INTRODUCTION

However, Lejeune himself remained dissatisfied with this since it did not seem to provide a sufficient boundary between autobiography and the adjacent genres of biography and fiction. A certain ‘latitude’ in classifying particular cases might be admitted but one condition for autobiography was absolute: there must be ‘identity between the author, the narrator, and the protagonist’ (Lejeune 1982: 193). However, the difficulty is how to apply this condition since the ‘identity’ Lejeune speaks of can never really be established except as a matter of intention on the part of the author. More than a decade later Laura Marcus noted how the concept

of ‘intention’ has persistently threaded its way through discussions of autobiography (Marcus 1994: 3). Attacked by the New Critics of the 1930s and 1940s as a fallacy, ‘intentionality’ signals the belief that the author is behind the text, controlling its meaning; the author becomes the guarantor of the ‘intentional’ meaning or truth of the text, and reading a text therefore leads back to the author as origin. Within critical discussions of autobiography, ‘intention’ has had a necessary and often unquestioned role in providing the crucial link between author, narrator and protagonist. Intention, however, is further defined as a particular kind of ‘honest’ intention which then guarantees the ‘truth’ of the writing. Trust the author, this rather circular argument goes, if s/he seems to be trustworthy. Hence for Roy Pascal, an early critic of the genre, autobiography depends on ‘the seriousness of the

author, the seriousness of his personality and his intention in writing’ (Pascal 1960: 60). For Karl Weintraub, an autobiography can only be understood if the ‘place’ the authors themselves occupy in relation to their lives can be reconstructed by the reader. Reading an autobiography ‘properly’ means reading with an already existing knowledge of the text’s meaning: ‘This moment, this point of view, needs to be recaptured for a proper understanding of the autobiographic effort; so must the motivation and intention of the author for writing autobiography at all’ (Weintraub 1978: xviii). For these critics, autobiographies are seen as providing proof of the validity and importance of a certain conception of authorship: authors who have authority over their own texts and whose writings can be read as forms of direct access to themselves (Olney 1972: 332). Even Philippe Lejeune, with whom we started, and for whom the concept of the author is more difficult to define, requiring him to resort to ‘authoritative’ legal terminology, proposes an ‘autobiographical pact’ or ‘contract’ based on ‘an intention to honour the signature’. According to Lejeune, the author of an autobiography implicitly declares that he is the person he says he is and that the author and the protagonist are the same (Lejeune 1982: 202); but have we necessarily believed all subjects in the same way? Have all signatures had the same legal status? Does not sincerity itself, as Nancy Miller suggests, already imply a masculine subject, since women are less likely to be believed simply on account of who they are (Miller 1988: 51)? Miller’s argument demonstrates the extent to which the genre

of autobiography has been implicitly bound up with gender. Insofar as autobiography has been seen as promoting a view of the subject as universal, it has also underpinned the centrality of masculine – and, we may add, Western and middle-class – modes of subjectivity. As we shall see, by focusing on a particular historical canon of texts which celebrated the extraordinary lives of ‘great men’, an important group of modern critics writing in the 1960s and 1970s deduced abstract critical principles for autobiography based on the ideals of autonomy, self-realization, authenticity and transcendence which reflected their own cultural values. For James Olney, for instance, autobiography engages

with a profound human impulse to become both separate and complete:

By gesturing towards a shared truth which ‘everyone’ can endorse, Olney establishes a particular view of the individual as transcending both social and historical difference. An appeal to the mysteries of the self can also function in much the same way as a mystificatory rhetoric obscuring the ideological underpinnings of its particular version of ‘selfhood’. According to Karl Weintraub, man’s task is, like autobiography’s, to arrive at some form of self-realization: ‘We are captivated by an uncanny sense that each one of us constitutes one irreplaceable human form, and we perceive a noble life task in the cultivation of our individuality, our ineffable self’ (Weintraub 1978: xiii). As individuals, ‘we’, as Weintraub says, assuming that ‘we’ represents everyone, are above society and beyond understanding; by implication, therefore, ‘we’ are also beyond the reach of any theoretical critique. It seems that there is little apparent difference for these critics

between realizing the self and representing the self, and autobiography gets drawn seamlessly into supporting the beliefs and values of an essentialist or Romantic notion of selfhood. According to this view, generated at the end of the eighteenth century but still powerfully present in the middle of the twentieth, each individual possesses a unified, unique selfhood which is also the expression of a universal human nature. For Olney, for instance: ‘the explanation for the special appeal of autobiography … is a fascination with the self and its profound, its endless mysteries’ (Olney 1980: 23). At the same time, however, autobiography, understood in terms of a similarly transcendent or Romantic

view of art, is turned to in the first place because it offers an unmediated and yet stabilizing wholeness for the self. Autobiography exemplifies ‘the vital impulse to order’ which has always underlain creativity (Olney 1972: 3). Or it offers the possibility of alleviating the dangers and anxieties of fragmentation: ‘Autobiography … requires a man to take a distance with regard to himself in order to constitute himself in the focus of his special unity and identity across time’ (Gusdorf, in Olney 1980: 35). Autobiography, as we shall see, has sometimes been viewed as aiding the diversification of culture and subjects through its appeal to different communities, its formal multiplicity and its excessive productivity. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, it was reinscribed by literary critics as itself offering a solution to the same threat it had posed by being restricted to the literary values of the ‘few’ and made to take on a unifying and conservative function. Returning for a moment to definitions, we can see a revealing

paradox at work in this formative criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. On the one hand, autobiography is perceived to be as ineffable and irreducible as the self it figures: ‘Definition of autobiography as a literary genre seems to me virtually impossible’, writes James Olney (1972: 38). On the other hand, critics like Lejeune and Gusdorf believed that the form must provide both ‘conditions and limits’ if it is to be containable and identifiable as an authoritative form of ‘truth-telling’ which is clearly distinguishable from fiction (Gusdorf, in Olney 1980: 43). On the one hand, autobiography, through its relation to individualism and humanistic values, is seen to be available to non-technical, common-sense readings: according to Barett Mandel, ‘Every reader knows that autobiographies and novels are finally totally distinct’ (Mandel 1980: 54). On the other hand, autobiography produces an unease that it could spread endlessly and get everywhere, undermining even the objective stance of the critic if it is not held at bay or constrained by classification. Candace Lang has argued that criticism and autobiography are

difficult to separate, since they are both self-conscious discourses ‘“about” language’ and thus engaged in the same task (Lang 1982: 11). Robert Smith makes a similar point when he sees autobiography as ‘a good way of taking the theoretical temperature … of

academics in the field’ (Smith 1995: 59). For the group of critics we are discussing here, the apparent neutrality or ‘liberalism’ of their approach to the subject both disguised and supported their critical authority. Autobiography was important to them because it helped to shore up an approach to the meaning of literary works through the author. The critic could have ‘objective’ knowledge of the work, thus ratifying his or her own place and authority, precisely because autobiography could be seen to supply a subjecthood which was both ineffable and discrete. The author stood behind the work guaranteeing its unity, while the critic interpreted what the author really meant to say, reducing the different elements of a work to a central message. What happens to autobiography afterwards, after the theoretical temperature hots up, forms the main substance of this book. Autobiography has been at the centre of the debates, which, drawing on mainly French theories of psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and feminism, have interrogated the self-evident nature of the subject and knowledge. Poststructuralism, in particular, by positing language or discourse as both preceding and exceeding the subject, deposed the author from his or her central place as the source of meaning and undermined the unified subject of autobiography. For the moment, however, before engaging more fully with these ideas and their relation to autobiography, I want to pose the problem of genre in more historical terms.