The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

constructed. 111 It is tempting merely to distinguish between lives as lived and
experienced, and lives as told or produced. However, Richard Ochberg suggests that
through the perspective of storytelling, we are able to understand the “‘storied nature’
of human lives”. Lives do not simply become narrativised after the fact, once people
have lived or experienced their lives. For Ochberg, people live out their lives in a storied
manner. It is not possible to disentangle lives as lived from telling or performing a story.
Individuals live in ways that are deeply embedded in narrative. Individuals conduct
their life episodes in patterns similar to the plots of stories. In other words, the ‘storied
life’ should become much more of a focus in the ways in which people think about
biography. 112
As Hannah Arendt has noted, we are part of narratives right from birth and these make
us both subject and object. Life stories are a way of fashioning identity in a public sense
and in a private sense. Individuals live their lives in a relation with their life stories
being narrated. Here the life story becomes part of the individual’s public life. But these
forms of personal narration in public may not be sufficient to constitute identity
formation. People do not merely tell stories of their experiences after the fact. They live
out their affairs in storied forms. We become greatly aware of the narrative connections
and attached meanings to certain life actions and these direct the choices made, relations
entered into and courses decided upon. In this way, life becomes lived almost like a kind
of argument in which one construction of experience is privileged over some other
one. 113
As much as people create themselves, they also recreate themselves and refashion their
identities, drawing from encounters with a range of ready‐made identities. It is language
and narrative, which make it possible to think about these identities and to shape new
111 Norman K Denzin, Interpretive Biography, p 62.
112 Richard I Ochberg, ‘Life stories and storied lives’, in Amia Lieblich and Ruthellen Josselson (eds),
Exploring Identity and Gender: The Narrative Study of Lives, (The Narrative Study of Lives, Volume 2)
London: Sage, 1994, p 113.
113 See Birgitta Svensson, ‘The Power of Biography: Criminal Policy, Prison Life, and the Formation of
Criminal Identities in the Swedish Welfare State’, in Deborah Reed‐Danahay (ed), Autoethnography:
Rewriting the Self and the Social, Washington: Berg Publishers, 1997.
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