JAMES OLNEY

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: AN ANATOMY AND A TAXONOMY

H a d such a conference as the present one on " G e n r e s in the Twentieth C e n t u r y : Continuity and C h a n g e " been convened at mid-century rather than eighty-five years into the century, I very m u c h d o u b t that anyone would have been asked to address the subject o f this paper: a u t o b i o g r a p h y as a literary genre. D r a m a , lyric poetry, epic poetry and the long poem, the n o v e l l - a l l these, which we talk a b o u t n o w in the context o f continuity a n d change, would u n d o u b t e d l y and very properly have been talked a b o u t also thirty-five years a g o ; but n o t autobiography, n o t alone and n o t accorded the honorific o f generic status. Or to turn the matter in another direction, saying m u c h the same thing but f r o m a different perspective: Psychologists or psychiatrists gathered together for a conference in 1950 might well have discussed the evidentiary value o f a u t o b i o g r a p h y for their quasi-sciences; 2 likewise, historians, ethnographers, perhaps 1 Although "autobiography as a literary genre" would have been disallowed as a legitimate subject thirty-five years ago, I think that it would nevertheless have been possible to include a paper in that hypothetical conference that would have addressed the same subject as that treated now by lay colleague and counterpart, Professor Szegedy Masz~tk: "Novel and Autobiography." As autobiography has long been considered a kind of auxiliary literature, so, in 1950, it would have been admitted to literary discussion only as an auxiliary topic-- propped up, as it were, and legitimated only by its partner, the novel. 2 In Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria Freud says of his diagnostic and analytic procedure in general, "I begin the treatment, indeed, by asking the patient to give me the whole story of his life and illness"; than he goes on to observe that "even so the information I receive is Neohelicon XIII]I

Akaddmiai Kiad6, Budapest John Benjamins B. V., Amsterdam

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sociologists, and even theologians have long had their own uses for autobiography and have known how to appropriate it according to their differing needs within their various methodologies. But literary critics, both practical critics and those who might be loosely classified as theoreticians, have had little to do with autobiography and almost nothing to say about it until as recently as a generation ago. At the present time, however, literary c r i t i c s - especially theoreticians but there is considerable practical criticism as w e l l - f i n d mothing so fascinating to contemplate and nothing so rewarding to speculate a b o u t and to analyze as autobiography; and specifically they have turned their attention to the generic properties, problems, and possibilities presented by this step-child (as it was formerly conceived) o f true literature, this illegimitate offspring o f history and belleslettres. Here in 1985, however, autobiography is something very like the crucial case for literary historians, theoreticians, and practical critics. Some three or four years ago, at a conference not unlike the present one, I was more than interested to hear Professor Svetlana Alpers (not, as it happens, a literary critic but an art historian) describe autobiography as the writing practice that "tests the medium" in the same manner, she argued, as, in painting, portraiture "tests the medium". The analogy Professor Alpers drew was not, I should emphasize, between autobiography and se/f-portraiture (which is something never enough to let me see my way about the case" would suggest that Freud held a view of autobiography as a creative and imaginative (not to say deceptive) act such as has recommended itself to literary critics only in recent years. Freud, of course, would not go so far as Nigel Dennis in his satire on psychiatry, Cards of Identity, where the President of the Identity Club (= psychiatrists), after mentioning Club policy that does away with the nuisance of patients, says, "We write our casehistories with a purity of invention and ingenuity impossible in the days when someone was always coming into the room." This ealls into question the real existence of the subject/object of autobiography in a manner at least as radical--though to different ends of course--as the probings of deconstructive critics of autobiography.

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o f a clich6) but between autobiography and portraiture in general. I emphasize this because,, according to the logic o f the argument, self-portraiture, far from being different in kind from portraiture, is merely a special instance o f it; autobiography, on the other hand, is not a special instance o f b i o g r a p h y - a kind o f sub-sub-species o f h i s t o r y - b u t is essentially and entirely unlike that writing mode with which it shares two-thirds o f its name. 3 It is a common and perhaps natural mistake (but no less a mistake for that) to conflate biography and autobiography; the consequence o f that conflation, in any case, has been to render autobiography a subject unfit for genre consumption by literary historians and theorists. The portrait-painter looks out on a living subject, whether that subject is sitting as a model in the studio or is reflected as an image in a mirror (which is why Professor Alpers can make her argument with such cogency by centering it on Vel~zquez's " L a s Meninas"); the autobiographer by contrast, looks not out but in and back and has no subject " o u t there" but only "in h e r e " - - a n d not even, to destroy any presumed objectivity yet more thoroughly, a subject " b a c k there" since memory is a function o f present consciousness rather than o f past events. Now, all this makes autobiography a generically messy business because, formally speaking, it can be almost anything. A further p a r a d o x - a n d a troubling one, too-is that the generic status that made autobiography inappropriate for literary discussion thirty-five and fifty years ago is the same one that 3 Biography, of course, both as word and as practice, predated autobiography. It is perhaps unfortunate that in English first and then in French afterward the "auto-" was simply tacked onto "biography," implying that indeed this newly denominated, ancient practice (formerly known as "confessions" or "memoirs," among other names) could be subsumed in all ways into the larger category. It might be interesting to observe, however, that both biography and autobiography must be subsumed under the most comprehensive category-- "writing"-- and from there one might well go on to argue that biography is a special instance of autobiography rather than vice versa.

