The Life and Times of Autothanatography

Autobiography, the very act of writing one's life story, has always implicated the hovering consciousness of death. Autobiography provides the space for personal authority, for reckoning, for ensuring its author that incontrovertible "last word." Indeed, Karl Popper has suggested that the human capacity for words of any kind determines our concepts both of self and of death. I believe Thomas Couser was the first to connect death and autobiography quite explicitly in his 1978 essay for the Hudson Review, "The Shape of Death in American Autobiography." The literature of life-writing-about-death has increased quite phenomenally since that time, as, of course, have our theoretical considerations. By 1994, Nancy K. Miller was able to say "Every autobiography . . . is also an autothanatography" (12). Her neologism "incorporates" into life-writing what one dying writer has called "Uncle Thanatos," that dark god of the underworld who summons us home-too commonly with pain and crises of anxiety.

My work begins with the relation between language and death--a complex matter because language enables us to conceive of death, which in turn enables us to apprehend our own identity in time and space. The anthropologist Robert Murphy makes these connections quite clearly in his own autothanatography: "The apprehension of mortality," he writes, "is a condition of our consciousness, a first premise of our sense of time, an axiom in our grasp of selfhood, a constant factor in all our plans, and a thread that is woven through the very fabric of our being" (62). Because I work in literature rather than in medicine or psychiatry, I am particularly interested to know what this apprehension of mortality looks like in language and in narrative structures. Autothanatography works, after all, on a paradox: either we recreate our lived experience of pain in language, which then, by definition, becomes another thing altogether than our lived experience of pain, or we find no language and no narrative and have no means outside the body (medicalised) or mind (psychiatrised) to explore, explain, or represent our experience. Insofar as language provides the conditions in which we may, or must, consider "self" and "death" and the connections between the two, we seem to be damned if we do and damned if we don't. My own interest lies with the "damned if we don't" consideration. In particular, I propose to identify three tropes that account for and represent three aspects of the experience of terminal illness.

First, I need to recognise that the term "autobiography," without this particular "pain and suffering" component, has, until very recently, referred to an extended narrative in which author, protagonist, and narrator claimed to be one and the same. This extended narrative provided not only quantities of insider information but also meaning. Autothanatography can do none of these things. It is a single-subject text. It treats of the process of one's own dying. It may investigate but seldom arrives at meaning. Recognising a transition in crisis writing from extended to limited narrative, to an immediate situation resistant to explanation because lacking conclusion, much recent theory describes such autobiography as relational in origin and dialogic or polyphonic in process. In other words, the autobiographical subject no longer conceives of him- or herself as first-person singular in life or in text but presents individual experience as shared in life and in narration. (As Terry Tempest Williams puts it, "An individual doesn't get cancer, a family does" [214]. As if supporting this observation, Treya Wilber calls her friend Vicky to her bedside in order to describe "the precise sensations, the actual feel, of having a brain tumor slowly destroy all normal functions, detail by gruesome detail" (393). Autothanatography begins, then by reversing the patterns of autobiography; it covers a brief period of time and a single main experience, and involves other people than the dying self often in a dialogue of shared experience, sometimes for the completion of the task.

Second, autothanatography takes on the whole business of the body. Peter Noll, who died of cancer of the bladder in 1982, questioned why cancer invites so much autobiographical writing and heart disease not. Several answers come to mind, but I shall focus on the fact that cancer foregrounds concepts of the body creating, hosting, "fighting" its own "enemy" and defining its own significant integrity as a body-self. Facing death, the body forces reversal of the normal trajectories of autobiography. Miller, again, has described the forward-looking story about the "becoming" of a life and describes autothanatography as an "UNbecoming." She may have known about Eric Michael's title, Unbecoming, for his AIDS journal. She may also have known Christina Middlebrook's dramatic account of a visit to the washroom at O'Hare airport, where the water in the basin did not flow because the electronic sensors of life and motion that stimulate flow could not detect her presence. The terminally ill patient struggles to come to terms with the facts and with the very idea of the body-self in pain and debility and is likely blocked or enabled by current cultural representations of that body.

