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Touching the World Touching the World REFERENCE IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY 7 PAUL JOHN EAKIN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright 1992 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eakin, Paul John Touching the world : reference in autobiography / Paul John Eakin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN 1-4008-0177-X 1. American prose literature—History and criticism. 2. Authors, American—Biography—History and criticism. 3. Authors, French— Biography—History and criticism. 4. French prose literature—History and criticism. 5. Reference (Philosophy) 6. Autobiography. I. Title. PS366.A88E27 1992 818′.50809—dc20 91-35636 CIP This book has been composed in Linotron Janson FOR MARION, EMILY, HALLIE, AND HUGH 7 7 Contents 7 Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION 3 CHAPTER ONE The Referential Aesthetic of Autobiography 29 CHAPTER TWO Henry James’s “Obscure Hurt”: Can Autobiography Serve Biography? 54 CHAPTER THREE Self and Culture in Autobiography: Models of Identity and the Limits of Language 71 CHAPTER FOUR Living in History 138 CHAPTER FIVE Autobiography and the Structures of Experience 181 Works Cited 231 Index 243 7 Acknowledgments 7 A FELLOWSHIP from the American Council of Learned Societies helped to launch this project, and another from the Humanities Re- search Centre of the Australian National University in Canberra al- lowed me to complete it. I am grateful for both, and for various grants from Indiana University. Portions of this book appeared in the following journals and collec- tions, and I want to thank their editors for the hospitality that they showed to my work as it was taking shape: —“The Referential Aesthetic of Autobiography.” Studies in the Liter- ary Imagination 23 (1990): 129–44. —“Henry James’s ‘Obscure Hurt’: Can Autobiography Serve Biogra- phy?” New Literary History 19 (1987–1988): 675–92. —“Alfred Kazin’s Bridge to America.” South Atlantic Quarterly 77 (1978): 39–53. —“Narrative and Chronology as Structures of Reference and the New Model Autobiographer.” Studies in Autobiography.Ed.James Olney. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 32–41. —“Reference and the Representative in American Autobiography: Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman.” Identità e Scrittura: Studi sull’ Autobiografia Nord-Americana. Ed. A. L. Accardo, M. O. Marotti, and I. Tattoni. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1988. 21–47. I want to record here my thanks to friends who read, criticized, and encouraged along the way: Martha Banta, Susanna Egan, Carol Holly, James Justus, Arnold Krupat, Philippe Lejeune, Shirley Neuman, and Eugene Stelzig. Joy Hooten and David Parker introduced me to the world of Australian autobiography. And to these friends this book owes more than I can easily say: William L. Andrews, James M. Cox, and James Olney. Robert E. Brown, my editor at Princeton, has been unfail- ing in his support of my work. Mary Carlson and Lauren Lepow gave invaluable help in preparing my manuscript for publication. Sybil S. Eakin has always been a voice for clarity and simplicity; I hope that I have learned to listen over the years. ix 7 INTRODUCTION 7 DOINOTknow that, in the field of the subject, there is no referent?” (Barthes, Barthes 56). This question reads like one of those conundrums in philosophy, prompting the reflective to ask, “Who is this ‘I,’ then?” As an instance of discourse in an autobiography, it seems doubly problematic, for autobiography is nothing if not a referential art, and the self or subject is its principal referent. This line and the book whose essence it has seemed to epitomize, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), have come to serve as a touchstone for assessments of the state of contemporary autobi- ography. Thus Germaine Brée, for example, captures the subversive drift of Barthes’s self-portrait when she identifies it, along with André Mal- raux’s Antimémoires (1967) and Michel Leiris’s La Règle du jeu (1948–1976), as an “anti-autobiography” (Narcissus 9). Again, for Dorothy Kelly, the book illustrates the fate of autobiography in the age of poststructuralism, when “deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis have exploded both the concepts of representation and of the self” (122). Moreover, the condi- tion of contemporary autobiography, in its turn, is held by Michael Sprinker and others to represent “a pervasive and unsettling feature in modern culture,” namely, “the gradual metamorphosis of an individual with a distinct, personal identity into a sign, a cipher” (322). A change of this magnitude in received assumptions about the nature of subjectivity would amount to something like a paradigm shift in Western