Leigh Gilmore’s The Limits of
Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony is a fine addition to the body
of excellent recent work in trauma studies, and is highly recommended for all
working in the mental health disciplines. However, neither the title nor
subtitle even hint at one of Gilmore’s major contributions: her intricate
analyses of, and insight into, the ways in which the legal system embodies
patriarchy and other forms of oppression and is thus imbricated with the
constitution of trauma for both males and females. The book has five chapters
in each of which a limit-case of autobiography, a case in which the canonic
criteria for autobiography are transgressed, is explored. These chapters are
framed by substantive introductory and concluding essays. The writing is
extremely fine throughout, and the book is a rich cornucopia of literary and
psychological analyses, theoretical sophistication, and interdisciplinary
connectedness; these treasures can only be suggested here.

The introduction, titled “The
Limits of Autobiography,” includes a fascinating discussion of the accusations
that Rigoberto Menchu’s memoir was falsified, and a presentation of the main
themes of the book. One of Gilmore’s aims is to challenge the “consensus that
has already developed that takes trauma as the unrepresentable to assert that
trauma is beyond language in some crucial way. Attempts to meet these
expectations [by linguistically representing trauma] generate incompatible
assertions that both metaphorize and literalize trauma.”(6). Gilmore’s goal is
to show that trauma can be and has been represented in ways other than literal
or metaphorical representation. Of particular interest to this reviewer, though
not often explicitly thematized by Gilmore, is her intention to show, contrary
to the received view, that trauma can not only be survived; rather, through
linguistic means the “sovereign self” can be subverted and the traumatized
subject radically transformed

Chapter One, “Represent Yourself”
confronts the paradoxes of autobiography, e.g., that the autobiography both
represents the author qua individual, and is representative of a genre and a
type of person. Also featured are a critique of the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation and a section on “Foucault, Pierre Riviere, and Althusser.” These
discussions subserve Gilmore’s “intention to describe an alternative
jurisdiction for the self-representation of trauma.”(43). The existing jurisdiction
is patriarchy, which has constructed these questions: “Can women tell the
truth? Do women have lives worth representing?” (21). Gilmore maintains the
limit-cases of autobiography described in the next four chapters offer “a
figure to rival the representative man”, the figure of “the knowing subject who inhabits locations
and forms of knowledge for representations of the self and trauma that refuse
the deformations of legalistic demands.”(44). 
Chapter 2 is an interpretation of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard
Out of Carolina. According to Gilmore, Allison’s Bastard, a book
about the trauma of illegitimacy in Greenville, South Carolina in the late
1950’s, “is a formal experiment in the self-representation of trauma,” which
depicts “a life that challenges the assumption, for example, that law equals
justice and that justice prevails” (48-49). In so doing, it opens up “an
alternative jurisprudence” which emerges “as the bastard daughter rewrites her
mother’s legacy”(49).

 Shot
in the Heart, interpreted in Chapter 3, is Mikal Gilmore’s dual
biography of himself and his brother, Gary Gilmore, who, notoriously, insisted
on his own execution for murder. According to Leigh Gilmore, the book shows
“how the family is embedded in a culture that makes the father’s violence both
permissible and invisible, both public knowledge and private, hence protected,
activity.” Thus, the tragic hopelessness of Gary’s life is encapsulated in his
last words: “There will always be a father.” Allison brilliantly summarizes her
view of Mikal Gilmore’s book as written “to dismantle the epistemological
privilege of just about everybody over Gary Gilmore and to reinscribe his
wounded brother as the vector through whom interpretation must flow” (95).

 In Chapter 4, Gilmore views the four books published by Jamaica
Kincaid in 1983, 1986, 1991, and 1996 to be a serial autobiography. Jamaica
Kincaid, a West Indian woman, born in Antigua in 1949, is, as Gilmore points
out, preoccupied with both “the mother daughter relationship as a site of
enigmatic trauma” and “the legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean…” (102).
Gilmore asks, “…what of the antagonistic relationship between law (as
official discourse) and truth (as unofficial and resistant discourse) that
structures the self-representation of the colonized?”(103). Regarding the mother-daughter traumatic
bond, Gilmore presents an extended discussion of Julia Kristeva’s views on
abjection. Yet, even while struggling to free herself from her intensely
ambivalent relation to her mother, “The colonial system aims toward a different
end. Annie [Kincaid’s protagonist] is to become an object in a narrative in
which she is made to know her place in the colonial order as strategically and
necessarily marginalized” (112).

Jeanette Winterston’s Written
on the Body (Chapter 5) is Gilmore’s final example of a limit-case of
autobiography that opens up new possibilities for the representation of self
and trauma. Winterston’s book “features an ungendered, unnamed narrator who
falls in love with a married woman.” Further, “no gender references are
permitted about the …narrator who nonetheless describes her or his sexual
adventures with men and women in some detail.” The narrator refuses the
patriarchal regime of names and this unmet expectation “reveals that identity is
a function of representation which is thoroughly imbricated in the juridical”
(124). For Gilmore, Winterston’s refusal of names for purposes of identity
including sexual identity does not sidestep representation of the narrator’s
traumatic past and is an act of resistance to “how the enforced linking of
names to kinship structures makes legally binding familial ties out of
arrangements such as marriage, and through this construction legalizes acts
that would be crimes were they committed against nonkin” (138). In conclusion,
Gilmore writes, insightfully and courageously, “ ‘Sex’ as it prefigures
‘gender’ and the autobiographical body for women is not primarily, then, a
lived construction so much as a nonlived obstruction” (142).

Gilmore’s concluding chapter is
called “The Knowing Subject and an Alternative Jurisprudence of Trauma.” Here,
Gilmore is most explicit regarding the influence of Foucault on her work. For
Gilmore, the books she has interpreted are ones in which the writer “undertook
the ethical project Foucault adumbrated as the ‘care of the self,’ which he
linked with the techniques and practices…that make it possible for one to
become other than what one is [ “On ecrit pour etre autre que ce qu’on est,” a
quotation from Foucault previously cited by Gilmore]”(145) In her concluding
sentence, Gilmore is again most explicit regarding the necessity of
transcending trauma through self and world transformation: “The knowing self in
contrast to the sovereign or representative self does not ask who am I, but how
can the relations in which I live, dream, and act be reinvented through
me?”(148)

The Limits of Autobiography is an extremely fine book that
stands on its own and deserves wide readership and study. As mentioned above,
this reviewer is inclined to look favorably on a work that presents, as
Gilmore’s study definitely does present, new ways of showing that trauma can be
not merely survived by transcended in acts of self-transformation.
Nevertheless, it seems to me (this is not a criticism of the book, which is the
book that Gilmore, not I, wished to write) that Gilmore’s important, indeed
invaluable insights would be more pregnantly realized in a philosophical and
psychotherapeutic framework that thematized the dialectic of self and subject
in the context of developmental theory of gender and intersubjectivity (the
work of Jessica Benjamin, is in my view the most relevant) and in the context
of a phenomenology of the life-world (Fanon and Husserl).

© 2002
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat

Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Ph.D., M.S.W., Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy,
Lewis University, Romeoville, IL ,
Clinical
Social Worker, private practice in psychodynamic psychotherapy, Chicago, IL, Member Executive Board, Assoc. for
the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry

Categories: Philosophical, MentalHealth

Tags: Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Trauma