This year I am writing an honours dissertation in English literature.
The topic of my dissertation is the function of autobiography in works of fiction.
Pretty much, I'm writing on a novel, but a novel that was inspired by real experiences in the author's life.
The book in question is called Nightwood, and it was written before World War 2, by a woman named Djuna Barnes.
It's the story of her 10-year love affair with the artist Thelma Wood, mixed in with the story of a faux baron, an unqualified doctor, and the rise of fascism in Europe.
Barnes was so scarred by her relationship with Wood that she tried to make sense of it and come to terms with it by putting it down in words and crafting it into a work of narrative fiction.
To me, this is one of the most interesting parts of autobiography in whatever form it takes.
Humans are always trying to put our lives into a narrative arc.
It seems that because we are capable of looking back at what has happened in our lives, and forward to what these past actions might trigger in our lives that we are tempted to try to find meaning in everything that we have done or might do.
There is a theory that autobiographical and biographical works can never be accurate or truthful representations of what lives actually were, because life events and experiences are always mediated by time and perspective.
Our understanding of the significance of an experience is always going to be different in the immediate aftermath as opposed to how we might understand it some time in the future.
Also, when writing a life story, there is a tendency to pick out certain events that one might consider to be important, or more important than other events.
This relies upon an understanding that certain actions carry more weight than others (probably a fair understanding), but also that there is some greater purpose to certain actions.
Or, that those certain actions are what carried you to a certain point.
Retrospect is capable of twisting almost anything so that it fits the narrative that you see your life to have taken.
Retrospect almost fits the end goal in to the beginning of your life story, making out that you always had something to work towards when that might not necessarily have always been the case.
I haven't written an autobiography because I haven't done anything worth writing about, but I have definitely tried to work out where and why things have gone right or wrong, or why they might have happened.
I suppose it's just our way of making sense of what is going on around us.
Barnes was a journalist. She was used to looking at single events and working out their significance, so she did the same with her novel.
She took a situation that she couldn't make sense of, because ultimately it probably had no rhyme or reason, and she condensed it down to its most essential parts and made something out of it that hopefully brought her some measure of comfort.
To my mind, narrative brings me both comfort and discomfort.
If you can trace a line back through something to work it out then you can work out either what you did right, and do it again, or work out what you did wrong and subsequently wish that you had done something differently.
It's also disappointing when one thing doesn't necessarily lead to another, but I guess that's also why life can be exciting and why we are so preoccupied with movies and books and anything else that explains things in a nice little linear arc.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
