Panel: Beyond the Autobiographical Pact: New Approaches to the Work of
Philippe LeJeune
Copanelists: Susanna Egan and Julie Rak
In his many writings on autobiography, Philippe Lejeune often noted the hostility shown by historians to this form of first-person writing. The very qualities that attracted Lejeune to autobiography—the imaginative strategies by which autobiographers shape their stories, their choices of what to include and what to omit, the interplay they permit between past and present—are frequently cited by historians as reasons to deny such texts the status of reliable sources.
Lejeune has now turned his attention to a very different kind of first-person text: the personal journal or diary. In contrast to their attitude toward autobiographies, historians have always regarded diaries as eminently respectable sources. We rely on them to give us precisely dated evidence of their authors’ actions and thoughts. Rather than foreshadowing a reconciliation between Lejeune and the discipline of history, however, this relocation of Lejeune’s interests threatens to widen the gap. By demonstrating the multiplicity of authorial strategies that can underlie the seemingly simple text of a diary, Lejeune’s approach converts these innocent “ego-documents” into complex cultural and aesthetic objects. Confronted with the results of Lejeune’s explorations of the dark continent of diary-writing, historians will be forced to rethink some of their fundamental assumptions about these highly prized sources.
Jeremy Popkin is the T. Marshall Hahn, Jr. professor of history at the University of Kentucky and the author of History, Historians and Autobiography (U of Chicago P, 2005), as well as several books on French history. He is interested in the implications of Philippe Lejeune’s work on first-person writing for historians, who frequently use autobiographies and diaries as source material and also sometimes write such texts themselves.