25 févr. 2015 10:56
C-M C
Subject is an ambiguous word to deal with when it is not contextualized. It may drive to think about a person who is submitted to an authority or to a person responsible for his actions. Institution is in the same time rather easy to grasp. It describes an authority which is to organize life in a community. There may then be the educational institution as well as a justice institution each of them holding the rules with which life is organized in their respective field for example.
John Locke (1632-1704) is considered as one of the philosophical basic character who inspired the foundations of an occidental perception of what a community should be.
“Men all being naturally free, equal, and independent, no-one can be deprived of this freedom etc. and subjected to the political power of someone else, without his own consent. The only way anyone can strip off his natural liberty and clothe himself in the bonds of civil society is for him to agree with other men to unite into a community, so as to live together comfortably, safely, and peaceably, in a secure enjoyment of their properties and a greater security against outsiders.”[1]
Community is there described as a compromise between several individuals who “deprive” themselves of their individual and natural freedom to a “political power” so as to ensure their protection again “outsiders”, to understand as anyone who would have not given its consent to the community and to secure their property. The first conclusion of this passage is that individuals are not individual any longer in a community. The members of a community change of subject status, from a person responsible for his actions to a person submitted to an Authority. They abandon a part of their agency[2] to the community.
And anyone would then not accept to consent to this compromise would be seen as an “outsider”, a threat to treat as such.
Denton Welch (1915-1948) was not exactly a writer. But he used this medium as an act of agency. He was born in Shanghaï in the decadent British Empire, but still taking advantages on the familial and financial scale. He was born in the dying British Empire but a death full of symbols and in a paradoxical exposure of its magnificence.
He was to keep what was perceived as a “strange habit” by his father, representative of the Georgian blind generation that did not want to take into account any possibilities of change. Denton collected objects that his father would call “junk”, there speaking more about his blindness than about his son. He was to do so all along his short life.
Denton Welch had a serious accident at the age of 20, in 1935, which would lead him to his death on long highway of pain. He sustained a fractured spine which made him discovered the definition of individuality in his very flesh. No compromise with any community could help him. In A voice through a cloud the description he wrote about his first wake-up in the hospital shows also his first denial of this meeting. The whole novel is the description of this meeting he first refused fiercely, waiting for friends to come and visit him in the illusion that quote from AVTAC
The three novels he wrote after his accident are considered as autobiographies since they seem to describe his life. But a closer reading may drive us to challenge this classification of Denton Welch’s novels. Auto-fiction is a very recent concept forged by Serge Doubrovsky (1928- ) for his novel Fils written in 1977.
Autobiographies are perceived as the story-telling of one’s life without any deep incidence on the community necessary characterization. Considering a novel as an autobiography drives to a classification of a distant individuality still attached to a community.
Auto-fiction is still vividly debated, considered as a vulgar sub-genre which should not be seriously taken into account on a wider scale than the one of an individual playing with the codes of literature and more specifically of narratology. Or on the other extreme part of criticism as a kind of “nouvelle nouvelle vague” which was born in the 1970ies[3].
But through the example of Denton Welch, considering his life and his project as an author, even if he did not go so far as to name his books “auto-fictions”, one could perceive auto-fiction as an attempt at describing the experience of real and deep meeting with one’s individuality and in this regard not enclosed in a linear literary evolution. The detailed descriptions of Denton Welch in In youth is Pleasure of the buildings he perceived during what could be understood as a first attempt at least to undo the ties that prevented him from meeting his Self, his own individuality, could be seen as a challenge of the codes of the community itself. In this novel the reader is told the runaway of the narrator who could not accept to go back to school, one of the institutions of the community. Quote from IYIP p 21 There the author described the reader his own experience of perception reversal of primary consent encoding of Space and Time. What is this date on this house? Is it the house itself? Is Time a construction?
Auto-fiction could be an act of agency on an individual level to resist the pressure of a cultural hegemony producing a manufacture of consent as theorized by Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) in about the same period in The Prison Notebooks. And as the title indicates it which were written in prison where Gramsci was thrown by the Mussolini’s government as an ideological threat to the birthing fascist State.
[1] John Locke Second Treatise on government 1690, chapter 8 The beginning of political societies Last Seen at http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/locke1689a.pdf on 02/25/2015
[2] Agency : ability to make one’s own choices and fight to make them be respected, a method used by individuals to identify themselves out of a community consensus.
[3] Sarah Pitcher McDonough, How to read auto-fiction, 2011, Thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University Last seen at http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1695&context=etd_hon_theses on 02/25/2015
