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AUTOBIOGRAPHY
This volume provides a wide-ranging introduction to the study of
autobiography.
In examining the historical tradition of the genre, Linda Anderson
ranges across canonical and non-canonical texts and looks closely at
twentieth-century women’s writing, black and postcolonial writing.
She explores the ideological assumptions about the nature of the
self that underlie autobiographical writing, particularly in the light
of recent feminist, psychoanalytic and poststructuralist criticism. As
well as providing a comprehensive introduction to the forms and
uses of the genre, this volume introduces the crucial questions of
identity, selfhood, language and writing which lie at the heart of the
related critical investigations.
This comprehensive and challenging guide is the ideal starting-
point for all readers interested in autobiography.
Linda Anderson is Professor of Modern English and American
Literature at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Her recent
publications include Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century
(1997), Women’s Lives/Women’s Times (edited with Trev Broughton,
1996) and Territories of Desire in Queer Culture (edited with David
Alderson, 2000).
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THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
Series Editor: John Drakakis, University of Stirling
The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to
today’s critical terminology. Each book:
. provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse) of the term
. offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and
. cultural critic
relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation.
With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest possible
breadth of examples, The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable approach to
key topics in literary studies.
Also available in this series:
Colonialism/Postcolonialism by Ania Loomba
Culture/Metaculture by Francis Mulhern
Discourse by Sara Mills
Genders by David Glover and Cora Kaplan
Gothic by Fred Botting
Historicism by Paul Hamilton
Humanism by Tony Davies
Ideology by David Hawkes
Intertextuality by Graham Allen
Literature by Peter Widdowson
Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form by Philip Hobsbaum
Modernism by Peter Childs
Myth by Laurence Coupe
Parody by Simon Dentith
Pastoral by Terry Gifford
Romanticism by Aidan Day
Science Fiction by Adam Roberts
Sexuality by Joseph Bristow
Stylistics by Richard Bradford
The Unconscious by Antony Easthope
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Linda Anderson
london and new york
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First published 2001 by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 2001 Linda Anderson
The right of Linda Anderson to be identified as the Author of this
Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Anderson, Linda R., 1950–
Autobiography / Linda Anderson.
p. cm. — (The new critical idiom)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Autobiography. I. Title. II. Series.
CT25 .A53 2001
809′.93592—dc21
00–051704
ISBN 0–415–18634–X (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–18635–8 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-18165-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-18168-9 (Glassbook Format)
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For Ann
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CONTENTS
Series editor’s preface
ix
Acknowledgements
xi
Introduction
1
Authors and Subjects
1
The Law of Genre
7
Poststructuralist Interventions
12
1 Historians of the Self
18
Saint Augustine’s Confessions
18
Non-conforming Selves: John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding 27
Serial Selves: James Boswell and Hester Thrale
33
Sublime Egos: Rousseau and Wordsworth
43
2 Subjectivity, Representation and Narrative
60
Freud’s Unconscious
60
Barthes’ Autobiographical Signs
70
Derrida and the Traces of Autobiography
79
Feminism and Poststructuralism
86
3 Other Subjects
92
Gender, Modernism and Autobiography
92
Locating Difference
102
Landscape for a Good Woman
110
Postcolonial Subjects
114
4 Practising Autobiography
121
Personal Criticism
121
Testimonies
126
Glossary
134
Bibliography
142
Index
150
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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which
seeks to extend the lexicon of literary terms, in order to address the
radical changes which have taken place in the study of literature
during the last decades of the twentieth century. The aim is to pro-
vide clear, well-illustrated accounts of the full range of terminology
currently in use, and to evolve histories of its changing usage.
The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one
where there is considerable debate concerning basic questions of
terminology. This involves, among other things, the boundaries
which distinguish the literary from the non-literary; the position
of literature within the larger sphere of culture; the relationship
between literatures of different cultures; and questions concerning
the relation of literary to other cultural forms within the context of
interdisciplinary studies.
It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a
dynamic and heterogeneous one. The present need is for individual
volumes on terms which combine clarity of exposition with an
adventurousness of perspective and a breadth of application. Each
volume will contain as part of its apparatus some indication of the
direction in which the definition of particular terms is likely to
move, as well as expanding the disciplinary boundaries within
which some of these terms have been traditionally contained. This
will involve some re-situation of terms within the larger field of
cultural representation, and will introduce examples from the area
of film and the modern media in addition to examples from a
variety of literary texts.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many friends and colleagues have helped, inspired and supported me
during the writing of this book. In particular I would like to thank
Desmond Graham, Michael Rossington, and Anne Whitehead. Ruth
Helyer gave me invaluable help in compiling the glossary. The
conversations that I have had with Trev Broughton over many
years go on influencing my thinking about autobiography. Ann
Spencer has cheered me up and cheered me on during the writing of
this book and I am grateful to her for all her support. John Drakakis
has been an assiduous and wise editor. I am also grateful to my editor
at Routledge, Liz Thompson, for her patience and encouragement.
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1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
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10
11
INTRODUCTION
12
13
14
15
16
All biographies like all autobiographies like all narratives tell one
17
story in place of another.
18
(Helene Cixous, rootprints, p.177)
19
20
It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect.
21
(Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.15)
22
23
AUTHORS AND SUBJECTS
24
25
‘Autobiography is indeed everywhere one cares to find it’, Candace 26
Lang wrote in 1982, thus acknowledging a major problem for 27
anyone who studies this topic: if the writer is always, in the broadest 28
sense, implicated in the work, any writing may be judged to 29
be autobiographical, depending on how one reads it (Lang 1982: 6). 30
However, autobiography has also been recognized since the late 31
eighteenth century as a distinct literary genre and, as such, an 32
important testing ground for critical controversies about a range of 33
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2 introduction
ideas including authorship, selfhood, representation and the division
between fact and fiction. The very pervasiveness and slipperiness of
autobiography has made the need to contain and control it within
disciplinary boundaries all the more urgent, and many literary critics
have turned to definitions as a way of stamping their academic
authority on an unruly and even slightly disreputable field. Philippe
Lejeune considered the problems, and in 1982 produced the
following judicious and widely quoted definition:
A retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person
concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life,
in particular on the development of his personality.
(Lejeune 1982: 193)
However, Lejeune himself remained dissatisfied with this since it
did not seem to provide a sufficient boundary between autobiography
and the adjacent genres of biography and fiction. A certain ‘latitude’
in classifying particular cases might be admitted but one condition
for autobiography was absolute: there must be ‘identity between
the author, the narrator, and the protagonist’ (Lejeune 1982: 193).
However, the difficulty is how to apply this condition since the
‘identity’ Lejeune speaks of can never really be established except as
a matter of intention on the part of the author.
As a recent critic of autobiography, Laura Marcus, has noted, the
concept of ‘intention’ has persistently threaded its way through
discussions of autobiography (Marcus 1994: 3). Attacked by the
New Critics of the 1930s and 1940s as a fallacy, ‘intentionality’
signals the belief that the author is behind the text, controlling its
meaning; the author becomes the guarantor of the ‘intentional’
meaning or truth of the text, and reading a text therefore leads back
to the author as origin. Within critical discussions of autobiography,
‘intention’ has had a necessary and often unquestioned role in
providing the crucial link between author, narrator and protagonist.
Intention, however, is further defined as a particular kind of ‘honest’
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introduction 3
intention which then guarantees the ‘truth’ of the writing. Trust
the author, this rather circular argument goes, if s/he seems to be
trustworthy. Hence for Roy Pascal, an early critic of the genre, auto-
biography depends on ‘the seriousness of the author, the seriousness
of his personality and his intention in writing’ (Pascal 1960: 60).
For Karl Weintraub, an autobiography can only be understood if
the ‘place’ the authors themselves occupy in relation to their lives
can be reconstructed by the reader. Reading an autobiography
‘properly’ means reading with an already existing knowledge of
the text’s meaning: ‘This moment, this point of view, needs to be
recaptured for a proper understanding of the autobiographic
effort; so must the motivation and intention of the author for
writing autobiography at all’ (Weintraub 1978: xviii). For these
critics, autobiographies are seen as providing proof of the validity
and importance of a certain conception of authorship: authors who
have authority over their own texts and whose writings can be read
as forms of direct access to themselves (Olney 1972: 332). Even
Philippe Lejeune, with whom we started, and for whom the concept
of the author is more difficult to define, requiring him to resort
to ‘authoritative’ legal terminology, proposes an ‘autobiographical
pact’ or ‘contract’ based on ‘an intention to honour the signature’.
According to Lejeune, the author of an autobiography implicitly
declares that he is the person he says he is and that the author
and the protagonist are the same (Lejeune 1982: 202); but have
we necessarily believed all subjects in the same way? Have all sig-
natures had the same legal status? Does not sincerity itself, as Nancy
Miller suggests, already imply a masculine subject, since women
are less likely to be believed simply on account of who they are
(Miller 1988: 51)?
Miller’s argument demonstrates the extent to which the genre of
autobiography has been implicitly bound up with gender. Insofar
as autobiography has been seen as promoting a view of the subject
as universal, it has also underpinned the centrality of masculine –
and, we may add, Western and middle-class – modes of subjectivity.
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4 introduction
As we shall see, by focusing on a particular historical canon of texts
which celebrated the extraordinary lives of ‘great men’, an important
group of modern critics writing in the 1960s and 1970s deduced
abstract critical principles for autobiography based on the ideals of
autonomy, self-realization, authenticity and transcendence which
reflected their own cultural values. For James Olney, for instance,
autobiography engages with a profound human impulse to become
both separate and complete:
What is . . . of particular interest to us in a consideration of
the creative achievements of individual men and the relationship
of those achievements to a life lived, on the one hand, and an
autobiography of that life on the other is . . . the isolate unique-
ness that nearly everyone agrees to be the primary quality and
condition of the individual and his experience.
(Olney 1972: 20–1)
By gesturing towards a shared truth which ‘everyone’ can endorse,
Olney establishes a particular view of the individual as transcending
both social and historical difference. An appeal to the mysteries of
the self can also function in much the same way as a mystificatory
rhetoric obscuring the ideological underpinnings of its particular
version of ‘selfhood’. According to Karl Weintraub, man’s task is,
like autobiography’s, to arrive at some form of self-realization: ‘We
are captivated by an uncanny sense that each one of us constitutes
one irreplaceable human form, and we perceive a noble life task in
the cultivation of our individuality, our ineffable self’ (Weintraub
1978: xiii). As individuals, ‘we’, as Weintraub says, assuming that
‘we’ represents everyone, are above society and beyond understand-
ing; by implication, therefore, ‘we’ are also beyond the reach of any
theoretical critique.
It seems that there is little apparent difference for these critics
between realizing the self and representing the self, and auto-
biography gets drawn seamlessly into supporting the beliefs and
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introduction 5
values of an essentialist or Romantic notion of selfhood. According
to this view, generated at the end of the eighteenth century but still
powerfully present in the middle of the twentieth, each individual
possesses a unified, unique selfhood which is also the expression of a
universal human nature. For Olney, for instance: ‘the explanation
for the special appeal of autobiography . . . is a fascination with
the self and its profound, its endless mysteries’ (Olney 1980: 23).
At the same time, however, autobiography, understood in terms
of a similarly transcendent or Romantic view of art, is turned to in
the first place because it offers an unmediated and yet stabilizing
wholeness for the self. Autobiography exemplifies ‘the vital impulse
to order’ which has always underlain creativity (Olney 1972: 3). Or
it offers the possibility of alleviating the dangers and anxieties of
fragmentation: ‘Autobiography . . . requires a man to take a distance
with regard to himself in order to constitute himself in the focus
of his special unity and identity across time’ (Gusdorf, in Olney
1980: 35). Autobiography, as we shall see, has sometimes been viewed
as aiding the diversification of culture and subjects through its appeal
to different communities, its formal multiplicity and its excessive
productivity. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, it was reinscribed
by literary critics as itself offering a solution to the same threat it
had posed by being restricted to the literary values of the ‘few’ and
made to take on a unifying and conservative function.
Returning for a moment to definitions, we can see a revealing
paradox at work in this formative criticism of the 1960s and 1970s.
On the one hand, autobiography is perceived to be as ineffable and
irreducible as the self it figures: ‘Definition of autobiography as a
literary genre seems to me virtually impossible’, writes James Olney
(1972: 38). On the other hand, critics like Lejeune and Gusdorf
believed that the form must provide both ‘conditions and limits’
if it is to be containable and identifiable as an authoritative form
of ‘truth-telling’ which is clearly distinguishable from fiction
(Gusdorf, in Olney 1980). On the one hand, autobiography, through
its relation to individualism and humanistic values, is seen to be
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6 introduction
available to non-technical, common-sense readings: according to
Barett Mandel, ‘Every reader knows that autobiographies and novels
are finally totally distinct’ (Mandel 1980: 54). On the other hand,
autobiography produces an unease that it could spread endlessly and
get everywhere, undermining even the objective stance of the critic
if it is not held at bay or constrained by classification.
Candace Lang has argued that criticism and autobiography are
difficult to separate, since they are both self-conscious discourses
‘“about” language’ and thus engaged in the same task (Lang 1982:
11). Robert Smith makes a similar point when he sees autobiography
as ‘a good way of taking the theoretical temperature . . . of academics
in the field’ (Smith 1995: 59). For the group of critics we are dis-
cussing here, the apparent neutrality or ‘liberalism’ of their approach
to the subject both disguised and supported their critical authority.
Autobiography was important to them because it helped to shore
up an approach to the meaning of literary works through the
author. The critic could have ‘objective’ knowledge of the work, thus
ratifying their own place and authority, precisely because auto-
biography could be seen to supply a subjecthood which was both
ineffable and discrete. The author stood behind the work guaran-
teeing its unity, while the critic interpreted what the author really
meant to say, reducing the different elements of a work to a central
message. What happens to autobiography afterwards, after the
theoretical temperature hots up, forms the main substance of
this book. Autobiography has been at the centre of the debates,
which, drawing on mainly French theories of psychoanalysis, post-
structuralism and feminism, have interrogated the self-evident
nature of the subject and knowledge. Poststructuralism, in
particular, by positing language or discourse as both preceding and
exceeding the subject, deposed the author from his or her central
place as the source of meaning and undermined the unified subject
of autobiography. For the moment, however, before engaging more
fully with these ideas and their relation to autobiography, I want to
pose the problem of genre in more historical terms.
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introduction 7
THE LAW OF GENRE
The term ‘autobiography’ is commonly thought to have been coined
by the nineteenth-century poet Robert Southey in 1809 when he
was describing the work of a Portuguese poet, Francisco Vieura;
however, there is evidence of slightly earlier usage, at the end of the
eighteenth century, in a review attributed to William Taylor of Isaac
D’Israeli’s Miscellanies, where he ponders whether ‘autobiography’,
though ‘pedantic’, might not have been a better term than the
‘hybrid’ word ‘self-biography’ employed by D’Israeli (Nussbaum
1989: 1; Marcus 1994: 12). Felicity Nussbaum argues that by the
1830s the word had become a matter of established usage, though
definitions of what it might mean were by no means stable. From
her perspective, focusing on a range of eighteenth-century autobio-
graphical writing, the pressure to read these texts in conformity
with ‘dominant notions of a unified self’ comes later, indeed can
be dated to the more prescriptive approach to autobiography adopted
by those modern critics we have aready discussed and who derived
their models from a few ‘classic’ texts (Nussbaum 1989: 4–5).
According to Laura Marcus, the nineteenth century saw a gradual
alignment of autobiography with the value accorded to author-
ship. If one of the anxieties around early discussions was the public
exposure of the private self, it is also the case that autobiography
gradually comes to be the site where genius, and in particular literary
genius, could be established as ‘internally’ valuable, without
reference to other ‘outside’ judgements. The writer had a vocation
which was not to be determined or valued in terms of the market-
place, but only with reference to the self. Taking Wordsworth and
Carlyle as her two exemplars of nineteenth-century autobiography,
Mary Jean Corbett sees how for them, ‘writing autobiography
becomes a way of attaining both literary legitimacy and a desired
subjectivity’ (Corbett 1992: 11). Autobiography resituates the writer
in his work, thus mitigating the dangers of the anonymity and
the alienation of modern authorship: ‘The presence of his signature,
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8 introduction
the narrative unfolding of his history, inscribes the text as belonging
to Wordsworth, who becomes “knowable” to his readers and insepar-
able from this text as a function of that self-representation’ (p.40).
Vocation would seem to be the key to authorship and it is also
the way in which ‘serious’ autobiography, that written by the few
who are capable of sustained self-reflection, is to be distinguished
from its popular counterpart. It is still the case today that popular,
‘commerical’ autobiographies by, for instance, pop stars are often
seen as lacking ‘integrity’, as debasing the self by commodifying
it. For nineteenth-century critics, such populism could be seen to
threaten the respectability of the form. For one reviewer, writing in
1829 in Blackwoods Magazine, there was, quite explicitly, ‘a legiti-
mate autobiographical class’ which excluded the ‘vulgar’ who try to
‘excite prurient curiosity that may command a sale’. Autobiography
should rather belong to people of ‘lofty reputation’ or people who
have something of ‘historical importance’ to say (Marcus 1994:
31–2). Social distinctions were thus carried across into literary
distinctions, and autobiography was legitimized as a form by
attempting to restrict its use. By the nineteenth century there was
a definite hierarchy of values in relation to self-representation with
memoirs occupying a lower order since they involved a lesser degree
of ‘seriousness’ than autobiography. As Laura Marcus puts it: ‘The
autobiography / memoirs distinction – ostensibly formal and generic
– is bound up with a typological distinction between those human
beings who are capable of self-reflection and those who are not’
(p.21). Similarly, autobiography came to be equated with a devel-
opmental narrative which orders both time and the personality
according to a purpose or goal; thus the looser, more chronological
structure of the journal or diary could no longer fulfil this ‘higher’
function of autobiography. According to Clifford Siskin, ‘develop-
ment’ in the nineteenth century becomes ‘an all-encompassing
formal strategy underpinning middle-class culture: its characteristic
way of representing and evaluating the individual as something that
grows’ (Siskin 1988: 12). However, to return to Felicity Nussbaum’s
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introduction 9
point, such a view comes later, and it would be wrong to see earlier
eighteenth-century writers of journals and diaries as ‘failing’ to write
developmental narratives. Instead, what they found ‘most “natural”
was . . . something that recounted public and private events in their
incoherence, lack of integrity, scantiness and inconclusiveness’
(Nussbaum 1989: 16). The writing and rewriting of the self over a
period of time, through constant revisions or serial modes, which
was common across a range of autobiographical forms and writers
before the nineteenth century, confounds the notion that there is
one definitive or fixed version. What we must take account of, there-
fore, is the way a developmental version of the self, which is also
socially and historically specific, has come to provide a way of
interpreting the history of the genre: all autobiography, according
to this universalizing and prescriptive view, is tending towards a
goal, the fulfilment of this one achieved version of itself.
The question that is posed by the above discussion is not simply
what kind of genre is autobiography; it is rather how does the ‘law
of genre’, to take the title of Jacques Derrida’s famous essay, work
to legitimize certain autobiographical writings and not others?
According to Derrida, it is in the very notion of a genre to consitute
itself in terms of ‘norms and interdictions’: ‘Thus, as soon as genre
announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line
of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly or monstrosity’
(Derrida 1980: 203–4). However, it is also part of Derrida’s argu-
ment that every time a text designates itself as belonging to a
genre – calls itself an autobiography, for instance – it does so through
a statement which is not itself autobiographical. Hence a title which
refers to a text as an ‘autobiography’ does not itself belong to the
genre of autobiography. This may seem like a rather pedantic point,
but it leads Derrida to conclude that there is always ‘an inclusion
and exclusion with regard to genre in general’ (p.212) and that no
text can actually fulfil its own generic designation. What is at stake
here for Derrida is not the power of individual texts to transgress the
law of genre but rather the way the law of genre can only operate by
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10 introduction
opening itself to transgression. As we shall see, Derrida’s point is
also part of his larger questioning of the borders of the text, of what
belongs to the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. His writing engages again
and again with the impossibility of stabilizing texts from the outside,
since all markers of the ‘outside’, such as the title and signature, will
get drawn into the process of the text’s engendering. In attempting
to posit a higher level of generality, genre is necessarily too general,
but it is also never general enough.
Fredric Jameson has also questioned the ability of a genre to
operate as a ‘law’; instead he sees genre as unable to detach itself from
what it is meant to define: ‘Genres are so clearly implicated in the
literary history and formal production they were traditionally
supposed to classify and neutrally to describe’ (Jameson 1981: 107).
For Celeste Schenk, Jameson’s argument has suggested the way
genres are always ‘cultural constructions themselves’ and operate not
as ‘ideal types’ but as ‘overdetermined loci of contention and conflict’
(Schenk, in Brodski and Schenk 1988: 282). However, it is also the
case that for Jameson genre has a more pragmatic function in that
it will be one of the ways writers will use to try to ensure that their
text is received and read appropriately: ‘No small part of the art
of writing, indeed, is absorbed by this (impossible) attempt to devise
a foolproof mechanism for the automatic exclusion of undesirable
responses to a given literary utterance’ (Jameson 1981: 106–7). The
markers of genre can thus be used to insist on a resemblance to what
is already known, and to organize and regulate the meanings of a
text for the reader.
Genre could thus be seen as a way of creating a dynastic relation
between texts, encoding tradition in formal features which operate
like ‘family characteristics’. According to Alastair Fowler’s more
positive view of genre, genre works beneficially by building a
tradition of similar texts through a kind of genealogical imperative.
Each work, according to Fowler, ‘is the child . . . of an earlier repre-
sentative of the genre and may yet be the mother of a subsequent
representative’ (Fowler 1982: 32). If we go back to Derrida’s essay,
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introduction 11
we can see that Derrida had also perceived how genre has a
‘controlling influence’ on ‘that which draws the genre into
engendering, generations, genealogy, and degenerescence’. However,
according to Derrida, this also reveals how the question of genre can
never be posed simply as a formal one:
It covers the motif of the law in general, of generation in the
natural and symbolic senses . . . of the generation difference,
sexual difference between the feminine and masculine genre/
gender . . . of a relationless relation between the two, of an
identity and difference between the feminine and the masculine.
(Derrida 1980: 221)
He also points out that in French there is a different range of
meaning for the term, that ‘the semantic scale of genre is much
larger’ and ‘always includes within its reach the gender’ (ibid.). In
other words, genre cannot avoid calling up gender through semantic
proximity; indeed as Alastair Fowler unwittingly demonstrates, in
the lexical and metaphorical passage of genre through generations,
sexual difference is inevitably installed at its heart: families descend
through mothers as well as fathers, though it may be only the
father’s line that can claim to be legitimate. Mary Jacobus argues,
with reference to Alastair Fowler’s notion of a generic ‘family’, that
‘genre is always impure, always “mothered” as well as fathered’
(Jacobus 1989: 204). Citing Derrida, she invokes his paradoxical idea
of the law of genre as ‘a principle of contamination, a law of impurity’
(Derrida 1980: 206). As we shall see, feminist critics have perceived
the politics of genre at work in its turn towards a patriarchal law
which delegitimizes women’s writing. However, the writing of
women, or perhaps of any subject who is deemed to be different,
allows us to read back into genre the heterogeneity or transgressive-
ness it tries to exclude. Genre, according to Derrida, assigns us ‘places
and limits’: ‘I have let myself be commanded by . . . the law of
genre’, he writes (p.227). Autobiography, we could say, turns itself
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12 introduction
into a genre in order to ‘place’ the subject, the ‘I’, only to be undone
by the instability and difference already instated within the law.
POSTSTRUCTURALIST INTERVENTIONS
In 1979, Paul de Man published a radical essay on autobiography
entitled ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, in which he signalled the
end of autobiography. Autobiography, de Man argued, was ‘plagued’
by a series of unanswerable questions, which arose from the funda-
mental attempt to conceive of autobiography as a separate genre at
all. According to de Man, autobiography ‘always looks slightly
disreputable and self-indulgent’ in the company of the major genres
– the novel, poetry and drama – never quite attaining aesthetic
dignity nor even providing an empirically useful way of under-
standing texts since ‘each specific instance seems to be an exception
to the norm’ (de Man 1979b: 919).
Most important of all for de Man, however, is the problem that is
encountered as soon as one attempts to make a distinction between
fiction and autobiography, and finds oneself taken up in the whirligig
of ‘undecidability’, inhabiting a threshold between contradictory
ideas. This experience, in de Man’s words, is like being ‘caught in
a revolving door’: you never get out of the dilemma but merely
suffer from the increasing effects of vertigo (de Man 1979b: 921).
As his own alternative point of departure, de Man proposes that
autobiography is not a genre at all but ‘a figure of reading or
understanding’ that is in operation not only within autobiography
but also across a range of texts. He identifies autobiography with
a linguistic dilemma which is liable to be repeated every time
an author makes himself the subject of his own understanding. The
author reads himself in the text, but what he is seeing in this
self-reflexive or specular moment is a figure or a face called into being
by the substitutive trope of prosopopoeia, literally, the giving of a
face, or personification. The interest of autobiography, according to
de Man, is that it reveals something which is in fact much more
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introduction 13
generally the case: that all knowledge, including self-knowledge,
depends on figurative language or tropes. Autobiographies thus
produce fictions or figures in place of the self-knowledge they
seek. What the author of an autobiography does is to try to endow
his inscription within the text with all the attributes of a face in
order to mask or conceal his own fictionalization or displacement by
writing. Paradoxically, therefore, the giving of a face, prosopopoeia,
also names the disfigurement or defacement of the autobiographical
subject through tropes. In the end there is only writing.
De Man illustrates his thesis with reference to Wordsworth’s Essays
Upon Epitaphs (1810); not surprisingly, since it is part of his point
that autobiography always contains the epitaphic, that it posits a
face and a voice that speaks to us, as it were, beyond the grave. For
de Man, the ‘trope’ that allows autobiography to speak also carries
contradictory signs of death:
‘Doth make us marble,’ in the Essays upon Epitaphs, cannot fail
to evoke the latent threat that inhabits prosopopoeia, namely
that by making the death speak, the symmetrical structure of the
trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb,
frozen in their own death.
(De Man 1979b: 928)
Language both gives a voice and takes it away. In an earlier,
companion essay to this one, ‘Time and History in Wordsworth’, de
Man had commented that The Prelude was an ‘epitaph written by the
poet for himself’, even if it was difficult ‘to imagine a tombstone
large enough to hold the entire Prelude’ (de Man, in Chase 1993: 63).
In this long autobiographical poem, who speaks to us is a dead
man, addressing us, as it were, from his own tombstone. In Essays
Upon Epitaphs, the deaf Dalesman is seen by de Man as Wordsworth’s
evocative figure for the plight of language: ‘Language, as trope, is
always privative. . . . To the extent that, in writing, we are dependent
on this language we all are, like the Dalesman in the Excursion, deaf
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14 introduction
and mute’ (de Man 1979b: 930). The Dalesman, called up by
language to conceal its own silence – the silence ultimately of the
grave – also carries the repressed sign of that silence. The human
figure is after all also figured by the silent text. This is the dilemma
of autobiography for de Man: to call up a figure for the self which is
by the same token a ‘disfiguring’, to depend for its ‘life’ on the same
textual figure that contains the sign of its death: ‘Autobiography
veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause’ (ibid.).
De Man’s essay constitutes a supremely deconstructive moment
for Romantic selfhood, quite literally turning its assumptions on
their head: instead of a subject who is unique, unified and trans-
cendent, the Romantic self – post-de Man – is fatally divided,
threatened by representation, forced to summon up rhetorically the
ghosts of a self they can never hope to be. As Robert Smith writes,
remarking on this significant turning point in autobiographical
theory: ‘As soon as language becomes an issue . . . any last footing
“the autobiographical subject” may have had gives way’ (Smith
1995: 58). The subject is undermined by metaphor, dissolved into
words. The ‘I’, on which both the subject’s and autobiography’s
identity had depended, is now seen as referring not to a subject
but to its own placing as a signifier within language or in a chain
of signifiers. ‘The death of the author’ which Roland Barthes had
announced in 1968, and which signalled his attack on the concept
of the author as origin or source of meaning, also had implications
for autobiography. Just as Barthes saw the author as ‘linguistically
. . . never more than the instance writing’, so he sees the ‘I’ as
‘nothing more than the instance saying I’ (Barthes, in Rice and
Waugh 1989: 116). The pre-existing subject of autobiographical
theory and its stabilization within a genre that could, like the self,
be identified and recognized, was presented as an illusion, unmasked.
Were we also then witnessing the death of autobiography?
The problem with death when it is invoked rhetorically, as it
frequently is within poststructuralist theory, is that it is never quite
the end, and leaves space for all kinds of ghostly returns. To go back
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introduction 15
to de Man for a moment, the notorious discovery in 1987, after
his death, of his wartime journalism in a Belgian collaborationist
newspaper, including an anti-Semitic article entitled ‘The Jews in
Contemporary Literature’, dramatically changed how de Man
was read. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham writes: ‘De Man’s work suddenly
switched genres, being read now not as literary criticism but as a
coded testimony’ (Harpham 1995: 390). Some critics tried to
interpret de Man’s work as a complicated, lingering act of expiation
through which he was producing the analytic tools that would
have enabled him to cut through the subjective mystification he
had succumbed to in his youth. Others saw de Man’s undermining
of authorial responsibility and voiding of autobiographical self-
hood as driven by personal necessity: his own need to repress his past.
Paradoxically, his very departure from autobiography in his writing
is what causes it also to return. In retrospect, too, the obsessive
figures of falling, mutilation and drowning, which pervade his
criticism, and which he offers as figures for the defacement of
writing by tropes, could also be read as more darkly personal images
of anxiety and guilt, concealing another reference point in his
own life.
The violent irruption of autobiography into theory which this
disclosure of de Man’s past has seemed to represent to many critics
may cause us to question a purely textual model of reading such
as de Man proposed. However, as Shoshana Felman warns us, there
is no easy way to locate the historical referentiality of writing.
Whereas de Man thought that, at the time, his wartime journalism
was simply ‘factual’, a form of historical witnessing, it is later shown,
through historical hindsight, to have been involved with the
‘ideological fiction’ of fascism. However, fiction can also have ‘real
consequences’: ‘That history subverts its witnessing and turns out to
be linguistically involved with fiction does not prevent the fiction,
however, from functioning historically and from having deadly
factual and material consequences’ (Felman 1993: 147). In other
words, history is never safely ‘out there’, to be defined in opposition
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16 introduction
to fiction, but instead can, at any time in the future, disrupt our
understanding; nor is fiction free as Felman says ‘from real effects’
which can work independently of their intent (p.148). Ultimately,
for Felman, de Man’s silence about his past tells us about the
impossibilty of simply remembering or representing trauma: his
silence is also a testimony; it addresses us by reminding us of our own
collusion in this silence, the repression of the past (p.164).
So far as autobiography is concerned, the usefulness of post-
structuralist theory for our understanding of it continues to be
debated. The argument that texts can have political or historical
effect revives the question of referentiality or truth, without neces-
sarily returning us to the same place. Indeed the notion of multiple
locations, both as contexts of reading and positionings for the
subject, becomes one of the ways autobiography has offered itself
as a site for new theoretical and critical insights. Robert Smith
suggests that ‘as a field of interpretation, autobiographical criticism
and theory is . . . conflictual and miscellaneous’ (Smith 1995: 58).
One could also say that it is both productive and diverse.
This book looks at some of the debates surrounding autobiography
as well as taking acccount of the complex relationship between the
theory and practice of autobiography. In Chapter 1, I write about
some of the texts which have made up the ‘great tradition’ of auto-
biographical writing: Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Bunyan’s Grace
Abounding, Rousseau’s Confessions and Wordsworth’s Prelude. What
is at issue is both the development of a narrative for the self which
has been constructed partly by later readings and which stresses
the similarities between texts, and the more discontinuous history
which emerges when autobiography is seen as a site for negotiating
and challenging the different ways meaning is given to the self.
