Gallery of self-portraits

The self-representations of the subjects given in answer to our questions follow recurrent narrative forms. The analysis of the most widespread stereotypes takes us back to collective identities, and thereby throws light on the hidden side of working-class culture. The commonplace elements in the self-representations are taken to reveal cultural attitudes, visions of the world and interpretations of history, including the role of the individual in the historical process.

‘Memory of self’ does not, then, refer to the psychological aspects that are at the root of self-representations (the psychological dimension is always taken to be the framework to which the narration in the last analysis returns, but is never directly dealt with in this account). Instead, it refers to the transmission and elaboration of stories handed down and kept alive through small-scale social networks – stories which can be adapted every so often in a variety of social interactions, including the interview.

Oral autobiographies can register commonplaces about oneself at other points of the story, apart from the preamble through reiteration, metaphor and recapitulation. These highly formalised devices of narration are distinct from the aspects of the life-story which reflect everyday life. In the latter, one often comes across the ‘mechanical retelling’ Bachtin mentions in relation to memoirs and autobiographies, in which there is no sense of continuity and the individual's life is taken in isolation; there are neither fathers nor generations.