Making, taking, and faking lives: the ethics of collaborative life writing

Style, Summer, 1998 by G. Thomas Couser

Whose book is this?

- Malcolm X

Although issues of literary ethics may arise in any genre, ethical dilemmas seem to be built into collaborative life writing in ways peculiar to it.(1) With fiction, ethical criticism is usually concerned with issues of meaning and of reception: in the simplest terms, does the text have beneficial or harmful effects on its audience? But nonfiction generally and life writing specifically raise other concerns. Indeed, although Wayne Booth limits his scope to fiction in The Company We Keep, he asks key questions that are perhaps even more compelling for life writing than for fiction: e.g., "What Are the Author's Responsibilities to Those Whose Lives Are Used as 'Material'" (130), "What Are the Author's Responsibilities to Others Whose Labor Is Exploited to Make the Work of Art Possible?" (131), and "What Are Responsibilities of the Author to Truth?" (132). With collaborative life writing, especially, ethical concerns begin with the production of the narrative and extend to the relation of the text to the historical record of which it forms a part.

Ethical issues may be particularly acute in collaborative autobiography because it occupies an awkward niche between more established, more prestigious forms of life writing. On one side is solo autobiography, in which the writer, the narrator, and the subject (or protagonist) of the narrative are all the same person; at least, they share the same name.(2) On the other side is biography, in which the writer and narrator are one person, while the subject is someone else.(3) In the middle, combining features of the adjacent forms-and thus challenging the common-sense distinction between them - is as-told-to autobiography, in which the writer is one person, but the narrator and subject are someone else.(4) The ethical difficulties of collaborative autobiography are rooted in its nearly oxymoronic status; the single narrative voice - a simulation by one person of the voice of another - is always in danger of breaking, exposing conflicts of interest that are not present in solo autobiography. Although the process by which the text is produced is dialogical, the product is monological; the two voices are permitted to engage in dialogue only in supplementary texts - forewords and afterwords - and even there, the dialogue is managed and presented by one party, the nominal author. Insofar as the process is admitted into the narrative, then, it is exclusively in supplementary texts, and generally as a chapter of the writer's life. Though critics are not in a position to mandate disclosure of the process, fuller disclosure is likely to reflect a more ethical collaboration; such disclosure is certainly rhetorically effective, insofar as it suggests that the nominal author has nothing to hide.

Autobiographical collaborations are rather like marriages and other domestic partnerships(5): partners enter into a relationship of some duration, they "make life" together, and they produce an offspring that will derive traits from each of them. Each partner has a strong interest in the fate of that offspring, which will reflect on each in a different way. Much of this is true of any collaborative authorship, of course; with autobiography, however, the fact that the joint product is a life story raises the stakes - at least. for the subject. It is easy enough to articulate ethical principles that should govern the production of collaborative autobiography. The fundamental one might be a variant of the Golden Rule: do unto your partner as you would have your partner do unto you. Thus, autobiographical collaborations should be egalitarian; neither partner should abuse or exploit the other. Given the subject's stake in the textual product, a corollary principle would be that the subject should always have the right to audit and edit the manuscript before publication. As we shall see, however, in some circumstances, this is easier said than done.

The vast majority of collaborative life stories result from partnerships that are voluntary, amicable, and mutually beneficial. Still, there is a thin and not always clear line between making, taking, and faking the life of another person in print. Co-authoring another's life can be a creative or a destructive act, a service or a disservice, an act of homage or of appropriation. The potential for abuse lies partly in something the term itself tends to elide: the process, though cooperative, is usually not in the literal sense a matter of collaborative writing (which has its own problems). Rather, some of the difficulty comes from the disparity between the contributions of the two partners. Obviously, there are different kinds and degrees of collaboration, but, in most cases, one member supplies the "life" while the other provides the "writing." The extent to which this is an oversimplification of the process depends on a number of things. I do not mean to endorse a model under which "writing" is taken too literally; as contemporary rhetorical theory insists, in some sense the entire process of composition, from initiation and invention to copyediting, is "writing." Nor do I mean to imply that the "writer" is entirely dependent on the subject for the "story"; most writers are drawn to their subjects by previous knowledge of them, and most supplement interviews with independent research. Nor do I mean to identify "form" exclusively with "writing" and "content" with "life" or to imply that the "writing" does not affect the content; any mediation carries its own message(s). Indeed, as we shall see, mediation can be a source of ethical problems, especially in cases of cross-cultural collaboration; for example, when the implications of the form are unavailable to the subject, there is the danger of misrepresentation that will go undetected by him or her. Ultimately, however, no matter how involved the subject is at each stage of the project, the partners bring different skills and contributions to the final project; their labor is of different kinds, and most of the wording of the final text is attributable to the "writer." In the final analysis, then, the partners' contributions are not only different, but incommensurate, entities - on the one hand, lived experience mediated by memory; on the other, the labor of eliciting, recording, inscribing, and organizing this material.