This chapter already introduces poststructuralist theory as it is;
arguably, only when this lens becomes available can we denaturalize
the unitary or Romantic subject and see it as a historical instance,
involved in its own ideological strategies. In Chapter 2, I focus on
poststructuralist theory and in particular the work of Sigmund
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introduction 17
Freud, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, all of
whom in different ways undermined the assumptions of humanism
and posited instead a divided subject, debarred from self-knowledge
by the unconscious or by language. All four also move between
theoretical writing and autobiography as if what causes knowledge
of the subject to disperse also brings about the dispersal of the subject
into knowledge. The subject and object of knowledge are no longer
divisible, able to be thought of separately. In Chapter 3, I look at
autobiographical writing, in particular by female and postcolonial
subjects, which has interrogated the ideological underpinning of
autobiographical tradition and explored the possibility of difference
as excessive and uncontainable, not able to be recuperated to any
notion of a ‘norm’. This chapter also asks how autobiography can be
used or read as a mode of political questioning at the very juncture
of contradictory and dissonant discourses. Finally, in Chapter 4, I
return to some of the issues raised by this Introduction; in particular,
the relationship between autobiography and criticism and the ethical
value of autobiography as a form of witnessing or testimony, which,
however, can never overcome the problem of where to locate the past.
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1
HISTORIANS OF THE SELF
SAINT AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS
In this chapter I want to look at some of the texts which have helped
to form the dominant tradition of autobiographical writing and the
way they have both drawn on and helped to construct a history of
selfhood, a paradigmatic narrative through which the subject has
learned to know who s/he is.
The best place to begin is with Saint Augustine’s Confessions
(c. AD 398–400) which is often thought of as the origin of modern
Western autobiography, both in the sense of marking a historical
beginning and of setting up a model for other, later texts. Georg
Gusdorf, one of the important modern critics of autobiography
whom we discussed in the Introduction, sees the Confessions as
‘a brilliantly successful landmark’ within a historical landscape
he has already limited to ‘our cultural area’, and defined as both
Western and Christian. According to Gusdorf, autobiography
requires a kind of consciousness of self which is ‘peculiar to Western
man’. Augustine’s Confessions express ‘in full rhetorical splendour’
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historians of the self 19
the Christian imperative to the confession of sins and thus promote
that inward-turning gaze which is the origin and basis of auto-
biography (Gusdorf 1956: 29, 31). Roy Pascal’s interest in the
Confessions is even more generically focused and generalizing than
Gusdorf’s. This ‘first great’ autobiography has a ‘decisive signifi-
cance’, he argues, in that it establishes a crucial narrative design
where incidents, trivial in themselves, become representative
moments in the growth of a personality. The author does not so much
remember the past as recast it, grasping and reshaping himself
in the process, and it is, according to Pascal, through creating
this ‘integrated succession of experiences’ that the Confessions lift
autobiography into art (Pascal 1960: 22–3). For another early critic
of autobiography, Karl Weintraub, who announces at the beginning
of his book that he is searching for ‘that proper form of auto-
biography’ in which ‘a self-reflective person asks “who am I?” and
“how did I become what I am?”’, the Confessions also hold a special
position. None of the ‘ancient’ writers before him, Weintraub argues,
though they might have written autobiographically, had ‘opened up
their souls in the inwardness of genuine autobiography’; moreover,
Augustine creates a model, partly through his own understanding
of the typicality of his experience, which will be influential for
centuries to come (Weintraub 1978: 1, 45).
What seems to be at stake in all these early critical approaches
to Augustine’s Confessions is the definition of autobiography as a
genre. By isolating Augustine’s text from his classical predecessors,
the criteria which define autobiography can themselves begin to
be isolated (Misch 1907, Vol. 1: 17). The historical moment of
the Confessions is both refigured and repeated as the inaugurating
moment of autobiography. As Jonathan Dollimore says, it is difficult
to see Augustine as occupying any single point in history since
the characteristics of his narrative have completely infused the
way we structure our understanding of him; he is continually
‘scripted’ in terms of the same narrative he himself ‘powerfully influ-
enced’ (Dollimore 1991: 131). The Confessions discredit the past and
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20 historians of the self
re-form it in terms of a meaning which transcends history, and
therefore help to establish a critical narrative of autobiography as a
genre which is also ‘beyond’ history. In approaches to the Confessions,
critical and autobiographical subjects crucially reflect and reinforce
each other. What we see is the unified subject of modern liberal
ideology successfully allegorizing their own history.
At a simple level, the Confessions tell the story of Saint Augustine’s
conversion to Christianity. This involves a process of spiritual and
physical wandering, as Augustine charts his development from
babyhood to manhood and a journey which takes him from his
birthplace in Thagaste, in North Africa, to Carthage where he taught
rhetoric, to Rome and then Milan where his conversion finally
happens. The notion that his wanderings should also be read as the
tribulations of error is introduced early on:
I was still my own unhappy prisoner, unable to live in such a
state yet powerless to escape from it. Where could my heart find
refuge from itself ? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?
Was there any place where I should not be a prey to myself?
None. But I left my native town. For my eyes were less tempted
to look for my friend in a place where they had not grown used
to seeing him. So from Thagaste I went to Carthage.
(Augustine 1961: 78)
As his biographer Peter Brown has suggested, the Confessions are
a ‘strictly intellectual autobiography’ and ‘a manifesto of the inner
world’ (Brown 1967: 167–8). By turning towards the outside world
Augustine believed he was also losing himself, and as a result losing
sight of God. ‘You were there before my own eyes, but I had deserted
even my own self. I could not find myself, much less find you’
(Augustine 1961: 92). The outward journey is a false journey,
becoming meaningful only in retrospect by being realized as a return:
it is a tortuous journey back to God. The narrative thus merely defers
a resolution which, from another perspective, is already known. This
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historians of the self 21
other perspective, of course, could be God’s. Towards the end of the
Confessions Augustine meditates on the ‘vast cloisters’ of memory
where he ‘meets himself’ (p.215); memory is the container of his
experiences, necessarily lived in time, but memory also exists beyond
time and comprehension: it is greater than what it contains. ‘This
means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely.
. . . Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can
it be part of it, if it is not contained in it?’ (p.216). Augustine’s
‘transcendent’ relation to his own memory is analogous to God’s
relation to his Creation: Augustine searches for God within his
memory but God is also ‘above’ him, the timeless container of
all human destinies. ‘In the same way you are not the mind itself,
for you are the Lord God of the mind. All these things are subject
to change, but you remain supreme over all things, immutable’
(p.231). The Confessions conflate Christian and narrative imperatives:
Augustine’s conversion also has to be read as a conversion, in narra-
tive terms, to a point of view from which the future, now become
past, can be seen as part of the overall design. Augustine becomes
god-like in his ability to read the formless or inconsequential events
of his life in terms of their eventual meaning (Sturrock 1993: 20–48).
Two incidents from the Confessions, one about sin or a fall from
truth, the other about redemption, will allow us to elaborate the
argument further. In the first episode Augustine famously recounts
his boyhood theft of some pears. What seems particularly shame-
ful in retrospect about this apparently minor episode is its sheer
wilfulness. He steals the pears neither from need nor greed: the fruit
is in itself not particularly ‘enticing’ and few of the pears actually
get eaten. Rather, Augustine describes himself as delighting in trans-
gression for its own sake. ‘Let my heart now tell you what prompted
me to do wrong for no purpose, and why it was only my own love of
mischief that made me do it’ (Augustine 1961: 47). Two aspects
of this incident seem significant: first, Augustine does not act alone
but as a member of ‘a band of ruffians’ (ibid.). The gregarious energy
of youth seems tantamount to sinfulness in itself: the laughter and
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22 historians of the self
‘fun and games’ generated by the group induce a reckless disregard
for the law which would never have been tolerated by Augustine
alone. This helps to highlight the contrary movement of the
Confessions towards singleness and individuality: sin can be com-
mitted in company, but salvation requires a private and increasingly
inward kind of soul-searching. The second feature of this incident
emphasized by Augustine is its contingency and pointlessness. Sin
is thought about in terms of wasteful energy – it is a waste of time
– diverting him from the path of Truth. It is also a detour, a
digression, in terms of the direction his story is taking. ‘Can anyone
unravel this twisted tangle of knots?’ Augustine asks at the end of
this section (p.52), deep in the entanglements of his story, and his
sins, yet anticipating the clarity of their resolution (absolution).
The second episode, the moment of Augustine’s conversion, seems
significantly to repeat the first, for the final conversion also happens
in a garden and uses as its context a children’s game. Augustine, at
the climax of a long period of indecision, first removes himself
physically from company, and then even from his faithful friend
Alypius who has followed him into the garden. It is at this point
that he hears a child chanting ‘tolle lege’ or ‘take it and read’ and
chooses to interpret the dislocated words not as part of a forgotten
child’s game but as a divine command (Augustine 1961: 177). He
picks up the Bible and selects at random a verse from Paul’s Epistle
to the Romans: ‘Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in lust and
wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with
the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s
appetites’ (p.178). This speaks so directly to his own weaknesses that
it confirms for him an act of heavenly intervention and dispels his
final doubts.
It is easy to see the ways in which this episode both echoes and
redeems the earlier one. The child’s voice, which could have been
taken as an accidental coincidence, hearkening back to a world of
frivolity and play, is now transferred or converted into a higher realm
of meaning; the passsage extracted from the Bible, which Augustine,
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historians of the self 23
in effect, appropriates for himself, is likewise read as a form of direct
address, yielding an instantaneous meaning. The divine imposes its
order on the secular as the word, removed from the fallibility of
human interpretation, becomes the Word, the divine Logos. This
garden marks both a return and a new beginning.
Just before this turning point, however, Augustine has had a
vision of Continence, in all her ‘chaste beauty’, but ‘not barren’, ‘a
fruitful mother of children, of joys born of you, O Lord, her spouse’
(Augustine 1961: 176). Continence is precisely what he has found
so difficult to espouse himself and with it the renunciation of
marital and sexual fulfilment. Her apparition is a supreme moment
of conflict for Augustine – ‘I wrangled with myself, in my own
heart’ (p.177) – and turns him decisively in on himself: ‘I probed
the hidden depths of my soul and wrung its pitiful secrets from it’
(ibid.). According to John Sturrock, this moment of inner turmoil
is what the Confessions realize at length: ‘This highly emotional
moment of the story ranks as a mise en abyme of the work as a whole.
Augustine is launched on the path of confession’ (Sturrock 1993:
44). Augustine therefore records here, in a condensed or metaphorical
way, what will be repeated in a kind of hall-of-mirrors effect through-
out the Confessions.
Yet it might also be possible to argue at this point that Augustine
is encountering some of the most intractable issues arising from
autobiography as a genre. As we have seen, Paul de Man has argued
that it is precisely the ‘specular moments’ when an author becomes
the subject of his own understanding that he must also depend on
the trope or rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia or personification. He
gives language a face at this moment of self-recognition as a way
of avoiding his own implication in language, only to be confronted
once again by the inevitably rhetorical nature of language (de Man
1979a: see pp. 13–15 of this volume). Continence’s attempt to shield
Augustine from fleshly temptation by interposing her own body into
the text is not dissimilar, in its paradoxical force, to her figurative
character being used to mask the duplicitous nature of language.
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24 historians of the self
Augustine’s dilemma as an autobiographer is how to get through
language to a state of transcendent unity with himself while writing
in a language which works through material signs and thus intro-
duces the inevitable effects of duration, the time required by the
process of reading, and uncertainty. This is true even of his conversion
in the garden: while he attempts to transfigure both spoken and
written texts, the child’s words and Paul’s Epistle into a divine
message, the very form of his conversion tells of their more mundane
origin as texts. Avrom Fleishman has pointed out that there are
various literary motifs at play in the conversion scene, including the
vision, the children’s game, and the sortes, or opening of a privileged
text at random, which derive from Jewish, pagan and Christian
traditions, all of which would have been well known to Augustine
as a teacher of rhetoric. This for Fleishman suggests that ‘his experi-
ence at the turning point of his life was from the moment itself an act
of literary interpretation’ (Fleishman 1983: 54). For T.R.Wright,
as well, the conversion is an extremely ‘intertextual conversion’
which involves ‘a complex chain of conversion narratives’. The story
of Ponticianus’ conversion which precedes Augustine’s own has itself
been effected by reading the life of St Anthony who was himself
influenced by a passage from the Bible (Wright 1988: 95–6). If
conversion follows conversion, we could equally say that story
succeeds story in an endless act of reading and reinterpretation.
Augustine’s struggle with language is also enacted in the dual
address of the Confessions. Written in the vocative – using ‘you’ – they
have as their direct addressee God. But as Augustine himself asks,
what is the point of telling God what He, in his omniscience, already
knows? ‘O Lord, since you are outside time in eternity, are you
unaware of the things that I tell you? Or do you see in time the
things that occur in it? If you see them, why do I lay this lengthy
record before you?’ (Augustine 1961: 253). For Augustine, the
answer is that he is also writing his Confessions for men, who in
the position of overhearers or witnesses will be able to learn from his
life and to share his vision of God. Augustine is aware that there are
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historians of the self 25
two problems about his Confessions: first, how will people know that
he is telling the truth, and second, how can he ‘confess’ without
also offering up his life for judgement by others? By making God
his addressee, Augustine also claims Him as the arbiter of his
truthfulness (it is impossible to lie to God) and as his supreme reader:
‘It is you, O Lord, who judge me’ (p.210). By being face to face with
God, Augustine creates a saving space or division between human
and divine responses; he can be humble in his attitude to God
while taking on god-like power to prescribe how his life should be
interpreted. ‘I shall therefore confess both what I know of myself and
what I do not know. For even what I know about myself I only know
because your light shines upon me’ (p.211). However, it is his human
reader who in the end justifies his Confessions since it is for his sake
that Augustine must set out his life in time as a history or as a
narrative, in the form of words. As Jean Starobinski has argued: ‘The
double address of the discourse – to God and to the human auditor
– makes the truth discursive and the discourse true’ (Starobinski
1971a: 78). The story in all its literality can ultimately offer the only
approach to its own desired dissolution into a higher and wordless
form of truth.
It is to the question of God’s position as transcendent interlocutor,
a God who knows everything in advance, that Jacques Derrida
returns, from a poststructuralist perspective, in his commentary on
the Confessions in his own autobiographical text ‘Circumfession’.
Derrida reads Augustine contrary to or against what Augustine says
as wanting something more than truth, and it is this desire for more,
some chance, some unpredictable event ‘as though Augustine still
wanted, by force of love’ that ‘something should happen to God’
(Derrida 1993: 18) that the Confessions enact for Derrida. At the same
time Derrida draws attention to the fact that Augustine writes his
confessions after the death of his mother, and like Derrida himself,
could be said to be writing for his mother. But that for has its own
twists: it could mean both towards and in her place. The Confessions
do indeed move relentlessly towards Augustine’s mother Monica.
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26 historians of the self
It is Monica who urges him on to conversion and it is with Monica,
after his conversion, that he shares a sublime and wordless vision of
the eternal life:
And while we spoke of the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and
straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleet-
ing instant we reached out and touched it. Then with a sigh,
leaving our spiritual harvest bound to it, we returned to the
sound of our own speech, in which each word has a beginning
and an ending – far, far different from your Word, our Lord, who
abides in himself for ever, yet never grows old and gives new life
to all things.
(Augustine 1961: 198)
Augustine and his mother must return to the transitory world, but
for Monica this moment of fusion (with God and each other) marks
the end of her life and for Augustine the beginning of his own
spiritual, and autobiographical, authority. After her death there is
nowhere else to go; no further progess to be made. Augustine, having
transcended bodily desires and attachments, addresses himself not
to his mother but to God.
However, if Augustine’s text moves towards the death or
elimination of the other person, in this context the mother, our own
reading perhaps does not need to, but can recognize instead the
importance of the mother within the structure of the autobiography.
This is the point which Nancy Miller makes. For her the represen-
tative masculine subject of autobiography, for which the Confessions
have seemed to offer such an important paradigm, is built upon
readers simply following Augustine’s lead and taking Augustine’s
final position as the text’s summation; they have re-suppressed the
mother’s role which Augustine nevertheless draws attention to until
almost the end of his text. For Miller this is part of a larger argument
about the gendering of autobiography. What has been widely
assumed, since feminist criticism of the 1970s, to be a female model
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historians of the self 27
of the self as defining itself through relations with others, may also,
she argues, apply to male texts, forcing us ‘to revise the canonical
views of male autobiographical identity altogether’ (Miller 1994: 5).
I will return to feminist criticism of autobiography more fully in the
next two chapters. For the moment, however, we can begin to see
Augustine’s writing as never attaining the final mastery of truth he
desires but as haunted by its own otherness, by figures of its own
uncertainty or dissolution. For Derrida confession necessarily
broaches something unclosable, something which can never be
laid to rest, something that exceeds rationality. From this point of
view we should not be surprised if behind the rhetorical figure
of Continence that we looked at earlier we can glimpse the more
immediate, emotive and mortal figure of the imploring mother.
Nor that the tears that Augustine failed to shed at his mother’s death
– ‘when the body was carried out for burial, I went and returned
without a tear’ (Augustine 1961: 201) – should well out of the text
at every turn. Indeed tears carry the body back into the text in
a melancholy, abject streaming. The paradox of Augustine’s text, for
all its centrality in establishing the unified, transcendent ‘I’ of
autobiographical tradition, may be that for the ‘I’ to see and to turn
its gaze self-consciously both inwards and upwards, it must first
be blinded by tears, it must reveal its dependence on the very body
it abjures. As Derrida has provocatively noted: ‘A work is at once
order and its ruin. And these weep for one another’ (Derrida 1990:
122).
NON-CONFORMING SELVES: JOHN BUNYAN’S
GRACE ABOUNDING
Seventeenth-century England, particularly the period after 1640,
witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of spiritual memoirs and
autobiographies. One important reason for this was the breakdown
of state censorship during the civil war and a newly democratized
access to print culture (Delany 1969: 81). For members of the
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28 historians of the self
dissenting sects which proliferated during this period, and who
produced by far the largest number of such autobiographies, personal
testimony was an important form of religious propaganda.
‘Mechanick preachers’ like John Bunyan who lacked institutional
sanction or formal education for their ministry, instead founded their
authority on a personal account of their special calling and journey
towards grace (Bunyan 1962: xxix). Indeed after 1660, when
dissenting preachers began to be subjected to periodic but intense
persecution, this positioning of the dissenting subject beyond the
state became a more openly defiant and individualized gesture
(Nussbaum 1989: 70). Bunyan wrote his autobiography, Grace
Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) after he had been imprisoned
in 1660, for being, as he states there, ‘an Upholder and Maintainer
of unlawful Assemblies and Conventicles, and for not conforming to
the National Worship of the Church of England’ (Bunyan 1962: 95).
This period of imprisonment was to last twelve years, though with
occasional and tantalizing reprieves.
Like Augustine’s, Bunyan’s narrative takes its form from the
experience of spiritual conversion, though there is nothing to suggest
that Bunyan was directly influenced by, or indeed had even read,
the Confessions. However, what Puritan selfhood shared with the
Augustinian model of the Confessions was an emphasis on a search
for unity with God which could redeem the self’s sinfulness and
hence its incoherence. According to the historian Christopher
Hill, the profound effect of the Reformation had been ‘to leave the
believer and his conscience alone in the world with no help except
from divine grace’ (Hill 1986: 23). The Puritan subject must turn
inwards, reliant solely on his own conscience, a divine injunction
addressed to him alone. The most important relation for a Puritan,
subsuming all others in their ‘infinite variety’ was, according to
Perry Miller, ‘the relation of the individual to the One’. ‘If man once
achieved knowledge of God and of his soul, the answer to all other
questions would soon follow’ (Miller 1939: 8). Moreover, since evil
was also the self’s responsibility, the Puritan must both strive to
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historians of the self 29
separate himself from his own fallen state and punitively keep watch
over his own erring soul. The meaning of life depended on a rigorous
separation of the soul from the contamination of sin, good from evil.
This profound dualism can be seen as fuelling both confession and
conversion.
For Bunyan, like Augustine, therefore, it is the spiritual impli-
cations of the events of his life that are significant. Retrospectively
he picks out those which reveal a providential design – how, for
instance, he was spared from various accidents and survived the
war – or illustrate his extreme sinfulness, later to be redeemed by
‘the merciful working of God upon my Soul’ (Bunyan 1962: 5). One
of these early stories, his playing of a game of Cat (bat and ball
but played with pieces of wood) is not unlike Augustine’s stealing
of pears, in that the spiritual significance that he reads into it seems
to far exceed the seriousness of the exploit itself. Here, in the middle
of his game, Bunyan hears a divine voice telling him to choose
between Heaven and Hell. Looking up, he sees as if ‘with the eyes
of my understanding . . . the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as
being very hotly displeased with me, and as if he did severely
threaten me with some grievous punishment for these, and my other
ungodly practices’ (p.10). It is a profoundly individualizing moment,
since Bunyan alone of the group of playmates is picked out for this
dire warning. It is also a moment when the spiritual impinges on
the empirical world, transforming a game into a lesson, and making
guilt the necessary consequence of play.
Yet, however much he is forced to confront a Divine meaning,
Bunyan’s conversion never quite takes the authoritative and con-
clusive form of Augustine’s. For one critic, Robert Bell, Bunyan is
simply ‘never as sure as Augustine’. This he attributes to the ‘Puritan
view of things, forever poised between hope and despair’ (Bell 1977:
118). The very need constantly to separate oneself from sin suggests
both the fluidity of the boundary, and an anxiety that such a division
may leave one finally and irreparably on the wrong side. Again and
again in Grace Abounding we see Bunyan return to a state of searching
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30 historians of the self
and uncertainty, in a struggle for salvation which is both arduous
and ongoing. ‘O the combats and the conflicts that I did then meet
with!’ (Bunyan 1962: 60), Bunyan laments at one point, as he sees
his certainty dissolve ‘sometimes twenty times a day’ (p.64). As he
himself writes in the Preface, his story develops repetitively, oscillat-
ing between his ‘castings down, and raisings up’ (p.2). Bunyan’s
progress depends upon repeated backsliding, and the hope, rather
than the certainty, that conversion has already taken place. In the
words of John Calvin, the elect must ‘employ their whole life in
the exercise of repentance, and know that this warfare will be termi-
nated only by death’ (Hawkins 1980: 272). Bunyan’s spirituality is
both effortful and unconsummated. While Augustine raises his eyes
to Heaven and is released into tears, Bunyan’s internal ‘warfare’
involves a corresponding strain upon his body. ‘By the very force of
my mind in labouring to gainsay and resist this wickedness my very
Body also would be put into action or motion, by way of pushing
or thrusting with my hands or elbows’ (Bunyan 1962: 42). The body,
though intrusive, is here labouring with the mind rather than against
it; later, however, Bunyan’s spiritual progress and the parting from
his wife and children is imagined in terms of the most painful of
physical rendings, ‘pulling the flesh from my bones’ (p.98). Bunyan
was reluctant to give up, if not sensuality, then the immediacy of his
physical life (p.116). This accounts for the often noted concreteness
of his vision, the detail in the foreground which pulls our attention
away from his spiritual quest towards his more homely dwelling.
Bunyan often provides a literal or metaphorical ‘house’ for his vision,
noting, for example, in one important providential meeting that the
poor women of Bedford were sitting ‘at a door in the sun’ (p.14) or
imagining Jesus looking ‘down from Heaven through the Tiles upon
me’ (p.65). If, for Augustine, the body makes a return, leaking its
pain and passion into his text, for Bunyan it is never relinquished,
but jostles for attention alongside the ordeals of his soul.
Grace Abounding is both didactic and exemplary. As with
Augustine’s Confessions, readers have frequently taken Bunyan’s text,
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historians of the self 31
even though there are important differences between the two, as an
enduring model of spiritual struggle and conversion. Its popularity,
both in Bunyan’s lifetime and the century after, is attested to by the
huge number of later editions and translations. However, its trans-
cendence as a text of its historical moment has been partly enabled
by Bunyan’s own detaching of his spiritual life from history. He
makes only a passing reference to the Civil War and says little about
the specific reasons for his imprisonment. It is also supported by
Bunyan’s realism which convinces the reader how personal and yet
how ordinary the experience is. Bunyan himself, in the Preface, points
to the unmediated nature of his writing which he compares with the
unadorned and authoritative nature of divine intervention. ‘God
did not play in convincing of me; the Devil did not play in tempting
of me . . . wherefore I may not play in my relating of them, but be
plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was’ (Bunyan 1962:
3–4). More ingenuously, he later remarks how ‘I never endeavoured
to, nor durst make use of other men’s lines . . . for I verily thought,
and found by experience, that what was taught me by the Word
and Spirit of Christ, could be spoken, maintained, and stood to’
(pp.87–8). The extent to which Bunyan’s text is conventional,
drawing both on patterns and formulations of experience which
he shared with other writers of the period, as well as echoing, in
particular, Martin Luther’s writing, has been widely commented on
(Haskin 1981: 302–3; Tindall 1934: 30). The paradox of Bunyan’s
autobiography is that he can assert its originality in the face of an
apparent conventionality, even, indeed, because of it.
Luther is comfortably accommodated within Grace Abounding as
confirming the importance of Bunyan’s own experience rather than
influencing it. Delighting in his fortuitous discovery of an old book,
Luther’s Commentarie on the Galatians, he comments:
I found my condition in his experience, so largely and pro-
foundly handled, as if his Book had been written out of my
heart; this made me marvel: for thus thought I, this man could
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32 historians of the self
not know anything of the state of Christians now, but must
needs write and speak of the Experience of former days.
(Bunyan 1962: 41)
Any anxiety about Luther as a historical precursor is held in check
by Bunyan making his own experience pre-date his discovery of
Luther. Indeed even the Bible, Bunyan’s weightiest pre-text, exists
in Grace Abounding, less as a source for his writing than as something
which happens to him experientially; bits of text ‘dart’, ‘rowl in’,
‘boult’ or ‘fall’ upon his soul, beyond, as it were, his own volition,
and his turning to the Bible is most often a later need to verify the
Word which he has already received directly and internally. The
Puritans, having substituted individual experience for the insti-
tutional and legal authority of the Established Church, were left
with the problem of how to prove that their own subjective experi-
ence was indeed what they said it was, direct communication with
God. As we have seen, the burden of doubt is felt by Bunyan as
he struggles to attain an impossible certainty and create a unified
subject position for himself. The only available ‘proof’ or verification
was the degree to which individual experience conformed to an
already established pattern. Bunyan anxiously surveyed his own soul
but he already knew what he was looking for. As Peter Carlton has
noted in general of Puritan ‘lives’: ‘The pattern they were taught,
they sought for; the pattern they sought, they experienced’ (Carlton
1984: 29). This circularity meant that the uniqueness and directness
of Bunyan’s experience served to mask its conventionality; but
equally it was only by its coincidence with other such spiritual
journeys that he could maintain its authenticity.
Despite its contradictions, Grace Abounding seemed to offer its
readers, then and later, the model of a unified private selfhood
which had divine authority. Arguably, it is this private self, now secu-
larized, which will serve the needs of a newly emergent middle
class in the period to come, producing a coherent claim to identity
in the place of ideological conflict (Nussbaum 1989: 37–8). What
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historians of the self 33
has been established at the same time, however, is the elision of
conformity with nonconformity; this model binds a belief in the
individual as a free agent with unique access to his own inner self to
the practice, which has more to do with the establishment of an
ideological and social cohesiveness, of scrutinizing and regulating
the self.
SERIAL SELVES: JAMES BOSWELL AND
HESTER THRALE
Bunyan attributed an important role to his wives in Grace Abounding:
it is his first wife who begins to awaken his ‘desire to religion’,
and passes on to him important religious texts which had been left
her by her father (Bunyan 1962: 8). He makes the parting from
(presumably his second) wife and children when he is imprisoned
one of the supreme tests of his religious faith. However, this does
little more than confirm women in a subsidiary position, by making
them aids, hindrances or witnesses to Bunyan’s own progress towards
salvation. It would be wrong to assume, however, on the basis of
Grace Abounding, that this was necessarily women’s role in the period.
Seventeenth-century women also wrote conversion narratives, having
been given access to equal subjecthood by the belief within certain
radical sects that the distinction between good and evil superseded
all others, including, even, the differences between men and women
(Graham et al. 1989: 3). These narratives, just as those written
by men, were thought of either as private exercises, an attempt to
assess the subject’s progress towards salvation, or as public models,
published, often posthumously, and offered by the male clergy
to other sectaries as example or treatise. As we have seen with Grace
Abounding, therefore, the writer could find validity and importance
for herself, but only within a framework of already prescribed
experiences and emotions. Yet women’s negotiations with these
narratives were not always completely smooth, and tensions can be
perceived as they move between the expectations of the genre and of
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34 historians of the self
their own feminine role. Sara Davy, for instance, in her posthumously
published Heaven Realized (1670), may seem to reveal to a modern
reader not just the conventional story of her sinfulness and salvation,
but the more intimate complications of guilt at her brother’s death,
suppressed anger with her mother and intense love for another
woman (Graham et al. 1989: 165–79), while Anne Wentworth, in
her Vindication (1677), defends her right to leave her husband, her
‘hardhearted yoke-fellow’, even to publish things to his ‘prejudice
and scandal’ because of the higher claims of her ‘heavenly bride-
groom’ (Graham et al. 1989: 180–96). While these autobiographical
writings constructed the subject through strict narrative and
linguistic conventions in order to create a conforming, if trans-
cendent, version of selfhood, for women they could also offer an
alternative space, a place from which to contest their socially
sanctioned position of silence and submission.
The argument that some autobiographical genres, such as the
conversion narrative, privilege the masculine subject must always
be held in check, therefore, by a recognition of the different and
historically variable uses that can be made of such narratives. This
argument also applies, though now in reverse, to the presumed
compatibility between women’s experience and the informal and
repetitive narratives of diaries and journals. Some recent critics
believe that diaries have had a particular importance for women,
allowing them to become authors in private, and thus circumvent
a historical prohibition. For others the ‘female form’ of the diary
created a space where the traditional ordering of narrative and
meaning could begin to be undone. According to Annette Kolodny,
‘the fine distinctions between public and private, or trivial and un-
important, which served as guides for the male autobiographer have
never really been available to women’ (Kolodny, in Jelinek 1980:
240–1). The unchronological and unprogressive form of the diary
could be viewed, therefore, as a reflection of women’s different experi-
ence, or as a deliberate strategy, an escape into a potential or protean
form of subjectivity. What then of diaries written by men?
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historians of the self 35
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the diary had become
a popular form as literacy expanded and as the authority of both
Church and State receded. Journals were private and increasingly
secular documents where the individual could broach the question
of their everyday life instead of being urged, in emulation of the
Divine example, to transcend it. For James Boswell, who wrote and
rewrote his life in notes and journals, and who eventually, with his
‘peculiar talent for abridging’ (Boswell 1950: 332), assembled them
in his monumental biography, The Life of Johnson (1791), attention
to detail was seen not only as a way of preserving experience against
the effects of time and forgetfulness, but of keeping the mind
constantly under review. The diary was an aide-mémoire, to be turned
to retrospectively when ‘remembrance’ had faded (Boswell 1970:
307), but it was also justified artistically as registering a freshness
and authenticity of impression which might be lost in subsequent
retelling. Boswell’s account of Johnson, for which he copiously repro-
duced his notes of conversations between them, was, he considered,
unique for this reason: mankind was enabled ‘to see him live, and to
“live o’er each scene” with him’. According to Boswell, ‘had his other
friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been
almost entirely preserved’ (Boswell 1970: 22).
However, the diary was also a ‘register of one’s life’, by which
Boswell meant it was a place to return to in order to contemplate
one’s self, or one’s ‘character’, otherwise unregarded in the disturb-
ance and confusion of living: ‘It is very necessary to have our thoughts
and actions preserved in a mode not subject to change, if we would
have a fair and distinct view of our character’ (Boswell 1951: 330).
Boswell considered that there was perhaps ‘more pleasure in reflect-
ing’ than living (Boswell 1950: 40) and that life which had not been
recorded would inevitably become dispersed and lost: ‘Sometimes
it has occurred to me that a man should not live more than he can
record, as a farmer should not have a larger crop than he can gather
in’ (Boswell 1951: 332). It was this serious dimension to the journal,
as an access to the moral knowledge of ‘character’, that protected
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36 historians of the self
Boswell’s journal writing from the charge of triviality and allowed
it to be a ‘manly’ pursuit. According to the contemporary view, it
was women who, immersed in the domestic and the private, attended
to ‘minute particulars’ while men took charge of the public narratives
of history and philosophy (Nussbaum 1989: 202). Boswell, guarding
against the feminization of his writing, caustically drew a distinction
between the self-regarding gaze of the woman and the intense self-
scrutiny of the male: ‘And as a lady adjusts her dress in the mirror,
a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal’ (Boswell 1970:
898). Boswell here claims the journal as a serious, and (consequently)
masculine, form of self-reflection.