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m a k e s it e m i n e n t l y a p p r o p r i a t e for literary discussion t o d a y . I t is the c o n t i n u a l testing o f the m e d i u m , the c o n s t a n t p u s h i n g a g a i n s t generic c o n s t r a i n t s , t h e careless d i s r e g a r d for generic categories a n d the t e n d e n c y for it to t u r n u p everywhere, in all varieties o f w r i t i n g a n d in every f o r m a l guise, t h a t m a k e s a u t o b i o g r a p h y so a t t r a c t i v e t o the p h e n o m e n o l o g i c a l or posts t r u c t u r a l i s t critic t o d a y where it w o u l d have been so u n a t t r a c tive to the fastidious N e w C r i t i c o f fifty years a g o ) T h e crucial case a n d the g r e a t test for the N e w Critic was u n d o u b t e d l y the lyric p o e m , w i t h analysis o f the i n t e r n a l d y n a m i c s o f t h a t f o r m the t y p i c a l critical p e r f o r m a n c e ;5 b u t j u s t as p r e v i o u s l y excluded texts a n d writers are n o w being a d m i t t e d to the c a n o n o f literature, so also with varieties o f writing, often unclassifiable o r u n r u l y o r u n l i t e r a r y , such as a u t o b i o g r a p h y . T h e effect o f allowing s o m e t h i n g as i l l - m a n n e r e d as a u t o b i o g r a p h y into the 4 Robert Penn Warren, who has been implicated with the New Critics, though I do not believe he ever really was one (if, indeed, anyone was ever really a New Critic), has recently said that all poetry, and in particular his own, constitutes a kind of disguised autobiography. He may have his philosophers confused (I believe the reference should be to Nietzsehe--see p. 64--rather than to William James) but Warren says of poetry what the text above would like to say not only of poetry but of all sorts of other writing practices as well: "For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography. Isn't it William James who once said that any man who creates a philosophical system is really writing an autobiography?" On the lyric poem as the paradigm of the work of literature, Rend Wellek and Austin Warren in Theory of Literature write: " . . . we shall have to raise an extremely difficult epistemological question, that of the 'mode of existence' or the 'ontological situs' of a literary work of art (which, for brevity's sake, we shall call a 'poem' in what follows)." Elsewhere Wellek and Warren divide imaginative literature into three groups: "fiction (novel, short story, epic), drama (whether in prose or verse), and poetry (centering on what corresponds to the ancient 'lyric poetry')." Not only do the authors disdain any mention of autobiography here but they establish in these two passages the following equivalence, which I think can be taken as symptomatic for the New Critic and for writers who theorized from a New Critical position: "literary work of art" "poem" = "lyric poem."

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house of literary genres is that it tries to occupy the entire place so that virtually no poem or play or novel or essay is exempt from being tagged as "autobiography": I know of one essay that argues at length that the Odysseyis "really" an autobiography, and I once heard a well-known American novelist inquire, whether seriously or not I am uncertain, if the Bible could not be read as God's autobiography. But if anything and everything can be taken to be autobiography, then it surely cannot be considered to be in any meaningful sense a literary genre, for while we may not require a hard and fast and immoveable definition for any given genre, we must expect a work to display some necessary combination of substantive and formal properties before we will be able to recognize it as a lyric or an epic poem or a novel . . . . or an autobiography. If we are to speak meaningfully about literary genre then this, ! believe, is not an artificial but a very real dilemma because autobiography pushes with such force against not only its own generic constraints but against the very concept of genre itself. When, a few years ago, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina (trained no doubt in a prestructuralist school of criticism) expressed astonishment that I should include among the readings for a seminar on autobiography Augustine's Confessions, he was first, I believe, being somewhat skeptical about the entire enterprise of a seminar on autobiography but he was also, as I came to feel, saying something, consciously or unconsciously, of real importance about autobiography: that it tends always to be t h a t - autobiography- and something else or something more. Thus we may have autobiography and biblical exegesis, autobiography and philosophic system, autobiography and doctrinal disputation, autobiography and psychological schema, etc. Or vice versa:virtually every piece of writing is whatever it is but it is nearly always, one way or another, autobiography as well. Now this is not true of drama or the novel, of epic poetry or lyric poetry; while each of these (drama, etc.) can be read as autobiography, we will seldom find an exercise in biblical exegesis that looks and feels

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like a play or a treatise in systematic philosophy that is that and a lyric poem as well. One obvious problem with taking autobiography for a literary genre is that so few autobiographies even aspire to be literature much less succeed in attaining that status. By way of illustrating the problematics of autobiography and literary genre, I might describe my experience of a few years ago in teaching a graduate catch-all course called "Problems in American Literature" at a black university in North Carolina. The "problem" we proposed was the relationship between autobiography and fiction in black American writing. We began with Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (the full title is essential to Douglass's purposes and it effectively makes my point about the extra-literariness of autobiography) and with extracts from a number of other slave narratives, went on to Booker T. Washington's Upfrom Slavery and W. E. B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folk, then to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. We then pursued the question in a slightly more complex form, considering writers who produced both autobiography and fiction: Langston Hughes, with The Big Sea and Tales of Simple; Richard Wright, with Black Boy and Native Son; and James Baldwin, with Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, and Go Tell It on the Mountain. We concluded with one book that claims in its title to be an autobiography but is n o t - T h e Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest Gaines- and one that clearly has certain autobiographical elements but is nevertheless a novel-Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Working with these specific texts we came to see autobiography as something that falls-or rises-between history or politics or social document on the one hand and literature, in the sense of belles lettres, on the other hand. It is my strong conviction that for all the literary properties that critics have discerned in, for example, Douglass's Narrative-structural design and rhetorical flourishes and patterns of imagery-the book does not in

