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Content NARRATIVE VOICE IN
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING
by
Edward R. Heidt
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirement for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1989
Copyright 1989 Edward R. Heidt
UMI Number: DP23141
All rights reserved
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CAUFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CAUFORNIA 90089
This dissertation, written by
Edward R. Heidt
under the direction of hXf. Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements fo r the degree of
tin.
E
HUS'
D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
Qate January^2 0, 1989
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1
j I would like to acknowledge and thank both my
t
i
dissertation director, Professor Jay Martin, for his
interest in my thesis, his thorough, singleminded reading
!
I and editing of my work and his wholehearted commitment to
i
see me through this project; and my fellow graduate
student, Kathy Schultheis, who introduced me to him and
encouraged me to ask him to serve on my dissertation
! committee.
!
! I would also like to acknowledge my indebtedness to
Professor Ross Winterowd who not only introduced me to
rhetorical theory and taught me in his Literature of Fact
; seminar but served on my dissertation committee as well.
| I am also sincerely grateful to Professor Marjorie
i
Perloff, Dr. Karen Bierman and Connie Destito for their
kindness and helpfulness to me during my first months in
' Graduate School.
I
j I also acknowledge here my religious community, the
Basilian Fathers, in the person of my Superior General,
| Rev. Ulysse Pare, C.S.B., for allowing me the time to
! pursue this degree. I wish to thank especially Mr.
Charles Reynolds, who first suggested to me the idea of
!returning to school, and the Rev. James Daley, C.S.B., who
encouraged me to investigate the possibilities.
Ill
i
I am thankful to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for
I
i
I allowing me to live and work in St. Basil's Parish which
j gave me the opportunity to continue to preach and minister
las a priest on a part time basis while pursuing the
I
'degree. I am especially appreciative of the pastor of St.
1
Basil's, the Rev. M. Francis Meskill, who holds the
doctoral degree in Comparative Literature, for his
; patience and understanding with me during those times when
; I was unable to assist him as fully as I would have liked.
t
I
: ... and, of course, my family, who have always been
I supportive and encouraging.
I
1
i v
I AKNOWLEDGEMENTS
i
ABSTRACT.....
INTRODUCTION:
CHAPTER ONE:
CHAPTER TWO:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
....... ii
............. vi
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING AS GENRE. .......1
ACTS AND STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
UNITED IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY...................57
Introduction.............................. 57
Tristram Shandy ........................65
Hermione Gart............................. 79
A Man Lying on His Back in the Dark......91
A Ninety-Five Year Old Man About to
Commit Suicide........... 98
Helen Keller..... ,,........ 112
Christopher Nolan...... 122
John Stuart Mill......................... 128
MayaAngelou........ 144
Conclusion.............................. 151
THE MEMOIR COMPARES AND CONTRASTS
ACTS AND STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS........ 153
Introduction...................... *..... 153
Gogo, Didi, Pozzo, Lucky................ 164
Tom Wingfield. .............. 176
William Wordsworth............... 186
Maxine Hong Kingston............ 201
Arthur Mi 11 er............................ 210
Edmund Gosse....... 222
V
Mary McCarthy............................ 230
I Conclusion ..........................236
!CHAPTER THREE: CONFESSIONS REVEAL ACTS AND STATES OF
I CONSCIOUSNESS ..... 239
Introduction............ 239
George, Martha, Nick and Honey.......... 249
Thomas DeQuincey ................. 271
Norman Mailer............................ 281
Andrew Greeley........................... 290
Perry Edward Smith.......................299
Conclusion........ 309
l
i CHAPTER FOUR: JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: CONFESSOR,
; AUTOBIOGRAPHER, MEMOIRIST....... 312
I
| Student and Scholar........ 315
The Quest for Certitude.................. 321
The Examination of Probabilities. ...... .328
The Right to Private Judgment............339
Conclusion............................... 351
CONCLUSION: A PHILOSOPHY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
WRITING: A METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE 354
LIST OF REFERENCES..................... 378
I
v i
i ABSTRACT
i
i
i
This dissertation studies selected narrative units
from autobiographical documents in terms of the
.mimetic/diegetic voices which express acts and states of
consciousness unique to the autobiographer. The
i
dissertation is intended to be a contribution to an
understanding of how autobiographical writing might stand
as a single genre and it details a method as to how this
might be done.
I
An autobiography proper unites acts and states of
■ consciousness by means of the narrative voices. The
mimetic voice expresses the different acts and states of
,consciousness and the diegetic voice comments upon and
!unites those. Eight pieces are used to illustrate this:
Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Hilda Doolittle's
<
iHermione Gart, Samuel Beckett's anonymous man lying on
his back in the dark, Eugene Ionesco's anonymous man about
to commit suicide, Helen Keller, Christopher Nolan, John
jStuart Mill and Maya Angelou.
; A memoir proper compares acts and states of
i
consciousness. The mimetic voice tells a story of a past
act or state of consciousness and the diegetic voice
compares and contrasts the memories. Eight authors are
used to illustrate this: Samuel Beckett's Gogo and Didi,
| vii
!
iTennessee Williams/ Tom Wingfield, Arthur Miller, Maxine
Hong Kingston, Edmund Gosse, William Wordsworth, Mary
McCarthy.
A confession proper reveals acts and states of
I consciousness . The mimetic voice reports the acts and
states of consciousness and the diegetic voice reveals
and explains the motives behind those acts and states.
Six authors are used to illustrate this: Edward Albee,
I Thomas DeQuincey, Norman Mailer, Andrew Greeley, Perry
Edward Smith and Cardinal Newman.
This study clarifies that narrative units in certain
documents are autobiographical to the extent that they
unite, compare, or reveal states of consciousness through
I
;effective use of the mimetic and diegetic voices in the
document or narrative. Speech act theory and narrative
theory set the theoretical frame for the genre study while
Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and Jacques Derrida's
language philosophy set a philosophical frame. These
theoretical and philosophical stipulations and
iclarifications, supported by the autobiographical
i
(examples, serve to differentiate and constitute
autobiographical writing as a genre in its own right.
I
I
INTRODUCTION
i AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING AS GENRE
My aim in this introduction is first of all to glance
: at the history of autobiography itself and of critical
writing about autobiography. Second, I will proceed to set
f
1 the theoretical frame for my investigation in this
dissertation of the voice in an autobiographical document
as autobiography, memoir, and confession; and to lay the
basis for distinguishing these from each other and from
i
iautobiographical fictions.
For the sake of a consistent exemplification, I will
i use James Boswell's narrative of the first time he met
Samuel Johnson to illustrate the various technical points
which I shall make. At the conclusion of these
^preliminaries, I will study the voices in other specific
narrative units from other documents as examples of
i
autobiographies, memoirs or confessions.
The remainder of this work will develop my own theory
J of autobiography as a genre, which I can anticipate
I briefly here, with the help of Patricia Spacks:
i
Autobiographies and novels alike must
achieve form, by discovery or by
invention....Novelist and autobiographer must
find the causality that produces plot: .. .To turn
lives into words— whether those words claim to
I render fiction or fact— involves some act of the
j mind that discovers the logic of happenings in
memory or imagination, although such logic
seldom emerges in immediate experience. Putting
a life into words, into narrative, rescues it
2
from confusion, even when the words declare the
omnipresence of confusion, since the act of
declaring implies dominance....Words lack
absolute clarity because they mediate between
one [Derridean] unknowable consciousness and
another. ...Consciousness, our only instrument
for understanding self and world, makes secure
understanding impossible;...It has been
persuasively argued that the problem of
insubstantiality so pervaded eighteenth-century
English thought that it determined the form and
content of much literature in the second half
of this period. .. .The efflorescence of novel and
autobiography as genres may represent a
significant response to this problem. Both save
individual identity from pure subjectivity by
converting human beings into objects: quite
literally: pages with words on them: illusions
of consistent substantiality.1
DEFINITION OF TERMS
At the outset, let me establish the "vocabulary" for
my study. First, I will indicate the concepts fundamental
to my study, defining each briefly. Subsequently, I shall
develop each one more fully. The crucial words or phrases
which I will be using are:
The autobiographical document is the published text
which indicates in some immediate way that it "intends"
to be autobiographical. It consists of a series of
narrative units of varying lengths. I will be considering
some specific narrative units which can be separated from
the document as autobiographical mini-documents in
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self:
Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth Century England.
(Harvard University Press, 1976), 20-22.
3
themselves.
The narrative unit refers to the sequence of events
of a particular autobiographical experience in
chronological order. If an autobiographer is narrating the
sequence of events of a particular experience and some
part of the event reminds the autobiographer of something
outside the event, the mimetic, chronological order of the
first event is interrupted by the diegetic voice of the
autobiographer who begins a digression. In this
dissertation, I will be more interested in the mimetic and
diegetic voices in the narrative units which represent the
autobiographer's consciousness than in the event itself
being narrated.
The voice tells the story in the document and its
units. Instead of narrating the story aloud, the
autobiographer transfers the oral, narrating voice to the
narratives in the written document.
The autobiographer' s mimetic voice speaks and renders
thinking as it spoke and thought at the time that the
story being narrated occurred. The autobiographer narrates
these sequence of events and voices of this particular
experience in a present voice. The chronology of the
external events is narrated in an attempt to represent
mimetically what actually happened. The voices of persons
who participated in the events are also narrated
4
ichronologically in an attempt to ;mimetically represent
I
[what actually was said and thought.
The autobiographer's diegetic voice. in contrast,
evaluates, interjects, changes, edits and otherwise
comments on these events and voices. The diegetic voice
| is the one which, in introductions, prefaces, dedications
and title pages, declares that the events narrated are
true and reflects upon them in the present. Indeed, the
actual title of the document, the act of calling it an
i"autobiography," and even the acknowledgement pages, like
Maya Angelou's, are diegetic acts:
I thank my mother, Vivian Baxter, and my
brother, Bailey Johnson, who encouraged me to
i remember....who told me I could write...who
! insisted that I must....who understood....A
! final thanks to my editor at Random House,
I Robert Loomis, who gently prodded me back into
the lost years.2
I want to situate my use of mimetic and diegetic in
t
! the foundations of Platonic-Aristotelian poetics which
I
!Gerard Genette has clearly and succinctly summarized in
<
his article "Boundaries of Narrative."3
Plato divided imitation properly speaking (mimesis)
|and simple narrative (diegesis) by saying that a narrator
2Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. (New
I York: Bantam Books, 1970), acknowledgement page.
j 3Gerard Genette, "Boundaries of Narrative," New
iLiterary History 8 (1) (Autumn, 1976), 1-5.
5
"speaks in his own name without trying to make us believe
that it is another who speaks /The Republic. Ill/
393a,e)." Plato denies to narrative (diegesis) the
quality of imitation (mimesis) and separates them.
Narration is at one remove from imitation which is itself
at one remove from the reality.
Aristotle, on the other hand, said that narration
(diegesis) is one of two forms of imitation (mimesis).
One is the direct representation of events by actors
speaking and performing before the public /Poetics.
1448a). The other is the power of the narrator to narrate
(diegesis) with as much imitation (mimesis) as direct
representation (1460a).
The acts and states of consciousness are the origin
and transmitting source for the document's narrative
units, its voices and structure. An act of consciousness
occurs when the internal activity in the brain and mind
happen as the result of the particular Husserlean "natural
standpoint"4 that the consciousness takes on the world of
external and internal objects placed before it. A state
of consciousness results after a series of acts of
consciousness have systematically bracketed and reduced
4Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure
Phenomenologyr (London: Collier MacMillan Publishers,
1962), 91ff.
6
the raw, empirical materials of the individual acts into
units, narrative groupings or mental states. Interior
activity has its own raw, empirical materials, parallel
with the external order, consisting of a gestalt of
insights, intuitions, attitudes, perceptions,
conceptualizations, assumptions, feelings, attitudes,
beliefs.
When acts and states of the autobiographer's
consciousness and life experiences are accurately
transmitted to the paper as a document based in the
consciousness of the autobiographer, a contract between
the author and himself and the readers is necessarily
established in the document in which the autobiographer
says that a variety of personal acts and states of
consciousness about life experiences are indeed voiced
accurately along with the events in which they occurred
in the document.
A novelist makes no such contract. The narrative and
the sequence of events and voices in a novel may have
little if anything to do with the real life of the author.
Novelists like Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Bronte, Charles
Dickens, James Joyce, or Hilda Doolittle represent their
fictional characters Tristram Shandy, Jane Eyre, David
Copperfield, Stephen Daedelus or Hermione Gart narrating
their own stories. When and if writers like Sterne,
7
Bronte, Dickens or Joyce make the diegetic addition in a
preface or introduction to the document that certain
specific parts of the mimetic representation of Tristram,
Jane, David or Stephen were taken from their own personal
lives, then that particular narrative in the document
changes and the writer's contract with the reader is
enriched in becoming more complex.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DOCUMENT
The basic work of bibliographic compilations of
autobiographical documents has been completed by William
Matthews (1955, 1968) and Mary Louise Briscoe (1982).