Yet by summoning up the mirror analogously, he also introduces
a gap or division into his idea of the self between the surveying
consciousness and the self surveyed. The subject, according to
Boswell, looks to the journal in order to see a self which is not always
the same: the private reflection may not fit the public gaze. The diary
becomes the place where he can examine and discard aberrant
identities:
When my father forced me down to Scotland, I was at first very
low-spirited, although to appearance very high. I afterwards from
my natural vivacity endeavoured to make myself easy; and like a
man who takes to drinking to banish care, I threw myself loose
as a heedless, dissipated, rattling fellow who might say or do
every ridiculous thing. This made me sought after by everybody
for the present hour, but I found myself a very inferior being.
(Boswell 1950: 62)
This ‘looseness’ of character, unacceptable as much for its unpredict-
ability as for any particular weaknesses, is very different from the
character Boswell ‘chooses’ to adopt. ‘I was now upon a plan of study-
ing polite reserved behaviour’ (Boswell 1950: 61); later, almost as
if he were picking a character off the peg, he asserts, ‘I felt a strong
disposition to be a Mr Addison’ (p.62). In the privacy of his journal
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historians of the self 37
Boswell can admit not only to faults of character, but to an instability
which turns his choice of a ‘proper’ character into the adoption of
another, possible dramatis personae. Publically, however, Boswell
argued for a necessary stability: ‘Nothing is more disagreeable than
for a man to find himself unstable and changeful . . . In proportion
therefore as the intellectual faculties are exalted, will the character
be fixed’ (Boswell 1951: 325). The journal was the private repository
for those errant selves which proved inconsistent with the public
character, and which must be labelled ‘out of character’ in order to
maintain the ‘truth’ of the public self. Public character could be
‘fixed’ because the journal could contain and restrain any problematic
‘looseness’.
In writing his Life of Johnson (1791), Boswell could be seen to
be resolving many of his problems with ‘character’, achieving a
tentative reconciliation, within the character of Johnson himself, of
that uneasy division between the public and private self (Nussbaum
1989: 117). Formally, the Life is woven out of many different kinds
of discourse: Johnson’s diaries, letters and conversations as well
as Boswell’s own notes, journals and intermittent commentary. As
we have seen, Boswell justified the inclusiveness of the Life on the
grounds of realism. However, Boswell also argued that all the details
ultimately cohere because all serve to illuminate further his ‘illus-
trious subject’: ‘they are all in some degree connected with him’
(Boswell 1970: 7). By writing the life of another, Boswell can unify
and make meaningful that which is episodic and incidental; he can
convey the ‘real’ meaning of the details from a position of knowledge.
Throughout the Life, Johnson’s ‘character’, while it is allowed to
have ‘imperfections’ and contradictions, nevertheless emerges as a
superior being who rises to eminence through his innate qualities of
mind and spirit, rather than rank or wealth. He is ‘manly’ (Boswell
1970: 69), endowed with ‘transcendent powers’ (p.86), and an
‘inflexible dignity of character’ (p.94), whose reason always masters
both melancholy and imagination (p.49); in other words, he is made
to exemplify a human or humanistic ideal of character where
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38 historians of the self
constancy and self-mastery are ‘natural’ features. Boswell has con-
structed the model of character that he needs, and to which he can
claim proximity through both friendship and writing.
Significantly, though Boswell presents Johnson as a universal
subject whose humanity transcends both class and history, he also
clearly characterizes him as masculine. His precocious ‘manliness’ is
evident, according to Boswell, when, as an infant, he feels ‘insulted’
by his schoolmistress’ protectiveness and beats her ‘as well as his
strength would permit’ (Boswell 1970: 30). Later mysogynistic
comments are also eagerly recorded, as in the famous comparison of
a woman’s preaching to ‘a dog’s walking on his hinder legs’ (p.327).
That masculinity required this aggressive beating off of the feminine
is evident in Boswell’s policing of his own version of Johnson against
other memoirists. In particular it is Mrs Thrale (later Piozzi) who
figures in the Life, sometimes anonymously as ‘a lady’, who threatens
the ‘reasonableness’ of Boswell’s account, and whose accuracy Boswell
calls into question. Represented as fanciful and therefore un-
disciplined, she is reprimanded by Johnson himself, in Boswell’s
account, for ‘little variations in narrative’ which ‘deviate’ from the
notion of ‘truth’ conceived of, by Johnson, as an absolute. ‘It is more
from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there
is so much falsehood in the world’ (p.899). Boswell will solicit the
‘impartial reader’ to discount her ‘small volume’ of Johnson’s say-
ings as unrepresentative: here it is less the accuracy of her recall
that is under attack than her judgement. Truth requires fairness
and moderation, an assimilation of all the detail into a unified view.
The ‘harshness of demeanour’ which Mrs Thrale’s book seems to
demonstrate comprises instances, according to Boswell, which were
spread over years; years ‘in which his time was chiefly spent in
instructing and delighting mankind by his writings and con-
versation, in acts of piety to God, and good-will to men’ (pp.290–1).
Truth, it appears, is an elastic and largely ideological construct which
excludes both feminine ‘fancy’ and contradictory facts. Boswell
carefully positions the reader as sharing the general and universal
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historians of the self 39
‘truth’ about Johnson while Mrs Thrale’s account, in drawing
attention to Johnson’s peculiarities, is itself made to take on the
qualities of singularity and deviancy.
Ironically, it was Johnson himself who first encouraged Mrs Thrale
to keep a journal, bestowing the same encouragement on her that
he had on Boswell. That Hester Thrale owed the beginnings of her
private and prolific journal writing not only to Johnson, but also to
her husband’s gift of blank notebooks, is testimony to the ambiguity
of her diary, even when kept secretly, as an alternative and yet
compliant feminine discourse, produced with, and perhaps for, the
approval of men. Her writings were also ‘dignified’ by being, in
part, a repository for the sayings of Johnson, and it is these, rather
than her more domestic writing, that were published in her lifetime:
her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786) were followed by the
publication of Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson in 1788. Her
public literary identity was therefore as the confidante of a great
literary man.
Yet Thrale was also alert to her own ‘difference’ as a writing
woman, who, however much she might admire and try to emulate
literary men, was also situated as female in a domestic sphere
which made heavy demands upon her. She could never be quite the
assiduous recorder of Johnson that Boswell was because her time and
attention were otherwise taken up:
All my friends reproach me with neglecting to write down such
Things as drop from him [Johnson] almost perpetually, and often
say how much I shall some Time regret that I have not done’t with
diligence ever since the commencement of our Acquaintance:
They say well, but ever since that Time I have been the Mother of
Children, and little do these wise Men know or feel, that the Crying
of a young Child, or the Perverseness of an elder, or the Danger
however trifling of any one – will soon drive out of a female
Parent’s head a Conversation concerning Wit, Science or
Sentiment, however She may appear to be impressed by it at the
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40 historians of the self
moment: besides that to a Mere de famille doing something is
more necessary & suitable than even hearing something; and if
one is to listen all Even and write all Morning what one has heard,
where will be the Time for tutoring, caressing, or what is still more
useful, for having one’s Children about one.
(Thrale 1942: 158)
This reads both as a justification for her own shortcomings as
memoirist and a spirited defence of her different priorities: ‘the
Mother of Children’ both knows and feels things which ‘wise Men’
do not.
Yet for all her motherly attentiveness, Thrale was an inveterate
note keeper. From 1776 to 1809 she kept what she called her
Thraliana; never intended as a consistent diary, it contains anecdotes,
quotations, literary opinions and pieces of personal history in
imitation of the French tradition of ‘ana’, as the collecting together
of fragments of these kinds was known (Thrale 1942: xi). These
writings allowed her to position herself in terms of diverse discourses
without having to strive for consistency, to partake of literary models
in an oblique and intermittent way while ‘modestly’ discounting
her own literary ambitions. She saw it as composed of ‘scraps’, ‘madly
selected’ and ‘awkwardly put together’ (p.840). ‘For Nonsense
and Whim – long live the Thraliana’, she wrote in 1777, just a year
after its inception (p.134). Unedited and unrevised, it was ‘a sort of
literary Curiosity’, as was the draft of Pope’s Homer:
We have got a sort of literary Curiosity amongst us; the foul
Copy of Pope’s Homer, with all his old Intended Verses,
Sketches, emendations &c. strange that Man shd keep such
Things! – stranger still that a Woman should write such a Book
as this; put down every Occurrence of her Life, every Emotion
of her Heart, & call it a Thraliana forsooth – but then I mean to
destroy it.
(Thrale 1942: 464)
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historians of the self 41
Significantly she goes on to disagree with Dr Johnson’s estimate
of the interest of reading Pope’s rough drafts by comparing it to an
act of male voyeurism: ‘a malicious Pleasure Such as Men feel when
they watch a Woman at her Toilet’ (ibid.). Clearly, her writing, if it
were ever made public in its naked state, would be even more at
risk from the salacious interest of men. However, she did not, as she
asserts, destroy it and even on occasion allowed herself to toy with
the idea of future readers, helpfully offering them an explanation
on one occasion ‘lest it should be wholly unintelligible’ (p.229).
Serving as a kind of written accompaniment of her life – ‘my
Confident, my solitary Comfort, and Depositary of every thought as
it arose’ – the Thraliana is also bound up with her fears of mortality
and hopes of survival: ‘What will be done with my poor Thraliana
when I am dead’ (p.799). The writing seems to occupy a space so
close to the physical body that it is doubtful whether it can have
an autonomous existence. If the notion of other readers raised the
spectre of a violating masculine gaze, Thrale’s secret relationship
with her writing can suggest an almost maternal protectiveness to
its textual body.
All-inclusive as the Thraliana may seem in its range of interests,
it is not, however, the only journal writing that Thrale undertook.
She also kept a ‘Family Book’ which she began in 1766 initially as
a ‘memorandum’ of the growing abilities of her first daughter
‘Queenie’, but which gradually expanded to become a domestic
history of all her children’s births, progress, ailments and deaths –
Hester Thrale bore twelve children, only four of whom survived into
adulthood. Her views on her role as wife and mother were on the
whole conservative: she accepted her ‘duty’ in a loveless marriage as
bearer of children and particularly of male heirs. Yet the ‘Family
Book’ is in many ways a radical document, in its discourse around
motherhood and its revealing of Thrale’s powerful role as educator
as well as nurturer of her children; she continually records all her
children’s attainments and failures, both mentally and physically,
with an astuteness and care for their individuality. In 1777 she wrote
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42 historians of the self
the following assessment of the differences between her four
daughters:
Susan is really surprising when one recollects her beginning;
& She is exceedingly clever . . . but is special ill Tempered to be
sure, tho’ I think her Health can hardly be mended
Sophy is a fine Countenanced well proportioned Girl, of a good
disposition and as the old Phrase was of a towardly Wit: Cecilia is
lively & forward of her Months, and bids fair to be a bit of a Beauty
like her eldest Sister. Hetty was always inclinable to be sandy
and so is She, but Hetty has been always exceedingly admired
– I wish poor Cicely may have half her Share.
(Hyde 1977: 179)
In the domestic sphere, Thrale was allotted care of the body, and
this extended beyond her children to the men of the household as
well. Dr Johnson came to her to be nursed through his illnesses and
while her husband only visited her two or three times a week after
the birth of their first child ‘in a sort of formal way’ (Thrale 1942:
308), she prepared and applied poultices to his infected testicle
after he contracted venereal disease. The irony of the situation was
not lost on her: ‘I now began . . . to perceive that my poor Father’s
Prophecy was verified who said If you marry that Scoundrel he will
catch the Pox, & for your Amusement set you to make his Pultices’
(Hyde 1977: 166). Yet it would be wrong to see her role as nurse as
simply demeaning. She continually asserts her expertise against male
physicians, disputing both their diagnosis and treatment, and
positions herself powerfully in terms of the discourses of the body
and illness. It was Thrale’s role not only to give birth to the children
but to preside over their education, their well-being, their health
and, most poignantly, their deaths. Traditionally, women have been
given the function of ‘being’ the body within masculine discourse,
of being both the silent ground or material base of thinking and
disruptive other which must be expelled in order to preserve the
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historians of the self 43
integrity of reason. Thrale’s ‘Family Book’ offers an alternative
discourse of maternal watchfulness, where the body also signifies
– it is a system of signs to be read – and is interwoven with, rather
than opposed to, rational identity. Boswell’s battle with Thrale
over how Dr Johnson should be written about is also a battle over
what constitutes the human subject. For Boswell, reason alone
ensured the subject’s wholeness. Thrale’s ‘Family Book’ however,
instead reveals, with remarkable clarity and control, the dis-
continuity and complexity of lives necessarily lived in and through
the physical body.
SUBLIME EGOS: ROUSSEAU AND WORDSWORTH
Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which he completed in 1770 and
which were published posthumously between 1781 and 1789, seem
to hark back, through the title at least, to Saint Augustine. Yet,
according to many commentators, Rousseau, instead of following
previous spiritual models, was ushering in, through this prodigiously
sustained, even obsessional self-writing, a new model of secular
autobiography for the Romantic era. According to Huntington
Williams, Rousseau both exemplifies ‘modern Romantic autobiog-
raphy’ and occupies a ‘pivotal’ position in its historical development.
Rousseau’s refusal of other sources for himself and ‘radical
internalization’ of personal identity makes him, for Williams, both
‘novel’ and ‘influential’ (Williams 1983: 3). W.J.T. Mitchell sees
Rousseau as ‘the great originator’ and ‘the first modern man’, a writer
whose reputation and thinking permeated the nineteenth century
to such an extent that one did not necessarily have to have read
him to be influenced by him: ‘simple literacy’, according to Mitchell,
‘was enough’ (Mitchell 1990: 648).
The attribution of originality to Rousseau by these critics
echoes, of course, the view promulgated by Rousseau himself;
he famously heralds the Confessions with the confident assertion of
his own singularity:
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44 historians of the self
I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and
which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to
display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the
man I shall portray will be myself.
Simply myself. I know my own heart and understand my fellow
man. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even
venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be
no better, but at least I am different. Whether Nature did well or
ill in breaking the mould in which she formed me, is a question
which can only be resolved after the reading of my book.
(Rousseau 1953: 17)
Though in the very next paragraph Rousseau goes on to invoke a
‘Sovereign Judge’ and an ‘Eternal Being’, God is being given only
a peripheral role to play: Rousseau addresses God as a source of
emphasis at the beginning of his autobiography rather than turning
to him, either here or elsewhere, as a pre-eminent and sufficient
arbiter of a truth. Truth for Rousseau becomes conflated with
truthfulness, the non-verifiable intention of honesty on the part of the
author. Truth, therefore, can never be established once and for all,
but can only be presented in terms of the constant reiteration of
avowals and disclaimers by Rousseau himself. Rousseau transposes
to ‘man’, and, in particular, ‘natural man’ or Nature, the power to
know or see inside the self that once resided with God. There is, for
Rousseau, no higher form of knowledge than feeling; self-knowledge,
it soon becomes evident, is inseparable from conviction or intuitive
self-understanding, from ‘a knowledge of his heart’ that belongs
to him alone. ‘I have only one faithful guide on which I can count;
the succession of feelings which have marked the development of
my being’ (Rousseau 1953: 262). Without recourse to Divine
help, or intervention, situated within secular time, Rousseau’s
‘feelings’ stretch out into a succession of endlessly renewable inner
revelations about himself. His ‘self’ is plotless and, because it is
without climax or denouement, seemingly interminable. Rousseau,
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historians of the self 45
having completed the Confessions, will embark on other auto-
biographical projects, the Dialogues (1776) and the Reveries (1778).
The ‘truth of feelings’, forever renewing and repeating itself in the
present, is also never complete.
Rousseau believed his task as autobiographer was to tell or
‘confess’ all and make himself as transparent to his readers as he was
to himself. ‘I must leave nothing unsaid’ he reminds himself in
Book Twelve (Rousseau 1953: 548). His autobiography was less an
attempt to remember the past, to memorialize the life he led, than
to make others recognize the inner truths about himself that he
already knows through the unique access he has to his own feelings:
‘Throughout the course of my life, as has been seen, my heart
has been as transparent as crystal, and incapable of concealing for so
much as a moment the least lively feeling which has taken refuge
in it’ (p.415). As Jean Starobinski says, Rousseau would have liked
to offer himself as ‘an open book’ to the reader, to reveal his feelings
without shadow or obliquity. It was only the reader’s unwillingness
or obtuseness which made this impossible (p.181). Transparency
for Rousseau pre-existed writing; it was what the writing aspired
to return to, but it was also created by the writing through the
unstinting attempt to offer proof to the reader and make himself
clear:
I should like in some way to make my soul transparent to the
reader’s eye, and for that purpose I am trying to present it from
all points of view, to show it in all lights, and to contrive that
none of its movements shall escape his notice, so that he may
judge for himself of the principle which has produced them.
(Rousseau 1953: 169)
Ultimately, Rousseau believed that if the reader came to the wrong
conclusion it would be his own fault. His responsibility as auto-
biographer was to give the reader all the evidence that was available;
all, therefore, that the reader should need in order to arrive at the
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46 historians of the self
correct judgement. Though the truth may be immediate and
spontaneous, its communication to the reader, on the other hand,
must be prolonged and insistent. ‘It is not enough for my story to
be truthful’, Rousseau writes; ‘it must be detailed as well’ (ibid.).
From the start, therefore, Rousseau is caught up in a series of
paradoxes or contradictions in relation to his autobiographical
project, and it is perhaps not surprising that his ‘history’ or story
tells of repeated incidents where he finds himself powerless to
act, the victim of a plot that repeatedly turns against him. Rousseau
cannot simply ‘dwell in the grace of transparency’, to use Jean
Starobinski’s phrase (Starobinski 1971a: 182); he must articulate
and prove himself through ‘confession’. Despite himself, he therefore
becomes trapped in the mediating power of story and language,
and the ‘plot’ of his autobiography could well be seen as displacing
on to the outside world the connivances and designs which belong,
at least in part, to autobiographical writing itself. Rousseau,
according to John Sturrock, is the ‘arch catastrophist’ among auto-
biographers, punctuating his narrative with ‘doleful markers’ of
the fateful turn that events are about to take (Sturrock 1993: 141).
One such moment comes when, as a boy of 15, he fails to get back
to Geneva before the drawbridge is raised. ‘When I was twenty paces
away I saw them raise the first bridge. I trembled as I watched its
dreadful horns rising in the air, a sinister and fatal augury of the
inevitable fate which from that moment awaited me’ (Rousseau
1953: 49). Instead of extolling his ensuing bold choice of freedom,
Rousseau dwells on the obstruction placed in his way: he sees
himself, both here and elsewhere in his text, as the victim of external
events. Fate, it seems, imposes a life on him through such arbitrary
yet crucial and often malign turns; Rousseau, on the other hand, is
passive, since whatever he does has already been determined by a
previous event over which he had no control. Alone and without
power to act except as fate determines, Rousseau cannot be blamed.
While the external world and other people are untrustworthy and
have proved to be duplicitous, if not downright vindictive, he is,
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historians of the self 47
above all, innocent, and his autobiography is as much his ‘alibi’ as
it is his confession (Starobinski 1971a: 194).
Given that his problems all stem, according to Rousseau at least,
from his relation with the external world, with other people, the
oppposite also turns out to be the case: Rousseau is at his happiest
when he can escape into an unbounded state of reverie, when he can
wander and think without encountering limit or obstruction. Early
on, he embraces a life of vagabondage, a picaresque existence, and
it often seems that his mind can range freely when his body is also
free to roam: ‘There is something about walking which stimulates
and enlivens my thoughts. When I stay in one place I can hardly
think at all, my body has to be on the move to set my mind going’
(Rousseau 1953: 158). At these moments, ‘thrown into the vastness
of things’, as he says, he can think ‘without fear or restraint’. He can
‘dispose of all Nature as its master’ (ibid.). These are also times
when Rousseau is free to absorb the outer into the inner world, when
the subject is ‘master’, and when the ‘plot’, which is necessarily an
ongoing story of encounters and frustrations, is temporarily
suspended.
Yet if Rousseau derives most happiness from his own company,
when he places himself at a distance or excludes himself from society,
it is also, in part, because he already feels himself to be excluded.
Socially he is a poor man, without status or family to protect him.
He has no special significance or importance in terms of his rank or
wealth. Part of the point of his autobiography is to claim his right
to be heard despite his social inferiority, to assert another ‘natural’
order which gives priority to inner qualities of mind and feeling
and according to which his own distinction will be recognized. Far
from being indifferent to other people, Rousseau is using his auto-
biography as a form of coercion, as an attempt to put right both social
and personal sleights and misrepresentations and to prove his own
specialness, his apartness. Under threat of misapprehension,
Rousseau must speak out, he must, in John Sturrock’s words, ‘spread
the truth about himself so as to bely the slanders of others’ (Sturrock
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48 historians of the self
1993: 153). As Rousseau embarks on the second part of the
Confessions he feels increasingly beset by derision; the truth which
should be sufficient is, Rousseau fears, never enough. In a sense he
is progressively invaded by his own fictionalized construction of
the Other, the projection of all that threatens him, which his truth
fails to keep at bay. ‘Being forced to speak in spite of myself, I am
also obliged to conceal myself . . . The ceiling under which I live has
eyes, the walls that enclose me have ears’ (Rousseau 1953: 263).
Wanting to tell the truth in all its immediacy, Rousseau is forced
into concealment; separating himself from others, he installs them
again in his text through the very act of writing. Rousseau’s delusion
is to believe he could either totally absorb others into his own self-
image or reject them. As his fictional self-image expands to fill the
world, he retreats inside it; others, now re-created in the form of
phantasmal presences, become, paradoxically, even more threatening,
since they can easily pass through the flimsy walls of his self,
monitoring and judging him from the inside.
The question of why Rousseau arrived at such a distorted sense of
human relations begs a further question: What purpose did it serve
for him? Rousseau himself relates his loss of trust in others to an
incident in his childhood. Wrongly accused of breaking a comb when
he is boarding with Pastor Lambercier and his sister, he refuses to
confess and is repeatedly beaten: ‘They were unable to force from me
the confession they required. Though the punishment was several
times repeated and I was reduced to the most deplorable condition,
I remained inflexible’ (Rousseau 1953: 29). For Rousseau this
injustice and cruelty marks the end of innocence, ‘the earthly
paradise’ he had enjoyed till then; a gap now opens up between
himself and others; he no longer looks on his elders as ‘gods who read
our hearts’ (p.30). Yet this seemingly paradigmatic story of innocence
and vulnerability being damaged by the harshness and cruelty of
others is oddly duplicated by another anecdote. This time, Rousseau
has indeed committed the crime he refuses to confess to: he has stolen
a ribbon in order to give it to a pretty maidservant, Marion, when
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historians of the self 49
he has been employed as a valet by the Countess de Vercellis. When
the ribbon is found on him, he defends himself by accusing Marion
of having given it to him. They are both dismissed. In retrospect,
Rousseau becomes his own accuser: ‘I may have ruined a nice,
honest, and decent girl, who was certainly worth a great deal more
than I, and doomed her to disgrace and misery’ (p.86). Indeed his
remorse and need to confess this ‘offence’ have been so great that
they are one of the chief motives for writing his Confessions: ‘The
burden, therefore, has rested till this day on my conscience without
any relief; and I can affirm that the desire to some extent to rid myself
of it has greatly contributed to my resolution of writing these
Confessions’ (p.88).
Paul de Man has offered a complex reading of this particular
episode and in the process made an important distinction, which
he believes also holds true for all autobiographical writing, between
its ‘cognitive’ and ‘performative’ aspects, between what it means
and what it does. Rousseau in effect does not limit himself simply
to telling us about his crime, he also excuses it by reference to
his contradictory inner feelings: ‘But I should not fulfil the aim of
this book if I did not at the same time reveal my inner feelings
and hesitated to put up such excuses for myself as I honestly could’
(Rousseau 1953: 88). However, whereas there is factual evidence of
the theft – a ribbon was in fact stolen – we must, as Paul de Man
suggests, simply take Rousseau’s word for his feelings; there is no
other available proof (de Man 1979a: 280). The performative
dimension of the confession – the excuse – functions, then, in a
different mode to the cognitive, as a verbal utterance which cannot
be verified and which also keeps the meaning of the action he is
confessing ‘open’. The excuse fails to satisfy; it does not provide
closure but could be both endlessly expanded and repeated (p.283).
Significantly, the feeling that Rousseau reveals in his attempt to
excuse himself is shame: he has not meant to lie and implicate
Marion, but has been overcome by shame when he was publicly
exposed: ‘My invincible sense of shame prevailed over everything. It
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50 historians of the self
was my shame that made me impudent, and the more wickedly I
behaved the bolder my fear of confession made me’ (Rousseau 1953:
88). Rousseau ‘confesses’ to the reader that his stealing of the ribbon
had to do with his desire for Marion: the ribbon was intended as a
gift to her. What de Man challenges is not the feeling of shame
itself but where it is located. After all, why should Rousseau,
either then or now, be ashamed to reveal a sexual desire which is
neither transgressive nor forbidden? Instead what de Man suggests
is that shame is intimately allied to exhibitionism and that there is
a connection between hiding oneself and self-revelation. De Man
believes that Marion herself is insignificant for Rousseau; she is, in
effect, the signifier of a desire which belongs elsewhere. His shame
is simply an ‘excuse’ for exposure, a ‘ruse’ which sanctions his
confession (de Man 1979a: 286). His confession cannot make repa-
ration to his victim; instead, according to de Man, Rousseau creates
‘a stage on which to parade his disgrace’ (p.28); he fulfils another
desire, his real desire in writing, which is to compel public
admiration for his inner self.
Following de Man’s argument, a case could be made for there being
less difference than first appeared between the incident with the comb
and this later one with the ribbon: both involve the re-staging within
writing of a scene of public exposure, where the performance of
innocent feelings – or feelings of innocence – is also the real source
of desire. Rousseau makes a drama out of his previously hidden
emotions, justifying the interest and importance he, as auto-
biographer, is claiming for himself. No wonder that Rousseau
prefigured the comb episode with an account of the beatings
administered by Mlle Lambercier and the erotic pleasure he derived
from them. The persecutory role of other people in his life is one of
Rousseau’s recurrent themes. It is a role that confirms his shame and
thus also, perversely, increases his pleasure; and it is because the
pleasure is shameful and secret that it becomes all the more gratifying
for him to reveal by confessing to it in his text.
The point de Man is making relates ultimately to auto-
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historians of the self 51
biographical writing itself. The performative, according to de Man,
will always be in excess of the cognitive dimension of autobiography.
The textual ‘I’ seeks out excuses to perform itself; it creates dramas
in order to stage the ‘real’ drama of the ‘self’. What it clearly does
not want to do is explain itself away through cognition. If everything
could be understood, there would be nothing left to excuse and there
would be no text, no justification or excuse for autobiography. For
de Man the text, paradoxically, generates guilt in order to justify the
excuse rather than the other way around; it is in search of an excuse
for its own being (which it can never know), a reason for coming into
existence at all. The point therefore is not what Rousseau confesses
but the act of confession, the drama of the self.
In the Confessions, Rousseau presents himself as a shy man who
is inhibited in his relationships with others from revealing his ‘true
nature’. He writes in order to achieve that self-possession which
always eluded him in company. The nearest he can come to his ideal
of spontaneous expression is reading his own work in public. The
text becomes the writer’s surrogate. On one occasion this stratagem
proves an outstanding success. He decides to read from his novel Julie
in order to ‘save myself the embarrassment’ of talking to Mme
de Luxembourg, of whom he is in awe. Rousseau is rewarded with
all the recognition he desires: ‘Mme de Luxembourg was crazy about
Julie and its author. She talked of nothing but me’ (Rousseau 1953:
484). However, he receives a very different response to a public
performance of the Confessions later on when his reading is greeted
by indecipherable silence. This is the last paragraph of the Confessions
and it is positioned as an ‘afterword’, outside the narrative:
Thus I concluded my reading, and everyone was silent. Mme
d’Egmont was the only person who seemed moved. She trem-
bled visibly but quickly controlled herself, and remained quiet,
as did the rest of the company. Such was the advantage
I derived from my reading and my declaration.
(Rousseau 1953: 606)
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52 historians of the self
The slight bodily frisson quickly fades into the silent self-control
shown by the rest of the audience who, in this act of physical
withdrawal or sublimation, seem to prefigure later silent readers of
Rousseau’s text.
Rousseau, according to Jacques Derrida in another influential
poststructuralist reading, uses writing as a ‘supplement’, a term
which Rousseau also applies to the ‘unnatural’ act of masturbation:
‘Soon I . . . learned that dangerous means of cheating Nature, which
leads in young men of my temperament to various kinds of excesses’
(Rousseau 1953: 108); later he also describes himself as ‘seduced
by this fatal advantage’ (p.109). To describe writing as a supplement
is to suggest that it is added on to speech; that it comes later, as
supplementary. For Rousseau speaking has a ‘naturalness’ and
immediacy which writing tries to imitate through a kind of ‘artful
ruse’; its artificiality attempts to ‘be’ natural; in other words, to ‘cheat
nature’. However, as Derrida points out, Rousseau is here describing
a Utopian version of what it means to speak, ‘speech as it should
be or should have been’ (p.141), rather than as it is. What Rousseau
demonstrates in his autobiography, according to Derrida, is that
it is up to writing to replace a deficiency or fill an absence where
speaking should have been; it offers vicarious compensation to
Rousseau who time and again fails to speak or to manage to make
himself present through speaking. Writing thus takes the place of,
or substitutes for, what is already lacking: ‘If it represents and makes
an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence’ (p.145). The
meaning of supplement as ‘surplus’, for Derrida, therefore, cannot be
separated from its other meaning as ‘substitute’, and Rousseau’s
writing can be seen to circulate between them. The onanistic pleasure
of writing is that it is both ‘symbolic and immediate’ (p.153); it
defers but does not seem to; it satisfies what, without symbolic
substitution, would never have been. Derrida’s point is not just
that we only have access to Rousseau’s essential reality within
the text but that there is no ‘reality’: there has never been anything
but writing; there have only been ‘supplements, subsitutive
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historians of the self 53
significations’. The idea of ‘Nature’ which Rousseau uses to name
an originating source of meaning preceding the text has, according
to Derrida, always already escaped; indeed it has never existed
(p.159).The poststructuralist Rousseau, therefore, is almost the
inverse of the Romantic one, for what this interpretation sees is that
autobiography begins from the ‘fatal advantage’ of a writing which
can only produce the ‘mirage of the thing itself’ (p.157) by means of
a subsitutive process. In the silence which is all the ‘advantage’, as
Rousseau says, he gains at the end of the Confessions, he is dispossessed
of words but he is also dispossessed by words. He has become the
author who is no longer recognized as the producer of his text.
The dilemma of Romantic autobiography, for which Rousseau
seems to have provided such extensive exemplary material, lies in
the way the notion of an original and authentic self, the transparency
which for Rousseau was his ‘natural’ condition, is both presumed
and put into question by representation itself, by a language
which performs more than it means to, which does not correspond
to experience, but introduces through displacement and excess other,
unpredictable meanings. The Romantic autobiographer proclaims
his originality but is also obsessed by a search for origins, for the
absent ‘maternal’ or material ground of his being. To recover it,
however, would also be to lose himself, and it is only because of
the absence of origins that the narrative of their recovery – the
autobiographical narrative – can be staged. According to Geoffrey
Hartman’s influential reading, the great paradox of Romanticism
was that the vaunted ‘return to nature’, or the desire to overcome
self-consciousness, could only be undertaken through consciousness
itself. Wordsworth’s Prelude begins with a longing for a subject that
eludes him. In terms of Hartman’s Romantic paradox, ‘Wordsworth
cannnot find his theme because he already has it: himself’ (Hartman,
in Chase 1993: 46, 49). Autobiography, in this sense, could be
said to represent a privileged form for the Romantic writer as well
as confirming his plight, the perplexity of a self forever recasting and
repeating itself as text.
