Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Fragmentary Life Writing and the Resistance to Narrative and Identity

Authors

  • Wojciech Drąg University of Wrocław

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.09.14

Keywords:

fragmentation, life writing, experimental literature, narrative identity

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur declares that “being-entangled in stories” is an inherent property of the human condition. He introduces the notion of narrative identity—a form of identity constructed on the basis of a self-constructed life-narrative, which becomes a source of meaning and self-understanding. This article wishes to present chosen instances of life writing whose subjects resist yielding a life-story and reject the notions of narrative and identity. In line with Adam Phillips’s remarks regarding Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), such works—which I refer to as fragmentary life writing—emerge out of a profound scepticism about any form of “fixing” oneself and confining the variety and randomness of experience to one of the available autobiographical plots.

The primary example of the genre is Joe Brainard’s I Remember (1975)—an inventory of approximately 1,500 memories conveyed in the form of radically short passages beginning with the words “I remember.” Despite the qualified degree of unity provided by the fact that all the recollections come from the consciousness of a single person, the book does not arrange its content in any discernible order—chronological or thematic; instead, the reader is confronted with a life-in-fragments. Although individual passages could be part of a coming-of-age, a coming-out or a portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man narrative, Brainard is careful not to let any of them consolidate. An attempt at defining the characteristics of the proposed genre will be followed by an indication of more recent examples of fragmentary life writing and a reflection on its prospects for development

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Wojciech Drąg, University of Wrocław

Wojciech Drąg is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław. He is the author of Revisiting Loss: Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (2014) and co-editor of War and Words: Representations of Military Conflict in Literature and the Media (2015), Spectrum of Emotions: From Love to Grief (2016) and The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction (2019). In 2018, he received The Kosciuszko Foundation fellowship at the University of Utah.

References

Ashbery, John. “Joe Brainard.” Joe Brainard: A Retrospective. Ed. Constance M. Lewallen. Berkeley: Berkeley Art Museum, 2001. 1–2. Print.
Google Scholar

Auster, Paul. Introduction. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. Library of America, 2012. E-Book.
Google Scholar

Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Print.
Google Scholar

Brainard, Joe. I Remember. New York: Granary, 2001. Print.
Google Scholar

Burnham, Gregory. “Subtotals.” Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity. Ed. David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman. Portland: Hawthorne, 2014. 207–08. Print.
Google Scholar

Coe, Jonathan. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson. London: Picador, 2004. Print.
Google Scholar

Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Print.
Google Scholar

Epstein, Andrew. “‘To the Memory of Joe Brainard’: Kent Johnson’s I Once Met.” Newyorkschoolpoets.wordpress.com. New York School Poets 20 Aug. 2015. Web. 29 Jun. 2018.
Google Scholar

Fitch, Andrew. “Blowing up Paper Bags to Pop: Joe Brainard’s Almost- Autobiographical Assemblage.” Life Writing 6.1 (2009): 77–95. Print.
Google Scholar

Kacandes, Irene. “Experimental Life Writing.” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Ed. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale. London: Routledge, 2012. 380-92. Print.
Google Scholar

Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Roland Barthes, Autobiography, and the End of Writing.” The Georgia Review 35.2 (1981): 381–98. Print.
Google Scholar

Laing, Olivia. Rev. of I Remember, by Joe Brainard. Guardian.co.uk. Guardian 7 Apr. 2013. Web. 30 Jun. 2018.
Google Scholar

Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Print.
Google Scholar

Padgett, Ron. Afterword. I Remember. By Joe Brainard. New York: Granary, 2001. 169–76. Print.
Google Scholar

Phillips, Adam. Foreword. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. By Roland Barthes. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. v–xv. Print.
Google Scholar

Ricoeur, Paul. “Narrative Identity.” Philosophy Today 35.1 (1991): 73–81. Print.
Google Scholar

Simms, Karl. Paul Ricoeur. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Google Scholar

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Print.
Google Scholar

Weissman, Gary. “‘I Feel Like I Am Everybody’: Teaching Strategies for Reading Self and Other in Joe Brainard’s I Remember.” Reader 60 (2010): 71–102. Print.
Google Scholar

Zabłocki, Krzysztof. “Od tłumacza.” I Remember. By Joe Brainard. Kraków: Lokator, 2014. 221–33. Print.
Google Scholar

Downloads

Published

2019-11-23

How to Cite

Drąg, W. (2019). Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Fragmentary Life Writing and the Resistance to Narrative and Identity. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, (9), 223–236. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.09.14