Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention
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Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention
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Overview
Originally published in 1985.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691631530 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #17 |
| Pages: | 300 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.30(w) x 10.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Fictions in Autobiography
Studies in the Art of Self-Invention
By Paul John Eakin
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1985 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06640-0
CHAPTER 1
Fiction in Autobiography: Ask Mary McCarthy No Questions
I. "In talking about the past we lie With every breath we draw"
Most readers naturally assume that all autobiographies are based on the verifiable facts of a life history, and it is this referential dimension, imperfectly understood, that has checked the development of a poetics of autobiography. Historians and social scientists attempt to isolate the factual content of autobiography from its narrative matrix, while literary critics, seeking to promote the appreciation of autobiography as an imaginative art, have been willing to treat such texts as though they were indistinguishable from novels. Autobiographers themselves, of course, are responsible for the problematical reception of their work, for they perform willy-nilly both as artists and historians, negotiating a narrative passage between the freedoms of imaginative creation on the one hand and the constraints of biographical fact on the other. Accordingly, in order to deal with the vexing issue of factuality that readers of these texts confront, it is essential to reach some understanding of the state of mind that motivates autobiographical discourse in the first place. On the basis of my research into the autobiographical act as performed by the twentieth-century writers discussed in the chapters that follow, I shall argue that autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in an intricate process of self-discovery and self-creation, and, further, that the self that is the center of all autobiographical narrative is necessarily a fictive structure. In these pages I seek to identify the fictions involved in autobiography and the sources — psychological and cultural — from which they are derived.
It is not my intention, however, to expel truth from the house of autobiography and to install fiction in its stead. One could conflate autobiography with other forms of fiction only by willfully ignoring the autobiographer's explicit posture as autobiographer in the text. It is, nevertheless, hardly surprising that the traditional version of the problematic of autobiography has focused on the apparently antithetical claims of truth and fiction that are necessarily involved in any attempt to render the materials of a life history in a narrative form. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often recognized as the father of modern autobiography, and perhaps he deserves credit, too, for inaugurating the conception of autobiographical truth that has stunted until very recently the growth of a criticism devoted to autobiography. Rousseau's stance in the opening lines of The Confessions (1781), hand over heart, grandly invoking "the last trump" of Judgment and his "Sovereign Judge" to bear witness to the truth of his account of his life, has probably been more memorable for most of his readers than anything else in the book, including even the pleasurable spankings and the notorious theft of the ribbon: "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." When Rousseau goes on to state, "I have displayed myself as I was," he affirms the possibility of a total revelation of human personality, and his readers have been arguing ever since whether to accept his claim for The Confessions as truth told with complete and unshrinking candor, or to dismiss it as the shameless magniloquence of a monstrous self-deception.
Edgar Allan Poe, for one, grasped the revolutionary import of a project like Rousseau's when he addressed the art of confession in a passage of his "Marginalia" in Graham's American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art for January, 1848:
If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own — the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple — a few plain words — "My Heart Laid Bare." But — this little book must be true to its title.
Poe correctly surmised that the lure of this model of autobiography, its appeal for the opportunist with an itch for notoriety ("STAR TELLS ALL"), is irresistible, and constantly exploited. Poe himself, however, would have none of it, because he believed that the psychological resistance to such a revelation was insurmountable: "No man dare write it." Radically opposed though they are about the possibility of enacting the confessional model of autobiography, Poe and Rousseau are united in their view that the challenge posed by autobiographical truth is in essence a matter of volition, of having the courage to utter it, leaving unexamined the problematical nature of the truth to be told, the epistemological difficulty of ascertaining what it is.
