it is usual for several voices to appear in one piece of work. As most of us are not gifted in impressionism, perhaps slightly shifting the metaphor to one of ‘key’ or ‘pitch,’ rather than ‘voice,’ would be helpful. Veeser writes of confessional criticism as “performance”54—we could conceive of this in terms of theatre as well as music. Sidonie Smith describes autobiography as “a kind of masquerade,” and I find helpful the image of the life story as a mask—“an iconic representation of continuous identity that stands for, or rather before, her subjectivity as she tells of this ‘I’ rather than of that ‘I’”55—representative of the self in the moment of performance, but not identical to it. Even more so than ‘story,’ performance is not individuated and solipsistic, but communal, dependent on the audience. It depends upon the forming of a relationship between the self in autobiographical narrative, and “the ‘fictive reader’ created by the autobiographer to help bring that self into existence.”56 In terms of autobiographical criticism, in the words of Nancy Miller, “[b]y the risks of its writing, personal criticism embodies a pact . . . binding writer to reader in the fabulation of self-truth, that what is at stake matters also to others: somewhere in the self-fiction of the personal voice is a belief that the writing is worth the risk.”57
The Trouble with Narrative
The research that underpins this chapter thus far was originally undertaken to support my own choice of a methodology of autobiographical reflection. The period of my initial research into life-writing in academic scholarship coincided with the long summer vacation, the first six weeks of my giving up smoking, and living alone for the first time. I came to consider whether these factors had a considerable effect on my reading: without the sense of routine provided by cigarettes, flatmates or term-time activities, my sense of self became rather hazy, and this was exacerbated by reading about the theory and practice of writing the self. At the time I wrote, I’ve been wandering around my flat, bearing sticking plasters. I forget that they are seeping in nicotine; instead I feel that they are patching up leaking holes.
I was looking for theoretical support and precedence for bringing my self (a self that seemed to be dissolving into the haze of the smoke of the cigarettes that I was not smoking) into my scholarship. What I found instead was that it was more complicated than simply being brave and preparing myself for some of my academic colleagues finding my writing embarrassing, or inappropriate, or—even worse—boring. The above discussions of the personal voice in academic criticism underscored what I was already beginning to sense—that the attempt to write oneself into one’s academic work can seem just as artificial as the attempt to make oneself invisible. Thinking about whether or not I wanted to write in this way, whether bringing my own story into my theological writing would be essentially pornographic—staged and false, while pretending to be revealing to the point of obscenity—also led me to think more deeply about the problems of a redemptive view of narrative.
Beneath the over-arching narrative of modernity, “we are encouraged to think of our lives as coherent stories of success, progress and movement.”58 Even in tragic stories, the narrative form still inclines to closure, to resolution. In the narrative structure of the popular imagination there is often little difference between epiphany and catharsis, and perhaps the anguish of the distance between the narrative of our hopes, and how our lives actually turn out, is not that the drama did not pan out as we would have liked, but that it did not follow a satisfying dramatic structure; events have not unfolded in a successive whole. Or, if we are able to tell our life stories as emplotted narratives in which there is a distinct pattern to events, we have to be extremely selective about which elements of experience to draw on. Janet Stacey, writing as someone in remission from cancer, but attempting to avoid “[t]he dangers of the success story”59 and working with the recognition that “the accounts that we produce are structured by the formations of memory and the conventions of narrative,”60 argues that “conventional narrative structure cannot necessarily contain the demands of a changing world.”61
I have had a significant—albeit shifting—sense of my own ‘story’ for a large part of my life. I grew up in an evangelical context in which it is not only believed that the history of the world is the unfolding of God’s perfect plan, but that one’s own life as an individual is also a story penned by God’s hand. Having been treated for depression from the age of thirteen, from an early age my self-understanding was shaped by a therapeutic paradigm in which the patient relates their emotions and experiences in order to arrive at a pattern of cause and effect, facilitating healing by making present distress explicable. I had lost interest in religion in the years leading up to my teens, which were characterized by stereotypically dysfunctional and rebellious behavior until I was ‘born again’ (again) aged fifteen. The severe depression did not lift, but it took on a different aspect, vacillating between elation and misery. The latter was dominated by religious guilt; this was compounded by the discord between my ‘testimony’—the narrative of how I had gone wrong but was now saved, and well, and happy—and how I actually felt a lot of the time. In my final year of school I had a breakdown and became agoraphobic for several months: this was after a school year in which I had been happier than ever before, thus undermining a model of gradual recovery and also my ability to assess my own mental health.
I did get through it, however, and left home for university, studied theology and philosophy, felt my dogmatic certainties gradually crumble and fall away—a narrative common to so many who come to the academic study of theology from a strict religious background. The left-wing and feminist values that I had always cherished, though they sat somewhat uncomfortably with evangelicalism, were able to flourish; I also felt able for the first time since I was fifteen to accept that I was not heterosexual, and nor did I want to be. So I also had a ‘coming out story’—a story of liberation from heteronormativity that would push aside my evangelical story of liberation from bondage to sin. Academically, I was for a while quite taken with canonical narrative theology,62 more attractive than the abstractions of systematic theology or analytic philosophy, and it seemed like a way of holding together my feminist beliefs with my resistance to theological study emptied of divine stories and symbols.
After graduating, I wanted to give my mind a rest, get healthy spiritually and physically, and live in the countryside, before commencing a PhD program. So I spent a year living and working at a liberal Christian retreat center in the Dales National Park in North Yorkshire. That particular story did not work out as planned—in the course of my time there the charity ran out of money and the center had to close, despite the extreme hard work and fierce idealism of those involved. I felt like the whole experience—of living in a small, often troubled community in the middle of nowhere, and being part of a religious institution that has failed—had stripped me bare of all the stories and words that had previously defined me. Living in such a beautiful and isolated place, where the powers and cycles of nature are so manifest, my spirituality became oriented more towards the world around me than to the canonical Christian narratives. I also lost the idealism that enabled me to believe that feminist theology can follow the same pattern of the Christian story; that it can tear down and then rebuild the monoliths of Christian doctrine, as I had once hoped.
In the early stages of my PhD study, I was encouraged to foreground my personal narratives in my theological engagement with literature. But this was colored by a nagging sense that in my autobiographical writing I was selecting certain parts of myself, certain ‘versions,’ presenting confessional writing as a mirror when it is more like a mask—something displayed for performance, rather than a slightly distorted
