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Russell describes the stages "in the slow abandonment of many of the beliefs that had come to him in his moment of conversion in 1901" before he was thirty. The process, he says, was as much the result of private experience as of world events; but the important point is that the change was a result of conscious reflection on experience–an experimental process that involved both principled engagement in the world and the possibility of modifying principles on the basis of experience. The beliefs I had acquired in my teens and twenties were, for the most part, never abandoned, but they certainly experienced an icy chastening, a deeper understanding, a finer tuing, so much so that in many ways they seemed like different beliefs. We all experience life differently and someone's autobiography offers opportunities to readers to help define their own experience. I hope this is the case here. The autobiographies of some artistic and not-so-artistic people, like John Ruskin for example, are almost useless as a record of their public and professional career.
I'd like to make a few remarks about how we experience memoirs, autobiographies and biographies in recent decades, at least the decades since I became a Bahá’í in the late 1950s. Until the late 1950s, as I say about the time I became a Bahá’í, films were based on a model of history which insisted that change occurred not because inequalities or unresolved social or economic unrest created tensions, but rather because uniquely gifted individuals, distributed through our history and certain strata of our population, were able to see into the future and give us innovative and improved ways to live. This view had and has some truth. The end of the 1950s marked the end of Hollywood’s time as the unchallenged purveyor of public history and this view of history in particular.
One of the big screen’s most powerful functions in its first decades was its cultivation of people’s notions of history. Soon after the excitement of early contact and diffusion in the fifties and sixties, television inspired nothing so much as a kind of docile—and dull—familiarity. This was true in Canada by the same late fifties and, in Australia, by the late sixties and increasingly as the decades advanced.
Rather than seeing history from afar and with a certain awe as we did on the big screen until, say, the early 1950s, TV shows offered us a world of lessons by seeming to talk at the viewer, by making the viewer feel personally connected to history in an intimate and startlingly casual way. “You are there,” was the tone and texture of the new wave. Unlike much of Hollywood’s escapist fare, TV also had shows which seemed designed to let spectators revel in the lowest or most deviant forms of human behavior and the quantity of that lowest denominator increased as the new millennium apporahced and was passed.
Real-life mini-dramas did not simply lay the groundwork for tabloid shows of later years; in their own time they cultivated a different set of values in the audience, and shaped an alternative template for depicting historical figures. They prepared us for a world of what might be called pathography and this pathography would characterize all biographical musings in a post-Watergate world, that is the world after the mid-seventies. In an era when watching did not mean going out to a theater as it had meant to my mother and father before I was born, a world of entertainment which was designed more like a temple or shrine, this world was transformed into a casual place for slouching on the couch like a common vegetable, potato I believe has become the parlance, watching a small box plunked down in a home where you “received” your history amidst the dull fare and pressing cares of real life which went on around the living room screen. The grandiosity and magnitude of cinematic fame and biography came to seem somewhat intimidating, even grating or foolish? The aesthetic of TV was the casual not the grandiose, the easy-going not the formal.
Until the time of my late teens, the world of biography in cinema, biopics as they were and are called, presented history’s causes as clearly explainable and just as clearly shown. Those in power, and those who possessed authority, accepted change, in the good part of the world at least, because clearly shown decisions to stay put or innovate were arrived at through democratic consensus, fueled by the common good. Ultimately, Hollywood’s version of history showed that no choice was made without the support of the ultimate arbiter: the great common sense of “the people.” Brokered through open and democratic debate, these leaders and their innovations and achievements were thus “shown” to have evolved towards the natural shapes and values for their times. Most importantly, these films suggested that change occured through the agency of individual intervention, through strong leaders. The rest of us, who were not on the same level with these exalted beings but who knew them as wives, brothers, and neighbors, could only admire or oppose them, follow their commands, be their audience and community.