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54 historians of the self
William Wordsworth began writing his long autobiographical
poem, The Prelude, in which he intended to chart the growth of his
own mind, in 1799, addressing it to his friend and mentor, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. Though completed in 1805, Wordsworth felt
dissatisfied with it, and would go on ‘retouching and revising’ it for
the rest of his life (de Selincourt 1932: xvii). The version published
posthumously in 1850 is generally agreed to be inferior to the
earlier one; yet it is also interesting to think about how the poem,
in the very process of its production, remains indeterminate, in
pursuit of an inviolable origin which inevitably gets dispersed
into various different revised or substituted versions. The poet uses
memory to attempt to return to the sources of his own poetic power
in childhood, sadly diminished with the onset of maturity and the
ascendancy of rationality over imagination. The poem becomes a
means of restoring what has been lost, but the story of this restoration
cannot be told as it never exists as a story in terms of a single
narrative trajectory; rather Wordsworth remembers a series of past
experiences out of chronological order, ‘spots of time’ (Wordsworth
1805: XI, 258) which revivify his writing in the present: ‘Such
moments worthy of all gratitude, / Are scatter’d everywhere’ (Book
XI, 274–5). The poem observes a gap between the poet’s past and
present selves, a ‘Vacancy between me and those days’ which can
make him seem ‘Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself / And of
some other Being’ (Book II, 32–3). However, the journey back
to ‘wholeness’ can only be undertaken within the poem itself by
the past being recomposed within the present time of writing. The
‘vacancy’ which the poem attempts to traverse is a space for the
imagination but, as Paul Jay points out, the corollary of this is
a dizzying self-consciousness (Jay 1984: 57). The poem could be
read not as a quest for a beginning but as a series of interruptions
which attempt to bring the poem back to its subject, which is none
other than the poet himself.
The debate about whether Wordsworth had read Rousseau’s
Confessions or had been influenced by them is a complex one.
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historians of the self 55
Nevertheless, these two autobiographical texts undoubtedly share
some important features, drawing on ‘a common psychological
vocabulary of sensation, feeling, memory, and imagination’ (Mitchell
1990: 646–7). Both texts reveal a reverence for Nature, a love of
solitude and the attempt to recover childhood experience; in both,
according to poststructuralist critics, the self-aware self is radically
divided, endlessly and paradoxically repeating its self-division in
the rhetoric of a unique, unified or pre-existing self. Nevertheless,
Mitchell is right to point to important differences: Rousseau’s
outlook is more tragic, his view of human relations hopeless and
embittered; Wordsworth goes on affirming the value of love, not
least by invoking his friendship with Coleridge in the very address
of the poem, but it is in their opposed treatments of guilt that the
most interesting comparison can be made. As Mitchell suggests,
‘Rousseau confesses everything and feels guilty for nothing’, while
‘Wordsworth confesses nothing and yet seems to feel excessive,
unmotivated guilt for some unnamed crime’ (p. 647).
From this point of view it is worth examining the famous boy-
hood episode in The Prelude when Wordsworth steals a boat. At
this moment, cast off from the shore, engaged in his ‘act of stealth /
And troubled pleasure’, the child is pursued by his own guilty
imaginings, the censorious adult projected on to the landscape itself:
a huge Cliff,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Uprear’d its head. I struck, and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measur’d motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me.
(Book I, 406–12)
The guilt is excessive, going far beyond what an adult might think
‘reasonable’, and the child’s subjectivity can only be approached by
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56 historians of the self
opening up a gap in interpretation: ‘for many days my brain / Work’d
with a dim and undetermin’d sense / of unknown modes of being’
(418–20). The absence of ‘determined’ meaning could well indicate
repression, and the sexual nature of that repression might well be
read, or read into, the ‘strokes’ of the boat which the child ‘rose upon’,
which then returns as a vision of a potentized and frightening
(castrating?) landscape. However, the fearful presence which invades
the child’s solitude, which takes on all the force of a gaze, is also a
kind of absence: ‘There was a darkness, call it solitude, / Or blank
desertion, no familiar shapes / Of hourly objects, images of trees, / Of
sea or sky, no colours of green fields’ (421–4). The traumatic memory
of a landscape which overwhelms the child with terror, which presents
itself as ‘spectacle’ rather than meaning, and leads to near extinction,
blanking his mind with ‘huge and mighty Forms that do not live /
Like living men’ (425–6), seems also to contain an intimation of
mortality, his future death. As we have seen, according to Paul de
Man, The Prelude (like all autobiography) is also a form of epitaph (de
Man 1993: 63; see Introduction: 14–15 of this volume): it is the
survival of writing beyond the grave, in which death, by writing, is
both anticipated and repressed. The poem reflects on a death which
is unimaginable; it also denies the death which has already happened
by presenting us with a vision, a writing which conceals its own status
as writing by, quite literally, returning it as a face or a gaze. While
Rousseau’s guilt helps to generate the text in the endless play of self-
justifying excuses, Wordsworth’s assures him of a haunting and
inexplicable indeterminacy of affect – a spectral presence – which
attempts to evade the lifeless finality of the text itself.
Wordsworth’s autobiography is also, of course, a poem, and,
because of this obvious difference, may be seen as able to assume,
unlike Rousseau’s Confessions, a set of values which supersede his
material condition, which are indeed transcendent or sublime,
too vast for the rational mind to comprehend. When Wordsworth
finds himself in the presence of Nature, it is also the occasion for
seeing his imagination’s own spaciousness and sublimity. This is
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historians of the self 57
never more the case than in the famous crossing of the Alps in Book
VI when Wordsworth offers a paean of praise to the Imagination:
‘Imagination! lifting up itself / Before the eye and progress of my
Song / Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power, / In all the might
of its endowments, came / Athwart me’ (525–9). However, the
problem with this passage, and its exulted sense of imaginative
potency, is that it also diverts attention from a failure, an anticlimactic
crossing of the Alps which has happened to the poet almost unawares.
The culminating scene of Alpine grandeur could be said to repeat
others where Nature in its sublime aspect is almost too much to
bear, overwhelming the poet with a possible loss of self. It is perhaps
providential that Wordsworth misses the supreme moment, since,
instead of simply being defeated, he is able to recapture it in words
and represent the processes of his own subjectivity. However, the
climb down from the peaks, which is also a descent into words,
paradoxically involves the poet in the evocation of a Divine face, the
finding of a ‘presence’ which exceeds the poet’s own:
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse.
(567–570)
The poet turns from a missed encounter with sublimity only to
find himself face to face with the Divine, and its apocalyptic
and unreadable inscription. If sublimity threatens the self, perhaps
even more threatening is the discovery that writing which does not
lift itself into ephemeral and mystical realms may succumb to its
own inert nature. The attempt to meet sublimity on its own
terms, even if such an attempt is doomed to failure, is also a way of
trying to guarantee the existence of a subject beyond the text. In
Mary Jacobus’ interpretation of this passage, the Divine signs are a
privileged and compensatory writing, protecting against the even
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58 historians of the self
greater anticlimax of the literal text: ‘writing comes in aid of writing,
reanimating the dead page with intimations of a meaning that always
exceeds it’ (Jacobus 1989: 15). The Wordsworthian autobiographer
needs the sublime, we could say, in order to give life to himself in a
Divine form, beyond the deathly finality of the book. The sublime
could be said to be what offsets the anxieties called up by the very
act of turning himself into (lifeless) words.
Gayatri Spivak has suggested that Romantic autobiography, with
its emphasis on the singular ‘I’, was premised on the repression of
sexual difference (Spivak 1987: 76). The transcendent subject, as we
have seen, sustains its unity with difficulty, positioning himself
beyond the body as pure consciousness, risking the recognition of
his own self-alienation within language. For Wordsworth the female
– be it Nature or the mother – is what the heroically questing self
must separate himself from, at the same time opening up a thereby
unassuageable desire for a return to a maternal source or origin.
Women, insofar as they appear in The Prelude at all, are located in
the realm of the pre-sexual, and assimilated to the masculine self,
the threat of otherness thus subsumed: Dorothy Wordsworth is
significantly apostrophized as ‘Child of my Parents! Sister of my
Soul!’ (Book XIII, 204); or they are cast out, as in the episode of the
prostitute in Book VII, whose solicitations are invoked only to be
denied and who is thus forced to carry the whole burden of sexuality
herself. Wordsworth is notably silent in The Prelude about his own
illegitimate child. Yet sexual difference cannot be wholly repressed;
it returns in the unstable rhetoric of gender which pervades the
poem and which Wordsworth struggles to control. As Anne Mellor
has argued, at the end of The Prelude, the imagination through
which Wordsworth has sought to prove his autonomous masculine
identity against a feminine Nature, having tracked her ‘up her way
sublime’ (Book XIII, 282; my emphasis), reveals its residual
femininity (Mellor 1993: 151). Difference installs itself at the heart
of the poetic subject, and both the autonomous self and its masculine
identification are open to question once again.
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historians of the self 59
Romantic selfhood, based on notions of the organic development
of the implicitly masculine subject, also requires the strenuous
repression of its Others. Perhaps it is not surprising, therefore, as
Barbara Johnson has argued, that the most powerful story told by
a woman in the Romantic period should be about a deviant creation
or monster (Johnson 1987: 145). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
is not of course an autobiography but a fiction; moreover it is a
fiction which is transmitted through the first-person accounts of
three men. Yet Frankenstein’s monster, with all his poignant emo-
tions of yearning and unfulfilment, not to mention his fragmented
body pieced together into the semblance of wholeness, could be read
as a perverse figure for autobiography, for what it means to create a
life in one’s own image. If Shelley hides her transgressive act of female
authorship behind the personae of articulate men while casting her
women into the role of passive victims, traces of her struggle to
produce the ‘hideous progeny’ of her book are incorporated into her
text, becoming the raw material which is taken over by Frankenstein
in his own desperate act of creation. Shelley turns away from auto-
biography, from the impossibility of fashioning a life on the model
of men, only for the monstrousness of the desire to assume a life of
its own in her text. Clearly we are not far away from the subject
of the next chapter and Freud’s understanding of the repressed as the
uncanny or unheimlich which can strangely pre-empt the familiar,
producing ghosts and terrifying doubles.
Whatever doubts are raised in relation to the notion of Romantic
selfhood, however, its assumptions have continued to exert an
important influence on the writing and understanding of auto-
biography. Paradoxically, as we shall see in the next chapter, the
notion of the natural, Romantic self outlives the recognition of its
own impossibility, called back to life again as a nostalgic revenant
or, with a wary realism, invoked as a necessary strategy on a route to
somewhere else.
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2
SUBJECTIVITY,
REPRESENTATION AND
NARRATIVE
FREUD’S UNCONSCIOUS
This chapter is primarily concerned with three twentieth-century
theorists and practitioners of autobiography: Sigmund Freud, Roland
Barthes and Jacques Derrida, whose writings, chronologically, suc-
ceed the autobiographies analysed in the previous chapter. However,
their work has already, to some degree, been anticipated. This is
because, in attempting to survey a historical tradition of auto-
biographical writing, however sketchily, it is important to take
account of how that tradition has been formed by certain key
assumptions which are also open to question. The modern dis-
illusionment with the unitary subject does not simply create a
break, opening up a new critical perspective; it also casts a backward
shadow, transforming how we read previous writing. As Candace
Lang argues, ‘not only is autobiography “in the Augustinian sense”
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 61
no longer possible, it never was’ (Lang 1982: 5). It is not that a unified
self was once available and can be rediscovered in past auto-
biographies; there is a sense in which it always was a historical and
ideological construct, an effect of discourse.
This notion that the present can retroactively alter the past
could be seen as one of Sigmund Freud’s major insights. Freud
characteristically looked to the past for explanations: it was the past,
imperfectly located as past, which created the neurotic symptom;
and it was the childhood drama of love, hate and jealousy in relation
to one’s parents – the Oedipus complex – which set the scene for
the adult’s later affective life. In treating history as developmental
or evolutionary, a process with a beginning and an implied goal or
telos, Freud could be seen as the inheritor of the great explanatory
narratives of the nineteenth century. The past creates the foundation
for the present and future and illuminates the flaws and diversions
as well as the normal pattern for individual growth. Yet childhood
and neurotic symptoms, according to Freud, also belonged to the
adult’s prehistory, a distant region which remained repressed or
unconscious and which thus existed outside the normal processes
of time and history. The past in this sense can enter the present only
as repetition or intrusive memory, disrupting linearity and giving
rise to a more complex temporality. To remember is not to restore
something previously lost, to find a link in a chain which was
previously missing. Rather the past can only be known belatedly,
restructuring in the present what had previously been thought of
as past. The past, then, lying dormant or latent within the subject,
seems to come from outside their lived experience as a momentous
and violent shock, causing them retrospectively to recast their sense
of themselves and the life they have led. History is never definitive
or finally known, therefore, but is capable of constant alteration as
more is remembered or released into consciousness, causing the
subject to think both the past and the present differently.
Freud’s thinking on the relation between narrative and the subject
has important consequences for the understanding of autobiography
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62 subjectivity, representation, narrative
and how we remember our lives. In effect it is possible to ally him
with two conflicting notions of time and narrative order, and it is
the difference between them that we need to understand here. As a
theorist and scientist he developed explanatory accounts of the
workings of the human psyche which relied on concepts of both
origins and goals; as a student of the unconscious he was aware
of highly complex connections between desires and memories which
obeyed no ‘rational’ system but required the careful following of the
individual subject’s own ‘unconscious’ associative links. In the four
extended case histories which Freud published between 1894 and
1918, and which we could also read as experiments in life-writing,
what becomes apparent is that he cannot maintain his scientific
stance; indeed his subject keeps escaping his own presumption of
mastery. From his very first attempt to write a case history in 1894,
Freud was disturbed by his inability to draw a clear division between
the scientific and the literary:
It still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write
should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they
lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the
reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible
for this, rather than any preference of my own.
(Freud 1974: 231)
Freud becomes a novelist, or at least a short story writer, despite
himself, and a short story writer, we may add, of a particularly mod-
ernist bent. In order to tell his patient’s story and interpret it, Freud
is forced to tell a story of his own, one which necessarily implicates
him as narrator/author. If the theory is that the patient should in the
end come into possession of their own story, what the case histories
demonstrate is a more ambiguous and inconclusive dialogue between
the patient’s version and Freud’s own.
In his study of the ‘Wolf Man’ (1918), Freud acknowledged the
impossibility of the task he has set himself of unifying within one
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 63
narrative the different temporal layers which belonged to the
patient’s story and his own interpretation:
I am unable to give either a purely historical or a thematic
account of my patient’s story; I can write a history neither of the
treatment nor of the illness, but I shall find myself obliged to
combine the two methods of presentation.
(Freud 1979a: 240)
The case study hinges on the notion of retroaction: Freud’s hypothesis
was that the Wolf Man witnessed his parents having intercourse
when he was 18 months old but that the shock of that impression
was deferred until he had attained some sexual understanding of
what he had seen. Freud is forced to follow a similarly confusing
chronology: ‘We must here break off the discussion of his sexual
development until new light is thrown from the later stages of his
history upon these earlier ones’ (Freud 1979a: 280). The problem
for Freud is that such early scenes are not necessarily to be differen-
tiated from phantasies with which they will have become entangled:
they require to be ‘divined – constructed – gradually and laboriously
from an aggregate of indications’ (p.285). The difficulties of analysis
reproduce the difficulties of the patient; Freud is also implicated in
‘constructing’ fictions in his attempt to interpret his patient’s history.
In his most famous case history, that of ‘Dora’ (1905), Freud is
forced to complete the story on his own, Dora having peremptorily
walked out on the analysis. Freud was disconcerted by the ‘frag-
mentary’ nature of the case history which seemed to indict his own
capacity for coherent thought. Freud must ‘restore what is missing’
himself, again offering his own constructions for what is unavailable
or ‘mutilated’ within the patient’s material (Freud 1977: 41). Despite
the fact, which he acknowledges, that any neurosis will to a degree
remain bewildering, even to the most practised analyst, he still
finds it difficult to suspend his own yearning for closure: ‘If the work
had been continued, we should no doubt have obtained the fullest
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64 subjectivity, representation, narrative
possible enlightenment upon every particular of the case’ (p.40). Yet
what becomes evident is not so much what is missing from the
case history as what Freud must himself exclude. Freud marginalizes
the conflicting evidence – Dora’s attachment to her mother, her
homosexual attraction to Frau K. – in order to demonstrate Dora’s
‘hysterical’ resistance to ‘normal’ heterosexuality. For later commen-
tators on ‘Dora’, what appears troubling is the meaning of femininity
which Freud can only ‘know’ in terms of his own Oedipal story, and
therefore in a fragmentary or incomplete way. In other words, what
is at stake here is not just Dora’s unconscious but Freud’s: his desire
is to contain the threat which Dora poses to his definition of
femininity and thus to his potency as a (male) scientist as well.
Freud was aware that his theory of the unconscious and its
workings was always in danger of being ‘watered down’ (Freud 1935:
95), its new and disturbing form of knowledge diluted, even though
he, himself, was often at odds with the implications of his own
theory in his desire to claim mastery over it. The challenge of Freud’s
later interpreter, Jacques Lacan, from the 1920s onwards is not
that he ‘revised’ Freudian theory or added to it, but that he drew
out its radical and disruptive potential. Lacan recognized that the
Freudian unconscious was at odds with the traditions of humanism
which Freud inherited and within which he tried to situate himself.
Whereas Freud’s ultimate aim was to restore meaning by providing
a therapeutic cure, Lacan drew attention to the status of the un-
conscious as a gap or a lost moment. For Lacan there was no way of
‘knowing’ the unconscious, since it cannot be circumscribed in any
temporal structure. Instead it appears in a moment of intuition
which disappears again before any conclusion can be reached (Lacan
1979: 32). Claims to mastery founder on an irreconcilable split
within the subject; the unconscious forever escapes the subject who
presumes to know, but who is, unknown to himself, mired in mis-
apprehension and delusion. When Lacan stated that ‘the unconscious
is structured like a language’ (p.20) he was not only bringing his
own post-Freudian understanding of linguistics into play, he was
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 65
also drawing attention to the only form in which the unconscious
ever makes itself available. ‘The analyst’s interpretation merely
reflects the fact that the unconscious, if it is what I say it is, namely,
a play of the signifier, has already in its formations – dreams, slips
of the tongue or pen, witticisms or symptoms – proceeded by
interpretation’ (Lacan 1979: 130). Psychoanalysis shares the same
fate as the subject: it starts in the labyrinth of language from which
it can never expect to escape; the unconscious presents itself in
terms of the allusive effects of language which can only be interpreted
again by the analyst within language. As therapy, psychoanalysis
is always concerned with the spoken word both as the analytic
material and as the only means the analyst has of interpreting it.
There is no way out of the twists and turns of language (Bowie 1991:
48).The subject is constituted within a (foreign) language which
speaks him. Whereas Freud was anxious about the complicity
of psychoanalysis with literature, Lacan finds within literature the
‘seeds’ and confirmation of an intricate and multi-layered language,
which speaks more than it knows.
For Lacan, the implication of Freudian theory was that the subject
was never more than a fantasy of a unified subject, already inhabited
by ‘the Other’. Lacan uses the term ‘the Other’ to designate both the
‘otherness’ of the unconscious and the other to whom the subject
directs his speech and who is thus the locus of meaning and iden-
tification. For Lacan what he famously designated the ‘mirror stage’
was the founding moment for the subject and the structure through
which the subject assumes his identity, as the unified image that is
reflected back to him from outside, from the place of the Other.
Traditional notions of the mirror were that it returned a more or
less faithful likeness of an original, pre-existing self. Lacan argued
that the mirror constructs the self, that what is ‘known’ as the
self is the cohesiveness of a reflection which the subject fantasizes as
real. Clearly this also has implications for autobiography which has
often employed the idea of the mirror as an analogy for the self-
reflective project of autobiographical writing. Read in the light of
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66 subjectivity, representation, narrative
Lacan’s mirror stage, autobiography, according to Shari Benstock,
‘reveals the impossibility of its own dream: what begins in the
presumption of self-knowledge ends in the creation of a fiction that
covers over the premises of its construction’. The subject, through
autobiography, strives towards the ‘false symmetry’ of the mirror, a
unified self which can only ever be a fiction (Benstock 1988: 11, 12).
The ‘return to Freud’ inaugurated by Lacan recognized that no
knowledge existed outside the destabilizing effect of the unconscious
and that the interpretive procedures that Freud initiated could be
equally applied to his own texts. Returning to Freud was not to
invoke his presence as final authority but to put into play all that
was unfinished about his texts, all that was Other about them or
at odds with their presumed meaning. Applying this to Freud’s own
autobiographical text, An Autobiographical Study (1935), means,
therefore, that the most Freudian thing about it could be less
what it tells us about Freud than what it does not. If we read it from
a post-Lacanian perspective, it becomes, perhaps, a form of desire in
relation to autobiography; an autobiography through which ‘Freud’
returns as the inexplicable haunting his own text, as the space, the
interval between one self and an Other.
Freud in fact wrote his An Autobiographical Study in 1924, ten years
earlier than the above publication date, in response to a request from
a German editor who wished to compile a collection of short studies
by members of the medical profession which would thus illuminate
current medical knowledge. As Freud’s translator, James Strachey,
suggests, ‘the stress was thus laid by implication on the professional
rather than the personal histories’ (Freud 1935: 9) and it would
therefore be easy to interpret how Freud presented himself as
determined by the aims of the collection itself. However, this par-
ticular emphasis seems to have suited Freud’s own ‘autobiographical
urge’. In the later postscript to the Study he himself chooses to
‘justify’ his life in terms of a triumphant sacrifice of the personal
to science:
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 67
The Autobiographical Study shows how psychoanalysis came to
be the whole content of my life and rightly assumes that no per-
sonal experiences of mine are of any interest in comparison to
my relations to that science.
(Freud 1935: 131)
Oddly, then, for someone uniquely aware of the decisive influence
of the hidden aspects of the psyche on the public self, Freud pushes
his own private and affective life to the margins of his autobio-
graphical text. The only relations that matter are, as Freud says,
the relations with science. His mother receives no mention at all;
his father fleetingly enters the text but only to be the servant of
Freud’s autonomy and professional independence: ‘Though we lived
in very limited circumstances, my father insisted that, in my choice
of profession, I should follow my own inclination’ (Freud 1935: 13).
His fiancée is presented as a hindrance to his work and the reason
he did not achieve fame at an earlier age, though he denies – with
rather obvious unconscious meaning – that he bears her ‘any grudge’
(p.25). His friendship with Breuer is a price that he painfully
but ‘inescapably’ has to pay for the development of psychoanalysis
(p.33). This disavowal of dependency at an emotional level extends
to Freud’s intellectual sources and influences as well. Though he
admits to having learned from others, notably Breuer and Charcot,
he also believed he alone understood the wider significance of their
ideas. He deliberately avoided reading the work of the philosophers
Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work was in
some ways close to his own, until late in life. If psychoanalysis could
be said to originate with Freud, psychoanalysis also proved his
originality: ‘I stood alone and had to do all the work myself’, Freud
writes of the important formative phase (p.101).
It could be argued that one of the desires that is encoded by
autobiography, and which Freud’s Study seems to exemplify, is that
of becoming, within the realm of the symbolic, one’s own progenitor,
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68 subjectivity, representation, narrative
of assuming authorship of one’s own life. This has a clear echo within
Freud’s psychoanalytic thinking. In one of his most famous formula-
tions, his theory of the Oedipus/Castration complex, the female
genitals remain ‘undiscovered’. As he writes in the Study: ‘Only the
male genitals play a part in it, and the female ones remain undis-
covered’ (Freud 1935: 67); the female genitals exist as the opaque
reality which Freud’s theory must convert into a symbolic lack
or absence in order clearly to maintain its own unity and coherence
as theory. As we have already seen in relation to Freud’s case study
of ‘Dora’, the male within Freud’s theory of sexuality becomes the
theoretical model for the female, while the female – fragmentary and
incomplete – is made theoretically impotent, denied the possibility
of a different theory of her own. However, the ‘undiscovered female
genitals’ could also be said to function in another way: undiscovered
in the sense that Freud himself described the pre-Oedipal lying
beneath the Oedipal; like a yet to be explored archaeological site,
they contain a repressed or forgotten knowledge of the conception
and birth that necessarily preceded his own self-conception within
language. By emphasizing his originality and the close corre-
spondence between his life and his intellectual achievement, Freud
could be said to have attempted to exclude the mother or feminine
Other whose identity threatens his own.
As we have already noted, Lacan suggested that psychoanalysis
itself may be at odds with the kind of singularity and transcendence
that Freud is proposing within his autobiography; on the contrary,
Lacan argued that psychoanalysis calls into question the possibility
of a ‘subject who knows’ by positing its inevitable relation with the
unknowable Other. Freud himself had written in 1910 that as a
psychoanalyst ‘one may sometimes make a wrong surmise, and one
is never in a position to discover the whole truth’ (Freud 1979b:
221–2). The very obvious ‘wrong surmise’ that Freud makes in his
Study is that he would die soon after he completed it in 1925; instead
he was still alive to add a postscript some ten years later. The text
that we have therefore offers a rewriting of the ending, revealing the
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error of his first more tragic perception of finality from the
perspective of his unexpected survival. Death, as if we had been
transposed from a Greek tragedy to a Shakespearean comedy, is no
longer the inevitable end, and authoritative utterance, such as Freud
assumes in the Study, loses its meaning. Indeed in the postscript
Freud is ambivalently positioned between being the author of
cultural and historical studies which have taken his writing in
ambitious new directions, and the thinker he was before, who has
added nothing original to his own theory of psychoanalysis. Freud
in a sense and, despite his efforts, cannot regain mastery of the
difference he makes to his previous text. His autobiography exceeds
its own conclusion(s) and he can only recover himself through
splitting and repetition; there is always more than one interpretation
to be accounted for. In a fascinatingly brief disclaimer towards the
end of the postscript he also opens up the possibility of reading other
of his texts as autobiographical or of recognizing that there may
be more than one text of the self:
And here I may be allowed to break off these autobiographical
notes. The public has no claim to learn any more of my personal
affairs – of my struggles, my disappointments, and my successes.
I have in any case been more open and frank in some of my writ-
ings (such as The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychoanalysis
of Everyday Life) than people usually are who describe their lives
for their contemporaries or for posterity. I have had small thanks
for it and from my experience I cannot recommend anyone to
follow my example.
(Freud 1935: 135)
Dreading disclosure which may, after all, have already happened
and longing for recognition, Freud also surrenders the omnipotence
he has claimed for himself throughout his Study. His denial of
‘relations’ makes a suitably Freudian return. In the transference
which occurs between writer and reader, he can only imagine a reader
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70 subjectivity, representation, narrative
who withholds recognition from him, from whom he receives small
thanks, while also clearly desiring from his public some other, more
gratifying relationship. According to Lacan, ‘the Other latent or not,
is even beforehand, present in the subjective revelation’ (Lacan 1979:
130). Freud can neither dispose of the Other’s implication within
his own discourse, nor conceal the traces of what exceeds or precedes
his own claim to mastery. Derrida, commenting in a suitably obscure
way about Freud’s attempts at autobiography through self-analysis,
suggests the supreme paradox of Freud’s thinking: Freud’s self-
knowledge is ultimately knowledge of what ‘he’, the subject, cannot
know: ‘He who called himself the first, and therefore the only,
one to have attempted, if not to have defined it, did not himself
know and this must be taken into account’ (Derrida 1991: 532).
BARTHES’ AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SIGNS
Roland Barthes’ autobiography Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
(1977) is probably the most famous attempt to write an auto-
biography ‘against itself’. While purporting to be an autobiography,
it deconstructs from within the major assumptions underlying
the genre. The text’s most salient break with tradition is achieved
through discarding the first-person singular and substituting instead
multiple-subject positionings: ‘he’, ‘R.B.’, ‘you’ and ‘I’ exchange
places almost arbitrarily in an attempt to reinforce the effect of
distance between the writer and the written text: ‘I had no other
solution than to rewrite myself – at a distance, a great distance – here
and now. . . . Far from reaching the core of the matter, I remain on
the surface’ (p.142). For Barthes the essentialized subject, the subject
whose depths are waiting to be revealed, is an illusion, an ideological
construct to be resisted and displaced. As is appropriate for the writer
who famously proclaimed in 1968 that the author is dead, his
autobiographical subject can never authenticate his reality but only
go on adding indefinitely to his many different spectral forms of
identity:
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This book is not a book of ‘confessions’; not that it is insincere,
but because we have a different knowledge today than yesterday;
such knowledge can be summarized as follows: What I write
about myself is never the last word: the more ‘sincere’ I am, the
more interpretable I am, under the eye of other examples than
those of the old authors, who believed they were required to
submit themselves to but one law: authenticity.
(Barthes 1977: 120)
For Barthes, the subject can neither recapture the past, restoring
it like a ‘monument’ (p.56), nor aim towards some ideal of trans-
cendence in the future: there is no other place of radiant unification
which can redeem the subject outside or behind the discourse in
which he constructs and deconstructs himself. Barthes, therefore,
with unmistakable ostentation, not only disperses the autobio-
graphical subject between positions or pronouns, he also rigorously
eschews narrative for the fragment, using the alphabet to ensure a
random ordering of autobiographical snippets or self-reflections
which deny the subject both origin and destiny:
The alphabetical order erases everything, banishes every origin.
Perhaps in places, certain fragments seem to follow one another
by some affinity; but the important thing is that these little
networks not be connected, that they not slide into a single
enormous network which would be the structure of the book, its
meaning. It is in order to halt, to deflect, to divide this descent
of discourse toward a destiny of the subject, that at certain
moments the alphabet calls you to order (to disorder) and says:
Cut! Resume the story in another way.
(Barthes 1977: 148)
The book then offers repeated beginnings; not the reconstruction
of a past nor a writing about the past but the continuing accretion,
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72 subjectivity, representation, narrative
through the present act of writing, of new layers that work to
‘abolish’ his ‘previous truth’ (p.56). It would be wrong, however, to
see the past as simply excluded by Barthes; rather it is stripped
of its ideological function as a privileged source of meaning, as
the ‘natural’ ground of identity. What Barthes does is to resist the
nostalgia which transfers desire to the past, which makes the past
the locus of a longed-for but irretrievable unity. Instead he ‘free-
wheels’ in language, collapsing the distinction between the present
and the past; he creates a ‘patchwork’ of discursive fragments without
reference to the past or the present; both equally constitute the
‘surface’ of the text in the ‘here and now’. By writing, he adds ‘to the
books, to the themes, to the memories, to the texts, another utter-
ance, without my ever knowing whether it is about my past or my
present that I am speaking’ (p.142).
Psychoanalysis figures in Barthes’ text as one of the discourses
which informs but does not contain his own. He can ‘make use’ of
psychoanalysis, he writes, only if he does not look at it directly
(Barthes 1977: 153). Like all ‘triumphant discourse’ (p.47), psycho-
analysis, when it is perceived as a body of knowledge or opinion or,
in Barthes’ term, doxa, excludes difference or excess. Barthes associ-
ates this difference with a relation to the living principle of writing
– ‘the Text of life, life-as-text’ (p.64). It is interesting to note here
that if autobiography is rejected by Barthes as a set of generic
conventions already in existence, it is nevertheless recognized by him
as a space of difference within discourse. The term which Barthes
takes over from psychoanalysis is ‘the Imaginary’, a term originally
used by Lacan to designate the repertoire of imaginary identifications
and mirror images through which the subject covers his relations
with the external world in order to ameliorate its otherness. Like
Lacan, Barthes sees the subject as diffracted through a mirror,
identified with his own delusional reflected gaze: ‘what actually
belongs to me is my image-repertoire, my phantasmatics’ (pp.152–3).
Much of Barthes by Barthes is involved with recognizing that a
coherent self is a fiction, that it must always involve being seen from
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 73
a distance, through the perspective of the Other. In one of the
captions which accompany the photographs at the beginning of
the book, Barthes writes: ‘Where is your authentic body? You are
the only one who can never see yourself except as an image’ (p.152).
Yet, through the activity of writing, he – or ‘I’ – is also on the inside,
pleasurably surrounding himself with the words and images. Barthes
can escape from the ‘image-repertoire’ in the space of work; words
themselves, freed from their known place – their pigeon-holes – and
attached to desire, can take the place of transitional objects. They
can blossom and float, becoming valued objects of play or fantasy:
‘As for the child, these favourite words constitute a part of his arena;
and like transitional objects, they are of uncertain status’ (p.130).
