The Read: Susanna Egan, Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt and Identity in Autobiography
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
A fairly long time ago, I got extremely interested in famous cases of imposture (or fraudulent claims about personal experience). I’ve kept an eye on the issue ever since, so I was extremely keen to read this book when I heard about it.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. I wasn’t conscious on picking it up that it is highly engaged with literary criticism that focuses on autobiography—it’s a very rich guide to disciplinary conversations about autobiography as a genre—but it also has a lot to say that has broader or interdisciplinary implications.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
If I get back into this topic myself—I have a draft of an essay that needs a lot of freshening up, but maybe?—this book will be a major touchstone for anything I might try to say.
I could imagine reading it in a class on microhistory or a broader class on historical methodology.
Quotes
“When publishers pull the fraudulent memoir in order to insert a notice or to remarket the work as fiction, they are dealing only with lawsuits or threats of lawsuits. However, like mud flung during a political skirmish, the charge of imposture sticks and affects understanding of the book.”
“Particular times and places are sensitive to particular identity performances…impostures are topical and timing is key to their success.”
“The imposter depends on essentialist mythologies of identity and authorship. To this end, the imposter adopts a single position in his narrative, as distinct from a continuous ground of identity. Where human experience and even the most naive life stories tend to include uncertainties and blurred edges, this identity has one uncomplicated meaning, inviting an uncomplicated response.”
“Autobiographical imposters perform a helpless or devalued identity for the benefit of those with power, inviting sympathy and identification.”
“I note the very central role that autobiographers have come to play in popular culture in the West, introducing to my friends and neighbors the newly acceptable reality of lives beyond our ken and moments in history that we had previously ignored. However, because this information is apparently personal and therefore vivid, seeking a personal identification and response, it deflects analysis and criticism.”
“Even today, friends and colleagues have wished me happy riding when I say I am working on Native imposture.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
My own interest in this topic was substantially focused on cases of racial imposture (pre-Dolezal) and how it was that white authors were able in so many cases to persuasively write memoirs and autobiographies in which they pretended to be Native American, Black, Latino, and so on. Egan is really perceptive in how she thinks through this exact issue, and I am really appreciative of the framework she creates for thinking about this particular history of autobiographical fraud. She puts a lot of things together: the way that print culture retains a sense of authority and trustworthiness, the extent to which audiences for impostures of this kind (generally white and Western) affirm autobiographies that tell them what they already think they know about non-white subjects (but also desperately want to have further affirmation about), the way that general techniques for imposture and fraud get deployed to particular effect in this specific kind of case, and a good deal more. Chapter Four is great especially—it deals with Grey Owl, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Little Tree, and then in the mix, with a lot of sensitivity, the issues surrounding Equiano’s autobiography.
The thing that drew me to this topic all those years ago was a thought that educated, self-styled cosmopolitan, upper middle-class Western readers have very particular hunger to consume representations of the experiences of others—that it is important to their entire worldview and ethos to be able to speak confidently about what it is like to be a person very unlike themselves. (I’m not mocking it—it’s part of an ethical commitment to the version of pluralism that a lot of folks in this mindset are trying to advocate and inhabit.) I think it turns out that so much of what we (because I am surely in this set of readers) know about the world is mediated by print rather than direct observation and experience and thus it also turns out that this is all that we have when it comes to knowing about difference, diversity, etc.—and thus that it is easy in many ways for a practiced reader of this kind to flip over and mimic what they’ve read in order to create a fraudulent autobiographical representation. Egan has a lot of very subtle and specific observations that track along these lines—I found it very stimulating to read in this sense in particular.
Egan also has a lot of interesting things to say about the different ways that autobiographical frauds come undone: investigations by readers or journalists, close readings that reveal contradictions within the text, accidental discoveries in archives, the author exposing themselves or drawing attention to their fraud purposefully or accidentally, etc. There’s an interesting difference between autobiographical frauds who are themselves (James Frey) and frauds who are pretending to be someone completely different, since in the latter case, the author has to remain secretive—no book tours, no public appearances, no interviews on Oprah.
There’s also the interesting question throughout that Egan (and other literary critics who study autobiography) returns often, which is how these texts would be read (or ignored) if they coded themselves as fiction from the outset—which also makes me think that an interesting mirror (of the “through a glass darkly” sort) would be works of fiction that use fiction to get away with telling a basically true autobiographical narrative that would provoke legal attacks if it were proclaimed as true. (Autofiction being only the latest turn in that genre.)
There’s also tremendous historiographical and theoretical depth in how Egan discusses fraud in general in print—this is one of those books that you’d want to use as an entry point to writing about any particular case or in reference to this subject matter overall—it’s a very erudite book, in a very readable way.