If debates about history’s truth status are never resolved; if contemporary writers are mired in a diversity of views and a sea of relativism, Hollywood’s strategic claim—that their biopics “possess” the truth—and its deployment in a variety of discourses about both film and biography, is difficult to accept at the least. Surveys of people's experience of studying history tell us that they find it “dull and irrelevant.” Hollywood is guilty of contributing its own share of dullness and irrelevancy to our national pool; there are areas where historians fail, but intrepid Hollywood excels. Hollywood knows how to make people “feel connected and stay connected.” It is all part of the vast carnival which makes up American commercial amusement. The “true” story of a figure we have chosen to celebrate and condemn, has played and continues to play a significant part in determining how our culture constructs its notions of fame, and what it takes to be a celebrated figure. Thus the whole environment in which entertainment is made and experienced has changed since the time I became a Bahá’í in 1959. In the same way, the world in which fame was figured has changed as much as the capacities we have to store and retrieve our thoughts about this change.
Cinema attendance began to decline in the 1940s and with the arrival of TV the decline became serious. Cinema had deliberate connections to codes of royalty and rites of religious pageantry and worship; the movie palaces or cathedrals gave way in the 1950s and 1960s to a much less grand, though equally ambitious structure, the suburban home, that domus which sheltered the frame of television. And that medium’s take on what constituted “a great life” more closely reflected tv’s conditions than the idea of greatness constructed by the classical cinema.
It is in this media milieux of biography and autobiography that I came to write my own work and this milieux has many important implications for what I am doing and trying to do. I have alluded to these implications many times throughout this work and it is not my purpose here to review them, outline them or expatiate on them at great length. Suffice it to say that in this burgeoning world of print and electronic media my own several volumes will be but a dot on the literary landscape.
Russell says, in discussing his relationship with his first wife, Alys Smith: "I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realised that I no longer loved Alys." As Schroeder points out in his review of Russell's work, Russell often had abrupt insights, theoretical and practical, and they were often "followed by a long period of struggle, often punctuated by additional abrupt insights." He had married at 22 and the marriage began to fall apart before he was thirty. I'm not sure if I ever fell out of love with my first wife, but I tired as did she, of arguing, of differences, of many things. And my marriage, too, fell apart before I was thirty. There was that experience of abruptness, that Russell had, and a long struggle. I think with my second wife there was more of a gradual deepening of the relationship with the years, after an initial, an intense, sexual enthusiasm.
Reading Russell's work made me realize how little I commented on significant relationships outside my family. Santayana, T.S. Eliot, A.N. Whitehead and D. H. Lawrence, among other famous people, come in for some critical scrutiny in his three volume work. Perhaps, at a later date, I may return to my work and fill in the gaps of the significant others who influenced my life. "In old age," wrote Russell "one becomes more aware of what has, and what has not, been achieved. What one can further do becomes a smaller proportion of what has already been done, and this makes personal life less feverish." Perhaps in some of these less feverish moments I may have cause to reflect on many things that I have left out of this work.
The affective realm of everyday life informs my understanding, my experience, of being a Baha’i. The everyday is incorporated into the project of my autobiography by my drawing on numerous theorists and my exploration of the narrative styles of various autobiographical modes and the personalised essays that go with them. The investigations of experience that took place in the social sciences throughout the last quarter-century, since the 1980s, are part of a wider interest in the everyday which developed in sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy from the 1950s onwards--from virtually the time that the story behind my own autobiography began, associated as it has been with my Bahá’í experience. This wider interest of the social sciences, focusing as it did on ordinary people as distinct from and in relation to the grand narratives of the nation and civilization, industrialism and modernity, religion and psychology has also been called 'the politics of the everyday'. I call it the politics of my everyday.
This latter phrase refers to the power relations of everyday transactions—in the home, the workplace and other locations. The interaffective and intercorporeal detail of these 'micropolitical' transactions remains largely unremarked and invisible in official discourses. It is remarked upon in this work as it is remarked upon in society increasingly, but I shall say no more on this crucial subject here.
The quotidian is the sphere of embodied practices of habituation and interpersonal relations; it is also the mode in which is enacted the primary social relationship with the stranger.
