Je ne suis pas ici

I come back to the idea of legitimately literary forms of writing. This is because I am doing my honours project in creative non-fiction. Personal narratives. Memoir. Autobiography. Lyric essays. Life writing. Writing a life. It feels as if it is the creation of a self within a text, completely opposite to those theorists who claim that the more distance there is between a writer and his text, the more legitimate this text is.

I do not agree. Of course I don't. When do I ever? Honestly, sometimes I wish I could just do something normal, or think something normal, or be normal. I don't think that's in the cards for me. So I write narratives that require a subjective self.

For the last few weeks I've been thinking that this project is actually about genre, and the ways that things don't often fit into neat little genre boxes, and how I don't want my writing to be one thing but many things, and so I've been looking at texts that use all kinds of genres to tell their stories. Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is one of these texts. At times this is prose, at times poetry, it is a fictional work about a real person so it contains things like news clippings and eyewitness accounts of events, there are falsified documentary-style photographs of Billy the Kid and his wife (the people in these photos are all actors/models), and the whole thing combines together to tell the story of a life. Sometimes, then, it is as far away from being what we normally associate with fiction as it can be. And, I think it might be fictional autobiography, which I sort of thought was an oxymoron.

I don't think this project is actually about genre at all, the more I think about it, even if my attempt is to deconstruct genre. The point is the subjective self. The placement of, the use of, the reality or unreality of the subjective self. Genre only offers a way for me to create that self, to look outside of my text, to look through lenses. It is secondary to where the self is found within the text.

So, where are you, subjective self?