Reading Acts of Narrative Appropriation: Four Instances of Fraudulent Memoir Amber Laine Baillie PhD Thesis Queen Mary, University of London Abstract This thesis examines acts of narrative appropriation, the telling of purportedly ‘authentic’ life stories by those for whom the stories are not theirs to tell. This misuse or subversion of genre - the discipline of historical writing and the category of autobiography - becomes a means for cultural, social and political dissimulation, and the analysis focuses both on the act: the event, trespass, or ‘theft’ of another’s life story, and on the cultural meaning that this event reveals. These narrative acts are approached theoretically through discussions of what it means to be an author, a reader, and through the consideration of literary and social genre, category and form. In exploring identities at particular risk of appropriation, this thesis shows how fraudulent appropriated narratives affect our reading of the world, and in turn influence our perception of already marginalized social groups. My primary examples include prostitution ‘narratives’, Native North American ‘memoir,’ and fraudulent Holocaust survivor ‘testimony,’ with each text providing decoded evidence of ‘genre-bending’ exhibiting a social and political intent. These works seek to be read as authentic personal narratives, as autobiography, and that is how they have been presented to the reader. However, they are imposters – fictional tales desiring the elevated status of historical authenticity and willing to bend the rules and contracts of genre to achieve their end. Here the appearance of authenticity is achieved through the use of cultural and social ‘myth,’ or perceptions of cultural identity, and as such its fraudulent construction is first and foremost a social act, with a social and economic motivation. As this thesis concludes, these texts are most successful when their own political and social ideologies echo and confirm that of the readership; when their subjects, the fraudulent ‘I’ at the center of the text is also a performative elaboration of cultural belief. 2 Acknowledgements I am most thankful for my time at the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. I have been supremely fortunate to have a supervisor, Professor Michèle Barrett, who is patient as well as wise. I am indebted to Michèle for her kind, generous guidance, critical insight and always-timely words of encouragement. Being part of ‘team Barrett’ has been a true treat. The academic community of staff and students, and the administrative office of the School of English and Drama, all contribute to make QM a place of breadth, motivation and enthusiasm. I thank them all and reiterate again the pleasure and privilege of my experience within the department. Of special note is Professor Cora Kaplan, whose knowledge of literature and questions of theory never ceases to inspire; Dr. Anurag Jain, Dr. Molly MacDonald, Dr. Pria Taneja and Dr. Adam Trexler have been that most precious of all things – dear friends. I’d like to thank Dr. Peggy Reynolds, for her encouragement as an early reader, and, also, Dr. Catherine Maxwell for initiating and overseeing the Thinking Writing Studentship, of which I was honored to be the recipient. My mother, Sheri Laine, has been unwavering in her support and eternally kind, I thank her for this and much more. My mother-in-law, Margot, Lady Baillie, has been a generous champion of this project from its infancy, for which I am most grateful. Finally I thank my husband, Adrian, who has done more than anyone else to make my words legible, my pages printable and my life magical. 3 Table of Contents Introduction: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ 6 Chapter 1. Autobiographical metafiction, or the trouble with categories 29 I. ‘Troubling this contentment’: Coming to terms with fiction 29 II. ‘The activity of reference’: Through the lens of postmodernism; reading Linda Hutcheon and ‘historiographic metafiction’ 40 III. ‘The facts of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them’: Creating narrative – historically, dogmatically, fictionally 46 IV. ‘Autobiography is not a guessing game’: The ‘impossible’ genre 49 V. ‘To give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth’: Roland Barthes and ‘The Death of the Author’ 62 VI. ‘The word person, in its first meaning, is a mask’: Erving Goffman and the performance of appropriation 65 Chapter 2. Les Belles de Jour : Appropriating the prostitute, exercises in pornography, morality and fantasy 72 I. ‘Autobiography as De-facement’: Paul de Man, prosopopeia and the prostitute’s body 72 II. The case of Cora Pearl 74 III. ‘A social act par excellence’: Constituting the narrative subject 79 IV. ‘An untouched record of fact’: Discovering Sheila Cousins 83 V. ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’: An engagement with Foucault 94 VI. ‘I am a young woman, I have sex for money, and I love to read and write’: Reading Belle de Jour 105 Chapter 3. Into the territory: Fraudulent Native American memoir and the politics of the ‘dispossessed’ 113 I. ‘Fantastical identities beloved by children and the dispossessed’: Coming to terms with auto/biographical ‘icons’ 113 II. ‘If you want anyone in the world to like you, just tell them that you’re Indian’: The Native American in the United States’ cultural imagination 118 III. ‘A human document of universal meaning’: The Education of Little Tree 119 IV. ‘A Klu Kluxer’: The remaking of Asa/Forrest Carter 123 V. ‘Nasty Gossip’: The inconvenient legacy of Forrest Carter and Little Tree 129 VI. ‘A genre on the verge of extinction’?: Writing race in a ‘post-racial’ world 136 VII. ‘To Become Again’: The story of Nasdijj 139 4 VIII. ‘It’s a white people word’: Writing the ‘Indian’ as victim 144 IX. ‘Navahoax’: Unearthing Nasdijj 147 X. ‘A Refugee from Gangland’: Love and Consequences 155 XI. ‘If you look white, you white’: Ethnic passing and North American identity 161 XII. ‘Maybe it’s an ego thing’: Fraudulent Native American memoir and the continuing ‘culture of narcissism’ 166 Chapter 4. False Testimony: Misappropriating the Holocaust 169 I. ‘If you didn’t have an amazing story, you didn’t survive’: What to do when all the stories are extraordinary 169 II. ‘Memory thief’: Binjamin Wilkomirski and Fragments 176 III. ‘Outside, if not beyond, history’: Fragments in context 183 IV. ‘A dramatization that offers no illumination’: The problem with reading Fragments as ‘metaphor’ 188 V. ‘It is not the true reality, but it is my reality’: Misha Defonseca and Surviving With Wolves 192 Chapter 5. Being a ‘Bad Guy’: James Frey’s instance of criminal deceit 203 I. ‘Truthiness’: The ‘moral panic’ over James Frey 203 II. ‘I was a bad guy’: James Frey’s criminal fantasy 208 III. ‘A Million Little Lies’: Reading A Million Little Pieces now 216 IV. ‘A beautiful and profoundly troubled girl’: James Frey and the new/old myth of the prostitute 221 V. ‘I left the impression that truth does not matter’: Oprah Winfrey - ‘just like everybody else’ 225 VI. ‘Trusting some people and distrusting the rest’: Speculating on truth 227 VII. ‘It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel’: The ‘spectacle’ of life-writing 232 Conclusion: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ 235 Appendix 239 Bibliography 244 Primary Sources: 244 Secondary Sources: 245 Other Resources 256 5 Introduction: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ So the truth is this. I read and recommend books based on my connection with the written word and its message… I rely on the publishers to define a category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work. So I’m just like everybody else. I go to the bookstore. I pick out a book I love. If it says memoir, I know that – that maybe the names and dates and times have been compressed because that what’s a memoir is. 1 Is Oprah Winfrey right? Is her perception of the memoir - as a genre defined and authenticated by publishers, where ‘names’ and ‘dates’ and ‘times’ have been acceptably blurred - truly what ‘a memoir is’? Certainly Winfrey’s perception is important. In an article celebrating Winfrey as one of ‘the Hundred Most Important People of the Twentieth Century,’ Deborah Tannen, for Time Magazine, referred to Winfrey as: ‘a beacon, not only in the worlds of media and entertainment but also in the larger realm of public discourse.’ 2 As such, Winfrey’s views, whether or not she really is ‘just like everybody else,’ cannot be discounted. If the belief, as put forward by Winfrey but presumably shared by many of the millions who make up her audience, is that the genre of memoir is regulated by a trustworthy publishing industry that supports and promotes ‘authenticity’ then we must look into this; just as we must consider, as well, the view that fictional literary tropes or the ease of narrative ‘compression’ can be used without incident in a work purporting to be non-fiction. Why, though, did Winfrey not mention the matter of authorship? Is it simply that the understanding of what ‘a memoir is’ is so implicitly dependent on the one main, invariable principle – namely, that the author is whoever he or she says that they are – that it needs not be mentioned? Unspoken, but surely assumed, in Winfrey’s discussion of the genre is that if the ‘category’ is 1 Oprah Winfrey on Larry King Live , CNN, January 11, 2006, transcript available online <http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/11/lkl.01.html> [accessed March 14, 2009]. 2 Deborah Tannen, ‘Oprah Winfrey: She didn’t create the talk show format. But the compassion and intimacy she has put into it created a new way for us to talk to one another,’ Time , June 08, 1998.