My present discussion of the terminally ill body has been influenced by Emily Martin's description (in a talk at UBC) of a paradigm shift over the past few decades, which involves thinking of the body as porous rather than fortress-like, and thinking of illness as turbulence rather than defeat. Certainly, autothanatography's attention to the body at its most abject suggests that much contemporary awareness of the body-self is less ashamed than engaged, which may explain why so many are now resisting what Peter Noll has called "the muteness of perishing" (14) and exploring avenues of meaning through their body's behaviour. Barbara Rosenblum, within weeks of her death, explains her experience this way: "Sometimes I can hardly use human language to tell how I feel. When I am frightened or feel alone and can't sleep, I need to take sleeping pills because I lie there thinking about dying. I explain to Sandy [her partner], 'If I were a dog, I'd be shaking and trembling.' Animals don't use words; their bodies speak for them. . . . But I am not an animal. I am a human being, an articulate one at that, who is challenged to find words to apply to sensations I've never had before, challenged to find meaning and stability despite a changing body. I'm caught in a relentless metamorphosis" (166-67).

Barbara's experience, repeated in varying forms in so many autothanatographies, introduces my third problem, which is that of time. If she and others like her are "caught in a relentless metamorphosis," their exploration of unresolved crisis is equally caught in continuous process and instability and transforms their understanding of time. And here we come to a multiple bind: the autothanatographer's sense of identity is largely controlled by the radically unstable body-self, disconnected from the healthy self and from all previous trajectories of the imagination for that self. Indeed, that earlier imagination is abruptly foreshortened and interrupted. Lacking an imaginative future, the body-self lacks many avenues of meaning in the present tense, or finds only what Peter Noll has called discontinuous "oases of meaning" (202). Further, when it struggles to translate the physical trembling like that of a dog into language, the trembling body-self finds language aimed quite particularly at deferral--avoidance, diversion, or delay. Experiential need and renditions of time fail to coincide. Repeatedly, one can see the efforts of autothanatographers to name their experience in words become a moment-by-moment wrestling match with the angel of death, an urgent capturing of time; as for Jacob, the struggle may seem interminable, is certainly unwinnable, but results, nonetheless, with amazing frequency in the naming of the self. Robert Fulton suggests this much when he writes: "Death asks us for our identity" (3). "In choosing how to confront death, "Richard Momeyer writes, "we choose our very character" (286). Identity and character are familiar achievements in autobiography but time, in this crisis, is the problem; compounding the problems of physical instability and the evasions of language, time is about to stop. The experience of dying remains scriptless because neither the self-as-subject nor the idea of the self-as-subject can cross that conclusion.

In other words, the criteria that enable a healthy person to produce comprehensible narrative collapse: that is, the adequacy of linguistic (therefore linear) narrative breaks down, the body provides no familiar (therefore readable) signs, and the positioning of the individual in time lacks a forward trajectory. The first trope for "self"-recovery that I have been suggesting is the close involvement of fellow subjects, a complex dialogic enterprise that articulates and interprets experience in continuous interaction. The second is the focus of "narrative" quite exclusively on the present moment, on Noll's "oases of meaning." This focus is apparent in journal and diary as forms of autothanatography. It replaces chronology and teleology with a continuous present tense, which seems to be true to the condition of dying. "I am stronger for the moment," Harold Brodkey writes, "which is maddening, since it means that I am only stronger for the moment" (144). In all decisions, as in all plans, as in the very act of continuous writing, he finds that "[t]he book is always closing" (152). And the last trope is a curious substitution of space for time. Lacking the space here for textual analysis, I would like to open discussion out from literary analysis and suggest the value to the autothanatographer of more readily spatialised forms of narrative such as visual arts, film, installation, and quilting. By way of example, I attach an illustration that may suggest just how effectively the comics form can work simultaneously with all three of the tropes I have identified. Combining visual and verbal representation makes positive use of the body-self, enables several characters to share the subject position, and enables each moment of successive experiences to appear in temporary relation to each other but also to appear as suspended in time, not reliant upon time for interpretation or meaning. This particular example comes from Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar (being diagnosed with cancer), his wife Joyce Brabner (whose emotional reactions are more powerful than his) and the artist Frank Stack.