Matthews compiled an annotated bibliography of British
autobiographical documents written before 1951 and Briscoe
compiled a similar bibliography for American
autobiographical documents from 1945 to 1980. Donald
Winslow (1980) compiled a useful handbook which contains
a glossary of terms applying to life writing generally
(biography and autobiography). A fledgling periodical
called A/B ("Auto/Biography") has been started recently
which, hopefully, will continue to meet the needs of
scholars and researchers in the area of biography and
autobiography.
Matthews' and Briscoe's compilations consist of all
varieties of autobiographical documents: autobiographies,
confessions, memoirs, reminiscences, journals, diaries and
8
letter collections. I will focus on documents and
narrative units which may internally, diegetically,
categorize themselves by any number of these names; but
I will be attempting to show that the document or unit is
in effect an autobiography, memoir or confession, whether
it calls itself that or not.
Part of my project in this thesis is to determine
exactly what an autobiographical piece of writing is by
looking at the acts and states of consciousness
represented in the voices in the narrative units. Many
writers call their documents autobiographies, confessions,
memoirs, journals, diaries or letter collections, but
there may be elements of each of these subdivisions in the
document or a confusion of these elements as in Gertrude
Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or Robert Graves'
I. Claudius or The Autobiography of Henry VIII whose very
titles set up problems of generic definition. Jane Eyre
and Tristram Shandy are characters in "fictive
autobiographical documents" who have nothing to do with
Charlotte Bronte or Laurence Sterne. Andrew Greeley mixes
all three types in his document The Confessions of a
Parish Priest; An Autobiography but then proceeds to speak
9
about it as "this memoir."5 Part of my object in this
study then is to determine exactly what constitutes an
autobiographical narrative which can appear in any
document, including a novel, an essay, a diary entry or
a letter.
SPECIFIC AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DOCUMENTS
I would like to situate some of the more we11-know
autobiographical documents from history into a perspective
from which I will explain my own point of view. Karl
Weintraub (1981) and Paul Delany (1969) situate the
beginnings of what could be called autobiographical
documents in the early Greek and Roman annals which
recorded the res gestae, the acts of heroism, of specific
social-political leaders. These early "autobiographical"
documents focused on "what I did today" and "what
contribution I made to society." The name
"autobiographical" can't really be applied to these
documents though because the very word itself was
not coined until much later.6 They called themselves
chronicles or annals and they attempt to unify a
5Andrew Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest: An
Autobiography. (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1986), 19,
21, 22.
William C. Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography:
Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (Yale
University Press, 1980), 176-77.
10
particular portrait of a particular person because of the
person's fame.
Karl Weintraub says that the res gestae7 tradition
was based upon one's strong sense of responsibility to
society coupled with one's definition of oneself in terms
of family history (genealogies). An active, public life
in which a good person, governed by interior reason,
contributed significantly to that society was a model for
existence. An individual life was justified because of
the good effect that life had on society. This
individual's "autobiography" was a recounting of these
significant acts for the polis8 as an attempt to define
the self.
Res aestae turned into the Christian recounting of
opera dei.9 works for God, in "confessions." A person's
"name" depends on the belief of others that the person is
worthy of respect and remembrance because of political or
religious acts of greatness. Self-glorification involved
this confession of these great deeds for society or
7Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the
individual; Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. (The
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 2.
®Weintraub, 2.
Weintraub, 43.
11
church.
The switch to the predominantly religious accounts
developed at the end of the Patristic period10 when most
autobiographical writing was done by self-conscious
Christians, most of whom were clerics, recounting their
conversions.
The image of the ideal life of the monk dominated
much medieval autobiographical writing. The conversion
from sin, not only meant an acceptance of Christ and a new
lifestyle but it also meant the adoption of the monastic
ideal of contemplation and seclusion from the world.
The document that is classically considered the "first”
autobiography is actually called a "confession" by its
author, Saint Augustine. Augustine set the tone for many
centuries of autobiographical writing. Augustine not only
recounts the events leading to and consequent upon his
conversion but he also performs the hermeneutic act of
interpreting Genesis and giving his theory of memory,
which, takes the confession outside the realm of the mere
recounting of his experiences and into the area which
concerns the effect of these experiences on his mind, his
consciousness, his thinking. He, of course, influenced
Protestants as well as Catholics. Margaret Bottrall
1QWeintraub, 50.
12
(1958), Dean Ebner (1971), and Joan Webber (1968) have
examined the complex spiritual ideology of the Puritan
autobiographical document in seventeenth century England
and Daniel Shea (1968) and Diane Sasson (1983) examined
Puritan autobiographies in America.
Ernest Curtius' article "Mention of the Author's Name
in Medieval Literature" in European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages accents the fact that when one mentions
one/s own name or connects one's name with one's work,
there is the danger of the sin of pride and vanity present
which Wordsworth was afraid of but which did not appear
to bother Rousseau in the least. The person expects to
be remembered and immortalized in the imperishability of
their work. Curtius points out that Hesiod only attached
his name to his work as part of his family genealogy and
Theognis gave his name so his work wouldn't be
plagiarized; some did not attach their names to their
works because the work was so poorly done.11 Margery Kempe
succeeds this tradition by referring to herself as "this
creature"12 throughout her Book. She is also significant
11Ernest Robert Curtius, European Literature and the
Latin Middle Acres. (Princeton University Press, 1953),
515.
12Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe. (New
York: Penguin Books, 1985), 33.
13
because she is one of the first women writers to recount
the conversion experience and write autobiographically.
Paul Zumthor in his article on "Autobiography in the
Middle Ages" notes that life stories employed the
conventions of allegory and emblem exemplified in
Margery's sermons which she obviously got from other
sources but which are allegorizations, metaphoric
replacements, of herself; her emblem of her "walking
staff" ("Moses' rod")13 stands as a synecdoche for her as
a Christian pilgrim. Margery's conversion and pilgrim
jexperience are idealized and universalized in her Book.
i
Autobiographical writing in the Middle Ages was intended
!to be functionally applicable to others and assist them
[
‘ in the conversion process. Margery intended that her book
effect conversion in others.
i
\
' Karl weintraub says that Petrarch's autobiography was
i
la first to combine the double task of doing one's duty as
j a Christian and still being free to pursue creative
productivity in the hope of secular fame. Paul Delany and
| Michael Cooke draw attention to the fact that Hamlet could
\
'be considered the fictional epitome of this Petrarchan,
Renaissance man.
Protestantism, under Luther, "stimulated a process
13Kempe, 156.
14
of differentiation"14 with regard to religious
autobiographies and confessions. Around the middle of the
seventeenth century a striking reversal occurs in the
pattern of mystical, religious, autobiographical writing.
The acceptance of Christ and Christianity gives way to the
various "ways" of accepting Christ: Anglican, Lutheran or
the Calvinist insistence on doctrine of predestination
and this change occasioned the psychological need for
certainty with regard to salvation and the technical means
of achieving salvation.
Autobiographical writing like John Bunyan's Grace
Abounding places great stress on interior self-examination
and not only accepting Christ but "achieving" salvation
through one's own efforts. Newman's Apologia discusses
which "way" is better, Anglican or Roman Catholic and
Newman too is very concerned about the certainty and
rightness of his decision. Benjamin Franklin was trained
in this Puritan, religious drive for achievement of
salvation and perfection of the virtues but he re-directs
the focus back to res gestae rather than interior,
religious perfection.
According to James Cox, the French and American
Revolutions were other turning points in the
14Weintraub, 228-229.
15
representation and understanding of the self. Franklin and
Rousseau embark on their decisive accounts of themselves
and their lives at this time and Boswell writes about
himself and Johnson in England. Rousseau transformed the
opera dei of the confession and Franklin transformed the
res gestae of the chronicle or annal.
Rousseau and DeQuincey changed the tone of the
autobiographical document from religious to secular
confession. In the Victorian period, Newman changed the
tone again when he adapted the confessional narrative to
an apology or a defense of a change of religious sects.
And in our own time, Andrew Greeley changed the tone again
when he adapted the confessional narrative to an apology
or defense of a religious, a priest, involved in secular
pursuits, which pursuits he defends as religious. In 1985,
Linda Peterson published "Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua
and the Traditions of the English Spiritual Autobiography"
in PMLA; this both became a book-length study of the use
of the biblical hermeneutic in Victorian autobiography as
well as a way of portraying oneself in a literary form.
Augustine's interpretation of Genesis and his theory of
memory are ways of "telling" himself which are different
from the narration of conversion.
In brief, autobiographical documents changed from a
chronological listing of res gestae to a chronological
16
listing of opera dei in the soul of the individual? then
with Rousseau and DeQuincey, the autobiographical document
"confessed" to the intricate, detailed workings of the
soul as separate from religious or political-social
heroism.
in the first chapter of his book Confession and
Complicity in Narrative. Dennis Foster explores the
motives behind the "confessional turn"15 in narration. He
says that the basic desire to master one's own story is
the primary motivation in any autobiographical document
but especially so in the case of the confession where the
writer wants to master an area that was particularly
confusing and controversial. A "confessional" analysis
transforms a past, alienating experience into a connected
account of that alienation, a revelation. A confessional
narrative attempts to reveal and objectify the alienated
state which has made the individual incomprehensible to
himself and others and the confessional narrative tries
to explain that incomprehensibility in terms of the
presence of the discontinuity in the self, a Derridean
rupture between a self that was and a self that is, as in
a religious conversion.
15Dennis Foster, Complicity in Confessional
Narratives, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Chapter
One.
17
Montaigne's philosophical Essais continued this kind
of introspective turn but he makes a new point about being
"consubstantial1 '16 with his book, his writing. Walt
Whitman echoes Montaigne in "Calamus" where he tells
"Whoever You Are Holding Me Now In Hand" is actually
holding Whitman.17 People like Whitman and Montaigne,
Rousseau and DeQuincey, are not writing about religious
conversion or secular feats of greatness. They initiate
a major change in the autobiographical enterprise because
autobiographers now begin to focus on the very minute,
private details and intimacies in consciousness which make
the problem of remembering as well as the problem of
generic definition more acute.
Eric Kahler's book The Inward Turn of Narrative
addresses precisely this question with regard to
autobiography. He says that as society becomes more
mechanized and industrialized, individuals are not only
invited but are actually forced to look inward, to become
reflective and to examine states and acts of consciousness
16Michel de Montaigne, Selected Essays of Montaigne.
Trans. John Florio, ed. Walter Kaiser, (Boston; Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1964), lvii.
17Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. eds. Sculley
Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, (New York: W.W. Norton
and Company, 1973), 115.
18
about personal experience.
I believe that this introspective turn causes the
focus to shift from external acts of greatness or
significant experiences in society to interior awarenesses
of highly detailed states and acts of consciousness about
individual, often highly insignificant, personal
experiences. It's not that one would remember religious
conversion or acts of heroism better or with greater
clarity and exactness than something else but that
autobiographers are now examining many incidental, private
events and details with great comparative, contrastive
detail.
American autobiographers like Benjamin Franklin,
Henry Adams or Henry David Thoreau tend to be
autobiographical rather than memoirist or confessional in
the sense that they are writing with a particular
consciousness of the self in mind: Franklin portrays
himself as the self-made man, the successful American
businessman. Adams unifies his life story as an
"education;" and Thoreau finds his true self at Walden
Pond, united with nature. They are less confessional and
they focus less on experiences in which remembering would
be a problem.
STUDIES OF FICTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DOCUMENTS
E. Stuart Bates (1937) points out that, from a
19
librarian's point of view, an autobiography is a book
which believes itself to be one. Autobiography, in fact,
is not so much a species of literature, he says, as an
idea. Bates distinguishes autobiography from diaries
because autobiographies are written on the basis of the
diaries, at a different time; he distinguishes them from
memoirs because, as he says, autobiographies are concerned
primarily with the writer, whereas in memoirs other people
and other subjects are introduced for their own sake and
because there is not some particular significant
religious, social or political issue, a significant event,
stressed by these writers.
With the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century,
writers began to express themselves and tell their life
stories under the guise of fiction. Patricia Meyer Spacks
(1976) and Paul John Eakin (1985) focus on the eighteenth
century autobiographies in their studies and the history
of changing self-concepts and affirmations of the
existence of a phenomenon called "the self." In 1954,
Wayne Shumaker was the first to study English
autobiographies before 1700 as a genre separate from
biography and made the important distinction that
novelists create but autobiographers re-create. Dickens
wrote David Copperfield who narrates his own story and
Richardson has Clarissa tell her story through letters.
