‘In other people’s mouths’:
Dialogic Interaction in Rick Moody’s The Black
Veil: A Memoir with Digressions
A word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language . . .
but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s
contexts, serving other people’s intentions.
—Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”
All biographies like all autobiographies like all narratives tell
one story in the place of another.
—Helene Cixous, rootprints
Shortly after the publication of The Black Veil: A Memoir with
Digressions, Rick Moody made this observation: “Literature is on a dialectic that
has fiction and nonfiction on either end. Together, they form one narrative [and
yet] The Black Veil will not be shelved with my [fiction] which is incredibly
irritating to me. I want people to read it in the context of everything else I’ve
done” (DeMott 73). Moody’s “irritation” in a sense directs us to an idea touched
upon by Mikhail Bakhtin: that just as literary works are shelved according to
their topic or genre, we are taught to read literary works within the boundaries of
their categorization. Fiction, nonfiction, literature, popular novels, plays, poems,
even grocery lists are all ways of ordering the written word and preparing us for
what we are about to read. This seems to go without saying.1 But by classifying
the writing (as we do), by embodying different works within the designation
“genre” (as we do), we, as Thomas Kent has aigued, “begin to understand the
kind of interpretation necessary in order to make sense of the text” (301). Thus
we have before us, imprinted on the cover and the spine of the work, a kind of
literary short-hand—a technique to steer us away from the dangerous rocks of
randomness and towards the already clear and highly navigational waters of
coherence and understanding.
Traditional notions of “autobiography” place it firmly within the borders
and boundaries of non-fiction, sometimes “literary non-fiction.” The reader reads
an autobiography, presumably, because she has an interest in the person’s “lifestory”—“written by himself’—and assumes that the recollection and recounting
will be truthful.2 Truthfulness is the guarantor, the promise, and the assurance
that the reader will not be tricked or fed falsehoods in the place of reality. Indeed,
as the theorist Philippe Lejeune has argued, the truthfulness of autobiography is
established by the condition that there must be “identity between the author, the