The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

idges the gap and revises the paradox between stories which are seen as recounted
and lives which are seen as lived. 118
Auto/biography and the production of history
It has been suggested by Laura Marcus that attempts to persist in defining
autobiography conceptually away from biography are inadequate and unhelpful.
According to Marcus, “far more exciting conjunctures occur, showing how
autobiography and biography function together”. She suggests two forms of interaction:
that recounting one’s own life “almost inevitably entails writing the life of an other” and
that the writing of another’s life “must surely entail the biographerʹs identifications with
his or her subject, whether these are made explicit or not”. 119 Indeed, Marcus’ use of the
category ‘auto/biography’ is directed at challenging a conceptual division between
autobiography and biography. This thesis suggests that there is a third, perhaps more
important interaction, namely that the writing of another’s life almost inevitably means
that one enters into the existence of autobiographical texts, of narrations of self on the
part of the subject. This includes narratives lived out in life itself, and biographical texts
that the subject had a hand in creating and establishing. The act of biography necessarily
entails such encounters with auto‐narrations and autobiography.
These storied lives are also lived out inside the narrative world of institutions, where
people are immersed in the biographical ordering that occurs through their structures,
procedures and discourses. Birgitta Svensson has examined the operation of power in
the coercive institutional edifice of the prison, and the mania of the welfare state for
recording and cataloguing individuals. Their administrative and bureaucratic
procedures of documentation reflect the power of the biographical project of the prison
system and penal policy in constituting specific criminal identities and biographies. 120
118 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Life in Quest of Narrative’, in David Wood (ed), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and
Interpretation, p 24.
119 Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, pp 272‐273.
120 Birgitta Svensson, ‘The Power of Biography’, pp 71‐104.
45