CARSON McCULLERS’S UNFINISHED AUTOBIOGRAPHY
CARSON McCULLERS’S UNFINISHED AUTOBIOGRAPHY

– A Document of the 20th Century Evolution or Involution of Women’s Position in American Intellectual Élite

Summary/Abstract: McCullers’s autobiography is somewhat like her life, i.e. fragmentary, unlike the Rousseau classic pattern of a chronological retrospective ordering. Her 'illuminations' have a complete life of their own: they take 'months or years' to form and some more months and years until a new writing is completed. These illuminations are sense-giving. They grant the author a new temporal dimension. They render unity and coherence to the otherwise disjointed storylines of her life events. Her unfinished autobiography, as her most subjective document, is the very source of sense-giving actions. As for us, with her memoir, it is exactly the open unfinishedness reminiscent of Scheherazade’s stories, that keeps us reading. The stream and enactment of illuminations, precisely because they are time-delayed and not instantaneous (albeit in a writing creased with lightnings) retrieve the ability of storytelling to give healing presence to former realities, through self-discovery, while navigating through the memory of tragedies and gentle moments.

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