life while deliberately including fictionality within the autobiographical testimony, i.e. via autofiction and fictional meta-autobiography. The fictional elements in this kind of writing often serve as a tool for self-reflection. Using specific narrative techniques, for example, these works comment on the issue of autobiographical memory, the epistemological (in)accessibility of the past, and the narrative construction of identity. This study endeavours to link the reflections of contemporary narratologists on fictional and non-fictional narration with an analysis of autofictional and meta-autobiographical works. The first section deals briefly with the issue of fictionality, presenting the rhetorical theory (of H. S. Nielsen, J. Phelan and R. Walsh), which enables us to perceive fictionality outside fiction as a component of factual communication about the real world. The following section focuses on the meta-autobiographical text Montauk by the Swiss author Max Frisch: it illustrates the method of including fictionality in an autobiographical text as a way to reflect on remembering, and on the possibilities of depicting one’s own life and creating one’s own I by writing. This analysis is linked to a brief excursus into narrative construction in autobiographical narration, primarily in connection with personal identity. The next section of the article briefly summarizes the differencs between classial autobiographies and contemporary self-reflectively inclined autobiographies and autofictions. It presents the category of fictional meta-autobiographies, which it includes in the broader framework of autofictional texts, and presents an (incomplete) summary of the many definitions and forms of autofiction. This is followed by an analysis of the second example of fictional metaautobiography, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by American author Dave Eggers, which ironically deconstructs the convention of autobiographical writing. The conclusion of the study points out the differences in the way fictionality is included in the works presented, forming the basis for a division of fictional meta-autobiographies in accordance with the kind of reading instructions which they present to readers: Montauk represents works that help the reader to switch between a fictional and an autobiographical interpretation method by indicating which parts or aspects are invented and which stay true to real events; on the other hand, texts like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius provide relatively few indications to help readers distinguish fictional elements and identify authentically autobiographical moments.

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1 Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo

1 Česká literatura (Czech Literature)

2 Fonioková Z.

2 2018

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Tellers and Experiencers in Autobiographical Narratives: Focalization in “Peeling the Onion” by Günter Grass and “The Liars’ Club” by Mary Karr

Fikčnost ve faktuálním vyprávění : případ fikčních metaautobiografií