Modernist Autobiography: Part I of ... However Long It Takes Me

[X-posted to the Valve ... but I like the fact that I receive different feedback from the audiences there and here, so comment wherever you feel most comfortable commenting.]

I'm not the type who normally thinks about identity, mostly because interrogations of it analyze novels designed to be interrogated by people interested in identity.  (I also greet poems written to be read by New Critics with a full-mouthed yawn.)  But as I delve into the depths (such that there are) of realist and naturalist literature, I find myself pining for the playful attempts to stabilize identity performed by British, Irish and American modernists. 

Take the whole modernist infatuation with "autobiography," which I scare-quote for obvious reasons.  What, for example, does Joyce hope to accomplish in the final chapter of Ulysses?  To what genre does "Penelope" even belong?  Is her lengthy internal monologue a stab at "autobiography"?  She narrates her life, questions the import of certain pivotal moments, and attempts to ground her desires in a personality her countrymen would recognize.  She attempts, in short, to think herself into a preexisting subject position.  Transgression is what she does, not who she wants to be.  Which critical mode best accounts for her self-duplicity?  Can we also bring it to bear on other modernist "autobiographies"?  (Or is this entire line of inquiry wrong-headed?  Should we consider her wholly a Joycean construct?)

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—whose cover emblematizes what this discussion addresses—Gertrude Stein writes:

About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography.  You know what I am going to do.  I am going to write it for you.  I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe and she has and this is it.

Can you imagine jamming more into a single word than Stein manages to stuff into "simply"?*  Stein wants to obscure the obvious here in such a way as to draw attention to it; but she can no more write the autobiography of Alice Toklas than Daniel Defoe can write the autobiography of the fictional Robinson Crusoe.  Perhaps Stein meant to allude not to Crusoe, but Alexander Selkirk, the castaway whose four years stranded on the island of Juan Fernandez is thought to be Defoe's model.  Only Stein knows Toklas intimately, whereas Defoe depended on the accounts of Edward Cooke and Woodes Rogers. 

I know what you're thinking: "No one would actually confuse the two, so why press the point?"  I press because I care ... and because otherwise brilliant writers have confused these modes in meaningful ways.  In Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf wrote

So [Crusoe] proses on, drawing, little by little, his own portrait, so that we never forget it.

The emphasis is mine, and you can guess its import.  I inserted "Crusoe" in that sentence because the italicized phrase vanquishes the idea that the antecedent of "he" is "Defoe."  What happened here?  What confused Woolf?**  I would argue that she missed what Stein, with her unsubtle pronomial slippage in the final sentence there, exploited in the passage I quoted earlier:

I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe and she has and this is it.

Stein records herself declaring her intentions, then switches back into Toklas' voice.  In lieu of a conclusion, however, I will leave you with a suggestive (not to mention my favorite) passage from Stein's Everybody's Autobiography:

Identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself ... you do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right.  You are of course never yourself.

The title alone should indicate why it piqued my interest.  Tomorrow, I'll discuss this passage, Woolf's "A Sketch of the Past," Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller," and Emile Benveniste's Problems in General Linguistics.***

* yes I said yes I can Yes.

** Admittedly, these were unfinished essays published posthumously, so she may have caught the slip in future edits.  Still, the slip itself is significant enough to warrant attention.

*** And unlike most blog-promises, I'll live up to this one.  Why should you believe me?  I've already written it.  So this isn't a promise to do more work—which should never be believed, especially of a blogger—but a promise to post what I've already written.

Comments

[CR]

Wow. You really, really need to go look at Coetzee's Nobel Lecture.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-lecture-e.html

I'm not sure I understand where you're headed with this, Scott. Woolf means, I think, that RC is written in the first person. Sure, there's the word "prose" - but that's a word that's open to just this sort of playfulness.

Of course, with Woolf's own works, and in her period more broadly considered, this whole deal becomes much more complicated, via free indirect discourse. What was Kenner's definition of the Uncle Charles Principle?

""Writing fiction, [Joyce] played parts, and referred stylistic decisions to the taste of the person he was playing. The Uncle Charles Principle entails writing about someone as they would choose to be written about."

[Luther Blissett]

Scott, I'm agreeing with CR here. Woolf implicitly draws the distinction between actual and asserted author. In *Crusoe*, the reader must go along with the illusion that the text *is* an autobiography (or whatever the name of that genre would have had at the time).

By Stein's time, the conventions of an autobiography are well-established, although I don't know about how far back the history of ghostwritten autobiographies stretches (a quick wikipedia search brings up Lovecraft's ghostwriting of autobiographies of Houdini and others). Stein is drawing attention to autobiography as a set of linguistic and narrative constructions -- an act of titling, of using "I," of asserting not only the truth but the personal ownership and "authorization" of a particular plot. So that later we'll get *Anybody's Autobiography*.

Proust would seem to be an odder figure here. Ron Silliman has recently blogged about the difference between Joyce's and Faulkner's streams of consciousness: the former is interested in an overall critique of modes of representation, the latter is interested in shaping characters. Proust is simply weird. His novels are novels, full of manufactured people, places, and events. But so much of the detail seems to be only of interest to a reader if the narrator is assumed to be a real person. In pure invented narrative, we go by the Chekhov rule: every detail must contribute to the unified effect and thematic structure of the narrative. But in Proust, we're in the world of Barthes' "reality effect," only turned up to eleven, so that certain details and passages seem to signify nothing more than "treat me as real" -- all fine and good, except the work is fiction.

Am I making sense?

[CR]

Am I making sense?

Brilliantly so, yes.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'm not denying anyone their playfulness. In fact, I'm drawing attention to it, hence my remarks about the "playful attempts to stabalize identity" in that first paragraph (and calling "Penelope" "her internal monologue). What happened was I wrote a post the size of Texas, one no one would read, so I chopped it into fourths. This is the first of them.

Luther, you have ruined the show a bit, though. Your point about what Stein's up to with pronouns is where I begin tomorrow with the Beneviste. As I'll say tomorrow, in reference (variously) to Joyce, Stein, Woolf and Defoe, is that they all "establish their linguistic subjectivity through what Emile Benveniste calls 'the act of individual discourse' in Problems in General Linguistics: 'I refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced [and] cannot be identified except in what [he has] called elsewhere an instance of discourse and that has only a momentary reference' (226)." Actually, that they play with that assumption as they transform "chronicle" into "narrative" (as with Stein in particular, but Molly too); as you can see, I could've gone with Benjamin or Hayden White here, but Benjamin fits the modernist moment and mood better. (Call it "the historicist creep.")

Also, the Woolf is certainly a slip, but I think it's a telling one, even if it is in an unfinished draft. At a basic, not-quite-unreflective but not-quite-entirely-critical, this basic error in attribution remains powerful enough to cause Woolf to nod.

Anyhow, I lied about this being the first of four parts. It's the first of three parts in desperate need of a fourth...which I hope to come up with before someone demands I post it.

[Bryan]

This is a very interesting post, Scott. I've long been fascinated by the nature of literary autobiography and I'm curious to see where this little series leads. I wrote a bit myself about autobiography way back in my first handful of blog posts, though as I'm not a literary studies guy I'm not sure interesting it would be to you, but it's there if you're so inclined to read it.

[Alex Leibowitz]

To the list you might add Proust's brilliant sentence about 'if the name of the narrator of this book were the name of its author, she would have called him,'...etc.