Collage autothanatographies

Abstract

This article argues that David Markson’s four last works, often referred to as a quartet or a tetralogy (1996–2007), and Evan Lavender‐Smith’s From Old Notebooks (2010) can be classified as collage autothanatographies. Both authors construct their formally experimental books out of brief snippets that combine personal meditations on death with various facts, anecdotes, and self‐reflexive comments. What grants those fragmentary texts a degree of unity is their concern with mortality: the refrain “timor mortis conturbat me” reverberates throughout Markson’s tetralogy while Lavender‐Smith’s narrator announces that “death is the glue that holds the book together.” The article begins with an examination of the collage structure of both works. The formal analysis is followed by a discussion of the ways in which the works in question meet the generic criteria of both autobiography and autothanatography. The concluding part asserts the formal predisposition of collage to represent experiences of personal crisis such as an acute fear of death.