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Five Contemporary Autobiographical Works Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1988 Augustine and America: Five Contemporary Autobiographical Works Dennis Gillespie Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Gillespie, Dennis, "Augustine and America: Five Contemporary Autobiographical Works" (1988). Dissertations. 2557. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2557 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1988 Dennis Gillespie { , . AUGUSTINE AND AMERICA: FIVE CONTEMPORARY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORKS by Dennis Patrick Gillespie A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy April 1988 <E> 1988, Dennis Patrick Gillespie In Memory of My Parents, Fine Writers and Lovers of Language John Paul Gillespie 1900 - 1979 Agnes McCarty Gillespie 1904 - 1964 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS When my wife, Joan Floberg Gillespie, and I came to Chicago fn 1979, the possibility of my obtaining a doctorate in English remained for me an unrealized dream. More than anyone else, Joan has helped me realize this dream. I cannot convey my gratitude. Becoming part of the Loyola Graduate Program in English has been like coming home. So many professors have reminded me of my father's colleagues and family friends. In particular, I acknowledge Professor Agnes Donohue; she reacquainted me with my early vision of the ideal, humane teacher. My Loyola education has advanced under two exceptional directors of the Graduate Program, Professors James E. Rocks and Allen Frantzen. Both have been wonderfully supportive, available, and sympathetically critical. On my dissertation COlllDittee they were joined by Professor Paul Jay, who leant his expertise in autobiography and contemporary criticism. Joan Thesing provided invaluable assistance in preparing the text. Throughout my education I have been helped by exceptional teachers. I especially thank Mother M. Rosemary, Margaret Pfau, Ward Miner, Thelma Miner and S.I. Roberts. I thank all the friends and associates who have encouraged me. And I gratefully acknowledge the help Ruth Floberg has provided Joan and me during this period. Some autobiographies are never written, but find expression in the work and lives of others. iii VITA The author, Dennis Patrick Gillespie, was born on August 20, 1944, in Youngstown, Ohio. He attended Saint Edward's School and graduated from Ursuline High School in Youngstown, where he was active in forensics and was president of the student council. Mr. Gillespie received his undergraduate education at Harvard University and Youngstown University. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude in English from both universities, awarded in 1966 (Youngstown) and 1970 (Harvard). He received a Master of Arts degree in American Studies from the University of Hawaii in 1978. At Harvard, his honors essay, "The Figure of Christ in Paradise Regained," received High Honors. At the University of Hawaii his major writing concerned the themes of death and dying in American nonfiction. At Youngstown University, his principal essay focused on religious issues in modern fiction. From 1966 until 1969 Mr. Gillespie was a Peace Corps teacher in Sabah, Malaysia, and in 1969 taught adults preparing for high school equivalency examinations in Boston. From 1970 to 1971 he was an assistant editor for Houghton Mifflin Publishers, Boston. Since 1972, he has worked as an advertising writer and creative director for advertising agencies in Honolulu and Chicago. Currently he is creative director of BBDM Advertising, Inc., Chicago, and is a member of the agency's executive committee. Mr. Gillespie began part-time graduate studies at Loyola University of Chicago in 1980. He is married to Joan Floberg Gillespie and is the father of Ian, Colin, Caitlin, Frances and Charles Gillespie. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION . • ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. iii VITA • • • • • . iv INTRODUCTION: AUGUSTINE AND AMERICA • l Chapter I. THE GENESIS OF MODERN AUTOBIOGRAPHY: SAINT AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS: BOOK THIRTEEN 32 II. THE CONFESSIONS OF JOHN ASHBERY: THREE POEMS • . • • • . • • • • • • . 66 Ill. TRANSFORMING LIFE: JAMES MERRILL'S "THE BOOK OF EPHRAIM" . 113 IV. THE END OF LIFE: ROBERT LOWELL'S DAY BY DAY •• . 157 V. SUBJECT TO SIGNS AND SEASONS: LYN HEJINIAN'S MY LIFE AND FRANK BIDART'°S°"""l:ONFESSIONAL" 204 CONCLUSION: ENCHANTED BY GRACE. 230 NOTES. • • • 235 WORKS C!TED. 237 v INTRODUCTION AUGUSTINE AND AMERICA "Our life looks trivial and we shun to record it." Emerson I. This study had its inception in my desire to write about auto­ biography, accompanied by the more sobering thought that there might be little of importance to say. Paul de Man remarks that "autobiography always looks slightly disreputable and self indu1~ent in a way that may be symptomatic of its incompatibility with the monumental dignity of aesthetic values" (919). I now confront a similar predicament of potential silence, not because autobiography seems "disreputable" or undignified, but because it appears enormously complex. The traditional definition of autobiography, "the story of a person's life written by himself , 11 1 implied a relatively objective retrospective. But Roy Pascal, in one of the first modern revaluations of the definition, illustrated autobiography's subjectiveness, selectivity, ordering process and attention to present time. To Pascal, autobiography's "center of interest is the self, not the outside world, though necessarily the outside world must appear so that, in the give and take with it, the personality finds its peculiar 1 2 shape" (9). Pascal read autobiography as "an interplay or collision, between past and present; its significance is indeed more the revelation of the present situation than the uncovering of the past" (11). Recently, virtually every term defining autobiography -- story, written, person, life, self -- has become problematic for autobiographers and critics. Paul de Man's essay, "Autobiography and De-facement,• reflects many of the issues raised by contemporary studies of autobiographical texts. He defines three important issues. First, he asks whether autobiography can properly be regarded as a genre, observing that "each specific instance seems to be an exception to the norm; the works themselves seem to shade off into neighboring or incompatible genres" (920). De Man also wonders whether the autobiographer's "life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences,• or whether we can •suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of the medium• (920). Third, he asks, "is the illusion of reference not a correlation of the structure of the figure, that is to say no longer clearly and simply a referent at all but simply more akin to a fiction which then, however, in its turn, acquires a degree of referential productivity?" (921). These observations of genre, fiction and referent create an environment for reader and autobiographer which can be liberating, but also, perhaps, less satisfying, since expectations based on the classic 3 definition remain unfulfilled. In addition to the work by literary critics, new insights in~o autobiography have come from studies of psychoanalysis. The goal of psychoanalysis, of course, is the fashioning of a narrative "so that the patient can accept and live comfortably with a resultant story" (Wallace 77). The psychoanalytic model suggests that autobiographical fictions are often born of necessity: "a crucial experience in the patient's life •.• may not have even occurred, but this does not alter its crucial importance. In view of the retrospective character of all narrative and the inseparability of the self from its story, the event is a necessary hypothesis for understanding, regardless of whether it is factual or fictional" (Martin 78). As partial r·evision of this characterization, however, Meredith Skura's reading of psychoanalysis asserts that "the self lies not in locatable scenes with characters, however wishfulfillingly fictional, but in a nontemporal, nonspatial, temporal play between scenes, and even in a changing narrative stance" (57). The impression we gain is that autobiography is a process more fluid than that conveyed by a traditional definition. Composition involves present time, current needs and a self more malleable than we might suppose. The complexity of autobiographical texts, as well as the history of autobiography, are not always reflected in analyses. This seems particularly the case in explications of works by contemporary American poets characterized as "autobiographical," "personal," or "confessional." For example, David Kalstone in his book Five 4 Temperaments discusses several writers I consider in the following study, but confines himself to relating autobiographical aspects of the works to the history of American poetry. He sets aside problems of composition
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