Unsettling Auto/Biography: Genre Transgression in Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces (original) (raw)

Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces (1996) dramatizes the after-effects of the Holocaust to investigate the interconnections among trauma, memory, and history. Her attempt to make sense of and articulate the unrepresentable horrors of the Nazi genocide of Jews has been widely recognized, and many critics acknowledge the contributions the novel has made to Holocaust literature. While a good deal of critical attention has been paid to its thematic concerns, the ways in which Fugitive Pieces achieves genre transgression remain relatively under-explored. Consisting of a prefatory note and two separate but related autobiographies, this novel appears to be quite uncomplicated in form. However, despite the absence of obvious metafictional or postmodern narrative strategies, Fugitive Pieces succeeds in subverting and undermining the generic conventions of biography and autobiography. Issues such as selectivity, constructedness, contingency, and uncertainty in the writing of personal history are brought to the fore. With the creation of a "ghostwritten autobiography," Michaels challenges the supposed convention of autobiographical referentiality, blurs the distinction between biography and autobiography, and exposes the ideological assumptions that underpin both genres. This unsettling of generic boundaries has a lot to do with the author's awareness of the risks of literary exploitation of the Holocaust. This paper aims to examine how Michaels adopts simple but effective strategies to cross generic boundaries between biography and autobiography, and how self