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the first place aspire to be "literary"; and I imagine that Malcolm X would have been very angry indeed if he had thought that the book on which he spent so much precious time was going to be looked at and thought of and analyzed as "only" a work of literature, or even primarily or secondarily a work of literature. And what does one say of autobiographies by people who also write fiction: Is Black Boy "literature" in the same way as Native Son ? The Fire Next Time in the same way as Go Tell It on the Mountain ? If three-fourths or nine-tenths ofalt autobiographies are something less than literature, however, nearly all autobiographies are something more than literature, and if we literary critics disdain to include them among certified works of literature, they frequently disdain to be so included. Nevertheless, as has frequently been observed by students of autobiography, there is a continual blurring or merging of autobiography with literary genres that are commonly accepted as such. Thus in a book that he calls L'Autobiographie, Georges May discusses the manifold ties of autobiography with other genres, the most obvious one being the novel. Likewise, May and others have talked about the similarities and differences between biography and autobiography, journals and autobiography, memoirs and autobiography, chronicles and autobiography, and so on. One can go further than May does, however, and consider the use in autobiography of elements and devices from other literary genres than fiction and the novel, or biography and journals: there thus occurs a merger of autobiography and poetry in The Prelude or in the lyric voice of Julian of Norwich's Showings; there is a joining of autobiography and polemical essay in Newman's Apologia pro vita sud; a dramatizing of autobiography in Yeats's Dramatis Personae or George Moore's Hail and Farewell; and so on. And the reverse of course is equally true and so well known that it is not necessary even to mention names and examples in saying that novelists, poets, polemical essayists, and dramatists are forever putting their lives and their autobiographies at the service of their art in whatever genre.

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This is all pretty clear and obvious, but again one can and, I think, should go further to observe that the blurring and merging occurs not only between autobiography and various literary genres, but, with autobiography as the central connecting act, it occurs in such a way among the various disciplines as to make them all seem one and the same discipline, one and the same performance merely cast in different terminologies. As to its literary status, I should think that autobiography is doubtless the most impure of any writing performance that can make any sort of claim at all to being "literature"; but the saving grace here is that if autobiography is forever an impurity in the realm of literature, it also insinuates itself into all sorts of other disciplines and endeavors-history, psychology, anthropology, sociology-and contaminates them to such a degree that they can hardly sustain any claim to being "science". Of his own "discipline" Nietzsche wrote, "Little by little it has become clear to me that every great philosophy has been the confession of its maker, as it were his involuntary and unconscious autobiography," and Clifford Geertz has written, in an altogether relevant way, of "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought" (meaning by "genres" what I am here terming "disciplines"). The image I would invoke to clarify what I mean is the image of a hub and spokes: Let the different spokes be physics, psychology, literature, philosophy, history, biology, theology, chemistry, and geology; and let autobiography be the hub. The central, centralizing act is autobiography whether that act take the form of theories projected in philosophy, physics, or literature. The epigraph I chose from Paul Val4ry for a volume of essays on the subject (Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical) says it another way: "There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography." The spoke leads back inevitably to the hub, the theory to the theorizer. "Theory" comes from the Greek ~ecopio)-"to took at, view, behold, observe" - ,and, of the m i n d - " t o contemplate, consider". This is very much the nature of autobiography: to look at the events of a life and to

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contemplate them in such a way as to discover their inner relationship, their pattern, their significance. For any individual life there are the outer events that form the course of life and there is the inner meaning that is the significant relationship binding all in a single whole: this personality, this life. Or put otherwise, there are the events of a life and there is a theory, shaped from within, that holds the events to a center and thus explains them. Here one is drawn to a passage on the nature of autobiography in Wilhelm Dilthey. "Between the parts", Dilthey writes, "we see a connection which neither is, nor is intended to be, the simple likeness of the course of a life of so many years, but which, because understanding is involved, expresses what the individual knows about the continuity of his life". And then he continues as what he w a s - an historiographer for whom autobiography offered the surest way to an understanding of the meaning of history: "Here we approach the root of all historical comprehension. Autobiography is merely the literary expression of a man's reflection on the course of his life". I would pause here for two remarks and one digression. First remark: by "literary" I think Dilthey merely means "written" not "belle tettristic". Second remark: "reflection" is exactly what I m e a n t - w h a t Val6ry m e a n s - by "theory": both beholding and contemplating. Digression: At the moment when I was writing this paper I received from Professor Georges Gusdorf (who, in 1956, published one of the most important and seminal essays on autobiography, "Conditions et limites de l'autobiographie") a chapter from a work in progress, to be called Ecritures du Moi, in which he traces "le commencement de l'6criture du moi au commencement du commencement, c'est-~t-dire au premier moment de la Crdation". More specifically, he argues that autobiography, in the Western world at least, is a human act imposed as a duty by God, and it begins when, after the Fall, God asks Adam, "Where art thou?" and Adam responds autobiographically by recounting and reflecting on the place he finds himself in in his world. Thus, to return

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to Dilthey, when he says that autobiography is merely the written expression of a man's reflection on the course of his life, he might as well have said that autobiography begins with Adam or any other individual, attempting to put into words an answer to God's question: "Where art thou? Where are you in your world? . . . . Such reflection", Dilthey goes on to say of this sort of incipient autobiography, "though it may be limited in extent, is frequently made by every individual It is always present and expresses itself in ever new forms. It is present in the verses of Solon as well as in the reflections of the Stoic philosophers, in the meditations of the saints and in the philosophy of life in modern times. It, alone, makes historical insight possible. The power and breadth of our own lives and the energy with which we reflect on them are the foundation of historical vision". The reflection that is autobiography, Dilthey maintains, is ever present and always assuming new forms, and we are forever composing mentally, if not actually writing, our autobiographies, which is one reason why the subject is so elusive and why as genre critics we have such a hard time putting our hands on it, or being sure what we have in our hands when we succeed in seizing on autobiography. As long as men go on theorizing, as long as they go on reflecting on their lives, as long as subjects turn back on themselves, seeking a meaning in their lives and in the very act of seeking thereby creating the meaning they seek, as long as men go on being h u m a n - s o long will the forms of autobiography change and alter and so long will autobiography decline to be fitted with a restrictive definition and refuse to be restrained within narrow generic bounds. The conclusion to which one is inevitably drawn by these observations and speculations is that autobiography is not always, or only or precisely a mode of literature and that it will seldom yield its fullest significance to a literary analysis that devotes itself exclusively to internal textual interpretation and to concerns that we ordinarily associate with the phrase " N e w Criticism". More radically and more comprehensively, one is drawn to the conclusion that autobiography is not a mode of

