Focusing primarily on the period from the eighteenth-century to the present, this interdisciplinary volume takes a fresh look at the institutions and practices of autobiography and self-portraiture in Europe, the United States and other cultures.

THE CULTURE OF Autobiography

Constructions of Self-Representation

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1993 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-2047-2

Contents

Contributors.................................................................................................................................................xiIntroduction: The Institution of Autobiography Robert Folkenflik............................................................................................1Theory Versus Autobiography John Sturrock...................................................................................................................21The Autobiographical Process Jerome Bruner..................................................................................................................38Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography Julia Watson....................................................................................................57Institutionalizing Women's Autobiography: Nineteenth-Century Editors and the Shaping of an Autobiographical Tradition Linda H. Peterson.....................80Self-Knowledge, Law, and African American Autobiography: Lucy A. Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light Lindon Barrett................................104The Mexican Immigrant as *: The (de)Formation of Mexican Immigrant Life Story Genaro M. Padilla.............................................................125What Happened in Mecca: Mumtaz Mufti's Labbaik Barbara D. Metcalf...........................................................................................149"In me the solitary sublimity": Posturing and the Collapse of Romantic Will in Benjamin Robert Haydon Roger J. Porter.......................................168Hogarth's Self-Representations Ronald Paulson...............................................................................................................188The Self as Other Robert Folkenflik.........................................................................................................................215Notes........................................................................................................................................................237Index........................................................................................................................................................267

Chapter One

Theory Versus Autobiography

John Sturrock

A leading question, appropriate to this liminal moment of my own removal from a social to a textual setting: Should we feel bad when we theorize about autobiography? Or, supposing all literary theory to have something unsociable about it, should we feel particularly bad when theorizing about autobiography? My answer, briefly, is that we should sense in ourselves a discomfort that is specific to theorizing about autobiography, a discomfort brought on by responding with the hardheadedness of the analyst to a kind of writing that, more than any other, is intended to work on our sympathies. But this sense of discomfort is not a reason for giving up the theoretical study of autobiography; quite the reverse, it is a feeling around which we might one day make a successful theory of autobiography to turn. For if autobiography does not lend itself altogether comfortably to theorization—or, better, if it seems to resist theorization—that makes it a most promising case, both in itself and because it may have something to tell us about the wider question of whether literary theory in general derives its energy from the theorist's sense of himself as a defaulter from certain ideals of sociability. An autobiography is a text that would draw us into itself without reservations, one that we are more strongly than ever inclined to read as dignified by a "metaphysics of presence," when not to do so is to refuse the peculiar appeal of the autobiographer. That text is the certificate of a unique existence, and the theorist who comes to it full of questions, and with a will to formalize its uniqueness away, knows himself to be playing a reprehensible part; he is not as other, innocent readers of autobiography.

Autobiography precedes theory, and it will do so here. Let me take advantage of the license allowed to its theorists of referring to episodes from their own lives in support of their theoretical case. Some years ago I was asked by a publisher in London to report on a manuscript whose subject was modern literary autobiographies, exclusively British ones as I recall. It covered a good many examples, summarizing what was in them, and adding some paragraphs of analysis or judgment before it passed on. It was essentially a list of autobiographies categorized more by the circumstances of their authorship than by similarities of structure. The manuscript struck me as falling heavily but interestingly between two stools. It was neither sufficiently empirical, by which I mean adequately descriptive of the contents of the books it discussed, nor sufficiently theoretical, since it skimped or else avoided any true classification of them. It never inquired into what the possible generic determinants of autobiography might be and what these particular examples had to tell us about them.

But here comes the theoretical point of this pre-theoretical anecdote. Who was going to respond to such a book, supposing it were published? What kind of reader collects autobiographies? Only those of us, presumably, with some theoretical interest in them as together making up a recognizable literary genre. The theorist will willingly pass from reading one autobiography to another, will read, it may be, nothing but autobiographies for months on end, in the furtherance of his strange professional interests. In the preface to his attractive study of autobiography, for example, Richard N. Coe records having read "some six hundred" texts during the eight years he worked on it. Such are the demands, or the anxieties, of comprehensiveness for the literary theorist, who can but proceed towards his general conclusions by induction from individual cases. The lay reader, whose interests are the opposite of generic, does no such thing. For the lay reader, an autobiography is not one more contribution to a genre or typology, but the unique self-presentation of author X or author Y, some public figure this reader already knows, and about whom he or she wants to know more. The lay reader does not normally read the autobiographies of previously unknown authors, or of authors without a name; the theorist on the other hand reads them indiscriminately, in search of formal or textual variety, the better to accumulate examples of the genre that preoccupies him. The theorist's concern is with the genre, not the autobiographer.