For Barthes the most important of such words is the ‘body’
(Barthes 1977: 130). It is a word which returns throughout the
text and which Barthes frees from notions of the known, discrete,
singularized body: ‘“Which body? We have several”’ (p.60). The
body precisely resists its own conceptualization (p.80). Missing from
stereotypes (p.90), it is the body which creates difference, which
inflects discourse by tracing within it its own movement of pleasure
and desire: ‘The body is the irreducible difference, and at the same
time it is the principle of all structuration (since structuration
is what is Unique in structure)’ (p.175). The body creates a ‘passion
of meaning’ (p.161), a disturbance or space where something happens
to language, where the body’s presence both animates and displaces
meaning, makes meaning both mobile and irrecoverably somewhere
else. For Barthes the most ‘meaningful’ discourse is discourse which
does not allow itself to be ‘caught’, but which ‘rustles’ with different
meanings, with a frisson or excitation which moves language away
from definitive forms, from signs ‘grimly weighted’ by signifieds
(p.98). Barthes’ own ‘most meaningful’ language is marked by its
entanglement with the body it also evokes, with an inspiration
(movement or breath) which comes from the body: ‘meaning, before
collapsing into in-significance, shudders still . . . it remains fluid,
shuddering with a faint ebullition’ (pp.97–8).
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74 subjectivity, representation, narrative
The body also has a relation to ‘theatre’, the space for Barthes
where all the divergent paths in his writing cross: ‘At the cross-
roads of the entire oeuvre, perhaps the Theater’ (Barthes 1977: 177).
Barthes’ conceptualization of theatre is Brechtian; that is, as for
Brecht, the actor never simply identifies with the character he
performs: ‘I am speaking about myself in the manner of the Brechtian
actor who must distance his character: “show” rather than incarnate
him’ (p.168). Barthes performs his ‘imaginary’ as if he were demon-
strating or rehearsing different parts, distancing himself from them
at the same time as scrutinizing them from different perspectives.
To ‘stage an image-system’, as Barthes is doing in this book, means
to arrange the perspectives, the roles and the limits; it is to give it
a certain topology (p.105). The body in performance can belong to
different scenes, without becoming merely a representation of the
body; the body moving through different spaces and performing
different roles is not fictitious; it is being used in a way which is
both ‘contingent’ and ‘essential’ (p.183). It does not so much provide
one location as many different ones, breaking up any simple iden-
tification, creating distance and multiple perspectives: ‘The image-
repertoire is taken over by several masks (personae), distributed
according to the depth of the stage (and yet no one – personne, as we
say in French – is behind them)’ (p.120).
Yet however ironically or critically Barthes treats autobiography
and the notion of the unitary subject which it has traditionally
enshrined, he also undertakes his project within a form which
still signifies to him as an autobiography. Sean Burke has argued
that it is important to distinguish between critique and rejection:
while Barthes puts the ‘duplicities of representation’ under pressure,
making visible at every turn the impossibility of escape into an
unmediated selfhood, he also resituates autobiography within a
different critical moment. Autobiography survives its reconfiguring
by poststructuralism, by absorbing and acknowledging self-critique.
According to Sean Burke, ‘to see the demise of autobiography in
Roland Barthes is quite simply to affirm a greatly simplified
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 75
conception of the autobiographical act . . . as though when a genre
or mode of writing advertises its inherent problematics it is thereby
denying or destroying itself’ (Burke 1992: 189).
That autobiography does survive, albeit in a different form,
signals not just its resilience but also, as Barthes himself admits, the
limits of his own deconstructive gestures towards it. To fragment
the subject and expose its illusions of unity may be, as we have seen,
an ideological imperative for Barthes; however, he also raises doubts
about whether such a project can ever be totally achieved. In line
with his many destabilizing gestures in Roland Barthes, Barthes is
finally also sceptical of his own strategies of fragmentation:
I have the illusion to suppose that by breaking up my discourse
I cease to discourse in terms of the imaginary about myself,
attenuating the risk of transcendence; but since the fragment
(haiku, maxim, pensée, journal entry) is finally a rhetorical genre
and since rhetoric is that layer of language which best presents
itself to interpretation, by supposing I disperse myself I merely
return, quite docilely, to the bed of the imaginary.
(Barthes 1977: 95)
In order for Barthes’ fragmented, disjointed discourse to be
possible another scene must exist. The fragmented self-image – the
body in bits and pieces, to use Lacanian terminology – can only,
paradoxically, in the end be known and represented from the
perspective of an imaginary wholeness. Fragmentation, cast in the
form of a rhetoric of fragmentation, comes only after the mirror stage
and the constitution of the subject through the illusory recognition
of unity, even though it attempts to represent what came before.
What appears, therefore, to disperse the unified subject is simply a
further projection of it; the violent shattering of a unified identity
leads back ‘docilely’ to the primary identification of the subject in
the imaginary. It is still the case, of course, that the mirror stage
produces only an illusion of identity, an imaginary wholeness, but
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76 subjectivity, representation, narrative
both past and future representations of the self are necessarily rooted
in it. There is no way back through the mirror; nothing, or no one,
exists on the other side.
Barthes’ last book, Camera Lucida (1984), was published some five
years after his experimental, ludic autobiography. Ostensibly about
photography, it also returns to the problems of the autobiographical
but with a sense of urgency and almost overwhelming pain. Written
in the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death, the book’s quest
to discover what photography is ‘in itself’ (Barthes 1984: 3) merges
with another quest: the autobiographical quest for the ‘essence’ of
the beloved person which no image can ever quite seem to give back
to him (p.107). Photographs had also featured in Barthes by Barthes
as a privileged site of the author’s pleasure and fascination which he
had positioned in the book before the text and without pagination,
just as psychologically the ‘image-repertoire’ could be said to
precede, or be outside, writing. ‘The image-repertoire will therefore
be closed at the onset of productive life. . . . Another repertoire
will then be constituted: that of writing.’ In Camera Lucida, therefore,
photography returns as a different kind of representational space
where questions of essence, which are treated as fallacious within
writing where meaning is always plural and substitutive, can again
be raised. In Camera Lucida Barthes goes on to develop his famous
theory of the punctum, the word he coins to describe a piercing,
uncodifiable detail that can pass from photograph to viewer and
which is powerful enough to connect the spectator again with the
‘real’ of the past. By the ‘real’, Barthes means, like Lacan, an essence
which is unsymbolizable, but where he differs from Lacan is con-
ceiving of situations where the threshold to the real can be crossed.
According to Barthes, the photograph can offer such an opportunity;
it can succeed where texts cannot in offering ‘the unheard-of
identification of reality (“that has been”) with truth (“there-she-is!”):
it becomes both evidential and exclamative’ (p.113); through its
appeal to ‘the absolute particular’ (p.4), it can communicate what
cannot be put into words.
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 77
Barthes’ fascination with photographs could be seen, as Rick
Rylance suggests, in terms of a surprisingly naive denial of the range
and sophistication of photographic trickery (Rylance 1994: 132).
However, in the access that photographs at least seem to offer him to
the ‘real’, his turning to photography also indicates a dissatisfac-
tion with the ‘reductiveness’ of writing (Barthes 1984: 8), a kind
of humanist residue that was also perhaps evident in Barthes by
Barthes, in the paradoxical ‘return’ of the ‘wholeness’ which his text
also continually dismisses and transgresses. ‘Totality’ is the question,
quite literally, which Barthes by Barthes comes back to in the end
(Barthes 1977: 180).
In Camera Lucida all photographs lead to one photograph: Barthes’
quest for the meaning of photography leads him as if back to the
beginning, to a photograph of his mother, which uniquely among
his photographs of her seems to reveal ‘the truth of the face I had
loved’ (Barthes 1984: 67). Strangely, however, this photograph is
not a photograph of his mother as he ever could have known her.
It is not a photograph taken during their life together. Instead it is
a picture of her, aged 5, posing with her brother outside a Winter
Garden. ‘I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother’
(p.69), Barthes writes. The ‘initiatic path’ that has taken him to
the moment of this discovery has also taken him to ‘the end of all
language’, a recognition of the unique being of his mother ‘in which
words fail’: ‘the rare, perhaps unique evidence of the “So, yes, so
much and no more”’ (p.109). Though Barthes derives a theory of
photography from this one photograph, ‘the only photograph which
assuredly existed for me’, it also remains private, hidden from the
eyes of the reader. ‘It exists only for me’, he states uncompromisingly.
The book leads back to the space of the personal, which is also an
unrepresented space that exists outside or beyond the text.
For Barthes this space is also presented as a feminine or maternal
space. If in Camera Lucida the death of the mother occasions the
search for an authentic photograph of her, and an enquiry into
what is authentic about photographs, it also seems to require an
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78 subjectivity, representation, narrative
autobiographical return to the intimacy of her dying. As in the
photograph, mother and son have here changed places, with the
mother occupying the place of the child and Barthes offering
maternal sustenance:
During her illness, I nursed her, held the bowl of tea she liked
because it was easier to drink from than from a cup; she had
become my little girl, uniting for me with that essential child she
was in her first photograph. In Brecht, by a reversal I used to
admire a great deal, it is the son who (politically) educates the
mother; yet I never educated my mother, never converted her
to anything at all; in a sense I never ‘spoke’ to her, never ‘dis-
coursed’ in her presence, for her; we supposed, without saying
anything of the kind to each other, that the frivolous insignifi-
cance of language, the suspension of images must be the very
space of love, its music.
(Barthes 1984: 72)
According to Barthes, the mother belongs to a place outside
discourse, or at least outside the persuasiveness of theoretical dis-
course. Earlier we saw how Freud had implicitly positioned himself
as theorist against the threat of the feminine or maternal body.
For other theorists too, matricide becomes ‘our vital necessity,
the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation’ (Kristeva 1989:
27–8); according to this view, the subject, by taking up their place
within the symbolic, by entering language, in effect kills the mother,
substituting words for her body which is forever lost. However, by
identifying himself with his mother, Barthes also keeps her alive:
‘ultimately I experienced her . . . as my feminine child’ (Barthes
1984: 72). Her real dying replaces her symbolic murder. For Barthes
it seems that the mother leads away from theory towards auto-
biography where, though her dying is represented, her death can be
endlessly postponed. Drawn back into a mournful relationship with
his mother Barthes writes autobiographically, but is there a necessary
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relationship between autobiography and the maternal? And what is
the relation between the mother’s real death and her symbolic
murder? These are questions which Jacques Derrida also raises and
which we will return to again.
DERRIDA AND THE TRACES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
If Barthes, in his rejection of autobiographical convention, wrote
a fragmented autobiography, Jacques Derrida goes one step further
and scatters autobiography as a motif or theme throughout his work.
As we have already seen, Derrida’s commentary on Rousseau’s
Confessions in On Grammatology points to the impossibility of
Rousseau ever fulfilling his avowed aim of self-presence in this text,
diverted as he is into the inevitable mediations and displacements
of writing. Autobiography as a demand for unmediated selfhood
is, it seems, doomed to reiterate itself endlessly as text. In a later
essay, ‘To Speculate – on “Freud”’, and starting from a different
direction, from a text which is not explicitly autobiographical,
Derrida nevertheless finds autobiography at work deconstructing
its supposed rational or theoretical basis. Taking Freud’s fort–da, the
famous scene in Beyond the Pleasure Principle where Freud describes
his grandson Ernst playing with a reel, throwing it away and
recovering it while at the same time uttering the words fort (there)
and da (here), Derrida sees autobiography as the unwitting repli-
cation by the text of the process it is trying, rationally, to understand.
Freud is also performing a fort–da by recalling the scene of his
grandson’s play, who is himself, with the aid of the reel, recalling his
mother. According to Derrida, Freud is doing with his text what
Ernst is doing with his reel: he is recalling himself, just as Ernst is,
but through a substitutive process – a supplementary operation
– which can never be complete and which he can never completely
master. Moreover, the scene opens up a series of genealogical permu-
tations – grandson and grandfather, daughter and mother – whereby
the substitution of places happens within an already existing chain
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80 subjectivity, representation, narrative
of family relations: Ernst’s mother becomes Freud’s mother but she
is already his daughter. Derrida characteristically employs puns in
order to enact this plurality and at the same time illustrate Freud’s
always incomplete mastery of the text. For Derrida the point is that
the fort–da is never simply the theory Freud supposes, but a process
inscribed by the text in advance. The string the child plays with is
also the descendant, son or grandson (fils); the net (filet) is already in
place, and by pulling on the string (fils) Freud inevitably gets caught
up: ‘He himself has been caught in advance by the catching’ (Derrida
1991: 548).
Derrida’s frequent returns to the problem of autobiography in
his writing signal its importance to him as an ‘irritant’ (Smith 1995:
5), troubling the border between the ‘life’ and the ‘work’. While the
autobiographical subject (as in Rousseau’s Confessions, for instance)
is always engaged in going beyond itself into other discourses, or
into discourse as a form of otherness, philosophical discourse is seen
by Derrida as dependent on moments which defy its own systematic
coherence, a specificity, or autobiographical trace, which remains
despite the assumption of universality, and which it can never deci-
sively overcome. Instead of using ‘autobiography’ in a familiar sense,
as a genre with a history and already recognizable conventions and
form, Derrida wants to think about autobiography as operating in a
new space in a completely different way. For Derrida the point is that
once one problematizes the border, once the life and the work become
difficult to separate and the status of empirical facts as they apply
to an author’s life or his ‘corpus’, his works, is thrown into question,
then the autobiographical also has to be ‘redistributed’ or ‘restruc-
tured’. Autobiography still exists, Derrida is careful to point out,
but its meaning will not be the same (Derrida 1988: 45).
Derrida’s reformulation of the problem of the autobiographical
has many ramifications; however, two in particular seem important
here. The first is his rethinking of the role of the signature, the
‘proper name’ or autograph, and the way it inhabits that problematic
borderline between life and work; the second, not unrelated, is his
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 81
redefining of autobiography as ‘thanatography’ (thanatos Gk. – death),
a writing not of a living but a dead author. For Derrida the question
of the proper name or signature quickly takes on overtones of death
since the name with which one signs will always outlive the bearer
of that name. Indeed, to the extent that the proper name has a life of
its own, it proclaims the death of its bearer every time it is used:
In calling or naming someone while he is alive, we know that his
name can survive him and already survives him; the name begins
during his life to get along without him speaking and bearing
his death each time it is inscribed in a list, or a civil registry, or a
signature.
(Derrida 1988: 49)
Therefore, since autobiography doubles the attempt to live through
the name by also taking the name into the title of the work, it also
increases its own involvement with death. In attempting to make
use of the name as a guarantee of self-presence, autobiography is
deflected further from its aim, overrun by the death it releases
through writing.
Derrida has exemplified many of these ideas in his exploration
of Nietzsche’s autobiographical text, Ecce Homo (1899). Taking
Nietzsche’s exergue, a single page which is situated between the
Preface and the first chapter, and which is dated as written on
his forty-fifth birthday, the day on which, as Nietzsche sees it, he
‘buries’ his forty-fourth year, knowing that the achievements of that
year, his writings, are ‘immortal’, Derrida finds Nietzsche’s own idea
of the ‘eternal return’ inscribed in the ‘strange present’ of this
autobiographical moment (Derrida 1988: 13). Nietzsche affirms
his own life by imagining it as a gift for which he feels grateful:
‘“How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life? – and so I tell
my life to myself.”’ This statement of autobiographical intent is not
autobiographical in the way commonly understood by the term,
according to Derrida; it is not autobiographical because the signatory
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82 subjectivity, representation, narrative
recalls his past life from a point outside or beyond the text but
because he is ‘the addressee and destination’ of the narration within
the text. The ‘I’, therefore, only constitutes itself through a return;
he does not sign prior to what he will have become through the
texts he has written. The ‘I’ thus has no prehistory, no point of origin
outside writing; rather ‘I’ is cited (recited) within the text: ‘It is the
eternal return that signs and seals’ (ibid.).
For Derrida the exergue, and its exemplary placing between –
between the title and the Preface on the one hand and the work to
come on the other – says something about the problematic borderline
of autobiography, neither inside the author’s work nor his life; but
never simply exterior to them either. This act of self-engendering
– ‘I tell my life to myself’ – which is not one moment or place but
structured through a return, an endlessly repeating gesture of
affirmation, looping back on itself is an ‘instantly vanishing limit’,
in Derrida’s words, that disappears only to reappear again (Derrida
1988: 14). Moreover, within this structure of return, difference
intervenes, for the ‘I’ who speaks does not coincide with ‘myself’ to
whom my life is told. In order to hear myself speak my speech must
pass through the labyrinthine passages of the ear; it must risk not
being heard or being heard differently. In this sense the ear is always
the ear of the other: the message I send cannot return unless I allow
otherness to intervene, unless the circuit from mouth to ear is open
for others to hear. It is this otherness which allows communication
to occur. It is therefore the ear of the other, according to Derrida,
that says ‘me to me’ (p.51); and it is according to this logic that the
signature becomes effective not at the time it apparently takes place,
but later, when the other, with ears to hear it, has understood my
name or deciphered my signature: ‘A text is signed only much later
by the other’ (ibid.).
The ‘I’ is always a place of self-division for Derrida, an addressor
and an addressee, a name which, after it is spoken, also requires to
be heard. Derrida finds another way of expressing this duality by
turning to Nietzsche’s ‘riddle’ of his family origins, his genealogy:
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 83
‘I am, to express it in the form of a riddle, already dead as my father,
while as my mother, I am still living and becoming old’ (Derrida
1988: 15). This gendered division within the subject makes the
father, or the name of the father, always the sign of death, while the
mother lives on as the ‘living feminine’. For Derrida, the mother and
father signify the dual inheritances of language: the formal, scientific,
dead paternal language and the ‘natural, living mother tongue’
(p.26). Language must pass through the body by way of the mouth
and the ear; in this way it takes what is already dead and regenerates
or revitalizes it as the ‘living feminine’. The mother is a metaphor
for what is not metaphoric about language. Hers is the body through
which language must pass to make itself heard; hers is the impetus
to difference and to specificity. However, the price of her positioning
as the vital principle of language is that she herself does not live or
speak. She is fundamental but she is also anonymous:
She gives rise to all the figures by losing herself in the back-
ground of the scene like an anonymous persona. Everything
comes back to her, beginning with life; everything addresses
and destines itself to her. She survives on the condition of
remaining at bottom.
(Derrida 1988: 38)
This statement provokes a number of questions about women’s
relation to writing, and to autobiography in particular, which I will
pursue in the next section. For the moment, however, it is important
to think a little more about Derrida’s positioning of the mother.
What happens, for instance, when Derrida writes autobiographically
about his own mother, as he does in ‘Circumfession’ (1993)? How
does his autobiographical address to the mother relate to his theo-
retical placing of her? And is it significant that ‘Circumfession’, the
most explicitly autobiographical of Derrida’s texts to date, should
open, like Barthes’ Cameria Lucida, on the painful scene of the
mother’s dying?
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84 subjectivity, representation, narrative
As we have already seen, ‘Circumfession’ is a text which is also
about Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and which therefore imbricates
another’s autobiography in its own. Derrida’s text runs along the
bottom of the pages of a ‘masterful’ outline of his work by the critic
Geoffrey Bennington which dominates the readerly space. Auto-
biography, so this multiplicity of discourses suggests, already has
a relation to other texts; there is no singular text of the self or no
autobiography which is only one’s own. However, this positioning
of Derrida’s text also suggests the way reason fails to comprehend
or master the autobiographical or the contingent, which troubles
its borders with some other, unassimilated meaning. Derrida
writes and tries to preserve the unpredictable, which is necessarily
absent from Bennington’s text about him. He engages in a ‘duel’
with him which he can never finally win. Who owns the name
Derrida? This is the same question that Derrida asked in respect of
Nietzsche when he discovered that the other must always sign
in his place. Now he suggests a struggle to preserve what cannot be
preserved; his challenge is to return what is not possible, the living
body or life to the text; to say something uncodifiable which
will disrupt Bennington’s text, a text which, by turning him into a
system of thought, has also forgotten him. To forget, in this instance,
means surrendering to the law, leaving out of account the living
presence.
Derrida also writes ‘Circumfession’ to his mother; he tries to
reclaim his name from Bennington in order to give it back to his
mother, but a mother who no longer recognizes him:
I am writing here at the moment when my mother no
longer recognizes me, and at which, still capable of speaking
or articulating, a little, she no longer calls me and for her and
therefore for the rest of her life I no longer have a name. . . . I am
writing for my mother, perhaps even for a dead woman and so
many analogies or recent analogies will come to the reader’s mind
even if no, they don’t hold, those analogies, none of them, for if
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 85
I were here writing for my mother, it would be for a living mother
who does not recognize her son.
(Derrida 1993: 25)
Derrida’s writing turns personal in its turn to the mother: he offers
up his name to her who no longer recognizes him. In trying to reach
towards his mother he must lose himself, since she, almost bereft of
language, can no longer recall him. Derrida’s interminable sentences
in ‘Circumfession’ seem to be trying to prolong the moment before
the end, to postpone the death that is also coming. In a sense the
mother’s death is unthinkable because it is she who underwrites his
name with her body, who guarantees his name by providing him
with his ground or being. Derrida invokes the ritual of circumcision
and the blood shed from the body during what is also, within Jewish
tradition, a ceremony of naming, in order to try to rejoin the text to
the living body. The mother’s role within circumcision has been
to sacrifice the son to the social, to offer up his body for the sake of
the name, but to weep for him and feel a pain which the social can
never recognize. Derrida tries to imagine an impossible writing
which, in a sense this autobiography is, which might include blood,
with the pen as a kind of syringe, drawing out the invisible inside
(Derrida 1993: 10); however, writing always presupposes that a
separation from the body has already occurred, that it comes after
circumcision, the sacrifice of the body, when the blood has already
been shed. To think of circumcision is also to think of a moment
when her prayers and tears are mingled with his blood; his pain now
recalls her pain for him then, a pain or mourning which, however,
she cannot express. In trying to speak to her or for her, it seems
Derrida always speaks in her place. Indeed when the mother appears
in Derrida’s text it is in terms of a body which is shamefully exposed,
decaying, or already dead. He, in a sense, cannot represent her
without doing violence to her, which in turn – and there is a
repetition here of the way she becomes him – recalls the violence
inflicted on his own body. Derrida tries to rescue his mother from
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86 subjectivity, representation, narrative
death through a writing, which, however close it tries to come to
her and to the body, will speak only of death. This, for Derrida, is
the dilemma of autobiography, which is always posited in terms of
an impossibility: the mother he addresses, who draws forth this
mournful, autobiographical text from him, also does not recognize
him. Pain and the risk of fragmentation are evident in this text which
pushes itself to the boundary of what can be said. But it also leaves
us with questions. Can the mother exist only on condition – and as
the condition – of the son’s speech? Does autobiography depend
on her living on but staying mute? Can she never speak for herself?
This, the problem of women’s relation to autobiography, now needs
to be addressed in the next section.
FEMINISM AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM
Feminist critics writing about autobiography in the 1980s
encountered an obvious gap: the absence of women’s texts from an
accepted canon of autobiographical writing, a canon which, as we
have already seen, placed the ‘confessional’ texts of Saint Augustine
and Rousseau at its centre. As with other genres, it was not that
women did not produce autobiographical writing but that it was
deemed to be unimportant, crude or illegitimate, to fail to live up
to the necessary test of ‘great writing’. In her Introduction to
the collection of essays which inaugurated criticism of women’s texts,
Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, Estelle Jelinek picked up
on a male critic’s hostile response to Kate Millet’s autobiography
Flying (1979) with the comment: ‘“Insignificant,” indeed, expresses
the predominant attititude of most critics towards women’s lives’
(Jelinek 1980: 4). The slippage from ‘text’ to ‘life’ is instructive and
helps to define a weakness in this early approach. If male critics had
too easily conflated the description of a genre with a narrative of the
masculine subject, feminist critics sought validation for women’s
experience in a not dissimilar way, by using autobiographical texts
as reference for life. The notion of a pre-existing self underlying the
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 87
text and accessed by it bypasses the problem of who the subject is
and how she is constituted. For Domna Stanton, what was at stake
in women’s autobiography was not the recuperation of identities
nor what she dismissed as a ‘facile assumption of referentiality’ but
the difference within women’s writing: the female autograph
dramatizes alterity and non-presence she believes ‘even as it asserts
itself discursively and strives towards an almost impossible self-
possession’ (Stanton 1984: 16).
‘Difference’ is the term that is used to replace the notion of
gendered identity as something innate, drawing attention instead
to how ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are meanings produced within
and through language. Since language is ‘phallocentric’, that is, it
subsumes the feminine into a masculine ‘universal’, women’s
difference is produced in terms of an absence or gap within language,
which can also be used as a subversive space. For Mary Jacobus the
late 1970s was the time when poststructuralist theory with its
critique of ‘essentialized’ identities ‘infiltrated and often polarized’
feminist criticism (Jacobus 1986: x). By the 1980s there was a
growing acknowledgement that ‘difference’, just like ‘identity’ to
which it was first opposed, could also become reified and abstract:
after all, there might be both political and theoretical dangers for
feminism in ignoring both the context and the strategic usefulness
of ‘identities’. Rather than simply seeing the debate between identity
and difference repeated in relation to autobiography with earlier
criticism being discredited or, at least, recomplicated, by later post-
structuralist theory, it is also important for us to recognize here
the part played by autobiography in changing or reconfiguring the
theoretical issues. Autobiography has been one of the most important
sites of feminist debate precisely because it demonstrates that there
are many different ways of writing the subject. The turn to auto-
biographical texts within feminism, therefore, also enabled critics
to replay the problem of the subject in ways that are often
experimental, which seemed to lie outside the terms of theory as it
was currently thought.
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88 subjectivity, representation, narrative
Nancy Miller, who came from a backgound in French theory, gave
a new turn to the argument in 1985 when she voiced the view that
the radical potential of poststructuralism had dissipated itself in
its own tendency to universalize and to fetishize difference. The
‘dead’ author, instead of vacating the role formally occupied by the
unitary subject of humanist ideology, was still a powerfully gendered
presence, according to Miller, inhibiting the recognition of its others.
Miller’s dissent was based on the belief that the concept of the author
was always inflected by a history and, what is more, a history which
had been notably different for women than for men:
The postmodernist decision that the Author is Dead and the
subject along with him does not, I will argue, necessarily hold
for women, and prematurely forecloses the question of agency
for them. Because women have not had the same historical rela-
tion of identity to origin, institution, production that men have
had, they have not, I think, (collectively) felt burdened by too
much Self, Ego, Cogito, etc.
(Miller 1988: 106)
Nicole Ward Jouve expressed a similar point when she suggested
the prematurity for women of deconstructing a subject which had
not yet been allowed to instate itself: ‘You must have a self before
you can afford to deconstruct it’ (Jouve 1991: 7). For the moment
these insights, applied to autobiography, raised the fear of women
again being consigned to an ‘unrecoverable absence’ in a new, but,
as it turns out, no less problematic, theoretical mode. Could women
risk their removal as authors without betraying their own feminist
political agenda? Should an autobiography not be able to offer the
woman reader a form of validation for herself, ‘the assurance and
consolation that she does indeed exist in the world’, as Bella Brodski
and Celeste Schenk put it? This satisfaction was what readers were
being deprived of by poststructuralist theory and ‘a femininity
defined in purely textual terms’ (Brodski and Schenk 1988: 14).
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 89
Perhaps, most importantly for these critics, it was precisely the ‘bios’
part of autobiography, that referentiality which had been excluded
from Stanton’s definition of autobiography, which gave access to a
range of differences in terms of material lives, which the general-
izing term, difference, obscured. Liz Stanley agreed: for her, readers
read autobiography for many, complex reasons, but one of the most
important was to find out about other people’s lives; one way of
reading autobiography, therefore, was to read it as biography. This
was connected for Stanley to the feminist argument that it was
politically necessary to recognize the plurality of women’s lives rather
than privilege through theory one (inevitably Western and middle-
class) notion of Woman. ‘The differences of women’s lives matter,
not differences from an assumed exemplary male life, but rather
differences from each other’ (Stanley 1992: 120).
To be fair, Derrida, who is so often cited as the critical opponent,
had also perceived the dangers in the 1970s of a feminist agenda
based on a singular concept of Woman: ‘There is no one woman, no
one truth in itself about woman in itself’ (Derrida 1991: 372–3). As
we have seen, his notion of autobiography also extends beyond
the question of the subject – its constructedness and alterity – to
the life, understood not as an object or a narrative, something, there-
fore, that we have already distanced ourselves from, but as a ‘living
principle’, troubling the status and boundaries of the written text.
Both ‘woman’, and autobiography with which she is sometimes
conflated, can act as ‘levers of intervention’, subverting the logic of
identity and exposing how a text’s margins and limits are also
inscribed within it (Feder et al. 1997: 2). However, the question
remains how far Derrida’s deconstruction of woman’s position in
one masculinist philosophical system merely entraps her in another.
As Ellen K. Feder and Emily Zakin point out in a recent collection
of essays entitled Derrida and Feminism, Derrida begins his inter-
rogation of Nietzsche in Spurs with the statement: ‘it is woman
who will be my subject’, and, however much she is the ‘locus’ for the
displacement of phallogocentricism, she is still, as the possessive
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90 subjectivity, representation, narrative
pronoun indicates, ‘the servant to Derrida’s interrogation’: ‘Women
have always been exchanged in the service of men’s subjectivity.
Derrida may simply be offering a new twist to an old theme: he
exchanges women in the service of the deconstruction of men’s
subjectivity.’ For these critics there is an important distinction,
which Derrida can be seen to elide, between ‘the question of woman’
and ‘women’s questions’, between woman as his subject and her own
(Feder et al. 1997: 41).
This argument does not necessarily mean falling back into
essentialism, the presumption that we already know what ‘woman’
‘is’. As Barbara Johnson argues: ‘Just because identities are fictions
does not mean that they have not had, and could not have, real
historical effects’ (Johnson 1994: 72). Or, just because essentialism
is philosophically discredited or deconstructed does not mean that
it has lost its power to form past and present understandings of sexual
difference or that it is not still, as Diane Elam argues, ‘very much
part of institutional practices’ . The question is, therefore, not what
it means to be a woman, but the ‘pragmatic force’ of institutional
readings of ‘sexual markings’ (Elam 1994: 64). The body has a
political meaning which is stubbornly resistant to its destabilization;
or, as Barbara Johnson puts it: ‘Being positioned as a woman is not
something that is entirely voluntary’ (Johnson 1987: 3).
There remains, therefore, if our emphasis shifts to the future, a
political imperative for women to consitute themselves as subjects
if they are to escape being never-endingly determined as objects.
This need not mean returning to the same (masculine) subjectivity
which saw itself as unitary and complete, simply expanding it to
include women within its definition, but rather imagining multiple
subjectivities, which are without foundation but located, instead, in
particular times and places. Within this project, autobiography has
an important role. For Diane Elam, ‘the genre of women’s auto-
biography should be understood as a strategic necessity at a particular
time, rather than an end in itself’ (Elam 1994: 65). As strategy,
autobiography need not offer a universal model of subjectivity and
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subjectivity, representation, narrative 91
its representation but ‘local uses of the self’, ways of expressing a
self or a position which ‘arises from the situation as it comments
on it’ (Probyn 1993: 98). Writing about Latin American women’s
testimonies, Elspeth Probyn sees the self in this writing as making
something appear, ‘a conjunctural document of the self and of
the times’ (Probyn 1993: 98). The question is recast, therefore,
in relation to autobiography, becoming not ‘what is it’ but instead
‘what does it do’. For Regenia Gagnier there is a ‘pragmatics of
representation’ where truth is less the issue than ‘the purpose an
autobiographical statement serves in the life and circumstances of
its author and readers’ (Gagnier 1991: 4). As we will see in the course
of the next two chapters there are other subjects, beyond some ideal
notion of ‘the Subject’, and other ways of reading autobiography.
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3
OTHER SUBJECTS
GENDER, MODERNISM AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was critically engaged all her life in
the problem of writing lives and, in particular, the problem of
writing women’s lives. An important modernist writer of fiction,
she also questioned from a feminist perspective traditional accounts
of the subject and prefigured and even helped to influence present-
day debates about writing and sexual difference. She provides a good
place to begin a chapter about ‘Other Subjects’ and an important
point of reference for all the debates about difference that follow.
Virginia Woolf’s family connections – she was daughter of the
editor of that nineteenth-century monument to egregious lives, The
Dictionary of National Biography, Sir Leslie Stephen, and the inheritor
of a family tradition of autobiographical writing, stretching back
several generations – ensured her fascination with life-writing as well
as sharpening her resistance to many of its assumptions and values.