20
Critics generally feel that James Joyce told his own story
through Stephen Daedelus. Charlotte Bronte creates Jane
Eyre who tells her own story. When individuals set down
to write their "autobiographies," they wrote them in the
form of novels, using fictional characters as personae for
themselves.
Patricia Spacks' Imagining the Self develops the idea
of identity as it is located in works that appear to be
autobiographical fact and novelistic fiction. The
autobiographer claims by his announcement of the genre
that he is going to present to the reader some version
of a real human being. The autobiographer exists, then,
as a literary phenomenon in the same way that fictional
characters, such as Tom Jones or Tristram or Jane, exist
as literary phenomena. Indeed, the spacious novels of
the eighteenth century, Spacks says, offer the names of
their central figures as titles, and are as preoccupied
as any autobiographical document with the character,
consciousness and human identity of Robinson Crusoe,
Clarissa Harlowe, Joseph Andrews, Evelina, or Peregrine
Pickle. These stories focus on the intricacies, the
paradoxes, and the difficulties of human development and
acts and states of individual consciousness. Spacks says
that novels and autobiographies provide acceptable
contexts for the dramatization of consciousness because
21
they render acts and states of consciousness
comprehensible and recogni2able by placing them in a
scheme that defines, limits, and justifies them. The very
notion of an imaginative, literary characterization of
oneself or another or a fiction of either implies
fundamental consistency of personality, a way for the
reader to perceive the consciousness of the creation.
Spacks' study proceeds largely by a series of pairings
between individual autobiographies and individual novels.
Technique is what the early novelists and autobiographers
most obviously share.
Paul John Eakin explores the fictions with which
autobiographers represent themselves as inventions which
circulate around a central, synecdochic moment or
experience of self-realization on which they base their
perception of themselves and hence their stories. The
story, the narrative unit, is a myth that purports to
accurately report the secret, interior experience. It is
the author's way of shaping the self into a
comprehensible, accessible guise for others. Metaphor,
metonomy, irony and synecdoche join myth as formal devices
of the autobiographical genre.
Jay Martin (1988) explores how individuals assume the
character and personality of someone else, a fictional
character from a book or movie or a real person, and so
22
create a "fictive personality."18 Mark David Chapman
became the Travis Bikel character from the movie Taxi
Driver. Andrew Greeley speaks about himself as Don
Quixote. Paula Lane and many others think of themselves
as Marilyn Monroe. The fictional Travis and Quixote
become real to real persons who model themselves on them.
The real Marilyn Monroe exuded her own fictional creations
and perceptions about herself and her own femininity which
Paula Lane and others perceive as real models for
themselves.
I wish to apply what these critics have said about
the fictional aspect of autobiographical writing to
specific autobiographical documents. I will not be looking
at autobiographical documents in terms of specific
historical periods or groupings like race, sex, creed or
color. Nor will I be studying one autobiographer. I want
to consider a variety of autobiographical documents and
select narrative units (fictional and non-fictional) in
an attempt to define autobiography as a genre in its own
right by focusing on the constitutive element of voice as
it represents acts and states of consciousness in the
narrative. Many autobiographers like William Butler Yeats,
18Jay Martin, Who Am I This Time; Uncovering the
Fictive Personality. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
1988), 26 ff.
23
Sean O'Casey, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou wrote
multi-volumed autobiographies. Autobiographers in the
twentieth century have started to focus on their
professions, races, creeds, countries of birth as the
unifying factor which makes their work, according to my
thesis, an autobiography, rather than a confession or
memoir. Germaine Bree uses Domna Stanton's word
"autogynography"19 for women's autobiographies. Brian
Finney (1985) studied the autobiographies of twentieth
century British writers and found them valuable because
they were written by people who were professional writers.
Book-length studies of individual autobiographers
have been undertaken for a limited number of authors: John
Whale (1984) on Thomas DeQuincey; Gerald Monsman on Walter
Pater (in 1980) and Charles Lamb (in 1984); Robert Lowry
(1981) on Sean O'Casey; Shirley Neuman (1979) on Gertrude
Stein; Daniel O'Hara (1981) on Yeats; Michael Mannheim
on Eugene O'Neill (1981); Robert Sayre (1964) on Franklin,
Adams, and James. I will attempt to study more closely
in Chapter Four of this dissertation Cardinal Newman's
Apologia. his novel Loss and Gain and a group of
autobiographical documents compiled by Father Henry
19Domna Stanton, "Autogynography: Is the Subject
Different?" in The Female Autograph (V. 12-13 of the New
York Literary Forum). Germaine Bree,"Autogynography,"
(Southern Review. Volume 22, #2, April, 1986), 223.
24
Tristram from Newman's papers which Newman himself
prepared for his biographer in my attempt to study one
autobiographer in relation to my definition of the genre.
Autobiographical documents can be grouped, then, by
many varying critical criteria. Theorists have selected
their points of view and approached them from a number of
different ways in order to accent one or another
particular perspective. The autobiographical documents
and the narrative units that I have selected for this
dissertation are based upon my desire to define the genre
in a new way. My thesis is that it is how the voice in
the narrative unit or document unites, compares, contrasts
or reveals acts and states of consciousness of the writer
which determines the nature of the document as
autobiographical. I wish to suggest that if there is doubt
about the autobiographical status of a particular document
or narrative unit, my criteria can be applied to it to
determine if it is truly autobiographical. If the
narrative unit portrays an act or series of acts and/or
a state or series of states of consciousness of a
particular individual (fictional or not) through the
mimetic/diegetic voices, then the narrative unit is
autobiographical. It is a "confession" if it reveals,
explains or defends the acts and states; it is a "memoir"
if it compares and contrasts the acts and states; and it
i 25
is an "autobiography” when it balances and unites these.
At this point, I need to give further definition and
clarification to voice and narrative unit and here I will
use Boswell more extensively.
THE NARRATIVE UNIT
I would like to clarify and define my concept of
"narrative unit" in relation to autobiographical writing
by using some key concepts form narrative theory, notably
from William Labov et al. (1968) who say in their study
of oral narratives that the basic unit of any narrative
i is the "clause" which they subdivide into "restricted "
lor "free."20 For Paul Ricoeur, this basic unit is the
| sentence and for Derrida, it is the "trace. "21 For Wallace
{
|Martin, it is the much larger "motif."22
i 20Williara Labov, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robins and
John Lewis, A Study of Non-Standard English of Negro and
Puetro Rican Speakers in New York City; Co-operative
,Research Project No. 3288, Volume II: The Use of Language
in the Speech Community. (Printed and distributed by the
I U.S. Regional Survey, 204 N. 35th Street, Philadelphia,
jPennsylvania, 19104, 1968), 286-287.
' 21Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatoloay. trans. Gayatri
!Chakravorty Spivak, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974), 80.
22Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative,
i (Cornell University Press, 1985), 111.
26
The narrative is constructed by using these tools of
the trace as word, clause, sentence, motif in such a way
that a mimetic sequence of events, a plot, is clearly
communicated as well as a diegetic point, a meaning, a
reason for assembling the story.
For Labov and Waletsky, the plot is captured in this
series of restricted clauses; clauses which cannot be
moved or the mimesis, the chronology will be distorted and
the "free" clauses which the narrator can move at will in
order to make a diegetic point or attach meaning to the
restricted sequence.
For Gerard Genette, this plot or sequence of events
must first be told restrictedly, objectively, with little
narratorial intrusion and commentary. If commentary is
needed or desired, Genette says that the plot sequence,
the narrative, will then linger over what it wants
stressed. Wallace Martin says that the tools of drama,
such as dialogue and direct discourse, and the tools of
narratorial intrusion, such as relation and commentary
are essential to the creation of his motif as part of
plot.
Each word, clause and sentence can be examined as a
Derridean trace, a building block, which advances the
mimetic plot line and voice and the diegetic commentary.
Some of these words, clauses and sentences within the
jnarrative unit itself single themselves out as motifs or
themes due to simple repetition giving them significance
throughout the unit.
Each narrative unit in a document then can be examine
as another kind of Derridean trace, a building block,
!which advances the mimetic plot line, voice and diegetic
l
t
commentary in the entire document. Some of these
•narrative units single themselves out as motifs or themes
due to similarity with other narratives units or
uniqueness as a narrative unit in the document.
| An autobiographical narrative unit. then, is a
written or oral record of the sequence of events and
voices for a particular situation in the life story of the
autobiographer. The events in the narrative unit are
I
■arranged chronologically and relate referentially. The
reader is able to reconstruct the sequence and situate the
i
(Characters and events in a referential, criterial system;
i
that is, the reader will be able to list various qualities
and characteristics of the particular people in the
narrative as well as list the important sequence of events
that comprise the main event being narrated. The reader
will be able to reconstruct the scene, the drama, enacted.
I
■ The autobiographer represents his or her own personal
i
i
! consciousness and voice in the discovery and/or invention
'of a drama, an action, a narrative that assures them of
28
their own reality. It is a simple speech act of self-
assertion.
My point is that each word, clause, sentence and
paragraph of Boswell's narration of his first meeting with
Samuel Johnson can be analyzed as "traces" which make up
the structure of the narrative. Each block adds some new
fact to the sequence of the events or the narrator's
voice. The word "great" in the Journal is considerably
enlarged in the Life as is the explanation of the comments
about Scotland and the actor Garrick. The first sequence
involves a "great" Johnson meeting Boswell, making a
sarcastic comment about Boswell's homeland and
reprimanding Boswell about his comments about Garrick.
They are building blocks of the narrative. The second
sequence involves a diegetic expansion of these where
Boswell attempts to explain them in more detail. They
become major motifs or themes in the narrative itself.
The narrative itself then follows the same relationship
to the entire document of both the Journal and the Life.
It is a building block that turns into a major moment and
thus a major narrative, a motif or theme, that sets tone.
These units or "stories within the larger story" of
a narrative or a document may function as synecdoches,
metaphors or metonymies of the autobiographer's life. The
narrative unit and the motifs, sentences and clauses
29
within it become metaphors when they can interchange with
and replace each other because they are so much alike.
Boswell's two narratives of his first meeting with Johnson
are metaphoric in the sense that they can replace each
other as versions of the same story. They might also
replace other narratives that describe a meeting between
Boswell and Johnson.
The narrative unit is synecdochic when it stands out
as representative because it is unique, not
interchangeable like a metaphor. James Boswell's
narratives of this significant day in his life is
synecdochic because with this day, his life was radically
altered.
The unit is metonymic when it stands out as
representative because it connects, sequences or focuses
on transition and would most likely be found in a
confession which attempts to reveal the connectedness
between consciousness and act. Boswell's narrative of his
first meeting with Johnson is metonymic because it answers
a question that naturally arises about Boswell and
Johnson: when did they first meet? When did this
relationship begin?
There are metaphors, synecdoches and metonymies in
the narrative itself. Boswell explains why he didn't want
Davies to tell Johnson where he was from. This is a
30
metonymic unit that might assist a confused reader.
Johnson's retort at learning that Boswell came from
Scotland might be a synecdoche for Boswell's perception
of Johnsonian wit. The Scotland and Garrick discussions
could be metaphors which replace each other in
representing the tone of the Boswe11-Johnson conversation
at this first meeting.
James Olney's (1972) contribution is in just this area
of the exploration of metaphor in the autobiographical
document where autobiographers communicate who they are
through a series of narrative units which are metaphors
of the self, like Thoreau's comparison of himself to
Walden Pond. Thomas Pison (1977) studies the use of
metaphor and metonymy in relation to Wordsworth's Prelude.
In his article, Pison summarizes Olney's thesis by saying
that the essential unity of the self evolves out of and
into this balance, poise, or cooperation of opposites and
that this union can be communicated only by metaphor or
symbol. One topic leads to another through their
similarity (the metaphoric pole) or through their
contiguity (the metonymic pole). The
final 'metaphor of self' that shapes a life and
governs the design of an autobiography [and in
effect becomes a synecdoche] must await its
formulation after the metonymical relationships
of the life lived in time has unfolded. . . .One
can readily agree that John Stuart Mill's daimon
was the rational mind, that Darwin's was the
nature of nature as objective fact, and that
31
Newman's was his religious conscience.23
Pison adds Wordsworth to this group by saying that
Wordsworth's daimon was his philosophic mind represented
in the subtitle of The Preludef "the growth of a poet's
mind."24 I would say that what Olney calls the "daimon,"
is the synecdochic image which none other can equal.
Other images and narratives may be metaphoric to the
extent that they represent the author but are equal in
value and can replace each other. The daimon, according
to Olney, is the personal genius and guardian spirit, the
dominant faculty, function or tendency that forms part of
the whole but from which there is no escape because it
forms an essential part of the self.25 Olney's
autobiography "simplex"26 tells one story of a career,
conversion or achievement focusing on the essential daimon
and his autobiography "duplex"27 focuses on a variety of
23Thomas Pison, "Wordsworth's Autobiography: The
Metonomy of the Self," ( Buckne11 Review. 23.ii,1977),
85, 92.
