Autobiographical theory

"Black autobiographers almost always focus on the racial authentication of self. Their narratives begin from a stated (sometimes disguised) position that establishes and asserts the reality of the self through experience." Nellie Y. McKay, "The Narrative Self: Race, Politics, and Culture in Black American Women's Autobiography" p. 96

"No matter how complicated or complete our attempt, creating an airtight definition of autobiography is virtually impossible." Timothy Dow Adams, "Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography," p. 2.

The nature of autobiography is by no means a pre-determined or fixed thing. Rather, the existance of autobiographical studies, a burgeoning field within literary criticism, shows that ideas about what autobiography is and isn't and what it can and cannot be are open to debate. However, along with the hundreds of thousands of published autobiographies (in print and online) it also shows the fascination that people have with autobiographies and with the power to look inside another person's life.

Karasic and her father, from WLAJFA

"In creating an autobiography, however, a writer transforms the complex interaction of self and society into a literary form. Raw experience must be shaped. The question of whether this imposition of form on experience takes place during the actual activity or is an act of literary imposition that occurs during the construction of a narrative may be unanswerable, but there is evidence that many writers use the autobiography as a means of imposing order on experiences that are disruptive and confusing." James Craig Holt, "The Ethnic I: A Sourcebook for Ethnic-American Autobiography"

Karasic uses two familiar conventions in her site: that of written autobiography and of the family photo album, which contains pictures of what we assume to be herself at various ages in relation to the story. She also uses a series of historical or "public" photos - the statue of liberty, civil disobedience at Selma - that create another familiar form of storytelling, that of the photo essay, or historical narrative. These three threads work together, and sometimes in ironic juxtaposition, to create a portrait of her life. Clearly, the three aspects are meant to have a connection. As the windows pop up, we not only know that the windows are meant to go in a certain order with each other from the numbers in the title of each window, but from the fact that each window is tied, if in only a tenuous way, with the others via content or reference. The "story" window that presents the Pledge of Allegiance, for instance, is linked with a "historical" picture of the Statue of Liberty. I see these windows as representing not onlythe "interaction of self and society" that Holt refers to above, or, in Karasic's case, the interaction of race, society and identity, but also the interaction of culture and ourselves: how we view cultural events and iconography as part of ourselves and our experiences.

In documenting this interaction in a specific way, that is, through the memory of her childhood, Karasic imposes a kind of narrative on what were both chaotic historical and personal events. Whether this narrative is "accurate" or not is almost beside the point. As bell hooks writes,

"Often we remembered together a general outline of an incident but the details were different for us. This fact was a constant reminder of the limitations of autobiography, of the extent to which autobiography is a very personal story telling -- a unique recounting of events not so much as they have happened but as we remember and invent them." from bell hooks, Talking Back

We are shown the story of Karasic's life as she remembers it; not necessarily in full detail or full disclosure but with anecdotes that seem important. We get an idea of what her family might have been like, but we don't know exactly; there is flexibility in what may have happened. We are only given a small glimpse into this family. We don't even know if it is the "truth" or not. Furthermore, we are not entirely sure it matters. It rings true.
"A promise to tell the truth is one of autobiography's earliest premises" -- Adams

hooks also writes about autobiography as a kind of catharsis; a tool that one can use to both capture and explain the past but also to find a way out of it. As she writes in Talking Back, her own autobiography,

"The longing to tell one's story and the process of telling is symbolically a gesture of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a sense of reunion and a sense of release."

In a sense, this is related to McKay's idea about racial authentication; Karasic wants to both acknowledge and authenticate, yet leave behind, her past.

For me, this site raises questions about the very medium that it is placed in. What is the place of online autobiography? Is the internet an appropriate place to tell family stories, to attempt to reveal the self? Thousands of people seem to think so, and dozens if not hundreds have done so artfully. Journals proliferate: those are a day-by-day look at the development of the self, while an autobiographical site is constructed with hindsight and deliberation; everything included is included presumably for a reason.

Autobiography can be extremely intimate, and the internet can tend to generate a feeling of intimacy: despite the almost unlimited and uncontrolled numbers of people who may view a site, complete strangers who may stumble on to it, when you view a site you feel like you are having a conversation between the author and yourself. One is generally alone when webbrowsing, and the experience of looking at the details of someone's life can be an intensely personal one. Autobiographical sites naturally intensify this effect. In some ways, Carmin Karasic is still a complete stranger to me, but in other ways I feel as if I know her completely.

"Every family has secrets behind closed doors" -- WLAJFA