Her great-grandfather, James Stephen, had written his memoirs in
the 1820s ‘for the use of his children’; Sir Leslie Stephen, devastated
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other subjects 93
by the death of his second wife Julia, Virginia Woolf’s mother,
similarly addressed his memoir of her, the Mausoleum Book, to their
children conceiving of it as ‘a little treasure to read for themselves
when I have become a memory too’ (Alan Bell 1977: x). As Trev
Broughton points out, though thus restricting its audience to ‘family’
and defining itself as ‘private’, the Mausoleum Book also dictates
‘the conditions and meaning of privacy itself’ (Broughton 1999: 5);
it thus recalls the way the father dominated the household, defin-
ing the space and the boundaries, after Julia’s death. As Woolf
was later to write, it was part of their ‘duty’ as children to encourage
their father to talk and vent his grief, while they inhabited a ‘stifling’
silence: ‘One had always to think whether what one was about to
say was the right thing to say’ (Woolf 1978a: 109). The Mausoleum
Book sets out to commemorate Julia for her children but ‘inciden-
tally’ turns the reader’s attention to Stephen himself: ‘I wish to
write mainly about your mother. But I find that in order to speak
intelligibly it will be best to begin by saying something about
myself’ (Alan Bell 1977: 4). The masculine narrative takes prece-
dence over the feminine one; indeed by depicting her role as domestic
angel and celebrating her unobtrusive ‘feminine’ virtues of care,
he also endorses his own centrality; he becomes simultaneously
the object of her concern and his readers’. The piety of ‘remembering’
Julia is thus waylaid by another, more dubious motive: to claim
his children’s sympathy for himself and reassert his central role
as ‘paterfamilias’ for all the children, including, most crucially in
terms of his future welfare, his stepdaughter, Stella (Broughton 1999:
67).
If Stephen’s avowed aim to write about his wife as ‘the main
story’ is pre-empted by his own needs and masculine viewpoint, the
hesitations and obliquities of the Mausoleum Book reveal that
nineteenth-century assumptions of gender – and genre – were not
entirely straightforward: the need to relate to, if not quite relate,
the other’s story leaves traces which are never entirely expelled
(Broughton 1999: 21). This is important when we come to consider
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94 other subjects
Woolf’s own writing. One of her earliest attempts at autobiography,
‘Reminiscences’ (1908), emulates the family tradition by addressing
itself to her sister Vanessa’s first child Julian, and borrowing both
scenes and language from her father’s text. Woolf, however, quickly
realizes that by memorializing her mother her writing turns lapidary,
making her into a statue by fixing her or enshrouding her in words:
Written words of a person who is dead or still alive tend most
unfortunately to drape themselves in smooth folds annulling
all evidence of life. You will not find in what I say, or again in
those sincere but conventional phrases in the life of your grand-
father, or in the noble lamentations with which he fills the pages
of his autobiography, any semblance of a woman whom you
can love.
(Woolf 1978a: 41–2)
Woolf experimented all her life, in both her autobiography and
fiction, with this problem of how to allow the mother’s presence
into a writing which has traditionally not permitted her a place.
This carries echoes of Derrida’s pursuit of the ‘living feminine’
within a language which excludes both the body and the mother.
To suggest an affinity between Woolf’s experimentation with lan-
guage and literary form, and poststructuralist thinking, has become
a commonplace in the last fifteen years: Woolf has emerged as a
pre-eminent ‘deconstructionist’ feminist who, according to Toril
Moi, ‘reveals a deeply sceptical attitude to the male-humanist
concept of an essential human identity’ (Moi 1985: 9). As auto-
biographer, Woolf produced unstable or provisional writing, sketches
rather than formal memoirs, letters and a diary. These forms, and in
particular her diary, became a way of constructing a different subject,
a ‘subject-in-process’, to use Julia Kristeva’s term, a subject which
is not fixed but ‘constantly called into question’ (Kristeva 1989:
129). Her diary was conceived of by her as speculative, a writing
towards a writing which has not yet happened:
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There looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form
which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn
what it is that one might make of this loose, drifting material
of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so
much more consciously & scrupulously, in fiction. What sort of
diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not
slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight
or beautiful that comes into my mind.
(Woolf 1983: I, 266)
By imagining her diary as an unbounded space, no longer under the
control of the subject, she also creates a space for something new to
emerge; she defers meaning, opening up a space of difference within
discourse (Anderson 1997: 49). Woolf’s imaginings and reimagin-
ings of space – the rooms and chambers of an uncharted unconscious
– always relate to the possibility of thinking femininity beyond the
certainty and closure demanded by what Woolf herself referred to
as ‘the damned egotistical self’ (Woolf 1983: II,14). It is only by
thinking outside the dominance of the letter ‘I’ which she wittily
figured in A Room of One’s Own (1929) as a ‘straight dark bar’, lying
across the page and obscuring sight of anything and anyone else, that
one can begin to glimpse a different subject; one can begin to open
the question of the woman at the edges of the masculine text (Woolf
1977: 95).
To backtrack for a moment: Woolf took her bearings from her
father’s work as biographer, but found herself intrigued by what she
called ‘the lives of the obscure’, the forgotten lives, mostly of women,
who had been marginalized by the Dictionary’s selection of ‘great
men’. It was not always the case that these lives had gone unrecorded:
they could be glimpsed, like the woman above, in existing docu-
ments, and Woolf imagined herself turning the pages of dusty
and hidden volumes, rediscovering lives which have been relegated
to the backwaters – or shadows – of history (Woolf 1967: 120). Nor
was it a matter of making an alternative claim for their ‘greatness’;
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96 other subjects
rather Woolf used their ‘obscurity’ to interrogate the very terms in
which the biographical subject is thought, challenging notions of
the ‘exceptional’ or ‘unique’ as self-evidently connoting value and
questioning whether progress and achievement provided the only
ways of structuring historical understanding.
It is one of the attractions of the unknown, their multitude, their
vastness; for, instead of keeping their identity separate, as
remarkable people do, they seem to merge into one another,
their very boards and title-pages and frontispieces dissolving,
and their innumerable pages melting into continuous years so
that we can lie back and look up into the fine mist-like substance
of countless lives, and pass unhindered from century to century,
from life to life.
(Woolf 1967: 122)
It is not possible to separate lives from books, or identities from
how they are represented, Woolf suggests, and much of what we
think of as ‘true’ or historically given, is really an ideological
construct; in other words, a fiction.
As a novelist, Woolf self-consciously defined herself as ‘modern’,
notoriously attacking her Edwardian predecessors, in particular
Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G.Wells, for their
‘materialism’, for missing the ‘unlimited capacity and infinite
variety’ of the living person by concentrating on social detail:
‘When all the practical business of life has been discharged, there
is something about people which continues to seem to them of over-
whelming importance’ (Woolf 1983: 3, 388). She brought similar
modernist preoccupations with the subjective to bear on biography,
questioning whether the truth of a person could ever be equated with
the external facts of their life. For Woolf Victorian biography was
both artless and dull: it produced ‘fossils’ rather than ‘living’ people
(Woolf 1967: 231). She tried to imagine a different kind of biogra-
phy which could bring together fiction’s attention to the ‘intangible
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personality’ and the ‘inner life’ with the veracity and substance of
historical fact, which could somehow create, as she said, ‘that queer
amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of
granite and rainbow’ (p.235). As so often in Woolf’s imagining of
difference, the tense points to the future, to an unrealized potential
which cannot be defined or contained within traditional structures.
However, this does not mean that Woolf did not herself try to
write biographies which mixed fact with fiction in exactly the way
she describes. In a very early work, for instance, her unpublished
‘Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906), she gives us a fictionalized
account of a fifteenth-century woman’s life, otherwise unrecorded in
history. As in her brief biographical sketch of Shakespeare’s sister
in A Room of One’s Own more than a decade later, she turns to fiction
as the only way to remedy a historical absence. This also involves
her in questioning the limits and authority of historical knowledge:
by writing a fictional history she demonstrates how like fiction
history is and how arbitrary and partial the distinction between
them. Joan Martyn’s journal also serves to insert into the historical
account of lives an intensely subjective voice: biography must
become autobiography in order to understand the ‘inner life’. For
the woman, living without external recognition, submerged in her
husband’s story, this becomes crucial: Joan Martyn tells of secret,
inchoate desires:
Yet what it is I want, I cannot tell, although I crave for it, and in
some secret way, expect it. For often and oftener as time goes
by, I find myself suddenly halting in my walk, as though I were
stopped by a strange new look upon the surface of the land which
I know so well. It hints at something; but it is gone before you
know what it means; it half frightens you, and yet it beckons.
(Woolf 1979: 256)
Hers is a story of becoming, of yearning and potential. For Woolf it
makes the case for another hidden story residing within history, for
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98 other subjects
the ‘unlimited capacity and infinite variety’ of the person which
is always in excess of what is outwardly visible or recoverable through
an account of external actions alone.
Woolf also wrote parodic versions of biography, drawing on the
mock-heroic tones of Laurence Sterne’s famously comic fictional
life, Tristram Shandy, to deflate the pretensions of the form, as well
as undermine the formal conventions which are used to sustain its
‘truthfulness’ (Briggs 1995: 251). Orlando is her most sustained effort
at debunking: it is an irreverent, triumphantly fictive biography in
which Woolf refuses to separate life and writing; Orlando’s progress
through the ages is also a history of writing, with Orlando’s change
of sex occurring at around the moment, during the reign of Charles
I, when, according to Woolf, the woman writer historically comes
into view. Towards the end of the novel, having arrived in the
twentieth century, Orlando offers an autobiographical ‘peroration’
on the multiplicity of ‘selves’ which constitute her; the biographer
as a result finds her own role ‘discomposed’:
We must here snatch time to remark how discomposing it is for
her biographer that this culmination and peroration should be
dashed from us on a laugh casually like this; but the truth is that
when we write of a woman, everything is out of place – culmi-
nations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does
with a man.
(Woolf 1978b: 195)
Woman’s difference, so Woolf suggests, requires a different emphasis;
it flies in the face of conventional modes of representation, producing
a multiplicity which cannot be captured within one and the same,
the singular ‘I’ of masculine discourse. It also deprives the biographer
of authority, displacing the notion of truth from one fiction to
another: ‘When we write of a woman, everything is out of place.’
The biographer cannot simply contain the difference which the auto-
biographical peroration makes to the narrative they are attempting
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to tell; a ‘natural’ hierarchy of genders and genres has given way to
a more casual and unstable ordering.
Yet despite her own irreverence towards the conventions of
biography and her insistence on the entanglement of identities with
writing, Woolf, at the end of her life, did return to writing a more
factual autobiography, her remarkable ‘Sketch of the Past’ (1940),
which also remained significantly unfinished and unpublished. Her
sense of the problems inherent in what she is doing are never far from
the surface, however, and her ‘Sketch’ is precisely that, an experiment
or notes towards a composition that she might undertake in the
future. Like her diary, the ‘Sketch’ presents itself as ‘improvisation’,
a relief from the ‘horrid labour’ required to make ‘an orderly and
expressed work of art’ (Woolf 1978a: 87). Here Woolf was referring
in particular to her current work in writing a biography of Roger
Fry, a task she had undertaken at his family’s request and to which
she found herself both temperamentally and theoretically unsuited.
The ‘Sketch’ then allows her to ‘let fly’ from a repressive present into
a different past; it opens up space or time for herself away from the
conventional ordering of biography ‘where one thing follows another
and all are swept into a whole’ (p.87).
In the ‘Sketch’ Woolf also returns to the problem of represent-
ing her mother which, as we have seen, she had first struggled
with more than thirty years before. Instead of writing in an ‘objec-
tive’ or ‘distant’ way about her mother as she had in her earlier
‘Reminiscence’, she now discovers new techniques of proximity,
ways of collapsing the distance which writing imposes between
herself and her mother’s body, in order to recall her own beginnings.
Woolf opens the ‘Sketch’ with her first memory which is of
anemones, seen close up, on her mother’s dress. This then leads to
another memory, which also seems, paradoxically, to be the first:
It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St.
Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and
sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking,
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one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the
blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the
blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this
light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here;
of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.
(Woolf 1978a: 74–5)
This second moment with its powerfully evoked ‘oceanic’ feelings,
or feelings of boundlessness, symbolically echoes the first; the rhythm
of the waves, the repetition of breaks within a continuous flow,
also recalls the perception of the mother’s dress with its bright,
particularized foreground against the dark background which holds
and contains it. Woolf is aware that these memories are primarily
‘colour-and-sound memories’ (Woolf 1978a: 77), archaic memories
which pre-date the ‘naming’ of the flowers as anemones as well as
the necessity, which language imposes, of giving her memories
a temporal order. Woolf is gesturing towards the pre-symbolic or
pre-Oedipal, the time, according to Lacan, before the subject is
constituted as such, before s/he takes up a position in language.
Trying to recall her mother, Woolf finds that she is both ‘dispersed’
and ‘omnipresent’ (p.98), that ‘one never got far enough away from
her to see her as a person’ but that nevertheless she was ‘central’: ‘She
was the whole thing. . . . She was keeping what I call in my short-
hand the panoply of life – that which we all lived in common – in
being’ (p.96).
For Woolf her mother is most poignantly invoked in terms of the
‘wholeness’ which pre-existed her separation from her: her mother
contained her in just the way Woolf is attempting now to contain
her mother in writing. Like the ‘obscure’ who merge into each
other, breaking down what ‘binds’ them as separate, Woolf explores
a region of her ‘self’ which is indissociable from her mother before
the subject is stabilized within language. Woolf is therefore using
language to break down the certainties of language, to register the
jubilation but also later the terror that exists when the subject strays
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towards the borders of subjecthood, when identity is called into
question. Woolf describes here, in retrospect, when language is again
able to reflect her, one such frightening moment of estrangement:
That night in the bath the dumb horror came over me . . . that
collapse I have described before; as if I were passive under some
sledge-hammer blow; exposed to a whole avalanche of meaning
that had heaped itself up and discharged itself upon me,
unprotected, with nothing to ward it off . . . I could not explain it.
(Woolf 1978a: 90–1)
Another such moment of self-fracturing happens when she
sees her mother dead (Woolf 1978a: 106–7). Again Woolf introduces
the memory as one of profound uncertainty. Did she see a man
sitting beside her mother or was she merely pretending, in order to
get attention? The memory is also about the instability of memory
in the face of shock; without her mother there to reflect her she is
not sure of what or who she sees; she doubts her self because her self
is put in doubt. Significantly, the mother’s death cannot be thought
by the child without her hallucinating a presence which figures the
strange otherness of her absence. There are things that cannot be
remembered because the subject is not ‘there’ to remember them. In
the ‘Sketch’, Woolf writes a memoir which is profoundly sceptical
of what ‘remembering’ means. Instead of a subject who recalls the
past from some stable place outside it, Woolf traces moments which
slip from and exceed the conscious control of the subject, deciding
that ‘the things one does not remember are as important’ as the
things one does (Woolf 1978a: 80). Writing the self involves
moments when the self is lost, when cracks appear and uncons-
cious memory floods in: ‘We are sealed vessels afloat on what it is
convenient to call reality; and at some moments, the sealing matter
cracks; in floods reality’ (p.142). The self is never secure, nor can it
form its own narrative. At best there are scenes or moments to return
to which ‘arrange themselves’, and which are ‘representative’ or
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‘enduring’ (ibid.). For Woolf the self is a construct which is known
as much through its fragmentation as its unity. More than most
writers she makes us aware of the process of flux and splitting which
underlies, and constantly threatens, any notion of attained
subjecthood.
LOCATING DIFFERENCE
Virginia Woolf has been a key figure for critics of autobiography
who, drawing on the psychoanalytic writings of both Jacques Lacan
and Julia Kristeva, have seen her writing as opening up the question
of the feminine as a challenge to the phallic or masculine position of
the subject. By conceiving of the subject as subject to dissolution
and by exploring those fragmented, inchoate and repressed psychic
realms, also coded within the symbolic as feminine, Woolf is seen
as undermining the unity and confidence of that universal ‘I’ claimed
by the masculine subject. For Shari Benstock, for instance, Woolf’s
‘Sketch’ offers the primary example of how ‘the self that would reside
at the center of the text is decentered – and often absent altogether
– in women’s autobiographical texts’ (Benstock 1988: 20). For
Sidonie Smith, the ‘Sketch’ is a similarly radical and important text
in which Woolf pursues ‘a diffusive rather than unitary subjectivity’
trying to ‘dislodge the old “I” from autobiography’: ‘Everywhere the
narrator of “Sketch” concedes the impossibility and the undesir-
ability of the old autobiographical project . . . Woolf disperses herself
into the past’ (Smith 1993: 87, 100).
However, the emphasis by these critics on difference as simply
sexual difference, as well as the codification of the feminine in terms of
loss, absence and anonymity, has also been seen as problematic.Trev
Broughton, for instance, suggests that ‘the idea that women’s self-
constructions might be distinguished solely, or even mainly, on the
basis of sexual difference – as the “other” of some putative universal
“man”’ – may be both ‘reifying and essentialist’ (Broughton and
Anderson 1997: 97). The point being made is that the concept of
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sexual difference can itself become both monolithic and abstract,
operating in effect as an alternative ‘identity’, rather than dislodging
any such positivist notions. Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith have also
recently argued that the privileging of gender oppression over other
oppressions ‘effectively erases the complex and often contradictory
positionings of the subject’ and can be seen as ‘a central instance of
the universalizing agenda of Western theorizing’. Instead they offer
a view of the subject as multiply determined, occupying different
locations in terms of gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality which ‘one
cannot easily sever, separate out, or subsume under one another’
(Smith and Watson 1992: xiv). In this view the subject is constituted
by gender but also by other divisions and representations which
belong to specific histories and locations.
The argument that sexual difference, however useful it had been
as an analytic tool in the 1970s and early 1980s, elided other forms
of difference, belongs to a period, as Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth
Grosz have argued, which saw the proliferation of ‘new social move-
ments’, each with a specific focus or theme such as sexuality, race,
ethnicity or class. The pluralization of difference within academic
discourse, they suggest, thus ‘also reflects and expresses . . . broader
sociological and political events’ (Cheah and Grosz 1998: 3). So
far as autobiography is concerned, the deconstruction of it as a
genre which privileged a white, masculine subject gave way, as part
of this same moment of diversification, to a sense of its potential
or use as political strategy by these new social groups. Julia Watson
and Sidonie Smith have argued that the marginalized subject, by
‘deploying autobiographical practices that go against the grain’ can
constitute ‘an “I” that becomes a place of creative and, by implica-
tion, political intervention’ (Smith and Watson 1992: xix). Julia
Swindells has provided a more wide-ranging but similarly optimistic
account of the new radical uses of autobiography:
Autobiography now has the potential to be the text of the
oppressed and the culturally displaced, forging a right to speak
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both for and beyond the individual. People in a position of
powerlessness – women, black people, working-class people –
have more than begun to insert themselves into the culture via
autobiography, via the assertion of a ‘personal’ voice, which
speaks beyond itself.
(Swindells 1995: 7)
The idea that autobiography can become ‘the text of the oppressed’,
articulating through one person’s experience, experiences which may
be representative of a particular marginalized group, is an important
one: autobiography becomes both a way of testifying to oppression
and empowering the subject through their cultural inscription and
recognition.
Yet this politicization of the subject, though it addresses it, by
no means solves the problem of ‘difference’, since the claim to speak
for others is always problematic and can also elide further differences
under an assumed representativity. An identification in terms
of sexuality, for instance, may occlude other differences in terms of
class or race. Nor can the marginalized subject simply escape
the mediations of discourse, that inevitable troping or figuring of
self-consciousness within autobiography which de Man described
and saw as confusing its boundary with fiction. As Julia Swindells
has argued elsewhere, the autobiographical self is not invented
ex nihilo but constructed by ‘calling on’ the representations that
are historically available and which may include fictional ones. Thus
nineteenth-century working-class women, according to Swindells,
turned to the novel, the melodrama or romance as models when they
came to represent their own lives, as places where women were at
least visible, albeit in a ‘reified’ or ‘idealised’ form (Swindells 1985:
11). That politicizing or ‘rematerializing’ of difference (Smith 1989:
315) which autobiography has been seen as undertaking is therefore
always a complex matter involving both the subject’s discursive
position and material/historical location. While position and location
are enfolded in each other they are not reducible to the same.
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As cultural critic Stuart Hall has argued, discursive practices ‘always
implicate’ the positions from which we speak and therefore ‘though
we speak, so to say “in our own name”, of ourselves and from our
own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is
spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place’ (Hall
1990: 222).
Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road
(1942), which her biographer and editor Robert E. Hemenway has
called ‘one of the most peculiar autobiographies in Afro-American
literary history’ (Hemenway, in Hurston 1984: ix), provides us with
an important text in which many of the problems of ‘identity’ and
‘difference’ outlined above can be seen as coming into play. Written
reluctantly, at the behest of her publisher, its ‘authenticity’ and
‘honesty’ have frequently been called into question. Hurston notori-
ously omits much of her life from the text: she refuses to elaborate
on her literary career and fails to mention her second marriage;
though she traces her life back to its origins and even recounts
the scene of her birth, she never provides a date. All this, according
to Hemenway, is part of ‘her general reluctance to locate personal
experience in the common chronological record’ which then feeds
into a far more problematic historical and political evasiveness (p.x).
Throughout her autobiography Hurston is more concerned with
‘individuality’ than she is with racial or gender identities and,
while not oblivious to racial oppression, she refuses to speak as repre-
sentative of her race, out of a common history of victimhood. In
a chapter entitled ‘My People! My People’ she challenges this
statement of belonging with her own belief in individual character:
‘Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any
racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was
the only way I could see them. I learned that skins were no measure
of what was inside people’ (Hurston 1984: 235). The enlightened
view is to see beyond skin colour to individual differences, and this
extends to both white and black: ‘Therefore I saw no curse in being
black, nor no extra flavor by being white’ (ibid.).
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For those critics and writers who, from the 1970s onwards, have
claimed that Afro-American autobiography is a specific sub-genre,
providing an alternative place of self-identification based on collec-
tivity, Hurston’s seems a disappointing text. Stephen Butterfield,
one of the first critics to write about ‘black autobiography’, believes
that autobiography is ‘one of the ways that black Americans have
asserted their right to live and grow’ and that these autobiographies
conceive of the subject as ‘a member of an oppressed social group,
with ties and responsibilities to the other members’ (Butterfield
1974: 2–3). The emergence of a black feminist criticism in the 1970s
which explored representations of black women’s lives has also
posited the centrality of ‘group identity’, ‘inter-dependence’ and a
respect for ‘voice-enabling traditions’ (McKay, in Brodski and Schenk
1988: 179). bell hooks, for instance, has argued for the political
importance of ‘honest confessional narratives by black women who
are struggling to be self-actualized and to become radical subjects’
in order to provide ‘texts which affirm our fellowship with each other’
(hooks 1992: 59). What we see again is autobiography being turned
to as a way of providing ‘truthful’ depictions of life, albeit now from
a radical perspective.
While Hurston has often been celebrated as a literary ‘foremother’
by contemporary Afro-American women writers and, in particular,
by Alice Walker, who wrote of Their Eyes Were Watching God that
‘there is no book more important to me than this one’, her auto-
biography has seemed anomalous, even embarrassing: ‘For me, the
most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote is her autobiography. After
the first several chapters, it rings false’ (Walker 1984: 91, 86). Dust
Tracks on the Road, indeed, can only be accommodated within black
autobiography’s emancipatory project, that teleological narrative of
‘becoming a self’, in negative terms, as compromising in its attempt
to placate its white readers, or as belonging to a historical moment
when self-acceptance proved impossible for Afro-American women.
However, it could equally be argued that the use of autobiography
to create and affirm an identity for a particular group also relies on
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encoding a particular readership and on employing a discourse
linking community and selfhood which is also, ultimately, a his-
torical discourse. In other words, autobiography might be said always
to involve strategies of representation, even if, for political reasons,
at this particular historical juncture, it has re-appropriated the
language of confession or truth.
Dust Tracks on the Road is a difficult text to situate within the
‘radical’ tradition of black autobiography because, as several critics
have shown, instead of claiming an identity Hurston deliberately
draws attention to the autobiographical self as a fiction. Early on, in
an image which recalls Virginia Woolf’s uneasiness about turning
her mother into a statue, Hurston describes how self-representation
is always at odds with our mundane selves; indeed that it monu-
mentalizes a self which is absent, or never existed: ‘People are prone
to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And
few people want to be forced to ask themselves, “What if there is no
me like my statue?”’ (Hurston 1984: 34). Hurston accordingly gives
us various ‘poses’ for herself or allegorical moments which position
her in relation to her reader. One of the most resonant of these
is from childhood when she stations herself as ‘watcher’ on the ‘seat
on top of the gate-post’, at the threshold of black and white worlds:
‘Often the white travelers would hail me, but more often I hailed
them, and asked, “Don’t you want me to go a piece of the way with
you?”’ (p.45). This not only emblematizes her own position within
the autobiography as observer and interpreter, mediating the black
world for white readers; it also signals her refusal of the boundaries
which assign her exclusively to one place or the other: Hurston
reserves the right ‘innocently’ to sit somewhere between and to
decide for herself which direction she will take.
According to Barbara Johnson, Hurston’s work was ‘constantly
dramatizing and undercutting . . . inside / outside oppositions’, a
spatial complexity she also translated into the ‘complex transactions
of discursive exchange’ (Johnson 1986: 318). Hurston also refuses to
be placed linguistically: she moves across different ‘languages’, the
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universalizing language of standard English, an anthropological
‘scientific’ language, a highly metaphoric language and the folksy
language of black oral tradition. In this passage, from the last
chapter, ‘Looking Things Over’, Hurston celebrates the mixed nature
of life, refusing to see herself as victim. Though she has been ‘in
Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots’, she nevertheless takes
‘no refuge from myself in bitterness. To me, bitterness is the under-
arm odor of wishful weakness. . . . I have no urge to make any
concessions like that to the world as yet’ (Hurston 1984: 280).
Mixing aphorism and reflection, this passage also uses the body as a
source of metaphor to enliven her language. If life is a mixture of
different experiences, ‘sharp shadows, high lights and smudgy
inbetweens’ (ibid.) which offers no stable, universal or transcendent
perspective, but numerous instances of ‘human self-bias’ (Hurston
1984: 281), language is similarly fluid, shifting across a variety of
registers, and mixing colourful individual and local usages with
‘rational’ but bland discourse (Smith 1993: 118). Hurston, as she
says, is ‘of the word-changing kind’ (Hurston 1984: 27). Trained as
an anthropologist and educated into middle-class language, Hurston
discovers that, in order to elicit the material she wants she must
learn to speak the language of her informants, to ‘tell the tales, sing
the songs, do the dances, and repeat the raucous sayings and doings
of the Negro farthest down’ (p.177). If she discovers that she must
leave the constraining environment of her childhood in order to see
both it and herself clearly, she also learns to value its specific culture
and language: each language adds to her knowledge of the other as
she moves fluidly between them, ‘forever shifting’ (p.117) without
any settled ‘home’. Refusing the boundaries of race and class and
the notion of a settled identity, Hurston’s freedom is also a form of
linguistic expansiveness: ‘Lord, give my poor stammering tongue
at least one taste of the whole round world, if you please, Sir’ (p.331).
The voice of this appeal is the ‘black’ voice of her childhood; it now
joins, however, with the universalizing language of political and
philosophical reflection in a vivid enactment of her meaning.
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Hurston’s homelessness or ‘wandering’ is related back by her to
the death of her mother which, for Hurston, as for Woolf, disrupted
the world ‘which had been built out of her body and her heart’
(Hurston 1984: 89). The description of her mother’s death again
constructs an almost allegorical scene in which Hurston is crucially
positioned in relation to her community. The inheritor of a burden
of guilt, Hurston is given the responsibility of speaking for the
silent mother, thus prefiguring her future role as writer. When she
is too ill to talk, her mother, according to Hurston, ‘looked at me,
or so I felt, to speak for her. She depended on me for a voice’
(pp.86–7). The mother had previously charged the 9-year-old
Hurston with defying the folk customs of veiling the mirror and
removing the pillow from her when she is dying: Hurston’s guilt is
that she is not strong enough to resist her community but, as child,
is forced to give in. The mother, this scene suggests, requires the
daughter’s speech in order to oppose the community which will
obscure her reflection and remove her imprint. Hurston is situated
in a complex place, at the intersections of gender and history: she
can only rescue the mother by transcending her mother’s silent
association with the body and defying the community which refuses
her recognition. Neverthess it is the voices of her community which
provide her with the language to describe and understand the
experience of death. Language, significantly, has a double function,
both connecting and separating her from her mother and the com-
munity. It is also what puts her into motion as a subject, allowing
her to avoid the ‘wordless feeling’ she associates forever after with
death (p.116).
Valerie Smith has argued that it is ‘striking’ how, when Anglo-
American feminists have begun to reconsider ‘the material ground
of their enterprise’, they have turned to the experiences and writings
of black women in a move which disturbingly reproduces
nineteenth-century cultural associations of black women with the
body and thus ‘with animal passions and slave labour’ (Smith 1989:
316). As we have seen, Dust Tracks on the Road, with its flamboyant
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foregrounding of language and refusal of racialized identity, has
tended to frustate such a critical move: Hurston is wary of any
collapse back into the body or the community which might ‘fix’ her
in one place and close off the ‘horizon’ she had directed her ‘self’
towards from childhood. However, if Hurston’s autobiography main-
tains a gap or distance between language and experience, this does
not mean that her writing simply transcends her historical and social
situation to speak ‘universally’. Barbara Johnson, for instance, has
suggested that Hurston turned her life into a ‘trickster tale’, deriving
her mode from the traditions of story-telling, ‘lying’ or impro-
visation, which she studied, where even the teller might not know
the ‘truth’ (Johnson 1986: 328). This is important if we are not
to see Hurston as simply ‘decentring’ the subject in general post-
structuralist terms, in accordance with a totalizing theory which
elides her specificity and difference. As Johnson argues, the terms
‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, still matter, even though
their reference is difficult to determine (ibid.). It was Hurston’s desire
to evade the (white) reader’s need to fix her in an identity by keeping
on the move through discourses, through identities. History, there-
fore, was already at work within her strategies of displacement. Her
‘unfixing of identity’ could thus be said to challenge the ways we
have of describing the subject’s specificity and historical locatedness,
without necessarily denying their ultimate importance.
LANDSCAPE FOR A GOOD WOMAN
In her book Sexing the Self (1993), Elspeth Probyn has put forward
an important case for autobiography as a particular strategy or use of
the self which can make productive links between discourse and
material location. The question for Probyn is whether a particular
autobiographical speaking position can be sustained without it
solidifying into an identity, with all the problems of privilege and
exclusion that that raises. She asks whether stories can ‘be told
through selves and through emotions without being at the expense
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of other stories and selves’ (Probyn 1993: 84). In other words, in
terms of the argument we have been pursuing, can the self eschew
its representativeness, its role of ‘speaking for others’ and still
have something of political significance to say? Can it move beyond
the personal? For Probyn, the answer lies in recognizing the
‘very mediated’ nature of the speaking subject, the fact that
self-representation is always developed in terms of the available
conventions and discourses: for Probyn there is never ‘a transparent
self who speaks from the heart’ (p.86). At the same time, however,
it may also be possible to be aware of how the self can function as a
‘lived moment’ disrupting ‘the smooth articulation of discursive
systems’: the self may thus also draw attention to discursive limits,
to a lack of fit between itself and discourse, through which the
historicity and locatedness of the discourses themselves come into
view. The self which Probyn envisages is thus like an ‘image’ through
which we are able to think where we are; it becomes ‘a point of view
into its own work as an articulation of the real and the discursive’
(pp.88, 92).
Probyn turns to Carolyn Steedman’s complex autobiographical
text, Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) to illustrate her ideas.
Steedman is primarily interested in how the specificities of class are
eliminated from the dominant theoretical discourses, and uses her
‘self’ and her autobiography in much the way Probyn describes to
question their limits. For Steedman, the powerful stories we tell
about the family, drawing on sociology or psychoanalysis, often
present their ‘constituents’ as neutral, though they actually use
‘socially specific images’ for their construction, the objects which
derive from the bourgeois household and which become ‘the system
of everyday metaphors by which we see ourselves and our past’
(Steedman 1986: 75, 77). Her own method is to use the images
deriving from her experience to question the ‘truths’ of theory.
