Autobiographical Act and the Formation of Self and Truth in the Autobiographies Of

Autobiographical Act and the Formation of Self and Truth in the Autobiographies of M.K Gandhi and B.PKoirala “To describe truth as it has appeared to me and in the exact manner in which I have arrived at it has been my ceaseless effort ". Gandhi This statement from Gandhi's autobiography signifies that his effort to write about his personal life is actually the effort to describe how he exactly arrives to the truth of his life. On the other hand, Bisheshwor Prasad Koirala, a Nepali political leader of Gandhi's time narrates: "During my long stay in the prison, I attempted writing about my life and thereby to write about the contemporary socio-political system, one or two times, to pass time. In doing so, what I found was I tended to write more about others than about my life" (My translation 1).1 In these two contexts, the first autobiographer Gandhi claims that his autobiography is an account of the processes of how he exactly arrives to the 'truth' of his life and the second autobiographer, Koirala, narrates the problem of writing about oneself. He states that he could not focus about his own life and was rather inclined to write about other, particularly about Nepali politics. The aim of this research is to unfold the answer of what actually happens when an autobiographer begins writing about his life and how does he or she profess to construct the 'autobiographical self' and the 'truth' about his/ her life in the autobiography. Gandhi's claim about the content of his autobiography and Koirala's experience of the problem in writing his autobiography in the opening paragraph of this dissertation are the points of departure from which I enter into these questions concerned with the 'autobiographical act'. Regarding the etymology of the word 'autobiography'; 'autos' means 'self', 'bios' means 'life' and 'graphe' means 'writing' in Greek language. The act of writing an 1 The subsequent quotations from the autobiography of Koirala are all my translation. 2 autobiography is a complex process since it requires recourse to fragmented memory. Past memories gradually fade with the passage of time therefore they are fragmented by their nature and almost impossible to recapture completely. Similarly, the autobiographical act of writing takes place in the dynamics of intention of an autobiographer, his space, time and circumstances of writing. This means with the change in time and space, the intentions and the circumstances of an autobiographer obviously change. This natural change adds complexity in the act of arriving to the truth of the life of an autobiographer. An 'autobiographical act' of writing involves this discursive process which is actually an act of using language to describe about one's life and the self. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson call this process a 'symbolic interaction' of an autobiographer with the reality of his\her life. "Life narratives are always symbolic interactions in the world.They are culturally and historically specific" (49-50). This means, autobiographical acts are rhetorical actions in the broadest sense. To make it simple, the act of writing about one's life is essentially the act of a careful selection of words to describe about one's experience. The degree of possibility of coming to the 'truth' and projecting the real self of an autobiographer in his\her autobiography objectively is therefore low. This applies to any autobiographical act of writing life stories. 'Autobiographical self' is the self created in an autobiography through the 'autobiographical act'. It is the subject or the self of an autobiographer projected by means of language in an autobiography. Autobiographical self is an image which an autobiographer picturizes about himself or herself while writing. 'Autobiographical self' is therefore, a 'constructed self' in language by the 'discursive activity' of writing or what Smith and Watson say 'symbolic interaction' of the autobiographer with his\her reality of life. Therefore, the objective of this research is to explore what goes 3 into writing an autobiography by an individual in general and how Gandhi and Koirala perform autobiographical acts in their autobiographies in particular. The significance of this study lies in unfolding the nature of an ‘autobiographical act’ and autobiographical subject (self) through the analysis of the autobiographical acts of Gandhi and Koirala. It also studies the way how an autobiographer perform an autobiographical act to create the image of 'self'. So the key search of this project is to answer how autobiography as the form of life writing process functions and how are Gandhi and Koirala motivated to write about their lives or what politics lies behind it. Regarding the form of the autobiographies, both of the selected ones are political autobiographies in general. Gandhi is very much sure about the primary focus of his autobiography. He assures the reader that his life in reality had been series of experiments with truth. Chapter two is the elaboration of how he arrives to the truths from his experiments. Koirala, on the other hand, begins with- the problem of writing about self. Indeed, after going through his autobiography one finds that, Koirala emphasizes much in writing about the events in relation to the political life, rather than focusing on his private affairs. I examine how Gandhi projects his autobiographical self, the image of oneself cultivated in one's autobiography, around his stories of several experiments which he claims to have performed in dietetics, in his ideas of non-violence (ahimsa), civil- disobedience (Satayagtaha) and celibacy (Bramacharya) and arrives to what he calls 'truth'. With a self assurance, Gandhi reinforces the image of a Mahatma2, a title conferred to Gandhi, by means of his narrative strategy in his autobiography. Meanwhile, I also examine how Koirala professes to cultivate his autobiographical self immersed in various political affairs of his life and time. He overshadows his 2 The great spiritual being 4 private life to render political overtones in most of the significant events of his life. This way he constructs his autobiographical self more as a politically colored self that makes no distinction between the private and public, between the self and other. It implies that Koirala has nothing significant to narrate about his private life but his was the life completely devoted to the democracy and freedom of Nepali people. As a political figure, his life is more a public life rather than the private. According to Philippe Lejeune: " We call autobiography the retrospective narrative in prose that some makes of his own existence when he puts the principle accent upon his life especially upon the story of his own personality" (qtd. in Smith and Watson 1). Since an autobiography accounts the stories of an autobiographer's life in retrospect; it is essentially about the past memories or reminiscences. In this sense, I argue that as the autobiographers, Gandhi and Koirala proactively recreate the memory of their past at present. They manipulate the events of their life and interpret them the way they intend at a particular spatio-temporal location they find themselves in, while performing the autobiographical act. This complex situation is the result of the nature of an autobiographer's memory in relation to his space, time, intention and the inherent purpose to write about one's life. This dynamics among the nature of memory in relation to immediate circumstances of the autobiographer, his intention and the inherent purpose to write about his life creates a problem. An autobiographer tends to merge both facts and fictions about his life into one and create a provisional truth about the self projected in his autobiography instead of the real flesh-blood self, on the process of act of writing about the self. This real self is simply unattainable in an autobiography according to the recent post-structural and postmodern theories of autobiography. 5 So, this research juxtaposes the ideas recently developed in the genre of "life writing" with the stories of Gandhi and Koirala to study how they project their images in their autobiography. In particular, I focus on autobiographical act of Gandhi and Koirala to explore how they politicize the ‘self’ and the ‘truth’ in their autobiographies to create the intended image of their self. I mean the image of an autobiographer which he deliberates to cultivate in his autobiography. For example the image of the self of a Mahatma created by Gandhi in his stories of experiments about the truth and the image created by Koirala about himself as a votary of political freedom and prosperity in Nepal. As mentioned earlier, writing autobiography is essentially a discursive activity. It involves the employment of discourses or language. Smith and Watson refer to the recent, post structural, postmodern and psychoanalytical theories and Derrida's theory of deconstruction that refute the adequacy of language to represent the truth. Smith and Watson bring the idea of Sigmund Freud's notion of psychoanalysis that human being is not essentially rational but the human self is the product of the unconscious desires which exist outside the conscious control and frame the psyche of a human being. Freud also insists that language does not function neutrally but it is always 'interested 'or encodes speaker's desires (124). Lacan reinterprets Freud and claims that Freud's unconscious is a language itself. The speaker's subject spoken through this language always becomes the other to the desire of the speaker himself or herself (124). So according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, the subject of the speaker formed in language is far from the real subject or self. Similarly, Watson and Smith bring Derrida's idea of self. According to the idea of Derrida, self is nothing but a fiction.

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