The author of the manuscript I have been citing had done something more revealing than merely fall between two stools; he had fallen victim to the strong tension or opposition between the writing of autobiography and its subsequent ordering into a theory. His program was a theoretical one, he had planned a generic study, but what he had then written was a catalogue, dimly raisonné, of individual titles or autobiographers. It could be argued that even to give a précis of an autobiography, to retell it as a story of one's own, is tacitly to theorize it, since however we choose to reduce a text we do so according to some set of rules or choices, so that a collection of potted autobiographies produced by a single author is sure to reveal a consistency of method amounting to a potential theory of the genre. But what the précis does very much more obviously is to pay its respects to the integrity of the text it is summarizing. It sets difference above sameness. This half-hearted and ultimately failed theorist had stumbled in practice over what the profoundly theoretical Paul de Man wrote of as the "disreputability" of autobiography, and "its incompatibility with the monumental dignity of aesthetic values." De Man, in common with others who have turned their thoughts to the specific nature of autobiography, asked whether we can define it as a literary genre at all, given not so much the apparent miscellany of the forms in which the autobiographical project may be realized, as the essentially contra-generic intentions that are its very source.

The autobiographer of course is on the side of the lay reader of autobiography, not of the theorist. It is the lay reader with whom he means to associate. He becomes an autobiographer because his name is already in the public domain: he has done or written something that ensures him a readership. Although he is in part known already, he may feel he is misleadingly or inadequately known, and write in order to correct that, to impose an image of himself whose authenticity no reader is in a position to question. An autobiography is offered as a textual accessory, either to its author's extra-textual life, which is the text's seductive but otherwise inaccessible ground, or else to his published oeuvre. Its relation to that oeuvre may vary according to the extent the autobiography acts as an explication of that oeuvre's hitherto unsuspected unity or serves merely as a chronological account in which its serial publication constitutes a succession of episodes. In either case, what the autobiographer has taken in hand is his own public integration, whose logic may be that of narrative or of orderly self-portraiture.

But for the theorist, the autobiographical text has to be brought out from under this too close tutelage of the life it represents; it has to be isolated even from the oeuvre of which it may purport to be the final rationalization. The theorist's loyalty is to the genre, and he reads autobiographies not as gratifying evidence of how it is possible textually to establish one's coherence as a living entity but in order to integrate these texts successively in whatever theoretical model of the genre he has thus far been able to build, either as confirmation of its soundness and capacity to incorporate new evidence, or else of the need to overhaul and enrich it. If we accept that the property rights of all autobiography lie inalienably with the author, then what the theorist is set upon is an act of expropriation, or of dismemberment. He assumes that we can, with profit, distinguish the dance from the dancer, or the self as impersonal performance from the self as unique and transcendent originator of the text. The theoretical task is to relate one autobiographical performance to others, and so to reclassify particular examples of autobiography in generic terms. Autobiographers themselves have done something of the same sort. They have learned how to write autobiographically from their own writing and reading of history, or fiction, or (auto)biography; they have acquired the rules by which alone any narrative or essay in self-presentation can proceed. But if they are themselves already generically adept when they set out to write autobiographically, they do not write in order to be read generically, as faceless new recruits to some ancient and familiar standing army. Rather, they naturalize the conventional methods of narrative or self-analysis so that it strikes us as a failure of our own goodwill if we pause to draw attention to them. There has never yet been an autobiography written for a readership of theorists, although, as we shall shortly see, there is a strand of extreme self-consciousness among some contemporary autobiographers that ought in the future to make any naive practice of the genre impossible.

The theorist of autobiography faces a serious dilemma in fixing the direction and bounds of his research: How far ought he to pursue the vital or intellectual context of the autobiographies he reads? If the autobiographer is or was a literary figure, how much of the rest of his or her oeuvre does the theorist read in order to give an informed reading of the autobiography? And should the theorist read it before or after reading the autobiography? Again, how much external historical evidence needs to be brought in, in order to relate a particular autobiography to circumstances of its author's life and times that have gone unrecorded, or that are perhaps taken for granted in the text itself? These, after all, are the directions in which the lay reader of autobiography will be led, or indeed the directions from which he or she may have come to the autobiography in the first place. Take the case of an autobiographer wholly remote from us, in time, in condition, and very likely in his creed: Augustine, whose Confessions no theorist of autobiography could conceivably ignore. When, as theorists, we read that extraordinary text and draw our formal conclusions from it, can we be quite easy in our minds doing so without having read anything else of Augustine's huge oeuvre, or any other account of his life apart from his own? Can we justify to ourselves knowing little or nothing of the intellectual or ecclesiastical traditions within which he worked?