One of the most significant images or autobiographical memories
that she describes is of her father picking bluebells and then being
caught and humiliated by the forest-keeper. Such a memory, as
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Steedman notes, does not fit well with the theory of patriarchy, the
generalized account of the centrality of the father’s role within the
family and culture. Steedman depicts herself in adulthood wondering
‘how the myth works when a father is rendered vulnerable by social
relations, when a position in a household is not supported by
recognition of social status and power outside it’ (Steedman 1986:
72). For Steedman her memories are not so much individualized
instances of some general truth as an ‘interpretive device’ (p.28), a
way of interrogating the relation between individual experience
and theoretical problems. The memory allows the past reality to be
reflected upon and its specific social configuration to come into
view. Another central image for Steedman is her mother in the ‘New
Look, a coat of beige gaberdine which fell in two swaying, graceful
pleats from her waist at the back’ (ibid.). This image is used by
Steedman as a way of understanding her mother’s desire and
frustrations and their formation within specific class and economic
terms. It also allows her to ‘see’ her relationship with her mother
as the passing on of a ‘deprivation’ which is both material and
psychological. The image is a dream image, but the dream image,
now recalled, allows Steedman to understand a social landscape.
Understanding herself then, as a child, seeing herself ‘in the picture’
also allows her to move the child into historical time. The social
understanding of adulthood can then be focused back on the image
allowing her to understand it further. Picturing the self allows entry
into the social, without losing specificity and individuality; instead
Steedman opens up a dialogue between the ‘dream’ and ‘reality’.
For Steedman subjectivity is always implicated in the social, in
the specificities of ‘place and politics’ (Steedman 1986: 6). This is
powerfully dramatized in her representation of her mother’s death
and her particular naming of it as a ‘working-class death’:
Simone de Beauvoir wrote of her mother’s death, said, that in
spite of the pain it was an easy one: an upper-class death.
Outside, for the poor, dying is a different matter. . . .
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Like this: she flung up her left arm over her head, pulled her
knees up, looked out with an extraordinary surprise. She lived
alone, she died alone: a working-class life, a working-class
death.
(Steedman 1986: 2)
It is worth noting briefly that, in all three of the autobiographies
by women that we have looked at, the mother’s death forms a central
moment. As we have seen in the previous chapter, when looking at
autobiographical texts by Barthes and Derrida, the mother’s death
may have a particular significance for the writing of autobiography.
For Barthes and Derrida autobiography is on the side of the feminine,
and their mournful accounts of the mother’s dying is also a way of
preserving her body within the body of their writing. In psycho-
analytic accounts of the subject, on which both Barthes and Derrida
draw, the ‘I’ is founded on separation and the loss of the mother’s
body: by identifying autobiographically with the mother – and
identifying autobiography with the mother – they, as it were, bleed
emotionally into their texts, opening up a wound in the self which
is also a space for her. Is this also true for the women autobiographers
we have looked at?
According to Julia Kristeva since ‘I am she’, it is much more
difficult for the woman symbolically to ‘kill’ the mother and there
is much more danger that she will identify with the ‘dead one’ who
has been abandoned within herself (Kristeva 1989: 29–30). We
might argue, therefore, that women become autobiographers against
this identification with the mother and by triumphing over the
threat of depression. What the texts we have looked at share in
writing about the mother’s death is a preoccupation with the imagery
of seeing and reflection – with mirrors and screens – which could
also suggest a disturbing specular identification with both the
mother and her absence. Forced to contemplate the mother’s absence,
the ‘I’ risks seeing its own negation in the mirror. Do these texts thus
provide insights into the writing of sexual difference?
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Possibly; but Steedman challenges us also to see the differences
between them in the local settings and emotions they describe. In
Woolf’s ‘Sketch’, therefore, looked at from this point of view, the
nurse, the candles, the formal visit to the deathbed and the rituals
of laying out and mourning all begin to take on a particular historical
and social meaning. Hurston describes the superstitions which
surround death and the very public nature of her mother’s dying in
a way which also evokes a particular cultural setting. Steedman helps
to remind us that these details matter, are resonant of both time and
place and help to form subjectivity; they establish a difference which
is lost or ignored in the ‘grand’ narratives of sexual difference.
Steedman also helps us to perceive that the mother is not just the
primordial ‘Other’ who is incorporated into the subject but also a
socially specific subject, who exists beyond the (psychoanalytic)
narrative of her loss. The m(Other) is not just a metaphor, in other
words; she is also a social subject whose difference and specificity
needs to be recognized and found a place in our thinking.
POSTCOLONIAL SUBJECTS
It is central to both Elspeth Probyn’s and Carolyn Steedman’s argu-
ment that discursive positions and material locations are imbricated
in each other, without ever forming a unity or a connection that is
necessarily absolute and unchanging. However, we now need to
ask what happens when the very notion of ‘location’ starts to change,
when ‘place’ becomes layered with numerous crossings. For
postcolonial critics the idea of ‘hybridity’ has become an extremely
important one in trying to understand the kind of mobility, cross-
over and diaspora generated by colonialism. Colonial rule, of course,
was premised on notions of racial and cultural ‘purity’ and on
preserving the ‘difference’ between the colonizers and colonized.
As Ania Loomba observes, ‘in practice, it did not necessarily work
in that way’ (Loomba 1998: 174), and colonialism instead provided
the impetus for numerous cross-overs, genetic, intellectual and
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discursive. Homi Bhabha has described the way in which colonial
discourse was itself split, producing a form of colonial mimicry, a set
of resemblances which are never quite the same, and which implicitly
question the homogeneity of the ‘original’ practices and discourses.
Hybridity is produced as an effect of colonial power which must
endlessly produce difference in order to justify its authority, and
can never return to a ‘wholeness’ which exists prior to the colonial
encounter. According to Bhabha, ‘the colonial presence is always
ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative
and its articulation as repetition and difference’ (Bhabha 1986: 169).
Paul Gilroy has drawn attention to the significant displacement
or movement of black peoples across the Atlantic which produced
new diasporic cultures. This historical emphasis, as Gilroy explains,
also requires a new way of theorizing identity, unhooking it from
nationhood and ethnicity, and thinking instead of the more difficult
theoretical option of ‘creolisation, metissage, mestizaje, and hybrid-
ity’ (Gilroy 1993: 2). As Ania Loomba suggests, there is ‘no such
thing as an uncontaminated white or European culture’; neither,
however, is there an ethnically and culturally stable black identity,
an essential identity that we can link to a point or place of origin
(Loomba 1998: 176).
Postcolonial ‘identity’ could be seen as a contradiction in terms,
therefore, seeming to arrest the movement of differences and gather
under one heading a multiplicity of countries and locations.
However, as we have seen, the lack of an essentialized identity does
not rule out the possibility of constructing a place from which to
speak. Within the language of dispersal there is a need, according
to Stuart Hall, for ‘arbitrary closures’, points at which the infinite
flux of differences is brought to a halt temporarily as a condition of
speech. This moment of stasis is ‘a kind of stake, a kind of wager. It
says, “I need to say something, something . . . just now.”’ Hall sees
these ‘arbitrary closures’ which are ‘not the end’ as necessary fictions
which make both identity and politics possible (Hall 1987: 44).
Paul Gilroy has recently invited us to substitute ‘placeless
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116 other subjects
imaginings of identity’ for the traditionally powerful claims of ‘soil,
roots and territory’ and to think about movement as an alternative
to the ‘sedentary poetics of either blood or soil’ (Gilroy 2000: 111).
For Gilroy the modern African diaspora becomes a model for a new
way of thinking about identity and identification, wrested away from
the imperatives both of the nation and genealogy. Instead of seeing
simply the trauma of an enforced separation and the exile’s deraci-
nation and mourning for a lost homeland, we should use the concept
of diaspora, according to Gilroy, to reorientate theories of identity
‘toward contingency, indeterminacy, and conflict’ (p.128). Instead of
the idea of a journey towards ‘the destination that a completed
identity might represent’, Gilroy, not unlike Hall, suggests
more contingent and temporary linkages, shifting webs or networks
which allows us to perceive ‘new understandings of self, sameness
and solidarity’. Such linkages transform notions of both space and
identity and create ‘new possibilities and new pleasures’: ‘Invariably
promiscuous diaspora and the politics of commemoration it specifies
challenge us to apprehend mutable forms that can redefine the idea
of culture through a reconciliation with movement and complex,
dynamic variation’ (pp.129–30).
‘Commemoration’ in this context does not refer to some unchang-
ing core of memory but to the continual act of reprocessing and
modifying it in the present. This is important when we consider the
autobiographical writing of two postcolonial writers, V.S. Naipaul
and Michael Ondaatje, both of whom have offered problematic
accounts of their ‘origins’ in terms of shifting and unstable memories,
fragments of discourse and stories which are not anchored in ‘fact’.
Ondaatje’s ‘return’ journeys to Sri Lanka in Running in the Family
(1984) allow him access only to ‘long lists of confused genealogies
and rumour’ (Ondaatje 1984: 205) while Naipaul’s ‘Prologue to an
Autobiography’ (1984) must deal with a family history of migration
from India to Trinidad, now lost in oblivion: ‘I knew only what I
knew or was told. Beyond (and sometimes within) people’s memories
was undated time, historical darkness (Naipaul 1984: 51).
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Significantly, both of these works are also travel books which put
the author’s ‘I’ into movement, not allowing any setttled perspective,
and reconsidering ‘home’ through the eyes of a stranger. Ondaatje
returning to Sri Lanka is both the ‘foreigner’ and ‘the prodigal who
hates the foreigner’ as alienation and nostalgia constantly displace
each other (Ondaatje 1984: 79).The book opens with an italicized
passage, written, as if by a stranger, in the third person, which
situates the writer in the landscape he has returned to, familiar to
him from childhood, but also strangely transformed by his night-
mare into a barren place which leaches sustenance from his body.
Sri Lanka, so the next section tells us, has enticed him back through
a dream – ‘what began it all was the bright bone of a dream’ (p.21)
– but the dream, like the nightmare, also suggests a breaking down
of boundaries and the disorientation of the subject. The starkly
contrasting geographies of Toronto, where he now lives, with its
‘brittle air’ and snowy ‘almost impassable’ streets and the tropical
landscape of Sri Lanka, become strangely merged in his mind as he
recalls the ‘frozen opera’ of his family (pp.22–3). The problem
becomes one of how to locate the subject across countries when there
is no possible linear narrative of return, no clear place of origin.
Ondaatje’s search for his ancestry is constantly frustrated by a
complex history of migration and the chaotic telling of family stories
which never allow him to get things ‘straight’ (p.105). Even the
name ‘Ondaatje’ is ‘a new name’ formed from a parody of Dutch,
deflected from the ‘original’ by its iteration in different languages.
Neither do the historical records afford any ‘clarity’, but either offer
faded ruins or a proliferating jumble of names: ‘We had not expected
to find more than one Ondaatje here but the stones and pages are
full of them’ (p.66).
The title Running in the Family suggests the mobility of the subject
who must travel across spatial and historical differences, assembling
a narrative and a self from fragments of ‘rumour’, gossip and
observation. It also, however, refers to the shared family traits that
provide a connection, though the irony is that these – drinking and
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118 other subjects
telling stories – are precisely the characteristcs that destabilize a
relation to ‘truth’, producing fantasy and excess. Ondaatje is carried
away on the ‘wave’ of his party at the beginning of the book, just as
he is by the story of his grandmother, and just as she is, after
a drinking bout, by the mythic flood (Ondaatje 1984: 23). ‘Once a
friend had told me that it was only when I was drunk that I seemed
to know exactly what I wanted’, Ondaatje tells us (p.22).
Drunkenness paradoxically bestows certainty, but on a subject who
has already become destabilized or Other: ‘Dancing, balancing a wine
glass on my forehead and falling to the floor . . . I knew I was already
running’ (ibid.).
Naipaul’s ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ deals not with an actual
but an imaginative return to the childhood memories which
prompted his own first attempts to write a story. Significantly it is
the memory of a ‘traveller’, Bogart, and, in particular, a voice from
the street in Port of Spain calling his name, which inspires his first
writing and thus initiates him into his identity as a writer. The
character, as it turns out, calls up for Naipaul a complicated history
of migration which partly overlaps with his own family history:
So there was a migration from India to be considered, a migra-
tion within the British Empire. There was my Hindu family, with
its fading memories of India; there was India itself. And there
was Trinidad, with its past of slavery, its mixed population, its
racial antagonisms and its changing political life; once part of
Venezuela and the Spanish Empire, now English-speaking.
(Naipaul 1984: 27)
For Naipaul it is at first difficult to think of writing outside a
European context: he thinks of himself as coming from ‘an intellec-
tually restricted world’, deprived of the ‘background of knowledge’
which is available for the English or French writer (Naipaul
1984: 27). In order to become a writer he has had to come to
England. However, not only does his writing come from memories
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other subjects 119
of displacement, he writes in the ‘freelances’ room’ at the BBC,
without the status of being ‘staff’, among the movement, anxieties
and chat of his colleagues (p.22). In other words, he has discovered
an alternative scene of writing, another way of locating the writer as
participating in movement, rather than drawing on a settled
community, and as a consequence found his own subject.
This is the reason why Naipaul juxtaposes his ‘Prologue to an
Autobiography’ with a travel sketch ‘The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro’
and sees them both as about ‘the process of writing’ (Naipaul 1984:
9). Travel undermines the possibility of locatedness, producing
temporary points of stasis or stations of observation for the writ-
ing subject. Of Naipaul’s African destination in the Ivory Coast,
Yamoussoukro, a friend says: ‘Try to get there at night. You’ll see
the double row of lights. You’ll wonder where you are. And in the
morning you’ll see that you are nowhere’ (p.82). It is that double
sense of being somewhere and nowhere that Naipaul pursues as
a writer and finds reproduced in the diasporic community he
encounters. The difference between people – ‘there were expatriaties
and expatriates’ (p.157) – is less where they come from, or some kind
of identity forged through race, than what they can make of where
they are. For Arlette, a West Indian woman who has married an
Ivorian man and been abandoned by him, ‘To live in Africa . . . was
to have all one’s ideas and values questioned. And it was good, she
added, for that to happen’ (p.106).
Paul Gilroy draws attention to the way ideas of nation have
drawn on notions of strict gender hierarchy in order to ensure ‘the
continuance of blood lines’: ‘The integrity of the nation becomes
the integrity of its masculinity. Indeed it can only be a nation if the
correct version of gender hierarchy has been established and repro-
duced’ (Gilroy 2000: 127). Diaspora, he suggests, could allow us to
valorize forms of kinship other than national and familial ones. In
both the texts that I have been looking at, the autobiographical
subjects attempt to rediscover a relationship to a father who has been
largely absent from their childhood, only to find that the father is
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120 other subjects
other than they thought he was. Naipaul’s belief in his father as
literary mentor and ‘reformer’ is undermined by the discovery of his
part in a traditional Hindu sacrifice and subsequent madness: ‘The
house where this terror befell him became unendurable to him. He
left it. He became a wanderer’ (Naipaul 1984: 71). Ondaatje’s father
is also a ‘runaway’, unfixable as the ‘real Mervyn’ (Ondaatje 1984:
175), the subject of stories which Ondaatje ‘cannot come to terms
with’ (p.181). The role of the father in both these texts is problem-
atic, disorientating, unable to secure the son’s identity; instead the
sons must strive for an affinity which has nothing to do with the
handing on of power.
It is appropriate that in this chapter, which began with issues
of gender, we should also return to them at the end and that it is
now the father’s role, rather than the mother’s, that is being ques-
tioned. The autobiographical subject is cast adrift from patriarchal
origins and must endlessly reinvent themselves, their location and
community along with new forms of autobiography. Anxiety, as
Gilroy suggests, may result, but also perhaps insight and pleasure
(Gilroy 2000: 129). With Naipaul’s Arlette we might want to say
that though everything has become unstable, ‘it was good . . . for
that to happen’ (Naipaul 1984: 106).
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4
PRACTISING AUTOBIOGRAPHY
PERSONAL CRITICISM
This final chapter will return to an issue raised briefly in the
Introduction, namely the interrelationship of criticism and auto-
biography. So far we have mostly surveyed either autobiographical
texts or theoretical and critical texts about autobiography. The
exceptions have been texts by Barthes and Derrida which have
interrogated the boundary between different kinds of discourse and
used the autobiographical, albeit in an attenuated or fragmented
form, as a source of pleasure and critique. Not surprisingly, therefore,
it is poststructuralism that has seemed to provide the intellectual
atmosphere in which claims to critical objectivity have been ques-
tioned over the past fifteen years and that has opened to debate the
function, or indeed the necessity, of the personal or autobiographical
within criticism.
For some this question, being broached belatedly in the 1990s
under the banner of ‘personal criticism’, is scarcely a new one. In 1996
in a ‘Forum’ on the ‘place, nature or limits of the personal’ in
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122 practising autobiography
criticism, published by the Modern Language Association, Jane
Gallop ‘snidely’ suggested that far from being a ‘new phenomenon’,
the personal within criticism was a commonplace and that scholar-
ship had always been ‘replete with personal narratives’. For Gallop
it was more a case of where and how one looked: the personal was
there but safely relegated to prefaces, acknowledgements, dedications
and footnotes. However, for Gallop, the belief on the critic’s part
that the personal, while sufficiently important to the work to be
mentioned, could be ‘cordoned off’ or pushed to the margins of the
text, failed to take account of how it would also leave traces in
the text, in moments of rhetorical intensity, for instance, or oddly
resonant words and examples. Personal affect, according to Gallop,
was always trying to get itself written, deforming both the smooth-
ness and clarity of critical discourse (Forum 1996: 1149–50). Other
contributors to the Forum agreed. Poststructuralism had not
so much released a new form of writing as precipitated the recogni-
tion of what is, in effect, an inevitability. All that was new, according
to Norman Holland, was a different attitude of acceptance and
enjoyment: ‘We are, willy-nilly, personal’, he wrote. ‘Let’s go with
it, then. Let’s enjoy it. Let’s chuck the pretensions to infallibility
customary to our profession and have some fun’ (p.1147). For others
the ‘personal’ offered a different pedagogical model, an opportunity
to acknowledge the limits of one’s knowledge and understanding,
to engage theoretical issues without necessarily employing a lan-
guage which will alienate most readers (p.1153). It suggested that
the critic is not contributing, as George T. Wright contends, ‘another
stolid block in the great pyramid of objective knowledge’ but
offering a ‘probably flawed contribution’ to a continuing dialogue
with other scholars (p.1159). Personal criticism suggested, therefore,
a more localized setting for critical writing and more modest
ambitions.
However, as Claudia Tate pointed out in her contribution to this
same debate, the recognition that ‘scholarly prose, like imaginative
literature, is inevitably personal’ also derives from serious political
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practising autobiography 123
concerns (Forum 1996: 1147). What is at stake is who speaks
or rather who is authorized to speak. An objective critical stance
which ‘claims to speak for everyone’ has, according to Tate, been
exclusive and has disenfranchised alternative points of view. Such
‘masterly’ discourses, which critics either mimicked or were silenced
by, masked an ideological investment in ‘white patriarchal law’.
A ‘multitude of personal expressions’ is both more democratic and
representative of the plurality of ‘personal and cultural narratives’
that, in fact, determine the identity of critics (p.1148). Indeed many
of the contributors to this debate who are advocates of the personal
within criticism speak from ‘minority’ positions, as gay, immigrant,
black, Asian or female, and see the personal as both a risk and
an opportunity: a risk because for the ‘minority’ writer, as Joonok
Huh argues, there is no already assured public role which will make
the ‘personal’ safe, transforming it into another form of public
performance; an opportunity because it is a way of getting free from
‘established paradigms and norms’ and ‘seizing the initiative of
utterance’ (pp.1156–7).
This critical Forum rehearses many of the arguments we
have already encountered in relation to autobiography, most notably
in the recognition of how a universal or objective point of view
implies a particular ideology of the subject. However, our exploration
of autobiography also suggested a need to be sceptical about the
claim that the personal can ever automatically guarantee authen-
ticity; often, as we have seen, the subject is simply exchanging
one discursive position for another, and there are perils in any claim
to ‘identity’which perceives the subject as unitary, and restricts
its perspectives, its movement or collaboration in other discourses.
‘I’ can also raise problems about privilege and exclusion, and create
anxieties not only about who is speaking and who by implication is
not, but also about where ‘I’ am speaking from and for whom. These
anxieties, of necessity, carry across into personal criticism.
The term ‘personal criticism’, whatever its wider historical
relevance as an idea, was coined in the 1990s and has been associated
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124 practising autobiography
in particular with two books published within a year of each other:
Mary Ann Caws’ Women of Bloomsbury (1990) and Nancy K. Miller’s
Getting Personal (1991); however these books also have slightly
different approaches and rationales. Mary Ann Caws returned to the
moment of writing Women of Bloomsbury from a later perspective in
the ‘Forum’ and expressed her dissatisfaction with two aspects of her
book: the first was the ‘personal-pronoun problem’ and the patterns
of inclusion and exclusion it cannot help but create; the second
was the ‘tentativeness’ and ‘passivity’ of her writing (Forum 1996:
1160). In 1990, ‘personal criticism’ had been her attempt to lend
intimacy and warmth to her criticism both as a move away from
‘impersonality’ and a way of getting closer to, or even ‘mingling’
with, the lives of the women she was writing about (Caws 1990: 2).
In retrospect she felt her writing to be too merged with her subject,
not forceful enough: ‘I wanted to be both passionate and compassion-
ate but I could not express my wanting in a form hard enough’
(Forum 1996: 1161). One might perhaps say that there are not in
fact two issues here but one, and that the problem with personal
pronouns has returned, transposed into a particular writing style. In
this idealized form of critical intimacy, with its belief in ‘involvement
and in coherence, in warmth and in relation’, there is little room for
difference and no understanding of the political stakes or locatedness
of the subject (Caws 1990: 3). Comprehending the relationship
between identity and difference, sameness and otherness, requires,
as we have seen, a critical and reflective vocabulary which is rooted
in political understanding. Is the personal ever enough? Is it, indeed,
only or ever really, personal?
Nancy K. Miller’s book Getting Personal emerged from her long
involvement with feminist criticism; as such it is not ‘anti-theory’
but rather another turn within theory, a deliberate ‘turning theory
back on itself’ (Miller 1991: 5). Miller offers a complex analysis
of personal criticism as arising out of a particular nexus of critical
concerns. First, she points to a dissatisfaction with the ‘absent’
subject of theory whose authority rested on not owning its own
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practising autobiography 125
necessary locatedness as a social subject: the fact that it is white,
male, heterosexual, or as in the case of Paul de Man, affiliated with
fascism. This dissatisfaction she sees as giving rise to ‘identity
politics’ and a wide range of different social groupings which,
however, cannot avoid equally contentious claims to representativity,
the problem of speaking as or speaking for that continually returns
and which seems impossible to resolve in any final way (Miller
1991: 20).
For Miller this relation of the subject to theory has a particular
gender inflection. While men have tended to stake their critical
authority on an ‘overweighted’ relation to theory and to disregard
their relation to the personal, feminism has ‘interrogated’ how
knowledge is produced and has developed an understanding of the
personal as itself theoretical (Miller 1991: 21). The point, therefore,
is not to offer the personal and the theoretical as contrasting and
mutually exclusive modes but to see their implication in each other.
For Miller personal criticism becomes a way of exposing the basis
of critical and theoretical writing; it stages the critic’s own relation
to the ideas:
By turning its authorial voice into spectacle, personal writing
theorizes the stakes of its own performance: a personal
materialism. Personal writing opens an inquiry on the cost of
writing – critical writing or Theory – and its effects.
(Miller 1991: 24)
The inclusion of the word ‘performance’ is important since it
suggests a form of contingent positioning rather than any claim to
authenticity. Miller is proposing the deliberate foregrounding of the
critic within the text not in order to pre-empt theory but to speak
personally within it and about it and thus also to reveal critical
impersonality as just another personal stance in disguise. Miller
herself indicates the dangers: a privileged few who can create interest
in themselves because of the status they already have adopting a cosy
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126 practising autobiography
self-referential style (Miller 1991: 25). At its best, as Miller both
contends and has extensively demonstrated, these ‘autobiographical
acts’ within criticism are ‘enlivening’ and challenging and extend,
just as feminism has, the range of cultural material that is available
(p. 21). However, as just another ‘institutionalized’ form of criticism,
the risks of personal criticism could be minimal, and, at worst, mean
little more than the substitution of one style of academic authority
for another.
TESTIMONIES
Miller uses the ‘old-fashioned’ word ‘engaged’ for the form of
criticism she is envisaging, and proposes a writing where the stakes
are high enough to ‘matter to others’ (Miller 1991: 24). It is with a
discussion of autobiography as a form of witnessing which ‘matters
to others’ that I want now to conclude this book. Shoshana Felman’s
book What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference (1993)
will provide us with a connection or bridge between the topics of
personal criticism and testimonial writing as well as raising crucial
questions about the relation of autobiography to history. Situating
her own writing in relation to personal criticism, Felman asks the
difficult question of how we know that the ‘personal’ voice that
the critic is speaking in is her own. ‘Getting personal’, here picking
up Miller’s title and critical argument, does not, according to
Felman, ‘guarantee that the story we narrate is wholly ours or that
it is narrated in our own voice’ (Felman 1993: 14). Felman is far from
denying the importance of autobiography or that reading and
writing has a relation to our lives that ‘matters’. The problem is
rather where autobiography is situated if, as Felman believes, our story
cannot be ‘self-present’ to us, cannot be under the conscious control
of the subject.
Felman’s argument is framed as a feminist argument and as
pertaining particularly to women’s lives and writing. It is, as Felman
argues, because women have been trained to see themselves as objects
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practising autobiography 127
and have been positioned as Other that ‘none of us, as women, has
as yet, precisely, an autobiography’ (Felman 1993: 14). What she
proposes is autobiography as a form of testifying, to be distinguished
from confession, which involves the speaker and the listener in
a shared project to recover ‘something the speaking subject is
not – and cannot be – in possession of’ (p.16). Felman points not to
autobiographical moments within texts but rather to moments
of resistance or hesitation between discourses – between theory
and autobiography, for instance – which she sees as testifying to
surprising irruptions of the Other. Whereas it may be impossible
to gain direct access to ourselves, through personal criticism, for
instance, it may be possible through a ‘bond of reading’ to access the
story of the Other in these hesitations or resistances, a story which
has yet to be told or understood (p.14).
At this point I want to leave the particular feminist slant of
Felman’s argument and turn back to her earlier work on testimony
from which this later book partly derives. It is because Felman
sees feminine existence as corresponding in some ways to trauma-
tized existence that she suggests it cannot be simply remembered
and narrated. According to Felman, testimony implies a relation-
ship to events as evidence of truth without being able to provide
‘a completed statement, a totalizable account of those events’ (Felman
1993: 5). To testify, in its legal sense, is to produce one’s speech
or one’s story as part of a larger verdict yet to be made. Testimony
is called for in a situation where the truth is not clear, where
there is already a ‘crisis of truth’: ‘The trial both derives from and
proceeds by, a crisis of evidence, which the verdict must resolve’
(p.6).
For Felman testimony has become increasingly important in
‘recent cultural accounts of ourselves’ because it issues from and
relates to the traumas of contemporary history, events like the Second
World War, the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb, which overwhelm our
ability to assimilate them and which exceed our capacity to under-
stand (Felman 1993: 14). Cathy Caruth, in her important writing
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128 practising autobiography
on trauma, has described the way traumatic memory can return
unwilled, in dreams or flashbacks, for instance, but yet remain
beyond the conscious recall of the subject. The traumatic history
cannot become integrated into the subject’s narrative or history of
themselves because it was not fully experienced at the time it
happened; nor is it fully comprehended when it is re-enacted in the
present. In this sense it is a history that literally ‘has no place’ but
is known only through a departure from it and in its insistent and
terrifying return (Caruth 1995: 153).
Charlotte Delbo, a survivor of Auschwitz, has described just such
a splitting within her ‘self’ between ‘deep-lying memory’ and
‘ordinary memory’:
I live within a twofold being. The Auschwitz double doesn’t
bother me, doesn’t interfere with my life. As though it weren’t
I at all. Without this split I would not have been able to
revive.
(Delbo 1990: 3)
Delbo’s survival has depended on isolating her Auschwitz ‘memories’
which remain inaccessible to any narrative account of them: ‘It is
not from deep memory that my words come’ (Delbo 1990: 3).
Instead they return, unbidden, in dreams which overwhelm her sense
of the present: ‘It takes days for everything to get back to normal,
for everything to get shoved back inside memory, and for the skin
of memory to mend again’ (ibid.). As Cathy Caruth notes, ‘the
traumatized . . . carry an impossible history within them, or they
become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot
entirely possess’ (Caruth 1995: 5).
For Caruth the implications of trauma are profound and raise
questions about both historical representation and understanding.
Trauma poses the problem of an inability to witness historical events
except ‘at the cost of witnessing oneself’. The experience, in a sense,
can only be perceived as a gap, or an absence of any direct represen-
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practising autobiography 129
tation, in the ‘collapse of understanding’ (Caruth 1995: 7). However,
the impossibility of articulating a comprehensible narrative,
according to Caruth, does not negate the possibility of a ‘trans-
missible truth’ (p.154). It is precisely by refusing coherent narrative
that a space can be opened up for ‘a testimony that can speak beyond
what is already understood’ (p.155). This also requires a particular
kind of listening and collaboration between the speaker and the
listener. The listener also bears a responsibility to listen not only
to an account of the event but the speaker’s traumatic departure
from it: ‘The history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can
only take place through the listening of another’ (p.11). The listener
takes on, as it were, the ethical responsibility of bearing witness to
what testimonial writing cannot directly represent, and breaking
down the isolation imposed by the nature of the event. It is part of
the argument, of course, that this traumatic history which exceeds
the individual concerns us all.
George Perec’s text W or History of Childhood is strangely assembled
from two texts, which apparently have nothing in common.
However, Perec warns us in an unpaginated and untitled Preface that
‘they are in fact inextricably bound up with each other, as though
neither could exist on its own’ (Perec 1996). The one text is a
non-narrative and fragmentary set of memories and meditations on
Perec’s wartime Jewish childhood; the other is a fictional account of
the faraway island of W, which has built a society devoted to athletic
prowess and competition but which is gradually transformed into a
concentration camp ruled by a completely arbitrary set of laws that
deny its inhabitants both agency and humanity.
Perec’s autobiographical text, full of hiatuses and repetitions, is
both an approach to remembering his parents and an acknowedge-
ment of the impossibility of ever healing through words the trauma
of their absence. All he can do is go on repeating in different words
without hope of return. His parents’ absence, at a time before he
could understand what was happening, prompts the need to write
now without necessarily allowing him to possess his subject or revive
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130 practising autobiography
their presence. There is both a personal and ethical imperative
to remember, not to surrender to the ‘unsayable’, but which must
nevertheless encounter and keep encountering the blank and
traumatic nullity of their absence:
I am not writing in order to say that I shall say nothing, I am not
writing to say that I have nothing to say. I write: I write because
we lived together, because I was once amongst them, a shadow
amonst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write
because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing.
Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their
death and the assertion of my life.
(Perec 1996: 42)
Perec’s father died fighting in France in 1940; his mother was
deported to Auschwitz in 1943. Perec gives us several different
accounts of his departure, aged 6, from his mother, whom he was
never to see again. The memory is briefly outlined in Section 8 when
Perec remembers that, though he had no broken bones, he had his
arm in a sling and that his mother bought him a comic entitled
Charlie and the Parachute. He returns to this memory in Section 10,
revising now the detail that he was wearing a sling and telling us
that in fact he had a rupture and was wearing a truss. In restrospect
there seems to be a common thread of imagery: ‘A triple theme runs
through this memory: parachute, sling, truss: it suggests suspension,
support, almost artificial limbs. To be I need a prop’ (Perec 1996:
55). Later, the parachute recurs in an actual experience of making
a parachute jump in 1958:
I suddenly saw, in the very instant of jumping, one way of
deciphering the text of this memory: I was plunged into nothing-
ness; all the threads were broken; I fell, on my own, without any
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practising autobiography 131
support. The parachute opened. The canopy unfurled, a fragile
and firm suspense before the controlled descent.
(Ibid.)
The full meaning of the trauma of departure is only decipherable
belatedly. As Eleanor Kaufman notes, it is not until after the war
that real knowledge of the trauma is possible – that this was a final
departure from his mother – nor till much later yet with the
parachute jump and the experience of physical falling, that he can
re-experience the inner trauma of plummeting without support
and understand its meaning (Kaufman 1998: 45). Indeed we
are never told when Perec realizes that his mother will not return;
when, in effect, the trauma of her departure is understood and fully
experienced. This trauma, the reality of the first trauma, is still
absent from Perec’s text.
