Embedded Documents and the Novel as Staged Document

THE EXPLICIT AND EXTENDED NARRATIVE of a life, either written or oral, presented by a parental figure is not the only way of embodying a life in a text—of creating biography. We can conceive of a “written life” not only as a single long-form narrative told or written by a person, but also as the summation of texts and documents that accrue to that person and the representation of his or her life story. The texts themselves bear witness to the events of a protagonist's life, and they also circulate in ways that follow the structures of transmission that I have identified as part of processes of testation. Although they may no longer be strictly genealogical, they retain the bond-forming and message-imparting functions, along with conditions of successful transmission such as self-reflection and receptivity on the part of the receiver, and as such they are still related to more narrowly generational structures. This type of circulation to some degree mirrors historical writing practices: scholars emphasize the extent to which bourgeois culture around 1800—that is, not only the precise group in which the conception of the nuclear family that is relevant to this study appears, but also the group whose literacy made up the greatest change in the literary public—was a written one. Letters, in great quantity, were read aloud, copied, and circulated far beyond their original recipients (this was not a betrayal of confidence; the writers expected as much), and there was a veritable profusion of journals and diaries among both sexes. Novels represent an important part of this culture—both in their portrayal of inner emotions of characters and in their reflexive thematization of the act of writing, they stage and exemplify written culture to a generation of bourgeois men and women. To a certain extent, text as such is the legacy of this culture, carefully developed, represented, and preserved within its novels.