Adventurous twentieth-century autobiographers have shifted the ground of our thinking about autobiographical truth because they readily accept the proposition that fictions and the fiction-making process are a central constituent of the truth of any life as it is lived and of any art devoted to the presentation of that life. Thus memory ceases to be for them merely a convenient repository in which the past is preserved inviolate, ready for the inspection of retrospect at any future date. They no longer believe that autobiography can offer a faithful and unmediated reconstruction of a historically verifiable past; instead, it expresses the play of the autobiographical act itself, in which the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of present consciousness. Autobiography in our time is increasingly understood as both an art of memory and an art of the imagination; indeed, memory and imagination become so intimately complementary in the autobiographical act that it is usually impossible for autobiographers and their readers to distinguish between them in practice. It is in this spirit, for example, that two hundred years after the publication of Rousseau's Confessions we find the writer William Maxwell meditating on the nature of autobiographical truth in So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), a narrative with equal claims to being a memoir and a novel (it is both):
I seem to remember that I went to the new house one winter day and saw snow descending through the attic to the upstairs bedrooms. It could also be that I never did any such thing, for I am fairly certain that in a snapshot album I have lost track of there was a picture of the house taken in the circumstances I have just described, and it is possible that I am remembering that rather than an actual experience. What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory — meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion — is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
It is this process of storytelling that I want to investigate, this drive toward narration of the self, and the autobiographers I have chosen to work on share my interest in the fictions of autobiography. Characteristically, they have little use for the narrow, no-nonsense, "nothing but the facts, Ma'am" approach to the realities of biographical experience. Jean-Paul Sartre's stance is representative. When an interviewer asks him whether he has "come closer to [his] own truth through Roquentin or Mathieu than in writing The Words," Sartre's reply demonstrates the limitations of hard and fast taxonomical distinctions between autobiography and novel: "Probably. Or rather, I think that The Words is no truer than Nausea or The Roads of Freedom, Not that the facts I report are not true, but The Words is a kind of novel also — a novel that I believe in, but a novel nevertheless." Most of the autobiographers I shall be discussing — not only Sartre but Mary McCarthy, Henry James, and Maxine Hong Kingston as well — freely avow the presence of fiction in their art. Rejecting the traditional view of fiction as a potential threat to the success of the autobiographical process, antithetical to the truth they propose to tell, they regard fiction instead as a central feature of that truth, an ineluctable fact of the life of consciousness.
My inquiry into the fictions of autobiography begins with a consideration of the referential dimension of autobiographical discourse in the case of Mary McCarthy, who teaches us that fiction can have for an autobiographer the status of remembered fact. In the chapters that follow, I study the dialectical interplay between an autobiographer's impulse to self-invention and the received models of selfhood in the surrounding culture. My investigation of Henry James's autobiography (Chapter Two) explores the dynamics of the autobiographical act, in this case devoted to the invention of an existential fiction. The fiction is double here, for James's tale is not only the story of young Henry's creation of a self designed to surmount the crisis of identity and vocation posed by his non-participation in the Civil War, but also, in its telling, a strategy of self-invention designed to aid the ailing novelist to achieve a recovery of his imaginative powers. In the case of Jean-Paul Sartre (Chapter Three), the model of selfhood is specifically literary, for young Sartre, pre-empting the autobiographer he would later become, proposes to transform himself into a text. This curious circumstance of a text about a self who would be a text offers a privileged occasion to inquire into the origins of the autobiographical impulse, that drive toward narration which Maxwell posits as the central act of memory: is this storytelling limited to the art of retrospect, something imposed on life history as a consequence of the autobiographical act, or can narrative itself be said to constitute an experiential category?
