The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

stronger theoretical grasp of the narration of lives. Indeed, for Norman Denzin, all
writing about lives is fictional. 126
Likwise, for Raymond Williams, the dichotomy between fact and fiction, described very
negatively as ‘myth’ as against ‘fact’ ‐ what did happen ‐ is crippling. Biography and
autobiography, for Williams, should be seen as test cases, suggesting an overlap
between fact and fiction. 127 Biographies, according to Denzin, are always “incomplete
literary productions”. Conventionally, they use narrative devices, which conform to the
presumption that lives have beginnings and the “cultural myth that lives have endings”.
These devices convey the idea that complete stories about lives can be told. Indeed,
according to Denzin, lives are not ‘real’. They are constructions, “constrained by the
cultural writing practices of the time”. 128 For Marcus, the distinction between
auto/biography and fiction needs to be effaced, by asserting the fictionality of all
discourse. In auto/biography, the ‘life’ and ‘the subject’ are constructed in writing.
Indeed, “[the] self does not pre‐exist the text but is constructed by it”. 129
Seeking an approach to biography that overcomes the untheorised, chronological
narrative procedures of traditional biography does not mean rejecting narrative
altogether. Indeed, this dissertation suggests that narrative should be taken more
seriously in the construction of lives and in the production of history. Merely to impose
a narrative structure on events in the reconstruction of the past, as a chronological
‘history of events’ or as a life history, in realist mode, placed in a ‘historical context’, is
not enough. Rather, we should recognise the existence of multiple narrations
intersecting and crosscutting each other, paralleling and contradicting each other as they
compete for the creation of historical meaning. These narratives and representations
constitute historicising projects differing between past and present, subject and
126 Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Biography, pp 22‐24.
127 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp 146‐149.
128 Norman K Denzin, Interpretive Biography, pp 24‐26.
129 Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, p 180. Marcus’s writing is a direct challenge to the much‐
cited work on autobiography by James Olney. Olney had argued for the concept of a unified human
nature pre‐existing textual expression and stood by a fact ‐ fiction dichotomy. See James Olney,
Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
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