culture, and it is precisely the history of this shift as reflected in the devel- opment of modern autobiography from Wordsworth to Barthes that Paul Jay proposes to chart in his recent study, Being in the Text (1984). Jay’s thesis is that changing views of the nature of the self have been registered in parallel changes in autobiographical form, culminating in the “strange mimesis” of self-referential works by Paul Valéry and Barthes, in which the reality of subjectivity, a sense of the self as divided and dispersed, lacking a central core, is mirrored in an equally fragmentary and discon- tinuous text.1 Although Jay is, I think, ultimately right in positing a mi- metic dimension to Barthes’s autobiographical practice, Barthes’s proposi- tion about the subject and its referent is itself considerably more radical and disabling when it comes to representation than Jay’s account of it as mimesis allows. 1 See Jay, Being chapter 6, and Wylie Sypher, Robert Langbaum, and Eugene Goodheart as presented in Eakin, Fictions 205–6. 3 INTRODUCTION Barthes does go out of his way to undercut the notion that the discourse of autobiography is supported by a structure of reference. What I want to suggest, however, is that the “strangeness” of self-representation in this book derives not only from its concerted, self-conscious difference from more conventional models of the genre, but also from the unsettled—even contradictory—nature of Barthes’s views on the experience of subjectivity and on the possibility for its expression in language.2 The autobiographi- cal practice of Roland Barthes really does not illustrate as decisively as some commentators would make out the demise of classical autobiogra- phy and its concern with the self. When the austere tenets of poststructu- ralist theory about the subject came into conflict with the urgent demands of private experience, Barthes turned for solace, as we shall see, to pho- tography, which he regarded as the supremely referential art. I shall pre- sent this mismatch between theory and experience in the case of Barthes with a view to establishing him as a representative contemporary autobi- ographer, but of a rather different sort from that proposed by Paul Jay, Dorothy Kelly, Paul Smith, and others.3 Barthes’s profound ambivalence about the self and language suggests that it is time to reopen the file on reference in autobiography. I. THE MARK OF THE SQUID IN ROLAND BARTHES BY ROLAND BARTHES Barthes’s arresting dictum on the subject appears comparatively early in the sequence of entries that constitute the text of Roland Barthes, under c, that is, in an approximately alphabetical arrangement running from a to t. The heading of the passage is “Coincidence,” and Barthes begins with his curious experience of listening to recordings of himself playing the piano. In making these tapes he has proposed to “hear myself”(Barthes 55), but that is not what actually takes place: 2 My own thinking about these issues as reflected in Barthes’s autobiography has been importantly shaped by Gratton’s essay on Barthes, which I shall discuss later on in this Introduction. 3 Several twentieth-century autobiographers have recorded the consequences of the life led too strictly in conformity to a theory of some kind—Jean-Paul Sartre in The Words and André Gorz in The Traitor offer striking instances. Paul Smith’s recent study of contempo- rary theories of the subject indicts poststructuralism for its deterministic view that fails to include an adequate conception of human agency. For an interesting recent study of Gorz, see Mundhenk. 4 INTRODUCTION What is it that happens? When I listen to myself having played—after an initial moment of lucidity in which I perceive one by one the mistakes I have made—there occurs a kind of rare coincidence: the past of my play- ing coincides with the present of my listening, and in this coincidence, commentary is abolished: there remains nothing but the music (of course what remains is not at all the “truth” of the text, as if I had rediscovered the “true” Schumann or the “true” Bach). (Barthes 56) In the moment of (re)expression, playings (or utterings) past and pres- ent seem to “coincide,” and “commentary” (on what has been) is “abolished”—“there remains nothing but the music”—and any trace of himself as player has vanished. The project of “hearing myself” has been defeated. As the meditation continues, Barthes discovers in his unexpected expe- rience with music an analogy for the creation of Roland Barthes: “When I pretend to write on what I have written in the past, there occurs in the same way a movement of abolition, not of truth.” The displacement of “truth” by “abolition” as the central dynamic of engagement in self-refer- ence (listening to himself playing,
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