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THE CULTURE OF Autobiography

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

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

Chapter One

John Sturrock

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

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

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

The author of the manuscript I have been citing had done something more revealing than merely fall between two stools; he had fallen victim to the strong tension or opposition between the writing of autobiography and its subsequent ordering into a theory. His program was a theoretical one, he had planned a generic study, but what he had then written was a catalogue, dimly raisonné, of individual titles or autobiographers. It could be argued that even to give a précis of an autobiography, to retell it as a story of one's own, is tacitly to theorize it, since however we choose to reduce a text we do so according to some set of rules or choices, so that a collection of potted autobiographies produced by a single author is sure to reveal a consistency of method amounting to a potential theory...