24Pison, 92.
25James Olney, Metaphors of the Self: The Meaning of
Autobiography. (Princeton University Press, 1972), 39.
2601ney, 39.
2701ney, 39.
32
metaphoric expressions and narratives of the essential
daimon.
James Mellard (1987) continues the discussion of
metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche in relation to
autobiography by saying that when an autobiographer
selects a certain story to be told, it can be selected
metonymically so as to suggest a unity through
connectedness to the life story in the sense that acts and
states of consciousness behind particular events are
revealed (confession) so as to connect them to themselves
first; or a story can be selected, like Pison and Olney
suggest, metaphorically or synecdochically in that they
can replace each other as meaningful representations of
the author or one can stand out as a singularly unique
representation of the autobiographer.
Narratives that are metaphoric compare and contrast
acts and states of consciousness which represent the self
and can replace each other (memoir). A narrative is
synecdochic when it expresses a singularly unique story
and experience which unites the person's consciousness
(autobiography).
Mellard uses Henry Adams' medieval virgin as a
synecdoche which best represents the metonymic development
of events called the Middle Ages. Cathedrals, Thomistic
philosophy, Franciscan spirituality are metaphors which
33
can replace each other in representing the age. Mellard
then uses Adams' image of the dynamo as the synecdoche
which best represents the metonymic development of the
events surrounding the rise of Industrialism. Pearson's
theory of kinesis or Darwin's theory of evolution are
metaphors which can replace each other in representing the
age. Henry Adam's own image of himself as "accidentally
educated"28 is a synecdoche which best represents the
metonymic development of his life story. The specific
educational experiences that he recounts in his
autobiography are metaphoric to the extent that they can
replace each other as representative of his life.
VOICE
Voice follows the same pattern. Each comment spoken
or thought is a Derridean trace, a building block, which
advances an understanding of the consciousness from which
it came. Some of these comments single themselves out as
motifs or themes which represent the consciousness
generally.
I would like to clarify and define my concept of
"voice" in terms of some key concepts from speech act
theory and Husserl's phenomenology. If the voices in a
28Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An
Autobiography. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961),
86.
34
narrative unit are formed in consciousness and are then
i
I "voiced" from the activity in that consciousness, speech
act theory and phenomenology help to locate more
i
specifically exactly what that activity is- I will then
apply it to Boswell's voice in the first meeting
narrative.
John Searle's (1969, 1985) definition of an
ii1locutionary act explains what happens in consciousness:
The minimal units of human communication are
speech acts of a type called illocutionary
acts..-Whenever a speaker utters a sentence in
an appropriate context with certain intentions,
he performs one or more illocutionary acts. In
geperal, an illocutionary act consists of an
j illocutionary force F and a propositional
{ content.29
1 Both Elizabeth Bruss (1976) and Philippe Lejeune
I
i
j(1975) take the illocutionary act from speech act theory
1 and apply it to autobiographical writing by saying that
the autobiographer is "constituted in a reverie"30 from
'which reverie the story is voiced and from that reverie,
I 29 John R. Searle and Daniel Vanderveken, The
: Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. (Cambridge University
;Press, 1985), 1.
30Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The
Changing Situation of a Literary Genre, (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 102.
35
the autobiographer makes a "pact"31 with the reader which
says that the writer/protagonist and narrator are related
and the information communicated is true.
This illocutionary activity which constitutes itself
in a reverie from which the narrative voice arises entails
the creation of a language which Richard Ohmann and Noam
Chomsky say is part of a unique "language system in the
mind of the individual,"32 a "private, innate language of
the mind."33
I will be looking at the voice in particular
"scenes"34 of particular autobiographical documents or
narrative units. This voice, I shall say, will have a
certain "quality or tone" manifest in the illocutionary-
locutionary acts of the narration of the scene in a co
31Philippe Lejeune, "The Autobiographical Contract,"
in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. Tzvetan
Todorov, trans. R. Carter, (Cambridge University Press,
1982), 193, 201-202.
32Noam Chomsky, Hilary Putnam and Nelson Goodman,
"Symposium on Innate Ideas," The Philosophy of Language
ed. John Searle, (Oxford University Press, 1971), 128,
144.
33Richard Ohmann, "Speech Acts and the Definition of
Literature," (Philosophy and Rhetoric 4 (1971), 3.
34Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, (Los Angeles:
The University of California Press, 1969), xv ff.
36
operative, contractual35 attempt to communicate part of
the larger discourse in the consciousness of the writer,
in a language uniquely his own.
The voice, then, is that which articulates the life
story in the series of spoken or written narrative
locutions. The voice is the vehicle through which an
organized narrative content and sequence is communicated.
The voice consists of the spoken words (locutions) of
narrators and characters and any dialogue between them as
well as any thoughts (illocutions) of characters or
narrators written by the autobiographer. The
autobiographer's voice originates in the illocutionary
activity in consciousness which is the source, the
authority, for the narrative sequences of the
autobiographical document.
The autobiographer voices thoughts, feelings and
attitudes about personal consciousness and experience
through the creation of thoughts, words and feelings of
particular characters in the narrative unit who utter
thoughts, feelings and attitudes about their own personal
consciousness and experience in the narrative. The
autobiographer's illocutionary activity in the discourse
35W.Ross Winterowd, The Rhetoric of the Other
Literature. unpublished manuscript, 1988, II, 13-17
explains Grice's co-operative principle.
37
of the mind is that which conceives and constructs the
narrative unit and its voices and identifies with the
sequence and the voices in a way that a fiction writer
does not openly admit to. The autobiographer in effect
says: "I have achieved my intended effect on the hearer
by getting him to recognize my intention. My sincerity is
an essential condition; my hearer must have some basis
for supposing that the asserted propositions are true and
that they represent actual states of affairs.”36
James Boswell clearly articulates his feelings about
his experience of meeting Samuel Johnson for the first
time. In the Journal. the story is a significant part of
Boswell's life in London for that year. In the Life, it
is significant because of the lifelong friendship that
developed between the two men. In the Journal. the larger
discourse occupying Boswell's mind revolved around his
general experience of life as a young man in London while
in the Life f the larger discourse that occupied his mind
revolved around his experience of Johnson and his
representation of him in biography. His intention is to
record "Samuel Johnson, a man whose talents, acquirements
and virtues, were so extraordinary, that the more his
36 John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1969), 43.
38
character is considered, the more he will be regarded by
the present age, and by posterity, with admiration and
reverence. "37
When he comes to articulate the narrative of their
first meeting, different motivations, intentions and
attitudes emerge. His illocutionary intention is
different in each version. In both cases, he co-operates
by being very careful to communicate the sequence of
events as well as the thoughts and feelings and there is
no reason to doubt his sincerity and honesty, especially
in terms of other documents about the two men.
My point in using this narrative in relation to speech
act theory is to illustrate that a simple narrative of a
first meeting over tea at a mutual friend's house becomes
quite a complex analysis of thoughts and attitudes,
perceptions and intuitions for both men but perceived
through the eyes of one.
For example, in the Journal. he describes Johnson as:
a man, of a most dreadful appearance. He is a
very(&ig man, is troubled with sore eyes, the
pal^y, and the king's evil. He is very slovenly
in his dress and speaks with a most uncouth
voice. Yet his great knowledge and strength of
expression command vast respect and render him
very excellent company. He has great humour and
is a worthy man. But his dogmatical roughness
37James Boswell. Life of Johnson. (Oxford University
Press, 1980), 1402.
39
of manners is disagreeable.38
While in the Life. he describes Johnson as...
I found that I had a very perfect idea of
Johnson's figure, from the portrait of him
painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds soon after he had
published his Dictionary, in the attitude of
sitting in his easy chair in deep meditation,
which was the first picture his friend did for
him, which Sir Joshua very kindle presented to
me, and from which an engraving has been made
for this work.39
His tone is quite different in each and suggests
different points of view and motivations.
I believe that Boswell's voice in this unit has a
particular "quality or tone" manifest in the
illocutionary-locutionary acts of the narration of a scene
that became highly significant for Boswell. He attempts
to communicate this significance through both narratives
as part of the larger discourse of his mind in a language
which reads as quite uniquely his own.
THE MIMETIC VOICE
I defined mimetic voice earlier in this introduction
as the voice which speaks and renders thinking as it spoke
and thought at the time that the story being narrated
occurred. The autobiographer uses the mimetic voice when
narrating the sequence of events and voices of the
38James Boswell, London Journal: 1762-1763. (New
York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1950),260.
39Boswell, Life. 277.
1 40
i
particular experience.
Seymour Chatman (1975, 1978) defines the mimetic
voice as the unmediated, direct quoting where the
character is shown in action. Robert Scholes and Robert
:Kellogg (1966) explain mimetic voice as the one that was
'the authoritative eyewitness at the event and their book
indicates that the roots of the narrative are in this
’eyewitness experience and the mimetic reporting of the
eyewitness. Labov et. al. explain the mimetic voice as
the one that most "naturally"40 and easily tells the
story and recapitulates the experience for the person.
1 I will be looking at the voice in the
,autobiographical narrative as "mimetic" in the sense that
jI will be observing it speaking as part of the chronology
of the particular scene being narrated. The mimetic voice
is also the voice of the autobiographer as it proceeds
j chronologically through the various editions of the
! narrative units of the document. It is the record (to the
I
best of the autobiographer's ability to remember) of the
voice as it actually spoke and thought in the sequence of
events that the autobiographer is reporting.
40Labov, Cohen, Robins, Lewis, 288-289.
41
Boswell's mimetic voice in the Journal describes
Johnson as "great"41 while in the Life he elaborates that
description in terms of the "aweful approach"42 of the
ghost to Horatio in Hamlet. His mimetic voice also says
in the Journal that he will try to remember their
conversation and "mark"43 what was said whereupon follows
a series of unconnected direct quotations of Johnson's.
In the Life. Boswell's mimetic voice attempts to render
their conversation more as a dialogue especially with the
addition of the Garrick section.
THE DIEGETIC VOICE
Seymour Chatman (1975, 1978) says that the diegetic
voice is the one of the narrator proper; the one who will
explain, evaluate, and point out the important elements.
The diegetic voice adds and deletes, edits and re-edits.
When Boswell's two accounts of his first meeting with
Johnson are set side by side, such additions and deletions
are self-evident.
Susan Snaider Lanser (1981) contributes to an
understanding of the diegetic voice with her discussion
41Boswell, Journal. 260.
42Boswell, Life. 277.
43Boswell, Journal, 260.
42
of the "status" and "stance" of the voice.44 "Status," as
she defines it, refers to whom the writer is in relation
to the act of narrating and the event being narrated.
The values, attitudes, interests of the writer are
distinct from those of the various narrators and
characters. "Status" refers to the clarity with which the
characters and situation are drawn. Lanser's
conceptualization of "stance" refers to the point of view,
the perspective, the angle of vision from which the
writer, narrator or character casts the Husserlean glance
or "natural standpoint," and tells the story. This vision
or stance and the special status as "autobiographer" are
what establish the authority to narrate the network of
interrelations in the text.
Hayden White contends that the diegetic voice is the
one which, by virtue of its status as author as well as
narrator, substitutes, creates or inserts a "meaning or
purpose" according to the particular stance taken in place
of a mere straightforward copy of events.
Boswell writes the narrative of his first meeting
with Johnson in his London Journal as something that
44Susan Snaider Lanser, The Narrative Act; Point of
View in Prose Fiction. (Princeton University Press,
1981), 224.
43
happened as part of his year in London. The mimetic voice
recalls and sketches the meeting, some of the things
Johnson said, and his physical appearance. Any comments
that could be construed as diegetic might be comments
about Johnson's “slovenly dress" or "uncouth voice" and
"dogmatical roughness of manners."45 The comment that he
was sorry to have to leave Johnson's company for another
engagement with a Mr. Pringle is also a diegetic
expression of feeling.
It is only in the later narrative in the Life of
Johnson that the diegetic, evaluative voice is enlarged.
He comments on the embarrassment at the Scotch joke,
Johnson's sarcasm, and his interest in presenting himself
well to Johnson. In the Life. Boswell's overriding
concern is to present a fair and accurate portrait of
Johnson and his relationship with him. The Life has a
much more particular point about Johnson that it wants to
make from the very particular stance of Boswell's lifelong
relationship with Johnson as opposed to the Journal which
has a different point to make from the perspective of
Boswell's desire to keep a record of the events of his
year in London.
45Boswell, Journal. 260.
