Occasional Autobiographies Into His Confessions
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V V ft i Occasional Autobiographies Susan K. Jackson I n this lively study of autobiography in the making, Susan K. Jackson looks at the ways in which Rousseau's earlier occasional work informed his later auto biographical masterpiece, Confessions, which some have credited with initiat ing autobiography in its modern form. Jackson's study begins with the prem ise that Confessions did not represent thefirst time that Rousseau became in terested in writing the story of his own life, although Rousseau himself claimed it was. Rather, Jackson traces his preoc cupation with autobiography, which she shows began as early as 1752, through many of his occasional and less well- known works. Reading Confessions in tandem with a series of texts that Rous seau insisted were occasional (texts that include personal Lettres in response to Malesherbes and belles-lettres of pur ported response to the official condem nation of his own Etnile), Jackson shows that Rousseau did not suddenly leap into autobiography as a way to challenge pre vailing philosophical and literary limits. Time and time again, Rousseau encoded himself in earlier works; therefore, Jack son argues, Confessions can only be fully appreciated if read in conjunction with earlier self-inscribed works. Jackson goes on to place Rousseau and his writing ROUSSEAU'S OCCASIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES ROUSSEAU'S OCCASIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES Susan K Jackson Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 1992 by the Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jackson, Susan K. Rousseau's occasional autobiographies / Susan K. Jackson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8142-0565-8 (alk. paper) 1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712—1778—Biography. 2. Authors, French—Biography—History and criticism. 3. Autobiography. I. Title. PQ2O43J33 1991 848'.509—dc20 [B] 91-34284 CIP Text and jacket design by Donna Hartwick. Type set in Garamond by The Composing Room of Michigan, Grand Rapids, MI. Printed by Versa Press, East Peoria, IL. Contents Preface vii Introduction: On the Occasional 1 1. Echoing Narcisse: The Self-Portraitist as Prefacer 19 2. Rededications: Auto-avilissement and Autobiography 57 3. (Without) Naming Names: The Preface de Julie 104 4. What the Censor Saw: Lettres a Malesherbes 142 5. Ultimate Sacrifices: Le Levite d'Ephraim 187 Conclusion: Theorizing the Practice of Occasional Autobiography 230 Notes 255 Index 273 Preface One occupational hazard of spending too much time in close quarters with Rousseau's autobiographies is the risk we run of catching his inca pacity for spontaneous self-irony and, by way of compensation, carrying self-irony to ludicrous extremes. It is partly to have done with the de mons offluctuating tone and excruciating self-awareness that I offer the following accounting for the way this book has turned out. Earlier versions were not nearly so concerned as this one with multi plying and elongating the moments of Rousseau's coming to write about himself. My exorbitant fascination with the question of how anyone could bring herself or himself to do such a thing nonetheless extends as far back as, Rousseau abetting, I can now remember. Painful or pleasur able, anything but affectively neutral, talking publicly about himself is one thing to which Rousseau's autobiographical texts never quite seem to come naturally. The defiant "moi. Moi seul" of the preamble to the Confessions only echoes less endearingly the antiphonal asides of the "Preface" to Narcisse ("II faut malgre ma repugnance que je parle de moi") and the Lettres a Malesherbes ("J'aime trop a parler de moi"). Striking a chord, Rousseau's labored beginnings remind me of grow ing up in a household where what seemed like thousands of mirrors were clearly off limits and designated as ornaments to be looked at, not into. Enshrining the master bathtub in damning testimony to the character flaws of former owners, a galerie de glaces furnished the occasion pro vii viii Preface chaine of sins committed by my brother and me on the watches of unwit ting babysitters. Was there really a self or two in the house? At the time of these early reconnaissance missions, we had no way of knowing that for me, as a girl growing up in the fifties, the question would turn out to be moot; there was, in any event, no self worth talking about. Cut to Mr. Barclay's Friday afternoon ballroom dancing classes, where the fox-trot and cha-cha provided incidental music for further lessons in living right, which involved crossing our legs at the ankles, turning to the gentleman on our left, and beseeching him to give us a full accounting of his in terests. By the time we had figured out the part about the ankles well enough to "know" full well what was on our