Of course not. But if we want to get on with formulating theorems of autobiography, we must not allow ourselves to be led astray by the feeling of unease that goes with this singling out of examples. The autobiographical theorist cannot afford to yield to the historical appeal of a text such as the Confessions, or be so drawn into it as to want to study patristic theology, it might be, or the psychology of religious conversion, or those others of Augustine's writings that it would always be possible to relate to the Confessions for their similarities of theme or form. The temptation always will be there, to know more of Augustine the better to interpret this one text in the documentary sense in which it was intended. It is a temptation to which most theorists of autobiography I am sure give in. It would be good one day to have their own autobiographical confessions, to discover how strictly they have been able to defend their virtue as theorists, to what extent they compromise it by reading around the text they are concerned with, and how far they are prepared to go in this contextualizing endeavor before feeling free to pass on to the next autobiography. Autobiography is unquestionably an appeal to us as its readers to progress in intimacy with the autobiographer, and there could be no more callous response to it than to register that appeal as characteristic of the genre without ever acting on it.

The theorist of autobiography is, in short, a singular reader of autobiography, someone whose motive for reading accounts of human lives written by those who have lived them is not to satisfy a humane curiosity about the privacy of others, or to encompass other lives as gratifying wholes in recompense for the perceived incoherence of his or her own life, but to know more about a certain kind of writing. The theorist is committed to a study that runs very suggestively counter to the task to which the autobiographer is committed. This I make, necessarily, as a theoretical point: the opposition intended is between the activity of the theorist and the activity of the autobiographer as understood in the perspective of the theorist, and not that of the individual autobiographer.

The autobiographer's wish is to single himself out by the writing of a book, to construct in prose an attractive identity for himself. We need perhaps the traditional notion of the book here, rather than that of the text, as standing more positively for the entity that the autobiographer aspires to create as a worldly representative among those for whom he can never be a bodily presence. The autobiographer, in quest of a shelf life, memorializes himself in the form of a book; the theorist takes down that book from the shelf, suspicious of its claims to integrity, and anaesthetizes it, in the hopes of conducting on this temporarily lifeless specimen a biopsy full of advantage to the literary specialist. The theorist knows, but is not deterred by the knowledge, that the autobiographer is already the interpreter of his life, already a textualist, and not some godlike chronicler mysteriously exempted from the equivocations of language. To an extent the theorizing of autobiography begins in the writing of autobiography.

The writer's urge to establish his singularity is an inaugural topos of the genre. It may be expressed very robustly, as it is by Nietzsche at the start of the preface to Ecce Homo: "Listen! for I am such and such a person. For Heavens sake do not confound me with anyone else." Thus speaks Zarathustra: the mood is the imperative, the typeface italic. It is this recognition of the autobiographer's predicament that has called for words of such vehemence to be spoken. Nietzsche is not unknown to the world because he has addressed it a good many times before, in the books he has published, but he has not been heard, he is not, he concludes, "alive." Hence the demand for attention, urgently required because of the disparity he observes between the "greatness" of his task as the transvaluer of all our values and the "smallness" of his contemporaries, that is, ourselves as his timid or benighted readers. It is his unacknowledged singularity that entitles him to address us now in this bullying form and that we are to be brought to recognize by attending to his declaration of "who and what I am." Nietzsche may count as an extraordinarily brash autobiographer, but he is not behaving any differently from his kind in proclaiming as he does his fated "genius." Such singularity of destiny is the promise held out to us by all autobiographical retrospection; it is simply held out with what one can but call a unique immodesty by Nietzsche, not least in the title he took over for his work of self-presentation, Ecce Homo.

The most celebrated statement of this generic promise is to be read at the opening of Rousseau's Confessions: "I have formed an undertaking for which there has never been a model, and whose execution will have no imitator. I wish to show my fellow-creatures a man in all the truth of nature; and that man will be me. Me alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I dare to think I am not made like any of those who exist. If I am not better, at least I am other." The emphasis here is different from that found in Ecce Homo: where Nietzsche cherishes the uniqueness of his destiny, Rousseau cherishes that of his nature, which is a more extravagant assertion for him to make. Without laying claim thereby to the status of Ubermensch, we can all be certain that the life we have lived is ours alone; few of us would go on, however, to presume the uniqueness of our nature. On the strength of Rousseau's proclamation of his own singularity of essence, as opposed to that of his past existence, one might decide that among autobiographers he is remarkable for the intensity with which he holds to that belief. It is an intensity made painfully sharp, as in Nietzsche's case, by his knowing, or imagining, that the image of himself already circulating as a consequence of his earlier public appearances as author or human agent is in desperate need of correction. It is not necessary to be paranoiac in order to write one's autobiography, but it surely helps to have a weakened sense of contingency, to be able to believe that one has been the victim either of ill-informed attention in the past or else of an unmerited neglect. The autobiographer is seeking to plot the course of his remembered life after the event(s); he is, by virtue of his calling, a conspiracy theorist, and it matters not whether the machinations of which he sees himself as the center be those of fate and favorable to him, as with Nietzsche, or those of society and unfavorable, as with Rousseau, whose conviction of his own uniqueness is underwritten by his anxiety to rescue his self-image from the custody of others.

(Continues...)

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