ABSTRACT
This final chapter will return to an issue raised briefly in the Introduction, namely the interrelationship of criticism and autobiography. So far we have mostly surveyed either autobiographical texts or theoretical and critical texts about autobiography. The exceptions have been texts by Barthes and Derrida which have interrogated the boundary between different kinds of discourse and used the autobiographical, albeit in an attenuated or fragmented form, as a source of pleasure and critique. Not surprisingly, therefore, it is poststructuralism that has seemed to provide the intellectual atmosphere in which claims to critical objectivity have been questioned over the past fifteen years and that has opened to debate the function, or indeed the necessity, of the personal or autobiographical within criticism. For some this question, being broached belatedly in the 1990s
under the banner of ‘personal criticism’, is scarcely a new one. In 1996 in a ‘Forum’ on the ‘place, nature or limits of the personal’ in criticism, published by the Modern Language Association, Jane Gallop ‘snidely’ suggested that far from being a ‘new
phenomenon’, the personal within criticism was a commonplace and that scholarship had always been ‘replete with personal narratives’. For Gallop it was more a case of where and how one looked: the personal was there but safely relegated to prefaces, acknowledgements, dedications and footnotes. However, for Gallop, the belief on the critic’s part that the personal, while sufficiently important to the work to be mentioned, could be ‘cordoned off’ or pushed to the margins of the text, failed to take account of how it would also leave traces in the text, in moments of rhetorical intensity, for instance, or oddly resonant words and examples. Personal affect, according to Gallop, was always trying to get itself written, deforming both the smoothness and clarity of critical discourse (Forum 1996: 1149-50). Other contributors to the Forum agreed. Poststructuralism had not so much released a new form of writing as precipitated the recognition of what is, in effect, an inevitability. All that was new, according to Norman Holland, was a different attitude of acceptance and enjoyment: ‘We are, willy-nilly, personal’, he wrote. ‘Let’s go with it, then. Let’s enjoy it. Let’s chuck the pretensions to infallibility customary to our profession and have some fun’ (p.1147). For others the ‘personal’ offered a different pedagogical model, an opportunity to acknowledge the limits of one’s knowledge and understanding, to engage theoretical issues without necessarily employing a language which will alienate most readers (p.1153). It suggested that the critic is not contributing, as George T. Wright contends, ‘another stolid block in the great pyramid of objective knowledge’ but offering a ‘probably flawed contribution’ to a continuing dialogue with other scholars (p.1159). Personal criticism suggested, therefore, a more localized setting for critical writing and more modest ambitions. However, as Claudia Tate pointed out in her contribution to
this same debate, the recognition that ‘scholarly prose, like imaginative literature, is inevitably personal’ also derives from serious political concerns (Forum 1996: 1147). What is at stake is who speaks or rather who is authorized to speak. An objective critical stance which ‘claims to speak for everyone’ has, according to Tate, been exclusive and has disenfranchised alternative points of view. Such ‘masterly’ discourses, which critics either mimicked or were
silenced by, masked an ideological investment in ‘white patriarchal law’. A ‘multitude of personal expressions’ is both more democratic and representative of the plurality of ‘personal and cultural narratives’ that, in fact, determine the identity of critics (p.1148). Indeed many of the contributors to this debate who are advocates of the personal within criticism speak from ‘minority’ positions, as gay, immigrant, black, Asian or female, and see the personal as both a risk and an opportunity: a risk because for the ‘minority’ writer, as Joonok Huh argues, there is no already assured public role which will make the ‘personal’ safe, transforming it into another form of public performance; an opportunity because it is a way of getting free from ‘established paradigms and norms’ and ‘seizing the initiative of utterance’ (pp.1156-57). This critical Forum rehearses many of the arguments we have
already encountered in relation to autobiography, most notably in the recognition of how a universal or objective point of view implies a particular ideology of the subject. However, our exploration of autobiography has also suggested a need to be sceptical about the claim that the personal can ever automatically guarantee authenticity; often, as we have seen, the subject is simply exchanging one discursive position for another, and there are perils in any claim to ‘identity’ which perceives the subject as unitary, and restricts its perspectives, its movement or collaboration in other discourses. ‘I’ can also raise problems about privilege and exclusion, and create anxieties not only about who is speaking and who by implication is not, but also about where ‘I’ am speaking from and for whom. These anxieties, of necessity, carry across into personal criticism. The term ‘personal criticism’, whatever its wider historical