The other story, the story of W, had its origins, so Perec tells us,
in a childhood fantasy. Rediscovered, it stood in for the memories of
his childhood which Perec long claimed not to have: ‘In a way, if not
the story of my childhood, then at least a story of my childhood’
(Perec 1996: 6). Rewriting it in the 1960s, Perec allows it to
be invaded by, or to become fused with, the historical events it was
designed to conceal, or which were not fully known to the adolescent
who first invented the island: ‘W is no more like my Olympic fantasy
than that Olympic fantasy was like my childhood’. It is precisely
in the passage from one form of fantasy to the other that the memory
resides, the sinister doubling or gradual revelation of what lies
behind the fantasy, or is implicit in its folds: ‘In the crisscross web
they weave as in my reading of them I know there is to be found the
inscription and the description of the path I have taken, the passage
of my history and the story of my passage’ (Perec 1996: 7).
It is also significant that the fiction of W begins with the story of
a voyage to find the body of a child who has been shipwrecked along
with his mother. The child was apparently ‘deaf and dumb’ for
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132 practising autobiography
reasons that ‘could only be ascribed to some infantile trauma whose
precise configuration unfortunately remained obscure despite
examinations by numerous psychiatrists’ (Perec 1996: 23). As Nicola
King notes, ‘A lost and traumatised child is at the centre of the text’
(King 2000: 129) whose name, we may add, is also given to the man
asked to search for him. This story, while not in any way referring
to a memory, yet holds the memory at its heart.
If Perec’s W testifies to a traumatic history precisely through its
absences, its uncertainties and its fictional rewritings, I want to
conclude with a text which raises a different set of problems, which,
while offering itself as a Holocaust survivor’s testimony, has in fact
turned out to be a fiction. Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories
of a Childhood 1939–1948 (1996) was offered as the recovered
childhood memories of Binjamin Wilkomirski who had survived
the slaughter of his parents and his own imprisonment in the death
camps, and who records, convincingly, the images and fragments
through which those memories surface and begin to be understood.
Wilkomirski, who still apparently defends the authenticity of his
account and believes in his identity as a survivor, has argued that ‘it
was always the free choice of the reader to read my book as literature
or to take it as a personal document’ (Gibbons and Moss 1999: 3).
However, the shifting from one genre to another has been profoundly
disturbing to readers and, as if embarrassed by their mistake, the
publishers have withdrawn the book. To return to the courtroom
scene which defines the meaning of testifying, Wilkomirski, it seems,
has been convicted of providing false testimony.
Should it matter? We have seen how impossible it is to decide
once and for all about the status of autobiography as either truth or
fiction, and this text would seem to suggest that even testimony,
with all its ethical weighting, is as unstable as a category as auto-
biography and could be subject to impersonation. In the future it
may be possible to understand Wilkomirski’s obsession with the
Holocaust and absorption of the historical archive of trauma as
telling us something, beyond individual pathology, about the
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practising autobiography 133
pathology of history whose traumatic effects spread uncontrollably
and implicate us in ways we do not as yet understand. This might
also allow us to see through the fiction to history again. It is
appropriate that this book should conclude with these problems of
genre, truth and interpretation. While autobiography supplies few
certainties or answers, its study leads us to engage with some of the
most intractable and important cultural questions of our time.
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GLOSSARY
absence a concern with what is missing from a literary work, rather than
what is to be found there. Since the publication of Pierre Macherey’s
A Theory of Literary Production (1978) such absences have been given more
attention. Macherey draws on Freud to emphasize his point that absence
is necessary for identification and existence, and as a follower of Louis
Althusser (the French Marxist philosopher), links absence with IDEOLOGY,
due to ideologies’ perceived failure to acknowledge their own condition. In
literary texts absence is not always related to subject matter; it can also
relate to style.
allegory a piece of literature written in such a way as to have two different
frames or levels of meaning. An allegorical interpretation draws attention
to meanings within literature other than those which are made explicit by
the work.
alterity the state of being OTHERwise, different, diverse.
canon deriving from Christian debate around whether the Hebrew Bible
should be granted divine authority. Used in literary criticism to refer to
(1) texts indisputably by one author, (2) works set apart from others because
of their quality. Included texts are agreed on by universities, the most
unassailable position being granted to the works of Shakespeare, with the
most extreme viewpoint being the refusal to call any text from outside of
the canon ‘literature’. In recent times alternative canons, such as a feminist
canon, have been proposed, to exist alongside the accepted canon. However,
those who promote the traditional canon do not acknowledge alternatives.
Supporters of the canon insist that it is not inflexible, but many critics feel
that canonization encourages standardized readings.
deconstruction a term associated with the work of the French philo-
sopher Jacques Derrida, deconstructionist readings attempt to undermine
Western metaphysics by revealing the workings of its logocentricism
(reliance on a fixed centre or PRESENCE). It questions any claims towards a
moment of pure origin, or essence, and whilst acknowledging such large
theses as ‘God’, ‘Truth’, and ‘The SUBJECT’, always seeks to question their
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glossary 135
authority. Deconstruction attempts to negate the apparent ‘logic’ of binary
hierarchies, and is a vital component of POSTSTRUCTURALISM. Decon-
struction cannot help but borrow from the system it is questioning (use of
language, for example), and in its attempts to avoid this it can seem
frustratingly obscure.
difference the source of this, now widely applied, concept lies within the
structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, who operated on the premise
that language works as a system of differences, using signs (accepted words)
to refer to objects mutually recognised as that being signified. Binary
opposition is the starkest form of difference and is used to form part of
structural textual analysis. An awareness of difference allows for textual
readings which are sensitive to such oppositions as the dominant and the
MARGINalized. Looking at texts in this way has had a huge impact on
discussions of identity as it opens up multiple questions about the notion
of the social and sexual self.
Difference is widely referred to in feminist criticism, in particular its
inference that we are all dependent for meaning upon what we are not.
Feminist criticism use of the term falls into three broad categories; Sexual
difference (turning upon ESSENTIALISM), Sites of difference (e.g. uneven
distribution of power in gender, race and class) and Multiple differences
between people (stressing need for plurality).
Derrida’s coinage of the term as différance combines ‘differing’ with
‘deferral’, to emphasize his point that meaning is deferred, due to being in
a process of continuous construction.
discourse a term associated with the work of Michel Foucault, who
connects it to the mediation of power and authority within society. It denotes
a socially and historically situated use of language – a discursive practice –
using a shared vocabulary, assumptions, values and interests, for example,
legal discourse, medical discourse, poetic discourse, the discursive practice
of teenage gangs. These generic groupings, of course, raise questions about
the boundaries of a particular discourse. Linguistic studies cite discourse as
language in use, as opposed to language as an abstract system.
essentialism the belief that attributes are inherent and distinctive to an
object or person, and therefore define its ‘true nature’, for example, that
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136 glossary
certain qualities are universal to women, regardless of context. Often these
traits are said to derive from biology and hence be inevitable; this belief is
also called biological determinism. From Aristotle’s writings to the present
day, the issue of ‘essence’ continues to be debated. To argue that humans
have a definable ‘nature’ relies on some proof of origins; making a God,
or some other TRANSCENDENT being, or moment, an attractive (or
convenient) proposition for some. Essentialist thought has been employed
by some feminist critics in order to present a discernible ‘female’ nature, as
the opposite of aggressive, power-seeking males. However, various other
forms of feminist criticism, such as those employing psychoanalysis,
DECONSTRUCTION and postmodernism, are more likely to discuss ‘female
nature’ in terms of its being a socially constructed perception.
genre a specific type of artistic or cultural composition, identified by codes
which the audience recognize. Examples of typical genre categories are
science fiction, detective fiction, the musical, the western, soap operas and
so on. There are also broader categories such as romance, pastoral, film noir,
comedy, etc., and even broader: the novel, poetry, drama, film, etc. It is
now increasingly common for texts to blur genre divisions.
humanism the word ‘humanist’ originally meant someone who studied
the humanities, which were defined in the Middle Ages as Classical
literature, rhetoric and poetry. Generally it is the belief that human values
and experience are at the centre of knowledge but it has been used more
recently, from a radical perspective, to denote bourgeois ideology which
unthinkingly assumes the centrality of the middle-class, masculine subject.
ideology a body of ideas (masquerading as irrefutable) that reflects the
beliefs consciously held by a nation, political system, etc. Frequently
described as indoctrinated, and discussed in conjunction with Marx’s
theories of ‘false consciousness’. Used in broader terms within the work of
Louis Althusser, as the naturalized perception of self and the world,
constructed as the individual enters the social order. Literary texts are
embedded in the social and economic circumstances in which they are
produced and consumed, something Althusser described as imaginary
relationship to real conditions of existence. Likewise, it could be argued
that a critic’s own ideology will always prevent unbiased reading and
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glossary 137
writing, for example, a feminist critic will object to the ideologies of
patriarchy, as a postcolonial critic will object to the ideologies of
colonialism. Postmodern thinking would claim that as there is only
‘falseness’ anyway, there cannot be a ‘false’ consciousness, taking us full
circle from accusing ideology of distorting reality, to claiming that there
is no reality.
imaginary/symbolic/real terms developed by French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan to describe the phases in the constitution of the psychic
SUBJECT. The ‘imaginary’ order refers to the first, pre-Oedipal phase of
infancy when the child’s relation to reality is structured by pre-verbal
images, fantasies and narcissistic desires, experienced in close association
with the mother. The ‘symbolic’ order is the realm of language, where items
become symbolized, and the Oedipal complex is resolved by the child’s
submission to the ‘Law of the Father’. The unconscious forms, and the
SUBJECT is placed on a quest for the unobtainable object (breast or bottle).
The next stage is the ‘real’, beyond language, and representing the impos-
sible, everything that could not be adequately shown by the imaginary and
symbolic phases. French feminist theorists have used, and adapted, Lacan’s
work. Julia Kristeva has named the pre-verbal realm ‘the semiotic’, and
argues that the desire and unity associated with this stage are not entirely
repressed, whilst Luce Irigaray proclaims the need to reformulate much
of the explanation of the phases, taking into account that babies are not
all male.
intentionality/intentional meaning a fallacy, sometimes pursued in
literary criticism, that a text may be defined in terms of its author’s
intentions.
intertextuality a term introduced by Julia Kristeva to denote a relation,
conscious or unconscious, between texts within an apparently discrete text.
More generally it indicates the penetration of any text by memories or
echoes of previous texts and therefore the way all texts comprise an
interaction between texts.
liberalism a term often used in conjunction with HUMANISM to denote
the belief in the individual as an autonomous being which assumes its
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138 glossary
neutrality but which has been critiqued by feminists as intimately allied
with patriarchal ideology.
logos a Greek word combining several meanings; that of ‘the Law’, ‘the
Word’, ‘sense,’ and ‘meaning’. A term much used by Jacques Derrida to
describe schools of thought which focus on a single, controlling centre as
logocentric (see DECONSTRUCTION). Derrida points out that these inward
rational principles, be they applied to texts, human beings or the natural
universe, cause the centre to be paradoxically both inside and outside of the
‘system’, as they are present, yet as an influence, prior – so absent. Such
anomalies, he feels, demonstrate the illusory nature of placing our faith in
inward-looking, rational principles.
margin(ality) terms used to refer to a place for repressed textual meanings,
but also the position of individuals and groups who do not conform to
normative assumptions, and are therefore subjected to oppression from the
power structures of mainstream society. To be within the margins can be
viewed as a negative and preclusive experience, or alternatively as an
advantageous position, from which to comment on the larger society. The
critical theories of psychoanalysis, IDEOLOGY and DECONSTRUCTION have
all encouraged readers to grant validity to marginal, subordinated mean-
ings. The spatial metaphor of centre and peripheries also owes something
to the schools of thought studying cultural geography and postcolonialism.
Authors too are described as occupying a marginal position, due to their
social or national identity. Many authors within the school of MODERNISM
were caught in the margins between cultures, and in more recent times
many feminist writers have chosen to focus on the way in which patriarchal
cultures allow male experience to dominate, hence marginalizing female
experience.
Modernism usually refers to the artistic and cultural production, practices
and attitudes arising between approximately 1890 to 1930 (exact dates
are contested). The period in question correlates with the explosion of
mass popular culture. Modernists proclaimed that the experimental nature
of their work overhauled traditional forms, values and perceptions.
Paradoxically, much modernist writing displays not only the determination
to break away from the past, but also a profound suspicion of the future,
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glossary 139
with its rapid technological developments and ever-increasing commercial-
ism. Modernist texts incorporate estrangement, montage, collage, demotic
language, interior monologue, parody, pastiche and a heightened self-
consciousness about the physical act of writing. Despite the work of
Virginia Woolf and HD, the majority of Modernism’s famous proponents
were overwhelmingly male, (e.g. T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, D.H.
Lawrence and Franz Kafka). Feminist criticism stresses the many women
writers omitted from the modernist CANON.
New Critics the name applied to a group of American critics in the
1930s and 1940s, among whom were John Crowe Ransom, W.K.Wimsatt
and Cleanth Brooks, who believed in the autonomy of literature and
advocated the close reading of texts. They defined various erroneous ways
of reading literature including the INTENTIONAL fallacy. The English critic
F.R. Leavis was influenced by the New Criticism, though he tended to
stress more than the literature role in moral and cultural education.
other a person, group or institution is placed outside the parameters of
normality by being classed as ‘other’, and subsequently inferior, to oneself;
it is therefore a process of categorization by exclusion. When used cynically,
such terminology legitimates inhuman treatment, and exploitation, of
‘others’, on grounds of their race, gender, sexuality or appearance – which
is typically described in stereotypical terms. With a capital letter the ‘Other’
invokes the theory of Jacques Lacan, in which the SUBJECT defines itself by
comparison with some Other, and the discourse of the unconscious becomes
the discourse of this Other. This idea, of the other as a part of oneself, is
often used in Gothic fiction, where a monstrous double must be resisted.
performative uses theatre studies, along with the general theatricality of
performance, to emphasize that identity is a social construct.
phallocentricism used in the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud
and Jacques Lacan, where the phallus is cited as being central to
psychological development, and the establishment of sexual difference.
More broadly, the term is used of any theory, textual representation,
DISCOURSE or social system which endorses the privileged symbolic power
of the male over the female, thus reinforcing the inequalities of patriarchy.
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140 glossary
The term has been much used by French feminists who associate it with
logocentricism.
poststructuralism a school of criticism that claims the text is never fixed
and irrefutable, but always capable of revealing more. Its close links with
DECONSTRUCTION mean that sometimes the two terms are used
interchangeably. In common with the other movements with the prefix
‘post’ (postcolonialism, postmodernism, etc.) poststructuralism indicates
both continuation, and an ongoing critique of earlier ideas, believing that
meaning is not centred within a closed system, and therefore demands
continuous analysis. Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes are perhaps the
two most obvious examples of components of this school, with Jacques
Lacan, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault also having affiliations, but of
a more ambiguous nature.
presence a vital element of logocentricism, in that the names relating to
the principles and fundamentals, believed by some to exist at the centre
of meaning, have always been designated an irrefutable presence (such as
God, existence, SUBJECT, consciousness, etc.). Such words have come to
represent points of authority, and hence the potential to escape from
Derrida’s play of DIFFERENCE.
prosopopoeia to represent an absent or IMAGINARY person as speaking
and/or acting through a rhetorical figure, or an inanimate object as
embodying personal qualities (personification).
real see imaginary.
Romanticism a literary movement which can be dated from about 1789
to 1830. Many of its ideological assumptions can be seen as persisting to
the present, in particular its central belief in the essential unity of both art
and the self, and their capacity to transcend society.
subject term for self, individual, human being, widely adopted by
poststructuralist critics due to the sense of doubling it gives, in the binary
opposition of subject/object. This implication of a split identity is a concept
explored by psychoanalytic, feminist and cultural critics, usually
encompassing readings of Sigmund Freud and/or Karl Marx.
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glossary 141
subjectivity the internal experience of being a SUBJECT.
symbolic see imaginary.
transcendent traditionally a term meaning existing beyond the created
world, and therefore free from its limitations; however, Jacques Derrida’s
use of the word to represent a negative authoritative unity has undoubted
implications for its use in literary criticism. As an example, the valorizing
of white, middle-class, European males could be labelled a transcendental
falsity.
unitary the belief that words, knowledge and representations can be
defined, and therefore stabilized, in a single distinct meaning, perceived
as the authorized version. DECONSTRUCTIONist work on language, and
psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious, directly oppose this belief, and
claim language to be ambiguous, and therefore inevitably offering multiple
meanings.
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Jacobus, Mary (1986) Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism, New
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Jameson, Frederic (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
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—— (1989) Black Sun: Melancholia and Depression, New York, Columbia
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Lacan, Jacques (1979) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,
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Lang, Candace (1982) ‘Autobiography in the Aftermath of Romanticism’,
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Mellor, Anne (1993) Romanticism and Gender, New York, Routledge.
Miller, Nancy K. (1988) Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing, New
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Harmondsworth, Penguin.
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Oxford Unversity Press, 1932.
Wright, T.R. (1988) Theology and Literature, Oxford, Blackwell.
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INDEX
NOTE: Page numbers in bold indicate major treatment of a subject; page
numbers followed by gl indicate information is in a Glossary entry.
absence 68, 87, 124–5, 128–9,
134gl
addressees see audience
African American autobiography
105–10
allegory 134gl
alterity 87, 89, 134gl; see also
other/Other
Althusser, Louis 134gl, 136–7gl,
140gl
‘ana’ 40
audience: Augustine’s Confessions
24–5; complicity of 16; family as
93; Rousseau’s Confessions
45–6, 51–2
Augustine, St: Confessions 16,
18–27; Derrida on 25, 84;
Monica (mother) 25–6, 27; as
paradigm for autobiography
18–19
Auschwitz testimony 128, 130
author: concept of 3, 7–8, 14; death
of 14, 88
Autobiographical Study, An (Freud)
66–70
autobiography: definitions 2, 5–6;
development of genre 7–9;
origins of term 7
Barthes, Roland 17, 60, 121, 140gl;
Barthes by Barthes 70–6, 77;
Camera Lucida 76–8; death of
the author 14; punctum theory
76
Bell, Robert 29
Bennett, Arnold 96
Bennington, Geoffrey 84
Benstock, Shari 66, 102
Bhabha, Homi 115
biography 2, 95–9
black autobiography 105–10
black feminist criticism 106
Blackwoods Magazine 8
body: Barthes’ view of 73–4, 75, 78;
role in spiritual memoirs 30;
role in Thrale’s writing 42–3
Boswell, James: diaries 35–9; and
Hester Thrale 38–9, 43; Life of
Johnson 35, 37–9
Brechtian theatre 74, 78
Breuer, Josef 67
Brodski, Bella 88
Broughton, Trev 93, 102
Brown, Peter 20
Bunyan, John: Grace Abounding 16,
27–33
Burke, Sean 74–5
Butterfield, Stephen 106
Calvin, John 30
Camera Lucida (Barthes) 76–8
canon 4, 27, 86, 134gl; modernist
canon 139gl
Carlton, Peter 32
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index 151
Carlyle, Thomas 7
Caruth, Cathy 127–9
castration complex 68
Caws, Mary Ann 124
Charcot, Jean Martin 67
Cheah, Peng 103
‘cognitive’ aspects of
autobiography 49, 51
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 54
colonial discourse 114–15
concentration camp testimony 128,
130, 132–3
Confessions (St Augustine) 16,
18–27, 84
Confessions (Rousseau) 16, 43–53,
54–5, 56, 79
conversion narratives: Augustine’s
Confessions 20–1, 22–4, 26;
Bunyan’s Grace Abounding 28,
29–30; by women 33
Corbett, Mary Jean 7–8
criticism and autobiography 2–4, 5,
16, 17; ‘personal’ criticism
121–6; women’s autobiography
86, 90
‘Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro, The’
(Naipaul) 119
Davy, Sara: Heaven Realized 34
de Man, Paul 12–16, 23, 125; on
Rousseau 49–51; wartime
revelations 15–16; on
Wordsworth 13–14, 56
death: of the author 14, 88; of
mothers see mothers’ deaths
deconstruction 89, 90, 94, 103,
134–5gl, 138gl, 140gl, 141gl; see
also Barthes; Derrida
Delbo, Charlotte 128
Derrida, Jacques 17, 27, 121, 141gl;
autobiographical writing 60,
79–86; ‘Circumfession’ 25,
83–6; deconstruction 134–5gl,
138gl, 140gl; différance 135gl;
and feminist theory 89–90;
on Freud 70, 79–80; ‘law of
genre’ 9–12; logocentricism
138gl; on Rousseau 52–3, 79
diaries and journals 8, 9, 34–5;
Boswell’s 35–9; Hester
Thrale’s 39–43; Virginia
Woolf’s 94–5; women’s 34,
39–43
différance 135gl
difference 17, 87, 102–10, 135gl; in
feminist theory 87–9; see also
sexual difference
discourse 6, 135gl
D’Israeli, Isaac 7
dissenters 27–8
Dollimore, Jonathan 19
‘Dora’ case history (Freud) 63–4,
68
Duckworth, Julia 93, 94
Dust Tracks on the Road (Hurston)
105–10, 114
Elam, Diane 90
epitaphs 13, 56
Essays Upon Epitaphs (Wordsworth)
13–14
essentialism 5, 90, 135–6gl
Excursion (Wordsworth) 13–14
false testimony 132–3
family accounts: Stephen’s
Mausoleum Book 93–4; Thrale’s
‘Family Book’ 41–3
fathers: in postcolonial
autobiographies 119–20;
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152 index
Steedman’s account of father
111–12
Feder, Ellen K. 89
Felman, Shoshana 15–16, 126–7
feminist theory: of autobiography
25–6, 124–6; black feminist
criticism 106; difference 87–9,
135gl; essentialism 90, 136gl;
genre in context of 11;
marginality 138gl; on modernist
writers 139gl; phallocentricism
87, 89–90, 139–40gl; and
poststructuralism 86–91; see
also sexual difference; women’s
writing
fiction and autobiography 6, 97–8,
129–33
Fleishman, Avrom 24
Forum of Modern Language
Association 121–3, 124
Fowler, Alastair 10, 11
Fragments (Wilkomirski) 132–3
Frankenstein (Shelley) 59
Freud, Sigmund 16–17, 59, 60–70,
78, 139gl, 140gl; An
Autobiographical Study 66–70;
case histories 62–4, 68; fort–da
theory 79–80; Lacan’s ‘return to
Freud’ 65, 66
Fry, Roger 99
Gagnier, Regenia 91
Gallop, Jane 122
Galsworthy, John 96
gender 3; and genre 11; and
language 83; see also sexual
difference
genre 136gl; autobiography as 1–2,
7–12, 19; ‘law of genre’ 9–12
Getting Personal (Miller) 124–6
Gilroy, Paul 115–16, 119–20
God: as Augustine’s addressee
24–5, 26; Rousseau assigns
peripheral role 44
Grace Abounding (Bunyan) 16,
27–33
Grosz, Elizabeth 103
Gusdorf, Georg 5, 18–19
Hall, Stuart 105, 115
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 15
Hartman, Geoffrey 53
Heaven Realized (Davy) 34
Hemenway, Robert E. 105
Hill, Christopher 28
history 15–16; Augustine’s
Confessions 19–20; false
testimony 132–3; Freud’s
treatment of 61, 63
Holland, Norman 122
Holocaust testimonies 128, 130,
132–3
hooks, bell 106
Huh, Joonok 123
humanism 17, 64, 136gl, 137gl
Hurston, Zora Neale: Dust Tracks
on the Road 105–10, 114
hybridity in colonial discourse
114–15
identity: in opposition to difference
87; postcolonial 115–16; see also
selfhood; sexual difference;
subject/subjectivity
identity politics 125
ideology 20, 88, 123, 136–7gl, 138gl;
and absence 134gl
Imaginary (Lacan) 72–3, 74, 137gl
intentionality 2–3, 137gl, 139gl
Irigaray, Luce 137gl
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index 153
Jacobus, Mary 11, 57–8, 87
Jameson, Fredric 10
Jay, Paul 54
Jelinek, Estelle 86
Johnson, Barbara 59, 90, 107, 110
Johnson, Samuel: Boswell’s Life 35,
37–9, 43; nursed by Thrale 42;
Thrale’s accounts of 39–41, 43
‘Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’
(Woolf) 97–8
journals see diaries and journals
Jouve, Nicole Ward 88
Kaufman, Eleanor 131
King, Nicola 132
Kolodny, Annette 34
Kristeva, Julia 94, 102, 113, 137gl
Lacan, Jacques 17, 140gl; Imaginary
72–3, 74, 137gl; mirror stage
65–6, 75–6; unconscious 64–5;
and Virginia Woolf’s writing
100, 102; see also other/Other
Lang, Candace 1, 6, 60–1
language: in Augustine’s
Confessions 23–4; de Man on
13–14, 23; gendered division 83;
Hurston’s use of 107–8; speech
52, 65; unconscious as 64–5
‘law of genre’ (Derrida) 9–12
Lejeune, Philippe 2, 3, 5
liberalism 6, 20, 137–8gl
Life of Johnson (Boswell) 35, 37–9
logos/logocentricism 134gl, 138gl,
140gl
Loomba, Ania 114, 115
Luther, Martin 30–1
Man, Paul de see de Man, Paul
Mandel, Barett 6
Marcus, Laura 2, 7, 8
marginality 103–4, 138gl
Marx, Karl 140gl
Mausoleum Book (Stephen) 93–4
‘mechanick preachers’ 28
Mellor, Anne 58
memoirs 8
Miller, Nancy K. 3, 26–7, 88; Getting
Personal 124–6
Miller, Perry 28
Millet, Kate 86
mirror stage (Lacan) 65–6, 75–6
Mitchell, W.J.T. 43, 55
Modern Language Association:
1996 Forum 121–3, 124
modernism 92–102, 138–9gl
Moi, Toril 94
mothers: Augustine shares
conversion with 25–6, 27;
Derrida’s theory on mother role
83; feminist view of 26–7,
113–14; Woolf relations with
93–4, 99–101, 114; as writers
39–40, 41–2
mothers’ deaths: St Augustine 25,
26, 27; Barthes 76, 77–9, 113;
Derrida 83–6, 113; Hurston 109,
114; Steedman 112–13
Naipaul, V.S.: ‘The Crocodiles of
Yamoussoukro’ 119; ‘Prologue
to an Autobiography’ 116,
118–20
name of the father (Lacan) 83
names 80–3, 84–5, 117
narrative order in Freud 61–3
Nature 53, 55, 56–7
New Criticism 2, 139gl
Nietzsche, Friedrich 67; Derrida on
Ecce Homo 81–3
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154 index
novels see fiction
Nussbaum, Felicity 7, 8–9
Oedipus complex 61, 68
Olney, James 4, 5
Ondaatje, Michael: Running in the
Family 116–18, 119–20
oppression and autobiography
103–4
Orlando (Woolf) 98
other/Other 65, 68, 70, 92–120,
139gl; in Barthes 72–3; mother
as 114; in Rousseau 48;
testimony to 126–7
Pascal, Roy 3, 19
Perec, George: W or History of
Childhood 129–32
performative theory 49–51, 125,
139gl
personal criticism 121–6
personification (prosopopoeia)
12–13, 23, 140gl
phallocentricism 87, 89–90,
139–40gl
photography 76–8
Piozzi, Hester see Thrale, Hester
Pope, Alexander 40–1
popular autobiographies 8
postcolonial writing 17, 114–20
poststructuralism 6, 12–17, 140gl;
and feminism 86–91; personal
criticism 121–6; readings of
Rousseau 49–53; see also
deconstruction
Prelude, The (Wordsworth) 13, 16,
53–8
presence 52, 73, 79, 81, 84, 134gl,
140gl
Probyn, Elspeth 91, 110–11, 114
‘Prologue to an Autobiography’
(Naipaul) 116, 118–20
proper names 80–3, 84–5, 117
prosopopoeia (personification)
12–13, 23, 140gl
psychoanalysis 138gl; in Barthes’
autobiography 72;
phallocentricism 139–40gl; see
also Freud; Lacan
punctum theory 76
Puritanism 27–8, 28–9
Ransom, John Crowe 139gl
readers see audience
Reformation 28, 31–2
‘Reminiscences’ (Woolf) 94
repression of sexual difference
58–9
rhetoric 23, 24
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
(Barthes) 70–6, 77
Romanticism 140gl; Romantic
autobiography 5, 53–9;
Romantic selfhood 5, 14, 53, 59
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Confessions
16, 43–53, 55, 56, 79; influence
on Wordsworth 54–5; public
reading 51–2; ribbon incident
48–50
Running in the Family (Ondaatje)
116–18, 119–20
Rylance, Rick 77
Saussure, Ferdinand de 135gl
Schenk, Celeste 10, 88
Schopenhauer, Arthur 67
‘self-biography’ term 7
selfhood: female 86–91, 102–3;
Romantic 5, 14, 53, 59; see also
subject/subjectivity
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index 155
semiotics 137gl
sexual difference 102–3, 135gl; in
Freudian theory 68; and genre
11; in Romantic autobiography
58–9
shame 49–50
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein 59
signatory role 80–3, 84–5
sinfulness: Augustine’s Confessions
21–2; Bunyan’s Grace Abounding
29; Rousseau’s Confessions
48–50, 55, 56; Wordsworth’s
Prelude 55–6
Siskin, Clifford 8
‘Sketch of the Past’ (Woolf)
99–102, 114
Smith, Robert 6, 14, 16
Smith, Sidonie 102, 103
Smith, Valerie 109
Southey, Robert 7
speech: psychoanalysis and 65;
Rousseau on 52
spiritual memoirs see Augustine:
Confessions; Bunyan: Grace
Abounding; conversion
narratives
Spivak, Gayatri 58
Stanley, Liz 89
Stanton, Domna 87, 89
Starobinski, Jean 25, 45, 46–7
Steedman, Carolyn 111–14
Stephen, James 92
Stephen, Sir Leslie 92–3, 95;
Mausoleum Book 93–4
Sterne, Laurence 98
Strachey, James 66
Sturrock, John 23, 46, 47
subject/subjectivity 60–91, 140gl,
141gl; according to Lacan 70,
137gl; in Barthes’ autobiography
70–6; in Freud 61–2; gendered
3, 88–91, 102–3; and
other/Other 65, 70, 92–120,
139gl; in Woolf 95, 101–2
sublime in Wordsworth 57–8
‘supplement’, writing as 52–3
Swindells, Julia 103–4
Tate, Claudia 122–3
Taylor, William 7
testimony 15–16, 17, 27–8, 126–33
‘thanatography’ (Derrida) 81
theatre 74
Thrale, Hester (later Piozzi):
Boswell on 38–9; diaries 39;
‘Family Book’ 41–3; on
practicalities of women writing
39–40; publications on Dr
Johnson 39–41, 43; Thraliana
40–1
tradition of autobiography 18–59,
60–1
transcendence 4, 136gl, 141gl; in
Augustine’s Confessions 21, 25,
27
transference 69–70
trauma and testimony 127–33
truth: in Augustine’s Confessions 25,
27; in Rousseau’s Confessions
44–5, 48
unconscious: Lacan’s interpretation
64–5; see also Freud;
psychoanalysis
unitary subject 60–1, 65, 75
Vieura, Francisco 7
Vindications (Wentworth) 34
vocation 7, 8
voyeurism 41
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156 index
W or History of Childhood (Perec)
129–32
Walker, Alice 106
Watson, Julia 103
Weintraub, Karl 3, 4, 19
Wells, H.G. 96
Wentworth, Anne: Vindications 34
Wilkomirski, Binjamin: Fragments
132–3
Williams, Huntington 43
Wimsatt, W.K. 139gl
witnessing 15–16, 17, 27–8,
126–33
‘Wolf Man’ case history (Freud)
62–3
women’s writing 17, 86; black
autobiography 105–10;
conversion narratives 33–4;
diaries and journals 34, 39–43;
and genre 11; and modernist
canon 92–102, 139gl
Woolf, Virginia 92–102, 139gl;
‘Journal of Mistress Joan
Martyn’ 97–8; Orlando 98;
‘Reminiscences’ 94; ‘Sketch of
the Past’ 99–102, 114
Wordsworth, Dorothy 58
Wordsworth, William 7–8; de Man
on 13–14, 56; Essays Upon
Epitaphs 13–14; Excursion 13–14;
influence of Rousseau 54–5; The
Prelude 13, 16, 53–8
Wright, George T. 122
Wright, T.R. 24
Zakin, Emily 89
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18 Pages 171-180 |
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18.1 Page 171 |
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18.2 Page 172 |
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18.3 Page 173 |
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18.4 Page 174 |
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18.5 Page 175 |
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