HISTORIANS OF THE SELF

In this chapter I want to look at some of the texts which have helped to form the dominant tradition of autobiographical writing and the way they have both drawn on and helped to construct a history of selfhood, a paradigmatic narrative through which the subject has learned to know who s/he is. The best place to begin is with Saint Augustine’s Confessions

(c. AD 398-400) which is often thought of as the origin of modern Western autobiography, both in the sense of marking a historical beginning and of setting up a model for other, later texts. Georg Gusdorf, one of the important modern critics of autobiography whom I discussed in the Introduction, sees the Confessions as ‘a brilliantly successful landmark’ within a historical landscape he has already limited to ‘our cultural area’, and defined as both Western and Christian. According to Gusdorf, autobiography requires a kind of consciousness of self which is ‘peculiar to Western man’. Augustine’s Confessions express ‘in full rhetorical splendour’ the Christian imperative to the confession of sins and thus promote that inward-turning gaze which is the origin and

basis of autobiography (Gusdorf 1956: 29, 31). Roy Pascal’s interest in the Confessions is even more generically focused and generalizing than Gusdorf’s. This ‘first great’ autobiography has a ‘decisive significance’, he argues, in that it establishes a crucial narrative design where incidents, trivial in themselves, become representative moments in the growth of a personality. The author does not so much remember the past as recast it, grasping and reshaping himself in the process, and it is, according to Pascal, through creating this ‘integrated succession of experiences’ that the Confessions lift autobiography into art (Pascal 1960: 22-23). For another early critic of autobiography, Karl Weintraub, who announces at the beginning of his book that he is searching for ‘that proper form of autobiography’ in which ‘a self-reflective person asks “who am I?” and “how did I become what I am?”’, the Confessions also hold a special position. None of the ‘ancient’ writers before him, Weintraub argues, though they might have written autobiographically, had ‘opened up their souls in the inwardness of genuine autobiography’; moreover, Augustine creates a model, partly through his own understanding of the typicality of his experience, which will be influential for centuries to come (Weintraub 1978: 1, 45). What seems to be at stake in all these early critical approaches

to Augustine’s Confessions is the definition of autobiography as a genre. By isolating Augustine’s text from his classical predecessors, the criteria which define autobiography can themselves begin to be isolated (Misch 1907: I, 17). The historical moment of the Confessions is both refigured and repeated as the inaugurating moment of autobiography. As Jonathan Dollimore says, it is difficult to see Augustine as occupying any single point in history since the characteristics of his narrative have completely infused the way we structure our understanding of him; he is continually ‘scripted’ in terms of the same narrative he himself ‘powerfully influenced’ (Dollimore 1991: 131). The Confessions discredit the past and re-form it in terms of a meaning which transcends history, and therefore help to establish a critical narrative of autobiography as a genre which is also ‘beyond’ history. In approaches to the Confessions, critical and autobiographical subjects crucially reflect and reinforce each other. What we see is the unified

subject of modern liberal ideology successfully allegorizing their own history. At a simple level, the Confessions tell the story of Saint Augustine’s

conversion to Christianity. This involves a process of spiritual and physical wandering, as Augustine charts his development from babyhood to manhood and a journey which takes him from his birthplace in Thagaste, in North Africa, to Carthage where he taught rhetoric, to Rome and then Milan where his conversion finally happens. The notion that his wanderings should also be read as the tribulations of error is introduced early on:

As his biographer Peter Brown has suggested, the Confessions are a ‘strictly intellectual autobiography’ and ‘a manifesto of the inner world’ (Brown 1967: 167-68). By turning towards the outside world Augustine believed he was also losing himself, and as a result losing sight of God. ‘You were there before my own eyes, but I had deserted even my own self. I could not find myself, much less find you’ (Augustine 1961: 92). The outward journey is a false journey, becoming meaningful only in retrospect by being realized as a return: it is a tortuous journey back to God. The narrative thus merely defers a resolution which, from another perspective, is already known. This other perspective, of course, could be God’s. Towards the end of the Confessions Augustine meditates on the ‘vast cloisters’ of memory where he ‘meets himself’ (p.215); memory is the container of his experiences, necessarily lived in time, but memory also exists beyond time and comprehension: it is greater than what it contains. ‘This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. … Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be

part of it, if it is not contained in it?’ (p.216). Augustine’s ‘transcendent’ relation to his own memory is analogous to God’s relation to his Creation: Augustine searches for God within his memory but God is also ‘above’ him, the timeless container of all human destinies. ‘In the same way you are not the mind itself, for you are the Lord God of the mind. All these things are subject to change, but you remain supreme over all things, immutable’ (p.231). The Confessions conflate Christian and narrative imperatives: Augustine’s conversion also has to be read as a conversion, in narrative terms, to a point of view from which the future, now become past, can be seen as part of the overall design. Augustine becomes god-like in his ability to read the formless or inconsequential events of his life in terms of their eventual meaning (Sturrock 1993: 20-48). Two incidents from the Confessions, one about sin or a fall from