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literature so much as literature is a mode of autobiography. The subsuming act is not literature but autobiography. This state of affairs-if, indeed, I have succeeded in describing it accurately- creates of course all sorts of problems for the genre critic whose first duty is to define, to establish limits, at least of a sketchy sort, and to draw lines that may in certain ways and at times be violated but that serve to distinguish, in a rough and ready manner, this particular genre from its contiguous neighbors. As an aside, and before proceeding not to a definition but to a kind of autobiography, one might speculate, since this conference concerns itselfwith"continuity and change" that it is precisely this fluid, unfixed and unfixable nature of autobiography, its generic unruliness, instability, and volatility, that (1) makes it specially intriguing for literary theorists; and (2) keeps it paradoxically alive and well, though sometimes barely recognizable, as a genre. It may be that a genre that is fixed, or that can be fixed, in form is a dying genre. A definition that would satisfactorily contain the wide range of practices and intentions that we allow to be covered by the term "autobiography" seems to me not really possible, so instead of unifying I intend to multiply: rather than attempting to bring all the disparate performances within a single formulation I propose to outline a number of what, if autobiography itself is a genre, may be thought of as sub-genres. I would do this by altering the central e l e m e n t - " b i o s " - i n the word that / describes the general practice, so that we would have such subgenres as, for example, "autopsychography" and "autophylography". If autobiography can be loosely described as the writing of a life by the person who has lived it, then the kind of life that is involved, the specific kind of "bios" in question-individual or communal, mental or physical-will be determinative for the written account not only in a substantive but in a formal way. I am well aware that the hybrid terms (no more hybrid than "autobiography", however) I will propose are awkward and unequal and unliterary and woefully incomplete, but being all these things they may better reflect the true state of affairs 5*

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with autobiography than if they were otherwise. I will try to describe and distinguish six, more or less abritrary, sub-varieties of autobiography, six (from among many more possible) terminological indications of the shape and direction an autobiography may take: autosociography, autoautography, autopsychography, autophylography, autoobituography, and autosoteriography. These terms will serve to suggest, if nothing else, what a mixed breed autobiography is and how extra-literary, as well as (often) non-literary, it tends to be: One almost never has autobiography alone to deal with but instead autobiography and psychology, autobiography and soteriology, autobiography and politics, autobiography and sociology-or, as in the case of C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary, autobiography and cricket and sociology and politics. I choose James's book to look at first for a number of reasons: because autosociography, which is one way of characterizing the mode of Beyond a Boundary, is pretty close to what Professor Jdzsef Szili talked about at the previous conference sponsored by the United States-Hungarian Commission on the Humanities in Princeton in 1983; because, in being so many different things, Beyond a Boundary exemplifies very nicely the many-headedness of autobiography in general while remaining, nevertheless, a consciously literary performance; and because the book begins, in the preface, with a disclaimer that, paradoxically, is a virtual convention of the genre of autobiography: "This book is neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography". Why, given the fact that Beyond a Boundary is something very like classic autobiography (with the distinguishing feature that its recall of the past centers on the s p o r t - or the way of lifecalled cricket), should James claim that it is not autobiography ? Surely one reason is that the author knows his book to be something else, something more than, something in addition to autobiography. But this is just what we have said of autobiography in general and what in particular must be said of (for example) Augustine and his Confessions, Montaigne and his Essais, Bunyan and his Grace Abounding to the Chief of

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Sinners, Jung and his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams, etc. Here is how James phrases the matter: "This book is neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography. It poses the question What do they know of cricket who only cricket know ? To answer involves ideas as well as facts. The autobiographical framework shows the ideas more or less in the sequence that they developed in relation to the events, the facts and the personalities which prompted them". That the "ideas" are of a social and political nature is specific to James's life and his personality; they might have been, given a different life and different personality, psychological, philosophical, theological in nature. But when the generation and evolution of the ideas is seen and recounted as adjunct to the experiences, the memories, and the achieved understanding of a lifetime, then what we have is autobiography and sociology and political science where we might have had autobiography and psychology or philosophy or theology-but nevertheless always autobiography and . . . . After describing his early memories of two cricket batsmen in the Trinidad where he grew up (that James came to cricket as a black Trinidadian is of course responsible for much of the ironic tension and ambivalence in his loving description of this essentially antique British, colonialist sport), James goes on to this reflection: It is only within very recent years that Matthew B o n d m a n and the cutting of A r t h u r Jones ceased to be merely isolated memories and fell into place as starting points of a connected pattern. They only appear as starting points. In reality they were the end, the last stones put into place, of a pyramid whose base constantly widened, until it embraced those aspects of social relations, politics and art laid bare when the veil of the temple has been rent in twain as ours has been. Hegel says somewhere that the old m a n repeats the prayers he repeated as a child, b u t n o w with the experience of a lifetime. Here briefly are some of the experiences of a lifetime which have placed M a t t h e w B o n d m a n and A r t h u r Jones within a frame of reference that stretches east and west into the receding distance, back into the past and forward into the future.

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There are many things to say about this passage-that stylistically it is as Viktorian as cricket itself; that it implies a whole theory of the necassary strnetual relationship or homology between memory and narrative; that it provides the perfect rationale for autosociography. Indeed, there are too many things to say of the passage and so I must content myself with quoting Dilthey again, letting his remarks this time refer to the"facts" and the"ideas" of James's book :"Between the parts we see a connection which neither is, nor is it intended to be, the simple likeness of the course of a life of so many years, but which, because understanding is involved, expresses what the individual knows about the continuity of his life". So, near the end of James's book, after he has given a lively sense of the ritual observances of cricket as more or less exact metaphor for the structural social dynamics of a British colony, when he declares that "The 'Case for West Indian Self-Government' and 'It isn't cricket' had come together at last and together had won a signal victory", we are prepared to understand, as he at last understands from looking all the way back through events and ideas born of those events to the beginning, how the threads are intricately joined to form a now discernible and as it were inevitable figure in the carpet-the very notion of which, James says, he finds "strange, and the more I think of it the stranger I find it". In a recent reissue of Beyond a Boundary (first published in 1963), we are told by the publisher that "C.L.R. James is currently living in London and is at work on his autobiography". If he completes that book James will not be the first person to produce more than one autobiography, but that he is working "on his autobiography" suggests, on the one hand, that all the volumes he has published or will publish will ultimately comprise parts of his autobiography and, on the other hand, that while Beyond a Boundary is a single volume in that multi-volumed Life and could bear the title "Autobiography", it is also more precisely describable as an exercise in autosociography. I choose to deal next with autoautography and autopsycho-

