The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

ones. 114 Modernity gave rise to lives that can be seen as “biographically ordered”. People
live their lives biographically and construct their reality on the basis of biography.
Indeed, as Birgitta Svensson has suggested, modern existence can be seen as “ordered as
an autobiographical presentation”. 115 The narrated life is characterised by a “struggle
between concordance and discordance”, the aim of which is to discover narrative
identity. Through narrative identity, one is able to develop a sense of one’s self as a
subject. 116
Conventionally, a distinction is made between the life as lived, supposedly in an
unmediated way, and the life as told through a subsequent process of narration.
However, according to Paul Ricoeur, the process of selection and narration begins “in
life itself, with attention and planned activity”. Life is experienced in a temporal way.
For Ricoeur, temporality and narrativity are mutually imbricated. Literature and history
have in common the human experience of time, of human “within‐timeness”. Life, for
Ricoeur, “prefigures” narrative. There is a “relation of dynamic circularity” between life
and narrative. People are born into a world of narratives, and life is lived “in quest of
narrative”. 117
We refer to a life‐story as the interval between birth and death. However, knowledge
over the past few decades, for the most part, has tended to distance narrative from lived
experience and to confine it to fiction. It is not only history that has a direct relation with
life. Ricoeur argues that fiction contributes to making life. He distinguishes between first
order narrative, in which “emplotment constitutes the creative centre” and narratology,
which is a second order “rational reconstruction of the rules”. This second order is
“always preceded by a narrative understanding stemming from the creative
imagination”. “There is”, he argues, “a life of narrative activity”. With this, Ricoeur
114 Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, Africa Seminar, University of Cape Town, 24
March 1997, pp 7‐8.
115 Birgitta Svensson, ‘Lifetimes ‐ Life History and Life Story: Biographies of Modern Swedish
Intellectuals’, Ethnologia Scandinavica, vol 25, 1995, p 26.
116 David Wood ‘Introduction: Interpreting Narrative’, in David Wood (ed), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and
Interpretation, London: Routledge, 1991, p 11.
117 David Wood ‘Introduction: Interpreting Narrative’, pp 16‐17.
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