partners' minds, it was too late to break the habit of our discreet, other-directed inquiries. Since boys were in short supply, the tallest girls were sometimes recruited to cross over, with the result that, on the dance floor at least, I still always lead a little. But when it came time for small talk, we single-sex couples were strictly on our own—allowed to chat, as I recall, but required by the master script only to mark time with both pairs of ankles crossed. To the published confidences of women like Helene Cixous I am grateful for validating and easing my discomfiture, and for nudging this book about perennial comings to self-inscription over the final concep tual hurdle. Cixous's "Sorties" evoke the inextinguishable resonances in any woman's writing of the momentous "dechirement qu'est pour la femme la prise de la parole orale—'prise' qui est effectuee comme un arrachement, un essor vertigineux et une lancee de soi, une plongee." This feeling is not entirely lost on the Rousseau of the Confessions, who mourns the innumerable missed occasions for speaking up and out from the depths of his being that someone less constitutionally slow-witted than Jean-Jacques would have known how to seize. Except that he of supreme faith in staircase wit (as, among other things, an indelible trait of his own character) thinks finally to take his revenge on real life. To his Confessions falls the task of driving a differential wedge between past and present, and of positing a former lifetime of failure to express his self in conversational context. Rousseau's act to end all acts of self-inscription aspires to remember and remedy without commemorating the former failure. My heart goes out more spontaneously to the earlier Rousseaus of less grandiose and single-minded ambitions for writing off the recurring wrench of coming to writing as a one-time investment in permanent self Preface ix hood. For the women of my generation, that wrench has become less uniformly traumatic since I first stared in disbelief at the interminable spaces allotted on my college applications for "personal" essays. But the fear and exhilaration of crossing the line have never entirely gone away, whether the transgression consists in sneaking enough of a peek at the mirror to recall that I am for all practical purposes still there or, more usually, in improvising an alternative to Mr. Barclay's scenario where we girls would assume responsibility for formulating our own questions. But taking responsibility has little to do with the pathetic isola tionism of Rousseau's sometimes wanting to befriend the truth to the point where there would be no further need for the help and support of real friends. I thank my teachers at Ohio State and my colleagues at Duke and Boston Universities for nurturing and challenging this project at every stage along the way. To Ron Rosbottom goes special gratitude for staying cheerfully and effectively on the case long beyond the endpoint of official obligations. At a critical moment, a Junior Fellowship from the Humanities Foundation at Boston University made time for sustained reading and thinking. I am lucky beyond measure to have parents who strongly encouraged those two activities when I was inclined to get by with less, and who understood when I eventually leapt to the opposite extreme of taking their encouragement over-seriously. I wish finally to acknowledge that portions of chapter 3 previously appeared as an article entitled "Text and Context of Rousseau's Relations with Diderot" in Eighteenth-Century Studies. To Hannah and Nathaniel, I am indebted for their keeping things always slightly out of control and in perspective. For them and for the room to grow infits and starts, I dedicate this book to Richard. Introduction On the Occasional . j'ecris moins I'histoire de ces eve[ne]mens en eux-memes que celle de I'etat de mon ante, a mesure qu'ils sont arrives. Or, les antes ne sont plus ou moins illustres que selon qu'elles ont des sentimens plus ou moins grands et nobles, des ideesplus ou moins vives et nombreuses. Lesfaits ne sont ici que des causes occasionnelles. Rousseau, "Ebauches des Confessions" Sans ces causes occasionnelles un homme ne tres sensible ne sentiroit rien, et mourroit sans avoir connu son etre. Rousseau, Confessions Between 1765 and 1770, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the Con fessions, which, published posthumously in the two volumes of 1782 and 1789, have been widely credited with "inaugurating the genre [of auto biography] in its modern form."1 Of these events in publishing history, literary historians after Rousseau's own heart have consented to make a more or less unprecedented and precedent-setting grande occasion. The tendency to commemorate Rousseau's would-be first of a kind "portrait d'homme"2 as a pivotal turning point in the evolution of Western letters is, understandably, most pronounced in the French tradition.