truth, the other about redemption, will allow us to elaborate the argument further. In the first episode Augustine famously recounts his boyhood theft of some pears. What seems particularly shameful in retrospect about this apparently minor episode is its sheer wilfulness. He steals the pears neither from need nor greed: the fruit is in itself not particularly ‘enticing’ and few of the pears actually get eaten. Rather, Augustine describes himself as delighting in transgression for its own sake. ‘Let my heart now tell you what prompted me to do wrong for no purpose, and why it was only my own love of mischief that made me do it’ (Augustine 1961: 47). Two aspects of this incident seem significant: first, Augustine does not act alone but as a member of ‘a band of ruffians’ (ibid.). The gregarious energy of youth seems tantamount to sinfulness in itself: the laughter and ‘fun and games’ generated by the group induce a reckless disregard for the law which would never have been tolerated by Augustine alone. This helps to highlight the contrary movement of the Confessions towards singleness and individuality: sin can be committed in company, but salvation requires a private and increasingly inward kind of soul-searching. The second feature of this incident emphasized by Augustine is its contingency and pointlessness. Sin is thought about in terms of wasteful energy – it is a waste of time – diverting him from the path of Truth. It is also a detour, a

digression, in terms of the direction his story is taking. ‘Can anyone unravel this twisted tangle of knots?’ Augustine asks at the end of this section (p.52), deep in the entanglements of his story, and his sins, yet anticipating the clarity of their resolution (absolution). The second episode, the moment of Augustine’s conversion,

seems significantly to repeat the first, for the final conversion also happens in a garden and uses as its context a children’s game. Augustine, at the climax of a long period of indecision, first removes himself physically from company, and then even from his faithful friend Alypius who has followed him into the garden. It is at this point that he hears a child chanting ‘tolle lege’ or ‘take it and read’ and chooses to interpret the dislocated words not as part of a forgotten child’s game but as a divine command (Augustine 1961: 177). He picks up the Bible and selects at random a verse from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: ‘Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites’ (p.178). This speaks so directly to his own weaknesses that it confirms for him an act of heavenly intervention and dispels his final doubts. It is easy to see the ways in which this episode both echoes and

redeems the earlier one. The child’s voice, which could have been taken as an accidental coincidence, hearkening back to a world of frivolity and play, is now transferred or converted into a higher realm of meaning; the passage extracted from the Bible, which Augustine, in effect, appropriates for himself, is likewise read as a form of direct address, yielding an instantaneous meaning. The divine imposes its order on the secular as the word, removed from the fallibility of human interpretation, becomes the Word, the divine Logos. This garden marks both a return and a new beginning. Just before this turning point, however, Augustine has had a

vision of Continence, in all her ‘chaste beauty’, but ‘not barren’, ‘a fruitful mother of children, of joys born of you, O Lord, her spouse’ (Augustine 1961: 176). Continence is precisely what he has found so difficult to espouse himself and with it the

renunciation of marital and sexual fulfilment. Her apparition is a supreme moment of conflict for Augustine – ‘I wrangled with myself, in my own heart’ (p.177) – and turns him decisively in on himself: ‘I probed the hidden depths of my soul and wrung its pitiful secrets from it’ (ibid.). According to John Sturrock, this moment of inner turmoil is what the Confessions realize at length: ‘This highly emotional moment of the story ranks as a mise en abyme of the work as a whole. Augustine is launched on the path of confession’ (Sturrock 1993: 44). Augustine therefore records here, in a condensed or metaphorical way, what will be repeated in a kind of hall-of-mirrors effect throughout the Confessions. Yet it might also be possible to argue at this point that

Augustine is encountering some of the most intractable issues arising from autobiography as a genre. As we have seen, Paul de Man has argued that it is precisely in the ‘specular moments’ when an author becomes the subject of his own understanding that he must also depend on the trope or rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia or personification. He gives language a face at this moment of self-recognition as a way of avoiding his own implication in language, only to be confronted once again by the inevitably rhetorical nature of language (de Man 1979a: see Introduction: pp.12-14 of this volume). Continence’s attempt to shield Augustine from fleshly temptation by interposing her own body into the text is not dissimilar, in its paradoxical force, to her figurative character being used to mask the duplicitous nature of language. Augustine’s dilemma as an autobiographer is how to get through language to a state of transcendent unity with himself while writing in a language which works through material signs and thus introduces the inevitable effects of duration, the time required by the process of reading, and uncertainty. This is true even of his conversion in the garden: while he attempts to transfigure both spoken and written texts, the child’s words and Paul’s Epistle into a divine message, the very form of his conversion tells of their more mundane origin as texts. Avrom Fleishman has pointed out that there are various literary motifs at play in the conversion scene, including the vision, the children’s game and the sortes, or opening of a privileged text at random, which derive