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graphy because these two sub-genres provide convenient contrasts to, but also effective transition between, autosociography and autophylography. My principal autoautographer is JeanJacques Rousseau and my principal autopsychographer C. G. Jung, but as the Confessions and Memories, Dreams, Reflections are both very long books, in my treatment I will confine myself to an attempt to demonstrate what the terms "autoautography" and "autopsychography" mean, what these two sub-genres are like, and how they contrast so strikingly with a species o f autobiography produced from a culture other than that o f Western Europe whence the Confessions and Memories come. The locus classicus ofautoautography is, as might be guessed, the opening paragraph or so o f Rousseau's Confessions: Je forme une entreprise qui n'eut jamais d'6xemple, et dont l'ex6cution n'aura point d'imitateur. Je veux montrer ~ rues semblables un homrne darts route la vdrit6 de la nature; eteet homme, ce sera moi. Moi seul. Je sens mon ceeur et je connois les hommes. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai vus; j'ose croire n'etre fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent. Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre. I have taken the liberty o f italicizing the phrase " M o i seul" but this emphasis does not, I think, violate the logic o f the passage, for Rousseau goes on to speak o f his isolate uniqueness in terms o f nature's having broken the mold in which he was cast, and in another version o f the opening (the Neuch~tel manuscript, also known as "Ebauches des Confessions"), Rousseau himself supplies the emphasis through verbal repetition that I have implied with italics: " . . . et cet autre ce sera moi. Oui, moi, moi seul . . . " Rousseau has often been said to be a descendant o f Montaigne and to have adopted from him an ideal o f selfrevelation and total frankness (Rousseau himself, however, while claiming that he was entirely frank, denied that Montaigne ever came anywhere near it); but there is something radically different between the "moi, moi seul" that we g e t - or do not g e t - i n the Confessions and the self-portrait of a man like

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o t h e r m e n ( " n o u s s o m m e s tous d u v u l g a i r e " ) discernible i n the

Essais. Be t h a t as it may, w h a t makes the passage f r o m R o u s seau so very useful is the h e a v y insistence a n d the extremity o f its e x p r e s s i o n - as it were a k i n d o f hysteria o f i n d i v i d u a l i t y a n d the fact t h a t the passage is u n d e r s t o o d b y some critics o f a u t o b i o g r a p h y to express the ideal to which all a u t o b i o g r a p h y o u g h t to aspire. A t the b e g i n n i n g o f B o o k Seven o f the Confessions, R o u s seau m a k e s clear the n a t u r e o f the " m o i s e u l " - "Yes, myself, myself a l o n e " - t h a t he w o u l d display entirely true to n a t u r e to his f e l l o w m e n : Je puis faire des omissions dans lcs faits, des transpositions, des erreurs de dates; mais je ne puis me tromper sur ce que j'ai senti, ni sur ce que mes sentimens m'ont fait faire; et voila deqnoi principalement il s'agit. L'objet propre de rues confessions est de faire connoitre: exactement mort interieur darts routes les situatiors de ma vie. C'est l'histoire de mon ~tme que j'ai promise, 6 et pour l'6crire fidellement je n'ai pas besoin d'autres m6moires: il me suffit, comme j'ai fait jusqu'ici, de rentrer au dedans de moi. 7

e It is instructive to compare the carefully considered definition of autobiography that Philippe Lejeune gives in Le Pacte autobiographique --"R6cit r6trospectif en prose qu'une personne r6elle fair de sa propre existence, lorsque'elle met l'accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l'histoire de sa personnalit6"--with this "objet" of the Confessions. As suggested in the text above, there are critics of autobraphy for whom Roussean's intention and performance become virtually prescriptive for the genre. 7 This tendency to explain what he is doing, to address the reader directly and to discuss almost endlessly the object and intentions of his writing, and to do it within the text rather than in a preface or in some other marginal location, is not only a signal feature of Rousseau's Confessions but is also altogether characteristic of autobiography, of whatever sort, in general, This represents a considerable complication if we take autobiography for a literary genre and if we try at the same time to obey D. H. Lawrence's dictum, "Never trust the teller, trust the tale."

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It is this particular sense of life, this "bios" composed of "ce que j'ai senti" and "ce que rues sentimens m'ont fair fake", in short, 'Thistoire de mon ~me", that provides the central, centering element of Rousseau's autobiography; but is this not to substitute "autos" for "bios" and so double the self as subject and object-the self writing the history of the self-in the autobiographical process ? Is it not, in other words, to engage in something fairly to be termed "autoautography"? For self, as the soul [cf. Rousseau's "histoire de mon ~me"], opp. to the body; or oneself, as opp. to others [cf. Rousseau's "Oui, moi, moi seul"]." The heroic, beleaguered, isolate, individual soul, of sentiments so fine they can hardly be suggested at all in human language-this is the Romantic ideal bequeathed by Rousseau to both critics and subsequent practitioners of autobiography. C. G. Jung was at heart a Romantic also, I believe, and his Memories, Dreams, Reflections might well qualify as "autoautography" but for one fact that makes "autopsychography" the preferable term: he was a post-Freudian psychiatrist for whom the psychic process-i.e., the object of autobiography-had necessarily to include the unconscious and all its manifestations in dreams, visions, fantasies, premonitions, and the like. When I say that the fact that Jung was post-Freudian distinguishes him from Rousseau, I do not mean, of course, that Freud and Jung agreed ultimately about the nature of the unconscious, s nor do I mean that Rousseau might not have been a fit candidate himself for the psychiatrist's couch-indeed, he would have been had he lived in our century, and he has proved a wonderfully attractive analysand for amateur psychiatrists benefitting s That post-Freudian autobiographers of a psychological turn of mind must acknowledge the unconscious and its products as crucial facts of their proper "'bios" explains why a number of critics of autobiography argue that the "real" autobiography of Freud himself is to be discovered not in his "Autobiographical Study" but in The Interpretation of Dreams where the specimen dream of Irma's injection, for example, was Freud's own dream. There are no dreams in the "Autobiographycal Study."