44
The voice in the autobiographical document is
"diegetic" when it exempts itself from the particular
scene and comments on or evaluates the scene in some way,
whether such exemption occurs a t the time of the event or
in retrospect. The diegetic voice in the narrative is the
record of the voice that comments and evaluates the
mimetic voice and the sequence of events. The diegetic
voice of the autobiographer is not pure to the extent that
it is interrupted by the representation of his own mimetic
voice in the narrative. The diegetic voice "tells"
explicitly what it wants known and noted about the mimetic
voice which "shows" the autobiographer in action.
The sequence is as follows: The "first" voice to
speak is the voice spontaneously speaking in the activity
of the event itself as it is happening. Davies introduces
Boswell to Johnson. These voices are in dialogue with each
other in the particular scene. Boswell's voice dialogues
with itself about the scene. Boswell is impressed with
various aspects of Johnson's speech and behavior and he
records them in the Journal. As he participates in the
scene, he also separates itself from the scene and
comments, evaluates and anticipates. This "second" voice
is not only the one that separates itself in the scene
itself but is also the one which narrates at the later
date. This second narrating voice is participating in
45
another activity which has its own mimetic sequence, that
is, the acts of remembering and narrating. Boswell re-
narrates the scene thirty years later. This mimetic act
of narrating is predominantly through a diegetic voice.
The biographer Boswell re-tells what was said, done and
thought but adds further commentary and evaluation,
additions and deletions revealing his own state of
consciousness.
Boswell's first voice remarks that he had always
wanted to meet the "great" Johnson. A second, diegetic
voice in the Journal describes Johnson's physical
appearance and a third diegetic voice thirty years later
adds the information about the portrait done by Reynolds
and the comparison to the "aweful approach" of the ghost
in Hamlet.
A first voice remembers random quotes in the Journal.
A second voice says it was honored to sit and converse
with Johnson. A third voice adds the conversation about
Garrick and a fourth voice talks about deserving the
reprimand. There are four levels of Boswell's awareness
or consciousness represented here.
ACTS AND STATES OF .CONSCIOUSNESS
Edmund Husserl (1913) contributes importantly to the
exploration of acts and states of consciousness. According
to Husserl, consciousness acts when it receives the raw
j 46
jmaterials of perceptions and intuitions of a particular
experience and brackets that experience into a construct
or state. Lawrence Watson (1976) applies Husserl's
phenomenology to autobiographical documents and he uses
Gordon Allport's term "introspective protocols"46 by which
the phenomenal consciousness of the autobiographer is
,understood.
Shirley Neuman (1979) discusses narrative
consciousness in relation to Gertrude Stein's
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The autobiographical
narrative unit can traverse time and transcend space and
Neuman considers this to be an important difficulty with
autobiographical narratives generally but she locates the
problem specifically in Stein's writing. The idea of
:beginning a narrative again and again creates the feeling
I
of a suspension of time, a continuous presence with the
very slightest, minute change of focus and direction.
Neuman argues that Stein recreates the narrative present
of the author's mind in the multi-dimensional spatial-
temporal configuration of the narrative.
! 46Lawrence Watson, "Understanding a Life History as
1 a Subjective Document: Hermeneutical and Phenomenological
Perspectives," (Ethos, 1976, Volume 4), 97.
i
47
I will be studying Tristram Shandy and Hermione Gart
from a similar perspective. The external events of the
autobiographer's experience are secondary to the
consciousness that was present at the experience and the
consciousness presently narrating. That consciousness may
have wandered back and forth in time and place during the
event and thoughts may go back to the past event by the
most thin thread; or the consciousness may project into
the future into some anticipated event again connected to
the present by the slightest link. Thus the narrative
becomes interlaced, intertwined, braided, much like the
stream of consciousness narratives of a Virginia Woolf
novel, but different from a stream of consciousness novel
to the extent that in autobiographical writing there are
real, external objects connecting real, external events
in the consciousness of the autobiographer.
Each associative digression takes the narrator to a
different point of beginning. This principle of observing
and recording massive compounds of details results in
either a relinquishing of control over the infinite
variables in any situation or attempting scientifically
to structure them and generalize by citing a single
significant variable.
Continuous presence is Stein's metaphor for
ontological autobiography. She attempts to capture the
48
essence, the consciousness, of the person by capturing the
flux and flow of their mental acts. She creates the self
as a phenomenon in the narrative. Generalizations and
opposing variables are allowed to co-exist in time and
space. The human mind has no relation to time, identity,
death, emotion. Stein admits the past to her
consciousness not as recollection or reliving but re
creating, renewing. When trying to create this continuous
presence in narrative, in a written text, the result is
a prolonged present because the moments do not pass
continuously without a prolonged elaboration of the
conscious thoughts and feelings. There are two continuous
presents: the historical past moment and the present
writing moment.
Stein's way of knowing herself is in assessing the
fragments of her life experience in an atemporal
atmosphere analogous to the scientific method in that each
bit of evidence that comes in, each variable, is used to
contribute to the making of the generalization. The
experience of the moment as the product of a linear
progression creates a portrait which incorporates and
extends (is contiguous with) the earlier portrait; there
is no denial or annulment of past moments. There is for
Stein, Shandy and Gart, no connection between the persons
and events in their lives except the connections made in
49
the mind and feelings of the autobiographer as recorded
in the text.
Daryl Mansell (1976) says that the autobiographer
wants to structure himself in words based upon this
impulse in consciousness, this impulse to order and give
purpose and meaning. The story is not being true to real
life experience as it actually happened but it is being
true to the author's consciousness of it and the impulse
to create, order, design, give purpose and meaning to it.
The main strength of autobiography is in its form. The
internal organization based upon interior, illocutionary
force not in correspondence with exterior facts. The
"truth" of what really happened is in the consciousness
of the autobiographer.
The acts and states of the autobiographer's
consciousness are the origin and transmitting source, the
authority, behind the sequencing of the voices and events
in the narrative units of the document. The discourse or
dialogue in the mind of the particular autobiographer
about the life story and how that life story is to be
expressed in a written document are acts in a larger
series of acts in consciousness. The autobiographical
narrative unit represents a state of consciousness based
upon a series of acts of consciousness which prepared it.
The series of acts of consciousness that an
50
autobiographer performs are those which examines the "raw
materials" (hyletic)47 of the interior activity and
discourses, other acts of consciousness, and attempts to
decide how best to reduce, "bracket"48 and represent
aspects of the life story and personal consciousness about
the story in a written narrative. If the autobiographer
compares and contrasts states, a memoir is written. If
the autobiographer unites the acts and states of
consciousness in the interior dialogue and finds a
narrative with which to express that unified
consciousness, the document is an autobiography. If the
autobiographer decides that the document or narrative is
going to reveal or explain the acts and states of
consciousness surrounding a particular event, a
confession, apology or defense is written.
James Boswell's narrative of his first meeting with
Samuel Johnson as recorded in the London Journal and the
Life can be considered memoirist to the extent that
Boswell's consciousness of the event is expanded in the
47Husserl, 91 (field of perception), 94 (field of
objects), 105 (stream of consciousness, field of
intuitions, 114 (sense experience), 226-227 (hyletic
versus morphic), 230 (objective field of consciousness),
292 (perceptual background, environment).
48Husserl, 99 (the phenomenological epoche), 132
(detachability principle), 214 (the epoche), 227
(intentional form).
51
Life and contrasts with the version in the Journal. On
the other hand, the narrative can be considered an
autobiography to the extent that this meeting with Boswell
is a very important, highly representative, synecdochic
event for Boswell.
My intention is to apply Husserl's phenomenology, as
Watson and Neuman do, to the autobiographical document and
its narratives as phenomena, objects of study, which
represent the phenomenal objects of acts and states of
consciousness in the autobiographer.
Louis Renza (1977) notes that this self-conscious
examination and revelation of consciousness is what the
author intends as a revelation of truth in the midst of
conscious fictional molding of the facts. Autobiographers
communicate their intention to tell objectively what is
secret and to render consciousness present.
When the narrative unit gives voice to various acts
and states of consciousness, it becomes a tangible locus
originating in and representing a part of the larger
discourse in consciousness. By reading and analyzing the
voices in the narrative, the perceptual, intuitive acts
and states of consciousness which created it are
represented. The autobiographer co-operates in
representing these interior acts because they are part of
the illocutionary act of sincerely intending to do so.
Boswell is very careful to detail his own thoughts and
feelings about his first meeting with Johnson,
j The autobiographer begins from what Husserl calls
"the natural standpoint," which is a unique, highly
iindividualized, personal standpoint, of being conscious
■that he would like to write his life story so he dialogues
with himself about this prospect. The field of objects,
the events, from his lived experience are surveyed and
determinations are made as to which of these invite
: narration, and would be put in the document. The narrative
I
I
! units of the document and the diegetic voice of the
i
|autobiographer become representative of the
'autobiographer's series of acts and states of
consciousness about himself at the time of writing. The
narrative units and the mimetic voice of the
autobiographer in the unit become representative of the
:autobiographer's series of acts and states of
i
jconsciousness about himself at an earlier time. Boswell
!narrates the story of his first meeting with Johnson on
i
the very day that it happens in his Journal and then
narrates the same story again thirty years later when he
I is writing Johnson's life story.
i
i
I When examining the field of external objects (the
i
;scene) which is comprised of particular events and
!experiences from the life or when examining the field of
I
53
internal objects (perceptions, intuitions) which comprise
a particular event or experience, each field has an
initial mass of external and internal raw materials from
and about the event. These raw materials are gradually
bracketed and reduced, organized by acts of consciousness
into a state of consciousness, the narrative unit that
eventually appears in the document. Boswell records the
raw facts in his memoranda, his notebook, on the day that
he met Johnson but after a thirty year relationship with
Johnson, the raw materials have proliferated and he
narrates the story of the first meeting not only with the
raw material of his memoranda and journal entries for the
day but from and with the thirty years of experience of
Johnson.
The immediate act of consciousness at the time of a
particular experience is that which records various
immediate perceptions, attitudes, feelings and insights
from the wide range of perceptions received. These are
recorded on to a palimpsest of past insights and
perceptions. Boswell already obviously had impressed upon
his consciousness a perception of Johnson as "great." His
consciousness then begins to bracket and separate these
events into single perceptions, attitudes, intuitions or
groups them together according to kind. Boswell attempted
to do this in the Journal when he tried to remember and
54
write down some of the things Johnson said. Some overlap
and interact with past perceptions and others will
interact with future ones. The experience of the event
takes a certain shape or state in the consciousness of the
person experiencing it. The autobiographer examines this
shape or state in another act of consciousness when
preparing to write the narrative and re-brackets, reduces
and re-combines again in preparation for the writing of
the narrative, the document, that will represent the
consciousness. An autobiographical narrative unit like
Boswell's dual narrations of his first meeting with Samuel
Johnson gives some insight into an understanding of the
acts, states, processes of his consciousness whose acts,
states, and processes are expressed in the document. The
document then becomes, in effect, a contract in which the
autobiographer says that consciousness would be
represented and indeed is.
I want to examine other autobiographical narratives
in the terms that I have outlined here: the diegetic-
mimetic voices, narrative units and acts and states of
consciousness. I believe that the autobiographical
document and its narrative diegetic-mimetic voices
originate in a complex series and accumulation of acts and
states of consciousness which are unified, compared and
contrasted, revealed and explained and I believe that this
55
is what constitutes them as autobiographical.
My theory of the autobiographical document is as
follows: An autobiographical document exists when there
are mimetic-diegetic voices in the narrative units of the
document which represent a variety of acts and states of
consciousness (illocutionary acts) which are unified and
singularly representative (autobiography-synecdoche),
compared or contrasted and replaceable (memoir-metaphor)
and revealed or explained as part of the contiguous whole
of the autobiographer's life (confessional-metonym). I
will apply this theory in the subsequent chapters of this
dissertation to a number of autobiographical documents and
autobiographical narrative units to determine if they
unify, compare and contrast, reveal and explain.
Boswell's narrative of his first meeting with Johnson
as recorded in the Journal and in the Life could be
considered from the three points of view of autobiography,
confession and memoir. As autobiography, the narrative
represents a significant, important event in Boswell's
life, one that altered his life and thus his consciousness
in a major way and stands as representative, synecdochic.
As a memoir, the dual narration compares and contrasts
Boswell's consciousness, his first impressions, of the
"great'* Johnson, who influenced his life so significantly
and they are metaphoric in the sense that they can replace
each other in the representation of the meeting. And
although the narrative is not really confessional, it does
reveal and explain the consciousness behind a plea like:
"Don't tell where I'm from." The narrative unit, "don't
tell him where I'm from," is part of the chronological
sequence and replays Boswell's mimetic voice. The
confessional explanation of why he said this, which
follows, is a metonymic, diegetic addition. The entire
narrative is metonymic in the sense that it is an integral
part of the sequence of Boswell's life story but there are
also metonymic moments within the narrative which reveal
and explain Boswell's feelings about the meeting.
