Approaching the Auto/Biographical Turn: The First International Conference on Auto/Biography, University of Peking, June 21-24, 1999

Report by Margaretta Jolly (University of Exeter)

Hosted at Peking University, Beijing, this four-day marathon conference in auto/biography brought together a larger number of Chinese and Western auto/biography enthusiasts than have probably ever before met. It was initiated by Zhao Baisheng, who is Director of the Center for World Auto/Biography at Peking University and President of the Chinese Foreign Biography Society, two organizations in China which are pioneering the field here. The cultural exchanges, both academic and personal, made the conference an unforgettable experience, despite the obviously staggering amount of work we Westerners caused to our hosts, as language, money, food, travel, and phoning all required extensive translation and rushing around in the pulsing heat of Beijing in June.

The conference provided a unique opportunity for developing cross-cultural perspectives on Chinese and Western work in the field. Out of 74 papers and 12 plenary presentations, these conclusions can be drawn:

1. The Chinese papers were much more concerned than the Western ones with the question of authenticity, and the vexed division between historical, fictional and autobiographical genres. Different approaches to the question were evident – ranging from a staunchly conservative assertion by Sang Fengkang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) that 'Biography Should Be Written as Being True and Real' to an extremely honed linguistic analysis of how epistemic modality in autobiographical writing serves to enhance the credibility of an account. (Epistemic modality, Li Zhanzi reminded us, is the group of words such as 'perhaps', 'it seemed to me'.) If there was a consensus amongst these different attitudes, it was that Chinese life writing has been too dominated by its historiographical functions in the past, and should much more confidently appropriate the techniques of fiction to create more psychologically orientated accounts.
2. Many of the Chinese speakers were also concerned to assert that there were strong differences between Chinese and Western life writing practices and traditions. The tradition of biography as the historical records of imperial dynasties has been accompanied by a much more nationalistic, often eulogistic mode, in which biography has flourished as official history but autobiography not much at all. (A fascinating comparison to the nationalist uses of biography was Tel-Aviv University scholar Michael Keren's paper on Ben-Gurion's biography and Israeli historiography.) This was interestingly developed in terms of the parallel effects of Taoism and Buddhism, (and implicitly, Communism), that are 'anti-autobiographical' in idealising the abandonment or submission of the individual self. Wang Dun (China Ocean Shipping Weekly) offered a comparison between 'Chinese and Western biographical mentalities' in terms of the difference between Chinese scroll painting, where figures are subsumed by landscape, and Western historical portraiture, where the individual looms large.
3. The Western papers seemed more eclectic, although this may have been my own difficulties in understanding the nuances of the Chinese ones, despite heroic efforts to make their work accessible to us through English translations and summaries. (Some of our papers were even more heroically translated into Chinese by a number of visible and invisible students and English lecturers.) Philippe Lejeune gave a witty defense of his assertion that autobiography operates with a 'truth' pact that creates a distinctly different writer-reader relationship than that of fiction (whatever the hardline deconstructionists say), a position possibly compatible with much of the Chinese research. He also reminded us that life writing is an everyday means of self-assertion, and one that should be defended in non-academic contexts and terms. This seems to be a stronger issue in France, where diary-writing for example, appears to be seen as a more shameful habit than in Anglo-Saxon countries. Judith Coullie movingly explored auto/biography in the new post-apartheid South Africa. Paul John Eakin's riveting plenary drew on developmental psychology to argue that early childhood dialogue with caretakers provides the narrative foundations for the construction of identity through time, and ultimately, adult autobiography. Other papers looked at collaborative autobiography, collective biography, disability and life writing, lesbian desire and gender in diaries and letters, Romantic autobiography, agency, Sylvia Plath, feminist biography, women's narratives of flight (special alert, Amelia Earhart!) and much more.
4. This greater range than the Chinese papers obviously testifies to the academic institutionalisation of the field in the West, where questions of auto/biographical truth have diversified into studies of the many functions that different genres and disciplines concerned with life story can serve. (It is striking that a significant number of the Chinese academics were working within English and American literature departments.) Nevertheless, two general points might be significant. First, was the emphasis the Westerners put on private and ephemeral forms such as diaries, letters, oral history and autobiographical research processes. Does this represent the greater reach of the Western academy? Or the greater permeation of autobiographical sensibilities throughout Western culture, (more diaries and letters are written, kept, valued)? Or even that a greater range of people consider themselves to be, as well as are being considered to be, writers?
5. Secondly, Western scholars focused on hybrid as opposed to national identities, particularly those produced through migration (several focusing on Chinese-North American exchanges). Again, we could profitably assess how this reflects the historical fact of China's relative isolation over the last century, compared to migration flows elsewhere, as against 'modernist' versus 'postmodernist' notions of identity. Notably, Anand Patil, from Goa University in India spoke of Dalit lower-caste women's autobiographies in post-colonial terms much more familiar to Western academics in the field.

The conference, cemented through a trip to the Great Wall and a home-brewed karaoke at the farewell Banquet, has produced plans to continue this valuable international dialogue through a list-serve.