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from a post-Freudian perspective. But Rousseau does not feel compeUed to write at the outset of his Confessions, as Jung does in the first sentences of the "Prologue" to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, " M y life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious condition and to experience itself as a whole". And Rousseau does not, nor can he, place at the very center of his book a chapter titled "Confrontation with the Unconscious" (surrounded by chapters called "Sigmund Freud" and "The Work"); neither does he conclude, as Jung does, "When Laotzu says: 'All are clear, I alone am clouded', he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age . . . . In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself". The "bios" on which Rousseau trains his gaze is not clouded but perfectly clear ("je ne puis me tromper sur ce ClUej'ai senti, ni sur ce que mes sentimens m'ont fait faire"); or rather one should say that the bios-cum-autos of his book was perfectly clear to Rousseau but not to his increasingly numerous enemies and hence the intention of his Confessions, which might better be called his Apologia: "Je voudrois pouvoir en quelque fa~on rendre mon ame transparente aux yeux du lecteur . . . . " This difference aside, h o w e v e r - t h a t Jung's subject, being in part unconscious, was forever clouded to him, while Rousseau's subject was for him transparent, a difference that requires the distinguishing terms "autopsychography" and "autoautogr a p h y " - J u n g and Rousseau both adhered to a Romantic, Western ideal that claimed that the highest human good was to be found in "individuation" (Jung's term) or in cultivation of "moi, moi seul", and that any autobiography worthy of the name honors the great I AM that lies behind and inside and all around it. In Jung's words, " M u c h might have been different if I myself had been different. But it was as it had to be; for all came about because I am as I am". Or in Rousseau's words:

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"Que la trompette du jugement dernier sonne quand elle voudra; je viendrai ce livre ~ la main me pr6senter devant le souverain juge. Je dirai hautement: voila ce que j'ai fair, ce que j'ai pens6, ce que je fus." It might be remarked, before leaving these two exemplars of autobiography in the Western mode, these representatives of the autoautographer and the autopsychographer, that the first person singular personal pronoun assumes a certain importance in the passages cited and throughout the Confessions and Memories: "Je viendrai . . . . Je dirai . . . j'ai fait . . . j'ai pens4 . . . je fus" and " ich so bin, wie ich bin". In Rousseau's two sentences "je" occurs five times; of the six words in Jung's tautology two are "ich". Many people, of course, would suppose that it is the very nature of autobiography that determines and demands the continual assertion of ' T ' both past and present (and the assertion as well of an identity between the past, written " I " and the present, writing ' T ' ) . Without taking up the special case of someone like Henry Adams, who transforms Rimbaud's "je est un autre" into linguistic reality by employing the third person for his own experiences throughout The Education of Henry Adams, one should nevertheless observe that there are distinct varieties of autobiography where either " w e " is substituted for ' T ' or, when " I " is the subject pronoun, it functions more as synecdoche ( " I " = "we") than as tautology ( " I " = = "I"). There are doubtless other cultures that tend to produce this variety of "we"-autobiography also, but as I am most familiar with the form as it comes from sub-Saharan Africa, I shall draw my examples of what I would term "autophylography" from that region of the world. Resorting again to the Greek-English Lexicon, one finds ~b/~2q defined thus: " a union among the citizens of a state, a class or tribe formed according to blood, a clan or caste. 2. later, a union according to local habitation, a tribe . . . . " If, as I would argue, it is the tendency of autobiographers from sub-Saharan Africa to make the generational life of the phyld the "bios" of their books, then it should come as little surprise that half a dozen or more Gikuyu

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autobiographers (from what is now Kenya) should begin their narratives not, as Rousseau, for example, does, with "I was born in such and such a year in such and a place", but with an account of the founding of the clans of the Gikuyu people by Gikuyu and Mumbi (who correspond to Adam and Eve in the Genesis story of creation), in conjunction with Mwene-Nyaga, the Gikuyu Creator-God. They begin, in other words, in the beginning with the birth of the phyld rather than with the birth of the individual autobiographer. Indeed, there is seldom any specific detail given about individual birth and little interest exhibited in it in autophylography from Africa; on the other hand, there is much detail about and much interest in the rite de passage that marks the second birth, the assumption of clan or tribal identity-phyld identity-as contrasted with individual identity. Here is one representative account, from L'Enfant noir by Camara Laye, of this generational, communal experience which embraces not just the boys passing from one state to another but the entire village as well and the whole of the ancestral, clan and tribal line: Nous dansions, je l'ai dit, ~t perdre souffle, mais nous n'6tions pas seuls /t danser: la ville entibre dansait! On venait nous regarder, on venait en foule, toute la ville en v6rit6 venait, car l'6preuve n'avait pas que pour nous une importance capitale, elle avait quasiment la m~me importance pour chacun puisqu'il n'6tait indiff6rent h personne que la ville, par une deuxi~me naissance qui 6tait notre vraie naissance, s'accrfit d ' u n e nouvelle fourn6e de c i t o y e n s . . . Trois fois dans la journ6e, nous sommes ainsi apparus sur la grapne place pour danser le " c o b a " . . . Nous n ' a v o n s pas dormi, et personne n ' a dormi; la ville n ' a pas ferm6 l'eeil: elle a dans~ toute la n u i t ! . . . Si le t a m - t a m ne nous avait pas soutenus, e n t r a t n 6 s . . . Mais le tam-tam nous soutenait, Ie tam-tam nous entrMnait ! Et nous avancions, nous ob6issions, la t6te 6trangement vide, vid6e par la fatigue, 6trangement pleine aussi, pleine du sort qui allait 6tre le n b t r e . . . . Sur la place, la f6te a cess6: les gens ont regagn6 leurs demeures. Quelques hommes p o u r t a n t nous ont suivis. Les autres attendront, clans leurs cases, les coups de feu qui doivent a n n o n c e r h tous q u ' u n h o m m e de plus, u n Malink6 de plus est n&

