The Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms defines ‘auto/ethnography’ as an emerging subgenre of autobiography, a life-writing practice through which writers produce hybrid narratives, that in turn combine both autobiographical and ethnographic writing techniques. An auto/ethnographer is seen to be situated ‘in, and through, a social milieu, or ethnos, that is irreducibly tied to the subject [he/she] constructs.’ In other words, auto/ethnographers recognize (self/cultural) identity’s transindividual or collective make-up, understand its ever-shifting positionality within networks of contesting ‘contact zones’ so that when the story of a self is being told it is never just a story of an alienated self. Consequently, self-presentation in auto/ethnographic narratives could resonate ‘through the representation of the subject’s historically mis- or unremembered group,’ therefore locating ‘the individual [or individuals] through a “synecdochic model”,’ where he or she accepts being a part of a collective body, ‘often one whose membership has been transmitted orally over generations.’
(The notion of a ‘synecdochic self’ (a self which is a product of a communal narrative rather than an individual, singular life-journey) has been largely tied to the study of Native American auto/biographical practices. Theorist Arnold Krupat is among the first in the field to recognize this unique feature of self-telling amidst native auto/biographers, who according to Krupat’s ‘synecdochic model’ of self-representation, not only commence their life stories with references to particular communal/tribal practices and customs, but throughout the narrativized text keep the ‘communal self-hood’ on the frontlines: the larger view, the community’s life in an through history, makes the smaller (personal) journey possible. (See Arnold Krupat, ‘Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self,’ in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. by Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 171-194, and Arnold Krupat, Ethnocentrism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)).
Cultural historian Mary Louise Pratt coined the phrase ‘contact zone’ (which seems to have become over the years inextricably tied to the proliferation and understanding of auto/ethnographic narratives), herself searching for a descriptively dynamic way to approach the study of social and personal relations amidst the intersecting frontiers of spaces marked by colonial encounters. In her work on the relationship between travel writing and colonized historical discourse, titled Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Pratt defines the ‘contact zone’ as ‘the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.’ By choosing a term (‘contact’) that is closer to linguistics than traditional historical analysis, Pratt hopes to bring into perspective the relational side to subject formation within the terrain of the colonized frontiers, therefore allowing for the production and distribution of auto/ethnographic ‘expressions’ that are ‘heterogeneous’ in structure, idiom and reception.
The term ‘auto/ethnography’ , which has been in use for the past two decades by both camps on the humanities divide, anthropologists and literary historians alike, implies more than a textual representation of auto-ethno-biographical modes of contact for and in multi-vocal settings.
According to ethnographer Deborah E. Reed Danahay, the editor of the first (and to this day, only) anthological work that examines this hybrid form of life-writing ethnography, titled Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social, ‘autoethnography’ is a boundary-crossing practice and product, simultaneously acting out the method behind the concept; as a method and a text, the act of auto/ethnographic representing fuses ‘both a postmodern ethnography, in which the realist conventions and objective observer position of standard ethnography have been called into question, and a postmodern autobiography, in which the notion of the coherent, individual self has been similarly called into question.’ Hence, Reed-Danahay endorses this ‘intersecting’ dual nature of ‘autobiographical ethnography’, which in her view could offer itself to be the perfect battle ground for questions relating to the act and practice of present-day representation (for instance, who speaks on whose behalf, how ‘authentic’ is their rendering of the represented life, and so on). As a result, whether or not the astute literary critic or social historian decide, respectfully, to stake their claim either with the autobiographic or the ethnographic side of the hybrid-form, ‘auto/ethnography’ thwarts conventional story-telling practices (of the ‘realist school’) by trespassing cultural and social boundaries, thus exerting its presence in ‘form of a self-narrative that places the self in a social context.’
The question beckons then, where in these definitions about the contours of auto/ethnographic self-telling could one find evidence to support a reading of Spalding Gray’s work, present in and behind the Swimming to Cambodia monologue, as an act of auto/ethnographic self-recovery?
For one, Gray does not belong to a historically ‘mis- or unremembered group’; moreover, he is a New England Brahmin with a ‘healthy’ bank account, a Southampton estate on the Island and a Tribeca loft in the city (in the now-trendy Lower East Village part of Manhattan). The only ‘mis-represented’ instance about his life narrative are his ‘WASP-ish features’, which in turn, contribute to the reality of him being typecast as either a professional WASP or a WASP doctor. Conversely, if we allow ourselves to part with the obviously apparent for the moment, we could begin to see Gray’s method of approaching the art of auto/performative self-recovery in contemporary media (theatre, film, TV) for what it truly is: an unassuming correlative to the narrative practices of other American auto/ethnographers, such as for example Sherman Alexie or Gerald Vizenor, two ‘postindian’ writer-activists, whose ‘trickster figures’ transpire transindividual contenders who are able to dance in-between tribal/communal practices as well as urban ‘civilities’ that are said to undermine and counter these backward traditions.
Secondly, the fact that Gray continues to work on his narratives while performing them ‘on the road’, facing different audiences each night, seeking out their guidance to help him ‘deliver his lines’, attests to his shrewd awareness of the complex nature of the ‘contact zones’ he lives out through the topography of his monologue-covered space. In that sense, the ‘recovered’ performative persona of Gray’s monologues, especially that of the Swimming to Cambodia monologue (1985, 1987), is never an autonomous self, never just another ‘perfectly ensconced’ identity. His various audiences are always present to remind him of this: there is the international cast and crew of The Killing Fields, then there are the world-wide audiences who saw and see this motion picture, sometimes accompanied by the film audiences for Jonathan Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia; next, there are those who were present during the filming of the monologue and those who have experienced the completed work afterwards, not to leave out the dedicated theatre audiences who had the chance to queue in for a live performance.
Finally, there is the vast readership associated with the published ‘text’ of the monologue’s narrative, and yet somehow the list seems to go on further. The palpability, though often times situated at varied spatial and temporal distances, of this multi-layered body of spectators, a collage of silent but not silenced voices, demands that Gray testify to his own hegemonic ‘isms’ (racism, passive colonialism, adherent economic imperialism, implicit misogyny), employing ‘an outsider looking inwards’ (and vice versa) perspective while simultaneously undermining his own ‘imbedded positionality’ in the web of postindustiralist social relations. Whether and how (for that matter) successful Gray and his performative persona are in the demanding structure that auto/ethnographic recovery imposes on the writing self is a question we can ask after having turned over all the ‘perfect moments’ of his artistic quest, in and outside the monologue’s humorously woven picaresque structure.
On to the pebbles then.
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