from Jewish, pagan and Christian traditions, all of which would have been well known to Augustine as a teacher of rhetoric. This for Fleishman suggests that ‘his experience at the turning point of his life was from the moment itself an act of literary interpretation’ (Fleishman 1983: 54). For T.R. Wright, as well, the conversion is an extremely ‘intertextual conversion’ which involves ‘a complex chain of conversion narratives’. The story of Ponticianus’ conversion which precedes Augustine’s own has itself been effected by reading the life of St Anthony who was himself influenced by a passage from the Bible (Wright 1988: 95-96). If conversion follows conversion, we could equally say that story succeeds story in an endless act of reading and reinterpretation. Augustine’s struggle with language is also enacted in the dual

address of the Confessions. Written in the vocative – using ‘you’ – they have as their direct addressee God. But as Augustine himself asks, what is the point of telling God what He, in his omniscience, already knows? ‘O Lord, since you are outside time in eternity, are you unaware of the things that I tell you? Or do you see in time the things that occur in it? If you see them, why do I lay this lengthy record before you?’ (Augustine 1961: 253). For Augustine, the answer is that he is also writing his Confessions for men, who in the position of overhearers or witnesses will be able to learn from his life and to share his vision of God. Augustine is aware that there are two problems about his Confessions: first, how will people know that he is telling the truth, and second, how can he ‘confess’ without also offering up his life for judgement by others? By making God his addressee, Augustine also claims Him as the arbiter of his truthfulness (it is impossible to lie to God) and as his supreme reader: ‘It is you, O Lord, who judge me’ (p.210). By being face to face with God, Augustine creates a saving space or division between human and divine responses; he can be humble in his attitude to God while taking on god-like power to prescribe how his life should be interpreted. ‘I shall therefore confess both what I know of myself and what I do not know. For even what I know about myself I only know because your light shines upon me’ (p.211). However, it is his human reader who in the end justifies his Confessions since it is for his sake that Augustine must set out his life in time as a history or

as a narrative, in the form of words. As Jean Starobinski has argued: ‘The double address of the discourse – to God and to the human auditor – makes the truth discursive and the discourse true’ (Starobinski 1971a: 78). The story in all its literality can ultimately offer the only approach to its own desired dissolution into a higher and wordless form of truth. It is to the question of God’s position as transcendent interlocutor,

a God who knows everything in advance, that Jacques Derrida returns, from a poststructuralist perspective, in his commentary on the Confessions in his own autobiographical text ‘Circumfession’. Derrida reads Augustine contrary to or against what Augustine says as wanting something more than truth, and it is this desire for more, some chance, some unpredictable event ‘as though Augustine still wanted, by force of love’ that ‘something should happen to God’ (Derrida 1993: 18) that the Confessions enact for Derrida. At the same time Derrida draws attention to the fact that Augustine writes his confessions after the death of his mother, and like Derrida himself, could be said to be writing for his mother. But that for has its own twists: it could mean both towards and in her place. The Confessions do indeed move relentlessly towards Augustine’s mother Monica. It is Monica who urges him on to conversion and it is with Monica, after his conversion, that he shares a sublime and wordless vision of the eternal life:

Augustine and his mother must return to the transitory world, but for Monica this moment of fusion (with God and each other) marks the end of her life and for Augustine the beginning of his own spiritual, and autobiographical, authority. After her death

there is nowhere else to go; no further progess to be made. Augustine, having transcended bodily desires and attachments, addresses himself not to his mother but to God. However, if Augustine’s text moves towards the death or

elimination of the other person, in this context the mother, our own reading perhaps does not need to, but can recognize instead the importance of the mother within the structure of the autobiography. This is the point which Nancy Miller makes. For her the representative masculine subject of autobiography, for which the Confessions have seemed to offer such an important paradigm, is built upon readers simply following Augustine’s lead and taking Augustine’s final position as the text’s summation; they have re-suppressed the mother’s role which Augustine nevertheless draws attention to until almost the end of his text. For Miller this is part of a larger argument about the gendering of autobiography. What has been widely assumed, since feminist criticism of the 1970s, to be a female model of the self as defining itself through relations with others, may also, she argues, apply to male texts, forcing us ‘to revise the canonical views of maleautobiographical identity altogether’ (Miller 1994: 5). I will return to feminist criticism of autobiography more fully in the next two chapters. For the moment, however, we can begin to see Augustine’s writing as never attaining the final mastery of truth he desires but as haunted by its own otherness, by figures of its own uncertainty or dissolution. For Derrida confession necessarily broaches something unclosable, something which can never be laid to rest, something that exceeds rationality. From this point of view we should not be surprised if behind the rhetorical figure of Continence that we looked at earlier we can glimpse the more immediate, emotive and mortal figure of the imploring mother. Nor that the tears that Augustine failed to shed at his mother’s death – ‘when the body was carried out for burial, I went and returned without a tear’ (Augustine 1961: 201) – should well out of the text at every turn. Indeed tears carry the body back into the text in a melancholy, abject streaming. The paradox of Augustine’s text, for all its centrality in establishing the unified, transcendent ‘I’ of autobiographical tradition, may be that for the ‘I’ to see and to turn its gaze

self-consciously both inwards and upwards, it must first be blinded by tears, it must reveal its dependence on the very body it abjures. As Derrida has provocatively noted: ‘A work is at once order and its ruin. And these weep for one another’ (Derrida 1990: 122).