In its creation and consumption, literature implies an intrinsic contract between reader and author. The parameters of this contract are often established by the genre of the work and help the reader determine whether the text should be interpreted as truth or fiction. When an author blurs this distinction, the reader considers the contract violated, and material that, under different contractual expectations, would be considered harmlessly fictional instead becomes maliciously deceptive. Conflict almost always arises when readers discover that fiction hides behind expectations of truth: the sacred boundaries of the genre depend on a lamellar division between reality and fiction. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Of course, any such distinction has always been impossible, the genre vainly attempting to erect tenuous partitions between the ultimately inseparable principles of truth and invention in the world depicted. Before the generic distinction between fiction and nonfiction was established, even supposedly “pure” fiction itself was greeted with skepticism, and, in its early days, the novel was denounced as deceptive, sinful, and corrupt. Based on the intrinsically paradoxical principle of verisimilitude, the novel is dedicated to the representation of what is similar to reality, but is actually fiction. Thus, even in its simplest and most recognizable form, fiction inextricably mixes fact and fiction, the real and the imaginary, making it impossible for any author to satisfactorily separate the two. This conflict is further exacerbated in the memoir genre. While authors often fail to meet the expectations delineated by even the clearest generic distinctions, the boundaries of memoir are murky from the start. Generically distinct from autobiography, memoir does not necessarily promise nonfiction, but presumably nevertheless relates the real experiences of real individuals. Through memoir, both Maxine Hong Kingston and Allison Bechdel explore the provisional boundary between truth and fiction, both seeing the latter as a means to discover and convey the former. Unapologetically mixing fact and fiction, The Woman Warrior and Fun Home highlight the ultimately arbitrary nature of the genre. These memoirs illustrate truth as equally dependent on what happened and what did not or may not have happened. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston extends this principle to discourse, and her narrative constructs meaning through both what is said and what is not said. Noting the importance of silence in memoirs, Jill Parrott observes: Scenes without verbal communication, words that are not intentionally spoken, or words that are changed or omitted serve as important a function in the overall rhetorical strategy of the text as the words that are expressed. They are “simultaneously meaningful” in the sense that they exist side by side on the page and work together to form the complete meaning-making artifact of the text. (377). Indeed, silence might be said – at least in principle if not in practice – to dominate The Woman Warrior, the memoir itself that opens with the command to silence: “You must not tell anyone what I am to tell you” (Kingston 3). . In this opening section, Kingston establishes the power of silence through its use as a weapon. The eponymous "No Name Woman" of the introductory narration, Kingston's unnamed aunt, becomes a victim of silence. In an attempt to erase every memory of his existence, his familyprohibits any mention of her name, or – in Parrott's Foucauldian terminology – “the family forcibly suppresses the linguistic representation of her name, dehumanizing her and symbolically denying her existence” (378). . Thus, for Kingston's family, silence – what is left unsaid – is as powerful a statement as any vocalized or written truth. As Kingston herself says: “There is more to this silence. They want me to participate in his punishment. And I did” (Kingston 16). Silence not only erases past truth, but actively functions to create and transmit a new truth, in the construction of which Kingston is forced, through silence, to participate. In an attempt to reclaim power, Kingston breaks this silence, making “the rhetorical choice to extend existence to that long-dead relative by telling the story” (Parrott 379). Naturally, however, Kingston cannot provide a factual account of her aunt's story, as any chance of that truth has been sacrificed to years of mandatory silence that have stretched across multiple generations. Kingston instead presents multiple variations of the story, illustrating his aunt alternately as a victim of rape and coercion, and also as a romantic, a young woman in love. Deprived of facts, Kingston is left to create truth from fiction, to fill the gaps left by silence with her own interpretations. In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel also creates meaning from the absence of linguistic representation. Like Kingston, the Bechdel family's story is obviously plagued by silence and repression. However, as a graphic memory, the “gaps” left by the absence of expression in Fun Home manifest themselves more literally in the form of narrative – that is, in the “hole” between illustrations, the vacancy of which is silently responsible for the creation of meaning between each scene illustrated. Thus, as in The Woman