I will consider Cardinal Newman from the three points
of view of autobiographer, confessor and memoirist in
Chapter Four.
57
CHAPTER ONE
ACTS AND STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
UNITED IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION
What else than a natural and mighty
palimpsest is the human brain?-..Everlasting
layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen
upon your brain softly as light. Each succession
has seemed to bury all them before. And yet, in
reality, not one has been extinguished....Yes,
reader, countless are the mysterious
handwritings of grief and joy which have
inscribed themselves successively upon the
palimpsest of your brain; ...They are not dead
but sleeping.1
The metaphor of the palimpsest for the mind and
consciousness is one which figures forth the diversity of
the mind, the chemistry of the brain and the complexity
of consciousness as a unity. An autobiography focuses on
the unity there represented in a synecdochic event or
moment; a memoir focuses on the diversity there
represented in the metaphoric replacement of significant
events and moments with each other; a confession focuses
on the revelation of a new, hitherto unrecognized or
unacknowledged metonymic connection.
My aim in Chapter One is to investigate eight pieces
of writing, four fictional and four non-fictional, which
Thomas DeQuincey, Tales and Prose Phantasies.
Volume XIII, The Collected Writings of Thomas DeQuincey.
ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black,
1890), 346.
58
I call "autobiography" as opposed to memoir or confession
because the diegetic/mimetic voice of the present
narrating consciousness of the writer/narrator unites with
the diegetic/mimetic voices in the piece. The series of
acts of consciousness which lead to the production of the
state of consciousness in the autobiographer who writes
the narrative unites with the series of acts and states
of consciousness represented in the narrative.
Besides the theorists used in the Introduction, I
will use William Earle, Jean-Jacques Mayoux and Georges
Gusdorf to clarify and define what I mean by this unity
between acts and states of consciousness which makes the
piece of writing different from a comparison, contrast or
revelation of acts and states of consciousness which I
shall define in subsequent chapters on confession and
memoir. I will use Tristram Shandy, Hermione Gart, a man
lying on his back in the dark, a 95 year old man about to
commit suicide, Helen Keller, Christopher Nolan, John
Stuart Mill and Maya Angelou as the illustrative documents
to support the theory.
William Earle says that the autobiographical
consciousness remembers and examines in the present a past
series of acts of consciousness about a particular event
or experience which acts were bracketed then into a state
of consciousness about the experience or event and are re
59
bracketed in the present re-telling. The present series
of acts of consciousness which remembers and examines are
autobiographical acts by which the autobiographer re
brackets the material for narrative re-telling. Northrup
Frye asserts that "most autobiographies are inspired by
a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select
only those events and experiences...that go to build up
an integrated pattern."2
In his article "Variations on the Time-Sense in
Tristram Shandy." Jean-Jacques Mayoux explores Tristram
Shandy's autobiographical consciousness which is caught
in what he calls a "thick present."3 Tristram's present
series of acts of consciousness are a series of acts of
remembering and examining a past series in a complex,
internal palimpsest of intuitions and perceptions.
Georges Gusdorf explores the importance of giving a
name to these acts and states of consciousness so as to
bracket, organize and unify them. Michael Cooke talks
about namelessness as a form of annihilation and naming
zNorthrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism; Four Essays.
(Princeton University Press, 1957), 307.
3Jean-Jacques Mayoux, "Variations on the Time-Sense
in Tristram Shandy," in Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy:
An Authoritative Text. The Author of the Novelf
Criticism, edited by Howard Anderson, (New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 1980), 578.
60
oneself in a text exemplifies the autobiographer's need
to create a name, a unified self-image and preserve a
self.
Lawrence Sterne contributes to the exploration of the
unity between acts and states of consciousness with what
I am suggesting to be the autobiographical document, The
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, where Sterne
portrays Tristram in the mimetic act of narrating his past
"life and opinions" as a present state of consciousness
with which he is united. This document juxtaposes the
"thick present" of mimetic associations and opinions in
Tristram's consciousness as acts of consciousness which
are united with Tristram's diegetic statements that this
narrative is the "history of what passes through a man's
mind,"4 a state of his consciousness.
Hilda Doolittle contributes to the exploration of the
unity between acts and states of consciousness in the
autobiographical document. Hermione where she portrays
Hermione Gart in the series of acts of consciousness which
narrate the interior state of consciousness with which she
is united. The interior state of random acts of
4Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy: An Authoritative
Text. The Author of the Novel. Criticism, edited by
Howard Anderson, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
1980), 61. All further references will be to this
edition.
consciousness and confused perceptions and intuitions are
1mimetically spoken in the series of acts of consciousness
jwhich dieaetically name the state of confusion through the
series of verbal images.
Samuel Beckett contributes to the exploration of the
unity between acts and states of consciousness in the
autobiographical document, company. where he portrays a
man lying on his back alone in the dark; and he portrays
this man in a mimetic series of acts of consciousness in
which the man dieaetically separates his consciousness
j
into three states and names them; a voice, a hearer, and
,a creator of the two.
Eugene Ionesco contributes to the exploration of the
unity between acts and states of consciousness in the
autobiographical document. The Chairs. where he
mimetically dramatizes a conversation between an old man
and his wife on the night of their suicides. The old man
*
!recalls past acts and states of consciousness which his
i
|present act of consciousness attempts to unify and, in a
i present diegetic act, to endow with meaning and value.
-The accumulation of experiences throughout a lifetime can
1
'be mimetically represented and diegetically selected,
explained and evaluated.
Helen Keller contributes to the exploration of the
unity of varieties of acts and states of consciousness in
62
her autobiographical document, The Story of My Life, where
she portrays herself as the young girl who learned to
communicate, read and eventually speak. The series of
mimetic acts and states of consciousness which led to
these achievements and resulted in the diegetic,
synecdochic realization that these were the "most
important days of her life" are united with Helen's
present mimetic series of acts and states of her narrating
consciousness which diegetically comments upon them in
retrospect.
Christopher Nolan's autobiographical document. Under
the Eye of the Clock, unites the consciousness of Nolan
the narrator/author with the consciousness of his
fictional protagonist Joseph Meehan. The mimetic series
of acts and states of consciousness of the quadriplegic-
protagonist Joseph Meehan are united with the series of
acts and states of consciousness of the quadriplegic-
author-narrator Christopher Nolan, who diegetically
comments on Joseph.
John Stuart Mill explores the unity between his acts
and states of consciousness which occurred during his
mental crisis in Chapter Five of his Autobiography "A
Crisis in My Mental History," a narrative unit where he
mimetically portrays himself as proceeding through various
[stages, or "rays of light,"5 on his way back to mental
f
| health and the acts and states of consciousness which he
i dieaetically selects and organizes into a narrative unit
t
; in the autobiographical document. He sifts the "thick
i
present" mimetically experienced in and during the past
!
act and state of crisis and diegetically "names" the
highlights in the present act and state of narration.
Maya Angelou contributes to this exploration of unity
in consciousness in Chapter 12, a narrative unit of her
j autobiographical document. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
’where she portrays herself as a child sexually abused by
i
| her stepfather. The past interior acts and states of
consciousness in the child are mimetically voiced and
united with the present interior acts and states of
consciousness of the diegetic voice of the narrating
adult.
William Earle focuses on the importance of the fact
that the autobiographer is examining a past consciousness
from the narrative point of view of the present
consciousness. Georges Gusdorf says that it is very
important for an autobiographer to examine the past and
5John Stuart Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1924), 99. All
further references will be to this edition.
64
gain control over it by naming it. Michael Cooke points
out that an autobiographer names and owns personal
experiences and states of consciousness so as not to let
them slip into the "chaos of namelessness,"6 Jean-Jacques
Mayoux calls Cooke's "chaos of namelessness," a "thick
present" of interconnections which the autobiographer
separates. Avrom Fleischmann, with Northrup Frye and
Susanna Egan, bases his theoretical perspective on his
belief that the autobiographical act is an attempt to
unify and integrate the life experience and consciousness
into a pattern.
Based upon these critics and documents, my theory is
that if a piece of writing, a narrative unit, unites a
series of acts and states of consciousness of the present
narrator with a series of acts and states of consciousness
of the protagonist, who is the narrator in the past, then
the narrative unit is generically a piece of
autobiographical writing and should properly be called an
"autobiography" as opposed to a "memoir" or "confession."
If a series of narrative units in an entire document
follow the same pattern, then the document is called an
"autobiography."
6Michael Cooke, "Do you Remember Laura?" or, The
Limits of Autobiography," (Iowa Review. 1978,ii), 61.
65
Each of the documents or narrative units that I have
chosen are noteworthy because they each evidence an
emergence from a "thick present" of confusion, where the
narrator was thrown into silence, into a unified,
integrated portrait where the parts of the chaos are
named. The chaotic subjectivity inherent in these
documents and narratives achieves patterned objectivity
when the acts and states of consciousness are cast as
phenomenological objects and given voice in narrative.
TRISTRAM SHANDY
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is a good
example of a narrating, authorial act and state of
consciousness by one who determines the narrative point
of view and voice throughout the document. Tristram is the
eyewitness to his own thinking, his own perceptions and
intuitions. Tristram casts his glance quite naturally at
whatever interests him and he organizes his discussion of
what he sees in whatever way he wants. He mimetically
represents the content of his own mind in sequence, which
appears, of course, to be completely, totally
disorganized, and diegetically comments upon and evaluates
it throughout the entire series of books which become then
an autobiographical document.
He diegetically comments on what he is mimetically
doing as narrator and protagonist and what he expects and
66
presumes that the reader will do. He says that he is
narrating his own opinions and feelings about his own life
story. He says the narrative is called his "life and
opinions" so that the reader is aware from the start that
there will be less "life" in the sense of a mimetic
sequencing of the external events as the field of objects
under investigation and more the "opinions," in the sense
of a mimetic sequencing of feelings and thoughts,
perceptions and intuitions, about the events and
experiences in acts of consciousness. His consciousness
is objectified as an Husserlean phenomenon in this
document as the various acts and states of consciousness
are revealed.
The content of the external field of objects from
which Tristram receives his perceptions and intuitions are
bracketed into isolated units which are insightful and
meaningful to him because of the simple fact that they are
his.
The fact that he created the story about the
problem with the clock oh the night of his conception (2)
or the problems at his birth (29) and baptism (44) or any
of the narrative bits and pieces, the traces, about his
relatives are devices through which he can mimetically
represent his random thoughts and feelings about these
events and experiences and make diegetic points about both
67
the experience and his thoughts. Tristram's narrative
subverts the assumption that this document will be an
accurate, unified sequence of external events or that it
will be a clear explanation of these events. His narrative
focuses on a sequence of random, incoherent, diegetic and
mimetic comments and evaluative remarks as present acts
and states of consciousness.
The sequences of persons and events in Tristram's
life come into this narrative at random; they are not
chronologically sequenced. They are sequenced only to the
extent that they trigger reactions in Tristram's present,
narrating consciousness. The associations in Tristram's
mind control the sequence; his opinions, perceptions,
insights, attitudes about his memories of events control
the presentation of events; Earle's two states of
consciousness examining each other. Past events are
narrated, amplified, clarified and sequenced according to
the present evaluative comments and associations in
Tristram's acts and states of consciousness.
The present series of acts of consciousness which
sets out to narrate this story is a random association of
acts of consciousness which have been formed into "states"
or constructs. Tristram's seemingly haphazard digressions
actually inter-relate and connect into an intercalated
narrative which represent a unified activity of his
consciousness. Tristram, in fact, admires his own
consciousness, his own digressive talent at inter-relating
past, present and future through associational digression,
progression and retrogression (52, 333, 380). He manages
to communicate that sense of simultaneity (268-269) of
past, present and future, that timelessness, which is part
of consciousness, by his mental meanderings. The mental
associations in one section of one story lead to a variety
of mental associations in another section of another story
and the incomplete stories overlap because of these minor
associations and not because they are connected in time
and space or have some major synecdochic significance or
metaphoric/metonymic similarity.
The events themselves took place or are taking place
or will take place in a particular time and location.
Each event has a field of objects which occupy or will
occupy some kind of position in Tristram's unconscious,
preconscious and conscious mind and memory. The details
of a particular situation in one story remembered about
one event may come to be associated with one or two
details from another event in another time and place,
joined metonymically, synecdochically or metaphorically
in the narrating present of the palimpsest of Tristram's
consciousness. These associations in Tristram's conscious
mind and memory braid together to form this narrative of
69
his consciousness, his "life and opinions" in this
document as a phenomenal object of study. Tristram
constructs and expresses an attitude, a stance, based upon
his own personal experience and feeling, that people
should be allowed to tell their own stories about their
own lives in their own way (446). It is not the external
things themselves, the sequential events and experiences,
the field of objects viewed, but the person's conscious
judgement and feeling about the experiences that matter;
the perceptions, intuitions, attitudes formed and
bracketed from the experience.
