Smith and Watson, "Autobiographical Acts"

Smith and Watson introduce Ken Plummer's idea about autobiographical stories involving three different kinds of people who contribute to the autobiography: The narrator, the coaxer, and the consumers or readers. They take his idea further to suggest there are many different groups involved. Coaxers, according to Plummer, is a person or institution that provokes people to tell their stories (50). Some coaxers can be more coercive than collaborative. This is important to keep in mind when examining an autobiography - how much of the story is the narrator's? How much has been deleted or changed based on the preferences of the coaxer?

Just as there are multiple types of coaxers, there are various sites of storytelling that are multilayered matrices (mostly personal, institutional, or geographical). There are four different autobiographical "I"s: The historical "I," the narrating "I," the narrated "I," and the ideological "I." The boundaries of an "I" is often shifting and flexible. It is based upon relationality to others or to the Other, and as one can imagine, there are multiple others.

There are a variety of methods that narrators use to tell their stories, and "the emplotment of autobiographical narratives can be described as a dense and multilayered intersection of the temporal and geographic" (74). Finally, consumers of autobiographies are varied and heterogeneous. This idea that the autobiography is a varied and multilayered genre is reinforced with almost each different aspect of the autobiography the authors address.

Perhaps this is not completely new to our study of the autobiography; however, I like that they remind their readers that it is important to be critical and mindful of the different dimensions involved in the genre of autobiography. Because autobiography is such a complex genre this becomes a difficult task when it is not always clear which "I" we are reading/seeing, when the chronology is fractured, when parts of the story have been cut out, and so on. The audience also changes over time and location, and the meaning can change. I think Plummer sums up this idea when he says, "always and everywhere the meanings of stories shift and sway in the contexts to which they are linked" (80).