Warrior, meaning in Fun Home is constructed not simply despite, but literally through absence. Of course, for Bechdel, this structural absence reflects real gaps in his knowledge. Bechdel's understanding of her father's life and death is necessarily incomplete, and in her attempt to make sense of it, she illustrates and conveys as historical events that she could not have known to be accurate, since she was not there. Through illustration, Bechdel partially shirks the responsibility of conveying the facts promised by the autobiographical tendency of her work, establishing a loophole in the contract between herself and the reader by rejecting linguistic representation and turning instead to graphic representation in which she is free to illustrate his ideas. own version of the truth. Perhaps the best example of Bechdel turning to illustration as a way to convey the unknowable as truth is in her depictions of her father's death. Like Kingston, Bechdel defines her personal memoirs largely in terms of family history. Like Kingston, Bechdel also grapples with the uncertain circumstances surrounding the death of a relative – in this case, her father – and must fill in the gaps in her knowledge with speculation. The idea that her death was a suicide is an unproven – and perpetually unprovable – theory that dominates the narrative, and Bechdel illustrates the scene several times throughout the memoir. In creating these images, Bechdel manages to redefine and ultimately possess a crucial moment of which, having not witnessed, her knowledge is incomplete. Even if in words Bechdel remains tied to her autobiographical contract with the reader and is forced to moderate her assumptions about her father's death with admissions of uncertainty such as: "Maybe he didn't realize that thetruck because he was worried about the divorce,” and “People often have accidents when they are upset,” in her illustrations, she remains free to recreate and represent the truth according to her own interpretations (28). Bechdel's dogged revision of the facts through visual images is also evident in the variations in her treatment of memory through these two – sometimes competing – mediums, text and image. Recalling an old story her grandmother told her as a young woman about her father's childhood, Bechdel integrates the narrative of his grandmother with illustrations of the events he describes. Once again, Bechdel qualifies his illustrated revision with the text, including the confessional interlude, “I know Mort was a postman, but I always imagined him as a milkman, dressed all in white, a grim reaper in reverse” (41). Here Bechdel once again deliberately distances himself from the facts, taking advantage of the freedom to interpret and express his own version of the truth through his illustrations. This variation between the realities presented in Bechdel's linguistic and visual representations reflects the idea of ​​multiplicity as truth – an idea that ultimately comes to define Bechdel's personal narrative and understanding of herself as an individual. For both Bechdel and Kingston, the individual is an amalgam of different influences and individuals, including family. As Bobby Fong of The Woman Warrior points out: Kingston reconstructs a past from fragments of memory, particularly the stories told to her by her mother. That past is not simply made up of remembered facts, but myth and history told and transformed to suit the narrator's needs. The work is chronological and open-ended; as readers we have the impression of a life in progress, with an order in progress, but not static, never incomplete. (117). While Fong argues that Kingston's move away from the traditional autobiographical focus on the self as an individual in favor of "defining oneself in terms of one's position in a line of kinship" uniquely reflects Eastern culture, it can be extended to Bechdel's thought. decidedly Western interpretation also of the American family (Fong 118). For both authors, identity depends on family history and understanding that history is crucial to understanding the self. Therefore, Bechdel and Kingston have no choice but to fill in the gaps in their knowledge with their own inventions and speculations, using fiction to create and convey the truth of their personal identities. If readers expecting a factual autobiography feel betrayed by these tendencies toward speculation and fabrication, they will certainly be shocked and confused by Kingston and Bechdel's ventures into actual fiction. Both The Woman Warrior and Fun Home incorporate fiction directly into the telling of their personal narratives: Kingston through myth, Bechdel through intertextuality. In this way, both Kingston and Bechdel irrevocably obscure the divide between fact and fiction, using both to define themselves through their narrative and shattering any expectations or supposed factual promises the reader may have about the genre. In “White Tigers,” Kingston moves away from the previous section's speculative interpretation of relatively recent family history, instead imagining herself as the legendary Fa Mu Lan. This story is one of many “models of reality” that Kingston illustrates, rejecting the idea of ​​his identity as a linear and individual progression (Fong 119). While obviously not factual or reflective of his actual experiences, Kingston recounts his own.