Most of those we meet in life are, in fact, strangers. They get little direct coverage here except in a philosophical sense. The everyday has historically been defined in negative terms, that is, according to what it is not. It has been distinguished, for example, from the epic and monumentalising narratives of history and science, from the rational and cognitive processes of philosophy; from the putative rigors of scholarship; from the formality and officialdom of institutions; from the aura of the sacred, the exotic and the uncanny. Historically there has always been a hierarchical opposition between the everyday and the official discourses of public life. However, rather than being oppositional to these categories, the everyday has a determinate and supplementary relation to them, at least in this work.
The everyday is not essentially different from and other than these categories. Rather, it embodies the familiarisation and routinisation--as well as the effect--of these categories. In other words, rather than being an exclusive realm the everyday paradoxically both includes and excludes each of the many macro-categories. It is from the everyday that the ideas, ratiocination and abstract concepts constitutive, for example, of philosophy and science emerge; conversely, we can only define the everyday through the specialised discourses of science, philosophy etc. The everyday, moreover, is not reducible to simply pure or raw data from which these discourses are produced.
The everyday underlines, shapes and informs the modes of rationality which are said to transcend it. Formal and official discourses and institutions, in turn, inform and shape everyday life. In my case these words and organizations, these frameworks and institutions were: the family, a host of work places, the wider institutions of my society and, of course, the Bahá’í Faith.
The conventional playing out of the relationship between these two levels which, historically, has been hierarchised, gendered and contestatory contains, in my memoir, a new understanding of everyday life as a transformational zone in which heterogeneous forms of knowing and doing intersect. Rather than being mutually exclusive, these heterogeneous zones inform each other. Rather than being seen as redundant and trivial, insignificant and empty or rich and meaningful, as the case may be, everyday life can be thought of as a field in which the macroworld, such as that found in official, national and international domains, becomes a world, tangential and translated in an ongoing sense into the human and the everyday.
Studies of the everyday across several disciplines, especially the several social sciences, have drawn on life stories. Scholarly writing on the Bahá’í community, writing which variously deploys life story, autobiography, personalised narratives and interviews, can be seen as part of this continuum. If everyday life can be seen as the realm of the reproduction of the person, personalised experience in the Bahá’í community related through writing does the work of scrutinizing the reproduction of this experience at the microsocial level.
If everyday life can be understood as a transformational realm characterised by the intersection of heterogeneous knowledge, then the personalised, critical experience of a Bahá’í conveyed in writing can be seen as a point of intersection between everyday practices of the self, on one hand, and the discursive reproduction of specialised knowledge, on the other.
My concern in this add-on epilogue is to situate the personal turn in recent memoir writing and its related theory within its discursive, cultural and literary contexts and to speculate about the ethical work it aims to effect. My interest lies in the dialogue and exchange between the traditions of literary and scholarly production and in the rhetorical transformations of the scholarly narrative modes of writing by Baha'is about many topics. I try to resist, as far as I can, the claim that this personal or self-reflexive turn in critical writing detracts from the overall literature in either the social sciences in general or the Bahá’í Faith in particular. I have explored the idea that the discursive shift in the textualities of Bahá’í writing reorients both the subject and object in the wider, the scholarly enterprise.
My purpose in discussing the critical, autobiographical, writing of Baha'is is, therefore, to identify and situate this writing within a specific historical moment. Identities are learned at a certain historical moment and Bahá’í identities, like everone else's, emerge within specific contexts. Mine is found here and I like to think I provide the intellectual and literary tools to help others locate their identity as well.
Autobiographical and personalized modes of Baha'i writing often investigate what, after Blanchot, one could call the several insufficiencies of our lives. These modes of writing tend to be critical of the humanist notion of a self-identical subject which exists independent of others. They scrutinise instead the dependency of the self on others. We have to be on our guard lest we live on a high-octane view of ourselves, of yesterday and of history.