relevance as an idea, was coined in the 1990s and has been associated in particular with two books published within a year of each other: Mary Ann Caws’ Women of Bloomsbury (1990) and Nancy K. Miller’s Getting Personal (1991); however these books also have slightly different approaches and rationales. Mary Ann Caws returned to the moment of writing Women of Bloomsbury from a later perspective in the ‘Forum’ and expressed her dissatisfaction with two aspects of her book: the first was the ‘personalpronoun problem’ and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion it
cannot help but create; the second was the ‘tentativeness’ and ‘passivity’ of her writing (Forum 1996: 1160). In 1990, ‘personal criticism’ had been her attempt to lend intimacy and warmth to her criticism both as a move away from ‘impersonality’ and a way of getting closer to, or even ‘mingling’ with, the lives of the women she was writing about (Caws 1990: 2). In retrospect she felt her writing to be too merged with her subject, not forceful enough: ‘I wanted to be both passionate and compassionate but I could not express my wanting in a form hard enough’ (Forum 1996: 1161). One might perhaps say that there are not in fact two issues here but one, and that the problem with personal pronouns has returned, transposed into a particular writing style. In this idealized form of critical intimacy, with its belief in ‘involvement and in coherence, in warmth and in relation’, there is little room for difference and no understanding of the political stakes or locatedness of the subject (Caws 1990: 3). Comprehending the relationship between identity and difference, sameness and otherness, requires, as we have seen, a critical and reflective vocabulary which is rooted in political understanding. Is the personal ever enough? Is it, indeed, only or ever really, personal? Nancy K. Miller’s book Getting Personal emerged from her long
involvement with feminist criticism; as such it is not ‘anti-theory’ but rather another turn within theory, a deliberate ‘turning theory back on itself’ (Miller 1991: 5). Miller offers a complex analysis of personal criticism as arising out of a particular nexus of critical concerns. First, she points to a dissatisfaction with the ‘absent’ subject of theory whose authority rested on not owning its own necessary locatedness as a social subject: the fact that it is white, male, heterosexual, or as in the case of Paul de Man, affiliated with fascism. This dissatisfaction she sees as giving rise to ‘identity politics’ and a wide range of different social groupings which, however, cannot avoid equally contentious claims to representativity, the problem of speaking as or speaking for that continually returns and which seems impossible to resolve in any final way (p.20). For Miller this relation of the subject to theory has a particular
gender inflection. While men have tended to stake their critical
authority on an ‘overweighted’ relation to theory and to disregard their relation to the personal, feminism has ‘interrogated’ how knowledge is produced and has developed an understanding of the personal as itself theoretical (Miller 1991: 21). The point, therefore, is not to offer the personal and the theoretical as contrasting and mutually exclusive modes but to see their implication in each other. For Miller personal criticism becomes a way of exposing the basis of critical and theoretical writing; it stages the critic’s own relation to the ideas:
The inclusion of the word ‘performance’ is important since it suggests a form of contingent positioning rather than any claim to authenticity. Miller is proposing the deliberate foregrounding of the critic within the text not in order to pre-empt theory but to speak personally within it and about it and thus also to reveal critical impersonality as just another personal stance in disguise. Miller herself indicates the dangers: a privileged few who can create interest in themselves because of the status they already have adopting a cosy self-referential style (Miller 1991: 25). At its best, as Miller both contends and has extensively demonstrated, these ‘autobiographical acts’ within criticism are ‘enlivening’ and challenging and extend, just as feminism has, the range of cultural material that is available (p.21). However, as just another ‘institutionalized’ form of criticism, the risks of personal criticism could be minimal, and, at worst, mean little more than the substitution of one style of academic authority for another.