As a fiction, the narration of Tristram Shandy
represents an abstraction, an idealization, a model, of
the autobiographical enterprise as the act of an
individual consciousness who examines the perceptions and
intuitions of lived experience and records those
perceptions and intuitions ad libitum. The discourse of
perceptions and intuitions, ideas, feelings, attitudes,
intentions and motivations in Tristram's individual
consciousness are language acts in the autobiographical
document which are metonymic parts of the larger discourse
in his consciousness but are removed and offered as
accessible acts of consciousness (synecdoches and
metaphors) to the reader or listener.
Tristram's "thick present" narrates past events in his
70
life but as he narrates, a detail about the event will
remind him of a detail in another event which may have
occurred before or after the event being narrated. This
activity in Tristram/s mind and memory is the activity of
a consciousness experiencing itself in the continuous,
internal present of interrelated details. The details come
from the external past, present and future comprised of
events,a field of objects from which intuitions and
perceptions were formed, and they can be narrated as
stories with beginnings and endings that can be verified
or disproved by other consciousnesses who were
eyewitnesses.
Tristram allows the details of the discontinuous,
unstoppable, external ever-present field of objects to
pass before him while he participates in the details of
a discontinuous, internal present, a field of intuitions
and perceptions, which he is free to stop and comment on
or shape and change or re-structure. As Tristram begins
to narrate a story with a beginning, middle and end about
an external event from his past, a field of objects from
which he drew perceptions and intuitions, this narrative
of the field of objects of the external event switches to
a narrative of the internal field of perceptions and
intuitions in consciousness.
He remembers a lecture that his father and Uncle Toby
71
gave on "Duration" which led him to write his own Preface
to Locke, the father of "Associationism" (Chapter 18 of
Book Three, 137 ff.). Locke's theory of Associationism
and Duration undergird Tristram's whole approach to his
own life and opinions and become Tristram's own diegetic
comment on his own consciousness of his own method of
analyzing consciousness. Perceptual-intuitive associations
in Tristram's consciousness keep succeeding each other and
connecting with each other and this record of their
succession and connection in Tristram's "life and
opinions" allows others access to them. He uses Locke as
a defense of his narrative method.
The continuous present in an individual's
consciousness along with an apparent continuous present
in the flow of events in time and space create this sense
of a "thick present" because the external field of
multiple objects continues to flow and change as do the
internal field of perceptions and intuitions drawn from
the external field of objects. Consciousness itself is
burdened with this complex pattern, this palimpsest, of
intuitions, associations and perceptions of past events
held in Freudian-Derridean memory traces which make the
present moment of individual consciousness "heavy or
thick" with anticipation, pregnant with expectation about
the future or weighed down by past accumulations. The
72
memory traces, the expectations and the recollections, run
side by side with the disconnected, continuous, random
succession of the present associations always going on and
being recorded by memory. Consciousness attempts to break,
bracket and integrate the disconnected, continuous, random
succession passing before it into connected, discrete,
ordered events, actions and activities, perceptions,
intuitions, attitudes giving them beginnings and endings
and placing them in memory as little packages, narrative
units, states of consciousness. These traces are
infinitesimal, microscopic, microcosmic interrelations and
intersections that "bump into each other"7 in random
succession (which is suggestive of Derrida's point about
violence) but connect in the bracketing done by the act
of consciousness.
Tristram does very little bracketing, connecting and
integrating into narrative units and so is concerned about
the welfare of the reader in this random journey through
his consciousness. He invites the reader's participation
but he cautions the reader to be patient with his
digressions. The nature of his narrative is such that it
is natural for him to stop and reflect on a particular
perception or intuition that comes to mind. This may be
7Mayoux, 583.
73
frustrating, boring and trivializing to the reader who
wants to get on with the action, the sequence of events,
the essentials of plot, the adventure. He focuses on
particular perceptions and intuitions and makes little
effort to co-operatively connect and organize them for the
reader. But, in terms of the autobiographical act as an
acquisition and expression of a unified consciousness, the
"action," the sequence of events, the plot, the adventure
that the reader is looking for is taking place in the
mind, the consciousness of Tristram's associations.
Tristram attempts Denis Donoghue's "communion" with
the reader by suggesting that there is a "confident
iality,"8 a personal relationship between them because he
is relating such personal feelings. His digressions may
be burdensome to the reader because they are illogical and
difficult to follow and the reader loses his own authority
and control as reader except to the extent that he may
adventurously try to connect the random thoughts. There
is always the danger that the reader will miss Tristram
while looking for the plot.
The diegetic point that Tristram is making and a point
that is essential to the autobiographical act is that
8Denis Donohue, Ferocious Alphabets f (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1981), 25.
74
I
(everything a person is interested m and feels strongly
I
I about is a doorway to an understanding of that person's
consciousness. Tristram does not want to close off any
of these doorways to his consciousness in the name of
getting on with a "plot." He warns the reader to be
careful because the digressions in the mimetic narrative
come fast and furiously and the reader may be lost.
Tristram admits diegetically that he really wants to "have
thee [gentle reader] in my power (40)'^ by continually
postponing the tale of Uncle Toby's amours and holding
!that story as "bait" for the reader to keep reading.
Tristram mimetically represents the stream of intuitions
and perceptions in his consciousness but with very little
diegetic selection or editing along the way except to say
that he wants the reader in his power and he wants to tell
.the story in his own way and he likes digressing at
random. He does indeed diegetically select from his
|consciousness but with no apparent rational order so it
|appears mimetic.
i
i Tristram concludes from his own experience of what
passes through his own mind that the subtlety and fineness
of consciousness depend on this immense network of
associations, this palimpsest, in the brain from which he
•selects with no apparent pattern. The experience of his
!
'consciousness as a Husserlean phenomenon with the variety
75
of perceptions and intuitions there become the object of
study for Tristram and he attempts to represent that
object mimetically in his narration.
Tristram says that he can tell the story of any
number of events in his life and list the facts, the
sequence, the field of objects, as he remembers them, but
it is the detail and flourish of the perceptions and
intuitions, the attitudes and feelings in his
consciousness that give the facts, the sequences of
events, their interest. He wants to get past the factual
details of the stories, which information anybody could
supply, and he wants to get on with his perceptions and
intuitions about selected details which may be disordered
(61, 104, 300, 443).
Tristram says that he can list any number of
perceptions, intuitions, attitudes and feelings from the
field of objects in his consciousness. He can make points
about how he feels, what he thinks, and how his attitudes
were formed and it is this detail and flourish with which
he embellishes his interior states that give them their
autobiographical significance. The bald statement of a
diegetic point either about consciousness and its field
of perceptions and intuitions or the external world and
its field of objects needs the rhetorical flourish, the
mimetic detail, to support the diegetic point.
76
In Chapters 14-19 of Book 6 (307), Tristram makes a
diegetic point, an attitude that he has, and one that I
think is important to his autobiographical act, that there
is some humor behind this whole endeavor (7, 2 37). He
takes himself so seriously and he wants his reader to take
him equally seriously by following carefully every thread
of every digression in every detail to its end point. He
admits that there is a certain humor to this kind of
delicate handling and mimetic tracing, leading and
following. He is sensitive to the meaninglessness and
disorganization of the minutiae of this mimesis but he is
also sensitive to the fact that this minutiae is the very
"stuff" of which his mind is made. He does not want to
edit or bracket the progress of these thoughts and
feelings through his mind except to say that it's pretty
humorous.
The serious side of Tristram's activity is his
admission that time and chance check us in our progress
and movements. We think there is order and coherence in
our minds and in our lives, he says, but he then
mimetically exemplifies his diegetic point that there is
neither order nor coherence in consciousness nor in life.
Order and coherence are diegetic creations of the
consciousness. The bracketing and reducing acts of
consciousness hinge on the multiple, mimetic, sequential
77
associations of perceptions and intuitions which accompany
events and experiences. The diegetic bracketing and
associating of the interior perceptions, intuitions, ideas
and attitudes into braided narrative units create
coherence in consciousness.
But as serious as this realization may be, Tristram
still reminds his reader that there is this "fancifulness
(156, 161, 218, 260, 307, 413, 421, 433)'f:©r humor to such
an endeavor. A focus on mimetic triviality and detail
calls to mind that one is free to focus on the details in
any way and for any length of time and one is also free
to organize and bracket them or not. The humor about it,
and Tristram's diegetic point is, that a person not be
obsessively tied to the mimetic, cause-effect detail: the
fact that time and chance check us in our progress; the
fact that we are compelled by necessity, predestined,
fated. But he makes the very important Derridean point
that we are indeed each free to "play" creatively with the
detail and imaginatively organize and unify (the
Husserlean bracket) the interior eyewitness traces, fully
aware of inaccuracies and aberrations but also fully aware
that the facts are not the controlling feature, the person
is. Tristram invites the reader to join the random journey
through his own consciousness by inserting a blank page
on which the reader can sketch a picture of the Widow
78
Wadman (330). Tristram invites the reader to sit back and
enjoy the absurdity of this "cock and bull (457j‘ story,
which opens the lungs and heart (257), he says, and forces
the blood to circulate and the whirl of life to run.
Tristram intends that his readers feel just as freely
with their own acts and states of consciousness. He
suggests that just as the readers are able to be good-
tempered, patient and humorous about this frustrating,
endless succession of his own associations so they should
be able to be as good-tempered, patient and humorous with
the flow of associations in their own minds (77, 104, 164,
333, 380, 435).
The multiplicity of perceptions and associations in
consciousness can create a very real, frightening sense
of "panic" though as one tries to arrive at constructions,
vision or states with which one can be comfortable.
Personal memories of past consciousnesses and traces may
be recycled in any number of ways in an attempt to unify.
Unlike Tristram, Hermione Gart unsuccessfully attempts to
bracket and give some kind of order, coherence, and
structure to the chaos and multiplicity of her own
consciousness. She has become a stranger to the range of
perceptions and intuitions in her own interior life and
her narration of her consciousness becomes an act of
consciousness which randomly explores the confusion.
79
HERMIONE GART
Hermione articulates a wide range of perceptions,
attitudes and intuitions in consciousness, some of which
are bracketed into states and named, most are not. Like
Tristram, she is lost in this "thick present" of interior
associations. But unlike Tristram, her voice is
"frequently overwrought"9 and imitates the experience of
interior confusion and fear brought about by what she
diegetically explains as an unorganizable interior chaos.
Hermione's consciousness is unable to modify, combine
or re-construct any state of consciousness or perspective.
The mimetic voice articulates a consciousness in
suspension, in the act of transition, and in the very
process of re-examining, from her own unique, natural
standpoint, that "state" of transition where she
diegetically perceives the dissolution or disintegration
of past perceptions, intuitions, formulations, constructs
and states.
There is an essential, phenomenal consciousness
represented here; a consciousness who is aware that she
is in a series of acts called transition, changing,
becoming. The diegetic series of acts of consciousness is
9Hilda Doolittle, Hermione (New York: New
Directions, 1927 ), ix. All further references will be
to this edition.
80
examining the multiple mimetic perceptions, intuitions and
the past acts of bracketing and reducing into states with
a view to bracketing and reducing again into a new self-
concept, a new state of consciousness.
"It feels like dementia (6)," she says. She knows
that she would be considered "certifiably insane (6)"
because of these "worlds forming worlds (6)" within her.
There were some acts of combining, modifying and re
structuring in consciousness but not in the sense of
arriving at anything conclusive. Her mind was a
"patchwork of indefinable associations (24)," she says,
"breaking up like molecules in test tubes.... Some plants
give birth by breaking apart, by separating themselves
from each other (31,118, 178)." Hermione needs to creep
back into her shell, like the hermit crab, so that she too
can moult and emerge full-fledged (221), the renewed being
arisen from the phoenix ashes.
She speaks of her consciousness as an object which
is "octopus-like (61, 71-72)." The extended octopus arms
which reach out to re-modify and re-combine, structure and
re-structure, in an attempt to collect the chaos of
perceptions, intuitions and feelings within and make sense
of them but these attempts at structuring only make her
feel more remote and distanced from herself. The octopus
image suggests that her consciousness is immersed in the
81
depths of some kind of sea and the raw materials of her
perceptions and intuitions and the various bracketings and
reductions already done are the tentacles of the octopus
which reach out helplessly and try to re-organize.
This synecdochic image of Hermione's consciousness
as an octopus flailing its arms coupled with the image of
this same octopus flailing its arms in a sea that is
"frozen (161)" and motionless is for Hermione an effective
representation of her mimetic consciousness. When the sea
is considered as the field of external objects from which
consciousness draws new perceptions and insights,
intuitions and attitudes, the image of the sea as frozen
suggests that the field of objects in Hermione's vision,
the natural standpoint that she is taking on reality, is
also frozen, motionless. She can receive no more raw
materials until consciousness has processed, bracketed,
what is there. "Divided we [the multiple and as yet
unbracketed perceptions and intuitions within] probably
would stand," she asserts (78).
