ABSTRACT
This would have appalled the younger Henry Adams who was so intent on recommending the 'subject' or the 'matter' as the primary focus of a literary work. Adams proceeds somewhat like a surveyor engaged in triangulation work, who maps first one area and then the area adjacent to it and then the one after that, and so on until he has created a network of relationships. Only in the second half of the book, where all the downward curves of the first half strive to turn tail upwards, is the Adams figure strong enough to resist the buffeting and keep on course. The scrutiny of self, in subsequent chapters, is squarely bound up with the construction of an art object that, by virtue of its multi-faceted perspectives, turns the relationship between author and reader inside out and gives renewed intensity to the 'auto' of autobiography.
