The Fragile Conjunction: Autobiography, Narrative Life and the Limits of Human Senses
Author : Apoorva
Abstract :
Autobiography has long been theorised as the privileged site where life and narrative converge, yet this assumption harbours significant complications when “life” is understood in its broadest ontological sense rather than through strictly human perceptual filters. Drawing on Jerome Bruner’s constructivist account of “life as narrative,” Brian Richardson’s fourfold typology of narrative definitions, and Maurice Blanchot’s radical theorisation of the indeterminate narrative voice, this article interrogates the anthropocentric limits of autobiographical self-writing. It proposes the concept of “narrative life” as a distinct category bounded by temporality, causality, appearance, relationality, and matter—qualities shared with but not exhaustive of organic and inorganic existence. Expanding the analysis beyond the course readings, the discussion incorporates Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity, David Herman’s posthuman narratology, and recent scholarship on animal autobiography to argue that autobiography’s reproducibility and cultural susceptibility stem from its confinement to human senses, while a broader view of life reveals narrative as a poietic force (Heidegger) operative across species and matter. The article concludes that autobiography’s apparent stability is illusory; its true value lies in exposing the instability of voice and the necessity of narratologies that transcend the human.
Perhaps one way to probe this assumption is by classifying what life should mean in conjunction to narrative. “Life in all its senses” or “life in all sense” (life through human sense, more specifically) are two distinct propositions. “Life in all its senses” demands that life be seen not solely through human senses whereas “life in all sense” seem to mean strictly life through human senses. Life seen from (human) senses is very limited but life, the totality of organic life, with its varied non-human senses and the inorganic matter is limitless. Most certainly, a literary theorist is concerned in usual cases with human life, but the connection between life and narrative may stretch beyond human life to other organic and inorganic things in life as to a physicist who may find in these varied states of matter the presence of an ultimate narrative and many narrative agents.
Keywords :
Autobiography, narrative theory, posthumanism, life writing.
