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LitNet Akademies Jaargang 9(2), Augustus 2012
the lyrical “I” in the poems and the autobiographical “I” of the poet add to the interpretation
of Krog's poems as autobiographical and thus more distressing for readers who consider such
themes taboo. In this article the autobiographical elements, as understood by the
“autobiographical pact”, in Krog's poetry are investigated, as well as various language and
thematic taboos. Philippe Lejeune's (1995) term autobiographical pact indicates the (mostly)
implicit autobiographically embedded code, or autobiographical elements in a text, that
correspond to the poet or author. When poets embed such elements in their work it is an
invitation to the reader to interpret their work on more than just an artistic level – it is an
invitation to an autobiographical reading. Since poems do not reflect autobiographical
features equally, and in some instances autobiographical markers are more disguised than in
others, I distinguish between four categories: direct, indirect, general and universal. For the
purpose of this article I focus only on directly and indirectly autobiographical poems. The
direct variant contains names or place names that link to the poet; while poems which gain an
autobiographical dimension when background knowledge of the poet's life is taken into
account are referred to as indirectly autobiographical poems. There are many nuances in this
category, because of poetic licence and the indeterminacy of facts.
Lejeune admits that instead of a definition of autobiography which excludes poetry, he
should rather have refined the focus:
I should have designated as the center of the present system this tension between
referential transparency and aesthetic pursuit […] that on both sides of a point of
balance, there existed a continuous gradation of text going, on one side, toward the
banality of the curriculum vitae, and on the other, toward pure poetry. At the two
extremities of the spectrum, the autobiographical contract, for opposite reasons, is
found to lose its credibility. (Lejeune 1995:128, my emphasis)
In this explanation the core issue of poetic autobiographical writings emerges: the tension
between referential transparency and aesthetic pursuit. It is ironic that the artistic aspect,
which predominantly receives preference in poetry, principally contributes to the difficulty of
the analysis of autobiographical poems. This is understandable, as poetry is built on a
tradition of aesthetics. Lejeune argues sensibly that the two extreme poles of the spectrum,
pure poetry and pure autobiography, are where the autobiographical pact loses credibility.
The autobiographical pact is based on the use of proper names or variants thereof that link
firstly with the name on the cover, secondly with the autobiographical first person in the
poems, and thirdly by the transfer of the truth, directly or indirectly present or even absent in
some cases (cf. Lejeune's prose theory 1995:14–6). Different readings of a given text and
vastly varying interpretations of the autobiographical pact can coexist. If at least two of the
three requirements of the autobiographical enterprise, namely the link between the poet and
the lyrical “I” and the inclusion of varying forms of the proper name, are present in the text, it
is an indication that the poet most likely wishes her work to be read as autobiographical. In
such cases the lyrical “I” is interpreted as the autobiographical “I”. The third requirement of
honesty or "truth" is a subjective representation which is largely not scientifically verifiable
(cf. Lejeune 1995:20–1).
Compared with the well-developed theory of the autobiographical genre in prose form
relatively little has been published on the theory of autobiographical poetry. I build on
Lejeune's autobiographical theory with my classification of poems in four categories. For
these distinctions I coin the following terms: directly autobiographical, indirectly
autobiographical, universal and general poems.
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