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Even here, where the experience is rendered in singular terms ( " u n h o m m e . . . un Malink6"), there is no sense o f " m o i , moi seul" but on the contrary of "nous, nous ensemble" and no sense o f a unique birth and individual entry into time but instead o f a cyclical rebirth and reembodiment o f an ancestral, Malink6 spirit o f immemorial age. Even in the passage that follows, when C a m a r a Laye describes his own fear ("J'avais peur, affreusement peur") the " I " is merely standing in for " w e " and the " w e " includes not the living alone but all generations o f the Malink6 people: Je savais parfaitement que je souffrirais, mais je voulais atre un homme, et il ne semblait pas que rien ffit trop p6nible pour acc6der au rang d'homme. Mes compagnons ne pensaient pas diff6remment : comme moi, ils 6talent pr~ts ~tpayer le prix du sang, Ce prix, nos Mn6s l'avaient pay6 avant nous; ceux qui na~traient apr6s nous le paieraient ~ leur tour; pourquoi l'eussions-nous esquiv6? La vie jaillissait du sang vers6! The Sonjo o f East Africa who live a b o u t as far f r o m the Malink6 as one can go in Africa, right across the broadest part o f the continent) believe, according to John Mbiti, that " I a m because we are, and since we are, therefore I a m " , and this is unquestionably the prevailing assumption, sometimes stated, sometimes tacit, ofautophylography as practiced by peDples throughout sub-Saharan Africa; and it is a b o u t as removed f r o m the assumptions o f autoautography ("moi, moi seul") and o f autopsychography ( " I am as I a m " ) as one could well imagine? It may seem that I a m not altogether serious in proposing a category like " a u t o o b i t u o g r a p h y " (or it could be termed " a u t o t h a n a t o g r a p h y " ) and in fact I have relatively few examples o f this sub- (perhaps sub-sub-) genre to offer; still some interest91 find that the temptation is to go on too long here. To resist that temptation I would refer the interested reader to three chapters ("African Autobiography and the Non-African Reader," "The Children of Gikuyu and Mumbi," and '"Ces pays lointains"') in my book Tell Me Africa: An Approach to African Literature (Princeton University Press, 1973) where these matters are dealt with, from a slightly different perspective, at much greater length.

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ing and revealing things happen to an autobiography when its author chooses to write it as i f - w h i c h of course can never really be the c a s e - t h e life, the bios were over and finished before the writing of it begins. "Here I sit in order to write, at the age of 67, something like my own obituary". Thus Albert Einstein in the first sentence of his "Autobiographical Notes", and thus Charles Darwin at the beginning of his Autobiography: "I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life. Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over with me". In declaring their brief autobiographies to be, at least as to intention, akin to obituaries, Einstein and Darwin (it is perhaps more than coincidence that both were physical scientists) conflate biography and autobiography, imply that it is possible to write the former from the point of view of the latter, and seem to subscribe to the common notion that autobiography ought to be written by people ofwhom the world has had reason to take note and then only at the end of the life when the lifework has effectively been completed. Yet Georges Gusdorf is surely right when he says, "L'autobiographie est un moment de la vie qu'elle raconte; elle s'efforce de d~gager le sens de cette vie, seulement elle est elle-mame un sens dans cette vie. Une pattie de l'ensemble pr6tend refi6ter l'ensemble, mais elle ajoute quelque chose/~ cet ensemble dont elle constitue un moment". It may be that to compose one's own obituary and call it an autobiography, "as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life", is to deny that there is meaning either in a life or in the writing of a life, but many readers of Darwin's Autobiography,if not of Einstein's "Autobiographical Notes", have felt that his perfomance gives the lie to any meaning-denying theory and that the Autobiography does, in fact, as Gusdorf says any autobiography will, add "something to this whole of which it constitutes a moment". Thus the relationship of autobiography to life is the synecdochical relationship of part to whole, and both part and whole, the book and the life, are to be interpreted according to the principle of the her-

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meneutical circle or hermeneutical spiral, a paradox that says that we can understand the whole only if we understand the part(s) but we can understand the part(s) only if we understand the whole, and so interpretation must proceed by continual reference back and forth with a slight increment of comprehension here producing a slight increment of comprehension there and so on. This brings me to my final category, which I have termed "autosoteriography" although I am not altogether happy with the term. It seems to me unsatisfactory not because it fails to describe what the principal text in the category (Augustine's Confessions) is about but because it gives little indication of what I would like to make of the Confessions in the present context. Perhaps I might pause here to try to justify referring to Augustine's Confessions at all in a conference devoted to "Genres in the Twentieth Century", for some sixteen centuries separate Augustine's surpassingly great book from efforts in autobiography in our time. Treatment of the Confessions might be justified by the argument William Spengemann has recently elaborated in The Forms of Autobiography: that all autobiography, whether of the seventeenth, the nineteenth, or the twentieth century, was anticipated in the Confessions and no autobiographer since Augustine's time has been able to do anything really new or different with the genre. A more interesting and relevant justification, however, may be discovered through reference to the subtitle of our conference: "Continuity and Change". If it is possible to demonstrate that for all the apparent (and no doubt very real) differences between Augustine's Confessions on the one hand and Rousseau's Confessions or Henry Adams's Education or Richard Wright's Black Boy or Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections or C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary or Malcolm X's Autobiography or Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior or even Samuel Beckett's Company on the other h a n d - t h a t for all the radical differences and changes there is nevertheless some continuity, then surely recourse to the Church Father and, some would say, father of the genre as well, will be justified.

