The Burdens Twain or Not Forgetting Yourself: The Writing of Betty Roland's Life

By the word `unhistorical' I mean the power, the of and of drawing a limited horizon round one's self.Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of HistoryNay, know ye not this burden hath always lainOn the devious being of woman;Yea, burdens twain;The burden of wild will and the burden of pain.Euripides, epigraph to The Devious Being, Betty RolandAutobiography, via the assumed roles of the genre, seems necessarily circumscribed by a certain context and set of discourses that signal and limit the written subject. According to Domna Stanton:Every autobiography assumes and reworks literary conventions for writing and reading. And its texture is ultimately determined by the ways in which the meaning can be signified in a particular discursive context, an (ideo)logical boundary that always already confines the speaking subject.(1)But autobiography is also fundamentally nostalgic, an act of remembering (and thus also forgetting) by a writing author who is (like the reader) irreducibly distanced from some written self, and from the context that once limited and constituted this self. So this ideological boundary, manifested in the text, is itself determined by the writing context of autobiographers, who must encounter the discourses which wrote them at an anterior time from some temporal and cultural point that is different. Autobiography is a profound example of the circularities of ideological interpellation, in which the subject appears and believes itself to be the source of the meanings of which it is an effect.(2) But in so far as this effectivity must be stretched over the mediation of history and memory, the circularity is further complicated, since the written effected subject both is and is not the writing effected subject, who must self-consciously write her or his own constitution from a position that is differently constituted. This irreducible loss of contiguity is a double split. One is that conscious split required by the autobiographer in speaking of the self as object, a split that is the prerequisite for the deployment of a `myself.' The other is an unrealised split, a contextual disparity that requires a writer to write her or his own inscription in and by ideologies and history, and in turn deny her or his own similar, contemporary limits, in order to identify with (and remember) this past and different self. It is the denial of this distancing, the pretence of coherent memory required by autobiography that, in connecting the limited subject with an apparently seamless personal history, becomes Nietzsche's art of forgetting, and allows a subject a continuous unhistorical identity which may be interpreted. Memory claims a right to its own story, an impossible self-knowledge which is an autobiography's profound self-evidence, a remembering automatic authority which embodies its own definition, eternally self-reflexive.All four volumes of Betty Roland's autobiography witness this split, and all four must deny it. As writer and life, Roland's voice claims an assertive transparency which she uses to make no apologies, positioning herself as a unifying reader and writer of her `self' who, in denying this melding function, can pretend to no conclusions, and forget her generic split. Nevertheless, the autobiography exhibits a clear gap between its subject, who is heroine and character, and therefore fallible and interpretable, and its author, who is not. The latter is, rather, an aggressively frank mouth-piece, sure of her own authority and exploiting her reputation as bohemian to maintain a revelatory impetus. It is this disparity that a reader marks, and it is this interstice which accommodates the writing process.Caviar for Breakfast is the volume of Roland's life constructed as a diary and as such it makes the best claim to denying this split, since it can pretend to an immediacy with the events and voice of its narrative. First published by Quartet in 1979, the Angus and Robertson Imprint version of 1989 is a reworking of both the original diary and the published version, but of course must camouflage this. …