We've been led to believe, for example, that the Wild West was dominated by gunslingers who left a trail of bodies in their wake. In truth, Billy the Kid and Jesse James were anomalies. Cowboys were peaceful chaps and few pioneers had guns. Americans want to believe otherwise because they want the past to be exciting. The gun-toting cowboy also fits in well with America's image of itself and thus reinforces that image: he's an independent, self-willed type who took fate by the scruff of the neck and carved out a life for himself on the rough frontier. It is unsettling to believe that the West was settled by bankers, accountants, land speculators and lawyers who spent more time behind a desk than astride a horse. The diffident, those who lacked confidence and others who had serious psychological illnesses are not part of our image of the settlers of the West. In a more practical sense, the belief that the frontier was rough leads naturally to an assumption that life remains rough today and that, in order to survive, cowboy qualities remain essential. America's obsession with guns and the belief that they are essential to survival is a direct manifestation of this cowboy myth.
The same process is also at work in so many walks of life. The popular taste in historical documentaries for the unusual, the exciting or the bizarre results in a perception of history as one characterised by catastrophe, or, at the very least, by constant dramatic change; the perception and definition of politics based on the continued view of question time; the emphasis on the heroic few who gave their lives in religion, in war and in other ways and a deemphasis on the many who lived in slow and uneventful lives by producers who place greater emphasis upon the dramatic quality of a program than on its historical accuracy--all of these distortions result in our failure to appreciate the importance of mundane events and the tremendous influence that stability and tradition have in the shaping of our lives. Autobiographers have to watch out for this same tendency. Some students of literature call it the synecdotal tendency which comes to view the whole by some or one of its parts. Other students are conscious of the tendency to see life through rose-coloured glasses, a view of the whole based on the exciting episodes. The opposite tendency was one offered to us by Thomas Hardy whose pessimism was expressed by a view of life as one long tragedy punctuated by occasional episodes of happiness. However rose-coloured or however pessimistic a writer's views may be to change the perceptions of facts, of life and society, of his readers is rare indeed. I do not anticipate achieving much of this perception-altering experience, at best perhaps the occasional window of insight and, with R.D. Laing, the rare door of perception.
The difference between history and the past is that the latter is what actually happened–-including the way people lived their often mundane lives; whereas, the former, history, focuses on the extraordinary--the often bizarre events which disturb normality. Great events are like fireworks displays on the 4th of July--loud, colorful, and exciting, but very brief disturbances to the quiet calm that surrounds us. Visions of the past are distorted because bizarre events are given disproportionate attention. Since history is one of the building blocks of personal and national identity, we end up with a warped image of the past and of ourselves. This is an interesting theme about which I will say no more here.
Memory is a key issue in self-creation. Memory is in some ways but the name for one's relation to oneself, or the affect on self by self. If the everyday is the sphere of the habitual, then memory has a definitive role in the cyclical practices of quotidian realities. The everyday could be defined as the experience of modernity in the private sphere and, as such, a new mode of duration. The everyday is the locus of primary social relationships with its occasional heightened drama, its occasional taking things to histrionic extremes and a squeezing out of tears. If everyday life seems melodramatically inclined, it is perhaps due to the myth of nations like Australia and Canada being nations in adolescence, a period characterized by melodrama.
Canadian and Australian cultural identity has long evaded definition. So too has its representation in literary works. Attempts to determine a true Canadiana or Australiana peaked in literary criticism circles in the 1970s, not coincidentally alongside an upsurge in Canadian and Australian political nationalism. Common themes were identified, such as isolation, wilderness, and the Great White North in Canada and isolation, silence and relationships in Australia. These motifs, it was decided, were true reflections of a uniquely "Canadian" or "Australian" experience. Not all texts, however, fell so easily into these analytical slots. Unlikely associations were forged between dissimilar texts linked only by the citizenship of their authors. Many Canadian and Australian texts resisted such simple classification, exposing the failure of imposed homogeneity on a body of diverse work. "Canadian" and "Australian" may be convenient identifiers, but they are unreliable and, for me, outdated. The undefined or even defined Canadian or Australian identity are for me untrustworthy qualifiers. My ability to overcome them makes them both unimportant and important in another way.