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Critics and readers have had a hard time knowing what to do with the last one-third or so of Augustine's Confessions, and as I would like to suggest an interesting way to think of that last part of the Confessions, perhaps a reminder of the book's structure will not come amiss. The first seven books are pretty straightforward biographical narrative; Augustine is converted in Book VIII and his m o t h e r - M o n i c a - d i e s in Book IX; the great book X is a kind of transitional disquisition on memory; and books XI through XIII (more than a quarter of the whole) are an exegesis and allegorical interpretation of the first verses of the book of Genesis. Modern editors frequently take care of the problem by lopping off the last t h r e e - o r even the last four (which I find shocking)-books of the Confessions, as if to say, "We asked for bread and you gave us a stone; we came for a story and you captured us with a narrative but then forced down our throats a hard rock of exegesis and interpretation". Pierre Courcelle, however, in his book Recherches sur les Confessions de St. Augustin, suggests something more interesting. Augustine, according to Courcelle, "conceived, right from the beginning, an immense overall project: by way of prelude, he would give an account of his entire past 'ex ordine', right up to the present moment, to show his personal experience of divine admonitions; then he would set forth a detailed exposition of Christian doctrine, based on the entire Scriptures, beginning with the first words of Genesis". Still according to Courcelle, Augustine intended, from Book III, to finish quickly with his biography, but he got caught up in his subject and could not refrain from biographical digressions and doctrinal side-roads. Finally, after he has spent two b o o k s - X I and X I I - o n the first two sentences of Genesis, Augustine realizes the hopelessness of his venture and, towards the end of Book XII, exclaims, "See, Lord my God, how much I have written on these few words ! Really, how much ! What strength of ours, what length of time would be enough to comment in this way on all your Scriptures !" Thereafter, as Courcelle would have it, Augustine aborted the project and abandoned it, as it were in

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mid-sentence, with Book XIII. Augustine's intention at the outset, however, was that the autobiography be prelude and the exegesis be his lifework. What I find fascinating and illuminating in this account is precisely this notion: that an autobiography, in being an epilogue to the experiences of a life (cf. Darwin and Einstein) - at least epilogue to that portion of a life that is seen by the autobiographer as formative, a time of change and development to a specific e n d - i s also prologue or prelude to a lifework. Epilogue to a life, prologue to a life work: it makes a nice circle. One thinks in this regard, obviously, of Wordsworth's Prelude, intended as biographical prologue to the "Excursion" and as epilogue to his life up to his becoming a poet. More relevantly, perhaps-since neither Augustine's vast commentary nor Wordsworth's immense "Excursion" was ever finished: on the contrary, they were hardly b e g u n - o n e might cite Newman's Apologia pro vit~ su~ which he always wanted placed as the first volume in any Collected Works- as it were the point of access, the key, the compressed whole of the multi-volume lifework; or the same with Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections and numerous other autobiographies that one might name. But it may be that the most pertinent text to cite is one that is both prologue and epilogue, both autobiography and lifework, a book that is all and everything at once, being (so to say) the hermeneutical circle realized to the full. I mean Montaigne's Essais. Consider this passage in " D u dementir", which is both crucial and altogether typical: "Moulant sur moy cette figure, il m'a fallu si souvent dresser et composer pour m'extraire, que le patron s'en est fermy et aucunement forme soy-mesmes. Me peignant pour autruy, je me suis peint en moy de couleurs plus nettes que n'estoyent les miennes premieres. Je n'ay pas plus faict mon livre que mon livre m'a faict, livre consubstantiel a son autheur, d'une occupation propre, membre de ma vie . . . " An integral part of his life, one might say, a moment in the life that claims also to reflect the whole life, epilogue to esperience and prologue to understanding of it. I am reminded again of something Georges Gusdorf has writ-

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ten: that the motto of every autobiography should be "To create and in creating to be created"; or in the original, because the reflexive in French gives an ambivalent, a richer and more hermeneutical-circle sense to i t - " F a i r e et en faisant se faire". "I have no more made my book than my book has made me". "The way up and the way down", as Heraclitus said, "are one and the same"; the way back and the way forward,'we might add, the tracing back in memory so that we can trace forward in narrative, are likewise one and the same. And it was again Heraclitus who said, "On a circle"-whether hermeneutical or otherwise- "on a circle the beginning and the end are common" - a s it were prologue and epilogue drawing up tightly and around into a circle the life and the lifework that an autobiography would claim to contain, reflect, and expand. But what has this to do with autosoteriography and any continuity, with whatever change, in autobiography from St. Augustine to the most recent of autobiographers ? Soteriology may be defined as theology of salvation, and discovery of the way to salvation is clearly the theme of Augustine's Confessions. If we expand somewhat the meaning of soteriology, however, so that salvation may be a secular as well as a religious matter, then what Rousseau, Adams, Wright, Jung, James, Malcolm X, Kingston, and even Beckett are doing in their various books could be seen as a variation on what Augustine did in the Confessions and on what Montaigne d i d - or does - in the Essais. Salvation and liberation, as many writers have suggested, lies in discovery of meaning, and the act of reconstructing a life through writing, with the intention of discovering a meaning for that life, may well create the meaning that is sought. But at this point we come back to the suggestion made e a r l i e r - a n d I am not sure that I like to conclude here but it seems inevitable: that autobiography is not a mode of literature so much as literature is a mode of autobiography. Perhaps even 1985 is too early to invite someone to address the question of autobiography and "Genres in the Twentieth Century".