The examples of McCarthy, James, and Sartre demonstrate that self-invention refers not only to the creation of self in autobiography but also to the idea that the self or selves they seek to reconstruct in art are not given but made in the course of human development. Thus, in the final chapter I place self-invention in the context of the history of the self as a concept in Western culture and in the context of current ontogenetic and phylogenetic speculations in linguistics, psychology, and philosophy about the nature of the self in the developmental history of the human individual. Investigation of the ontology of the self, both as entity and as idea, suggests the wisdom of abandoning the familiar formulation of the relation between the self and the language that is its means of expression in autobiography. Instead of debating the old either/or proposition — whether the self is a transcendental category preceding language in the order of being, or else a construct of language brought into being by it — it is preferable to conceptualize the relation between the self and language as a mutually constituting interdependency, for study of early human development reveals an intimate and necessary linkage between the acquisition of language and the emergence of self-awareness. In the ontogenetic schema of self-realization I present in Chapter Four, the autobiographical act (when it occurs) figures as a third and culminating phase in a history of self-consciousness that begins with the moment of language in early childhood and subsequently deepens in a second-level order of experience in childhood and adolescence in which the individual achieves a distinct and explicit consciousness of himself or herself as a self. In this developmental perspective, the autobiographical act is revealed as a mode of self-invention that is always practiced first in living and only eventually — sometimes — formalized in writing. I view the rhythms of the autobiographical act as recapitulating the fundamental rhythms of identity formation: in this sense the writing of autobiography emerges as a second acquisition of language, a second coming into being of self, a self-conscious self-consciousness.
My study of the fictions that structure autobiography, then, is finally intended as an exploration of the relation between narrative and the fundamental structures of consciousness, for I believe that the impulse to write autobiography is but a special, heightened form of that reflexive consciousness which is the distinctive feature of our human nature. I have chosen to conclude the last chapter with commentary on the recently published autobiographies of Saul Friedlander and Maxine Hong Kingston because these texts help to answer why the autobiographical imperative, a seeming anachronism derived from the old belief in self and presence, continues to exercise its creative force with undiminished urgency, vitality, and originality in what our newest critics would have us accept as an age of absence and privation.
II. "Mea Culpa"
We readily accept the presence of autobiographical elements in fiction, and any reader with an interest in the life of an author takes pleasure in identifying them. Thoreau wisely reminds us of the inevitable presence of autobiography in fiction when he observes that "it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking." The presence of fiction in autobiography, on the other hand, tends to make us uneasy, for we instinctively feel that autobiography is — or ought to be — precisely not-fiction. We want autobiography to be true, we expect it to be true more or less, and most of us are content to leave untested the validity of its claim to a basis in verifiable fact; most of the time we are not in a position to make such a test anyway. In those cases when we are forced to recognize that an autobiography is only fiction, we may feel cheated of the promised encounter with biographical reality.
To abandon expectations of the sort I have just described would be to abandon autobiography itself. Why would we bother to read it in the first place if we did not believe in autobiography as a primary expression of biographical truth? Realizing this, most autobiographers refrain from any behavior that would disturb the delicate entente between writer and reader that Philippe Lejeune has described as the autobiographical pact; indeed they are apt to encourage our trust in the historicity of their accounts lest we leave them in the lurch with their lives on their hands.
Mary McCarthy, however, risks violating the convention of the autobiographical pact at the very opening of her "memoirs" when she argues that any autobiographer, acting in the best of faith, is going to produce a narrative that will have fiction in it, like it or not. The presence of fiction in autobiography is not something to wish away, to rationalize, to apologize for, as so many writers and readers of autobiography persist in suggesting, for it is as reasonable to assume that all autobiography has some fiction in it as it is to recognize that all fiction is in some sense necessarily autobiographical. The practice of Mary McCarthy provides an ideal opportunity to launch an investigation of this presence, not only because she explicitly addresses herself to this issue but because her performance offers such a distinctly problematical illustration of it. In her case the autobiographer is an established writer of fiction recalling in a series of sketches that look very much like short stories the truth about a self she portrays as a liar.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fictions in Autobiography by Paul John Eakin. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
- CHAPTER ONE. Fiction in Autobiography: Ask Mary McCarthy No Questions, pg. 1
- CHAPTER TWO. Henry James and the Autobiographical Act, pg. 56
- CHAPTER THREE. Jean-Paul Sartre: The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Book, pg. 126
- CHAPTER FOUR. Self-Invention in Autobiography: The Moment of Language, pg. 181
- INDEX, pg. 279