Hermione needs to cling to some state or construction
of consciousness of herself, some thing or idea to hold
onto as a nucleus, a core, a unified, organic sense of
self. One way for her to do this is in the assertion of
her name, Hermione Gart (4, 32, 28, 64, 70, 73), which she
does throughout the narrative.
82
The series of acts of consciousness which name the
self or parts of the self is a diegetic act of
consciousness which reduces or brackets the multiple
components of the self into the name, as a unit, and a
statement of fact. The act of naming is that act of
bracketing or reducing whereby one creatively utters the
words which represent the consciousness.
The names uttered are acts of consciousness similar
to Husserl's bracketing. The names are a frame in which
to place the object. Naming confers an essence, an
identity, on consciousness. Hermione is reduced to an
essential kind of self-consciousness in the simple
utterance of her name. Her awareness of her radical,
interior division of previous reductions and namings and
the chaotic multiplicity of perceptions and intuitions and
past formations are highlighted by the fact that she
breathes forth a variety of forms of her name for herself
throughout the book. She is aware of a multiplicity by
using different names but she is also aware that the name
is a common denominator. "I am the word AUM. God is in
a Word. God is in Her. I am the word AUM (64, 119, 175-
6, 193, 197, 198, 210)."
Hermione's constitutive "I" expressed in her name is
in self-conscious interaction with other "I's" and names
in the document. The self-conscious "I" in dialogue with
83
various past "I's" become the subjects, the heroines, the
organizing principles in the document. This kind of
autobiographical document represents a consciousness
examining itself in public in writing. But the 'public
Hermione7 examining herself in the written document is
the same as the private Hermione who is in the process of
interior turmoil, painful introspection. The public
Hermione in the document who is experiencing all of this
difficulty and disorientation is a heroine; her attempt
to unify and re-structure her consciousness is given
heroic status in the book.10 Consequently, the experience
of the real Hermione, the private person, who wrote or
narrated the story, receives an equally heroic status.
Her personal acts of consciousness, of re-structuring and
re-organizing, become externalized in the public figure
in the document so that her personal consciousness becomes
an object with its own field of perceptions and intuitions
and acts of bracketing and reduction for others to read
and interpret in the document.
Hermione says that "a person only has to address a
thing by its name and it would do anything (200)." She
needed to have this image, this construction of herself,
10Monica Biasing, The Art of Life: Studies in
American Autobiographical Literature (Austin: The
University of Texas Press, 1977), xv.
84
no matter how fluid, negative or inchoate, that her name
represented. Sometimes she says that she felt so very
strong, so right. Nothing hurt. And other times she felt
choked with tears of humiliation (175). What at once
feels like a great strength turns into a nothingness, an
emptiness and then a fear. She thinks that if she just
stops and stares hard enough in an act of consciousness
that concentrates, trying to bracket and reduce, trying
to arrive at systems and constructs of herself, then she
will have evolved out of the nothingness and fear. She
meets the Derridean absence, the void within while
attempting the Husserlean bracket.
•'The rest" to evolve is a "heart," an ability to feel
again, she says (183, 186). A spiritual-emotional heart
that would beat in rhythm with her own physical heart. In
the document, her confusion is named a "hollow space
(186)" where she wants heart and feeling and sense of self
to be. Her first sense of a multiplicity (in which there
is also a void) occurs when she becomes conscious that she
is stagnating, suffocating, embedded, forever "moss-grown
(116)" yet at the same time starving for an inner vision,
trying to break away, expand, grow. She "hugs HER to
Hermione. The feeling was odd, queer and distorted, like
being jerked out of the mellow width of space, out of the
length and breadth of people, out of black trouser legs
85
(135)." The predominant sense was that she was being
"galvanized to extinction (13)," turned inward, thrust
backwards. Like Beckett's man in Company. three
personalities dialogue with each other when "She feels
that something in Her should have warned Hermione."
Her perception of what was really happening to her
was not in keeping with her vision of a future definition,
a growth. She felt half of herself would be forever
missing (16, 56, 200) and she needed that half to modify,
re-combine and re-construct the whole. She says that it
feels like one presence was torn from her and another
alien presence was left alone within her. She could not
know who she was nor is because she is really only half
there; she has let the other half go. She did not feel
at home in herself nor did she feel at home outside of
herself. She feels as if she were the mercury about to
burst out of the top of the thermometer (59); rising
higher and higher, pulsing and beating, reaching for
degrees which are beyond its capability. She feels as if
she is shut up in a submarine (87) or in a bomb that is
suddenly ready to explode. She obsesses about finding
herself and she is aware that she is obsessed with the
obsession itself (33); but she realizes that giving up the
obsessive search was itself too frightening. It is easier
to cling to memories overgrown. She would grope about
!(with the octopus-like tentacles of her consciousness) in
the search forward but there was no sign in the world to
give her direction. The tentacles of the octopus of her
mind later become a "mental cobweb (59, 188)" that she
herself (or some self within her) has woven.
She does have some sense of hope which occasionally
emerges, but she wonders, when "this" shaping, this
i
apparent bracketing and reducing, will be over (136); when
this play they call "Pygmalion" will be finished (138).
She determines that "incandescence" is that quality of
soul which gives it its shape and centrality. Words
constructed and breathed forth as names for acts of
consciousness make that state of consciousness
t
incandescent. There is always, in the heart of a new
consciousness forming, just that center, that pin point
of "incandescence" that holds it together (206, 215). And
I
j Hermione does very often feel as if she is the Eliza
'Doolittle character being formed in Pygmalion or a
I
character in a bad novel where there is no reality (168-
i
J9, 173, 190).
i
, She needs to move about and re-arrange her life "like
doll house furniture (55, 151)" but she can't do it. She
feels like she's the doll who has been set down by someone
else in a window. This state brings about a negativity,
a self-consciousness that is painful because it can't
1
I ____________ ________________________________________________________________ _________
define and name itself. She is not doing the shaping and
molding.
When asked what she would "take up next (51)," she
responds that she does not know what this "take up" means.
She is lost in the present interior journey through
multiple perceptions and intuitions, past constructs and
visions, and does not care to "take up" anything except
to perform the acts of consciousness which will give her
the authority to sort out the multiplicity within; nor
does she even know how to go about "taking up" anything
new. Others still suggest that she ought to do something
because she looks too odd, distracted, worried, and "not
right here (96, 196)." They want to know where she is
going. She agrees that everybody seems to be "taking
something up" and "caring for something (82)" but she
wonders when this will happen for her. She rather feels
continually beaten down when she tries to "take up." She
focuses on the incidental and the trivial, the molecules
and triangles of her mind fetched in by the octopus arms.
The confused state causes her to generalize and
conceptualize in such a way that it feels like a
construction to her, something she has created rather than
been forced upon her. "All your life (52)" may be spent
in vain looking for glory or fame, wisdom or happiness but
she feels as if she can't love anyone and her brain is a
88
lead block, a frozen sea, when she tries to remember
having loved or cared for something or someone. She
wonders what she ever "took up" and what she was when she
took it up? And what is she now?
As a matter of fact, now, she says, is raging down
upon her like a "great lumbering bullock (54, 237)," half
formed, dangerous. The confusion tossed her about in the
undulation of the now and she could not re-comprehend, re
organize, re-order. Now is the very thing that made this
so difficult. She would sit with the moment, the now, the
fraction of waiting, and lose it. Nothing could bring
back that lost moment. No words could make the thing
solid, visible and able to be coped with. Hermione seeks
the solid and the visible as the something tangible and
real about her consciousness with which she could cope.
She is tremendously conscious of significant, solid,
visible moments transcending themselves and passing into
"all moments" and thus losing their specificity,
uniqueness and tangibility (214-216).
The day, like her consciousness, is divided into these
moments from dawn til dark. One moment divides early
morning from exact morning, as another moment has divided
it from dawn. Zeno-like, Hermione divides herself and
everything else infinitely in two. Like Beckett's "millet
89
grains of sand,"11 in Endgame. the pile of sand represents
the essential wholeness of being and unity of
consciousness at the same time that it is comprised of
this infinite number of these grains of sand. Hermione
sees herself, her consciousness, as divided into moments
which are each standing upon the other, like grains of
sand, each moment connected to the other, saving the
other. This petty pace of infinite divisibility, she
says, echoing Shakespeare's Macbeth, will creep on into
tomorrow as it did today, making all her yesterdays and
tomorrows into an infinite, frustrating divisibility of
moments (216) . She stood now as part of next year and
part of last year but not totally either (225); she could
feel the moment about to pass on to the next moment and
then into all moments. But each of those moments, taken
together, gave her consciousness its incandescence, its
wholeness, its centrality.
"People do get lost, don't they," she asks (232).
We've all come to the end of something and when we look
back at it, it appears to be a "heap of things," piled up,
millet grains, infinitely divisible. She wonders where
11Samuel Beckett, Endgame: A Play in One Act
followed by Act Without Words: A Mime for One Player.
(New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1958), 70. Also Malone
Dies, (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 50.
her own voice is, her own reality. She knows that there
is within her that one grain, that one atomic, minute,
center, that core of pure, incandescent truth that will
unite her division.
Later in the book she wonders why she ever did "go
on with it (191)“ and she determines that the something
that she got on with was a someone, herself. She wonders
why she ever did get on with herself because herself
turned out to be a series of others within her who
tampered with each other. The very multiplicity and
complexity of the range of intuitions and perceptions in
consciousness are like a "delicate mechanical instrument
(191)" and should not be tampered with unthinkingly
because such tampering is disrespectful to the
complicated, sensitive mechanism.
She concludes that she should not have really
bothered with all of this analysis of the "thing behind
the thing that mattered" which is her essential self-
consciousness, her incandescence (193, 198). If she had
just gone on saying and doing the same things or perhaps
just let go and drifted along, perhaps then, she and the
others within her would have come to realize that the
thing (the phenomenal consciousness as an object of study,
the person, the unified self) behind the thing (the
exterior field, the surface, the physical, the multiple
91
perceptions and intuitions) was what mattered.
In Hermione's acts of consciousness which creatively
and mimetically construct themselves from the perceptions
and intuitions that make up her consciousness, she conveys
the state of multiple self-consciousness that is keenly
aware of itself. She talks about judging the entire tree
by one leaf (56) like one may judge an entire person from
one conversation. She sees the forest (the whole pile of
sand) of her consciousness or the trees (the millet
grains) or both or neither. She pictures herself in the
forest primeval (98) and talks about herself as a little
bird which has no wings, beak or feathers or the sort of
thing a caterpillar would be before it is born (144).
A MAN LYING ON HIS BACK IN THE DARK
In the document Company. Samuel Beckett creates three
voices to represent mimetically the acts and states of
consciousness of a man "who is on his back in the dark."12
The man diegetically comments that he acknowledges these
entities for the sake of the company they bring. Besides
hearing the voice, the man is also aware of visual
changes in the degree of blackness which make up the
darkness when he opens and closes his eyes and he is also
12Samuel Beckett, Company. (London: Jack Calder,
1980), 7. All further references will be to this
edition.
92
aware of spatial changes in that he can vary his physical
position.
He hears this voice "telling his past (8)" but the
information given by the voic’ e "cannot be verified (7-8)."
The voice alludes to the present fact that the man is
lying on his back in the darkness and rarely alludes to
the future but the voice appears to be a "devising for the
sake of company (8)."
The man lying on his back in the dark says that the
voice is addressing him as "you" and telling stories about
his past. The man decides that he will refer to the voice
as "he" or "that cantankerous other (9)." He wonders if
this voice might be talking about someone else present in
the dark room or if the voice is speaking to him or
someone else in the room or "to another of that other or
of him. Or of another still. To another of that other or
of him or of another still (14)." He concludes that the
voice is in fact speaking to him about himself because he
recognizes the stories as accurately describing him, his
past and his situation. He wonders why the voice is
speaking if there is no one else to hear and benefit from
the stories (61). The only one to benefit is the hearer
himself. He hears the stories about himself and then is
left with silence punctuated by his own breathing. The
hearer leaves, stops listening, because the voice stops
93
speaking. The man remains on his back in the dark and he
reminds himself in the silence that both the hearer and
the voice are creatures, figments of his imagination (63).
He himself on his back in the dark is the one who created
them, who devised them for company to counter and temper
the experience of the void within, the silence, the
nothingness (64). The "devised deviser devises (64)" the
voice and the hearer for the sake of company. Whether the
deviser is the man himself or the voice or the hearer,
they "devise" each other as entities who are created for
the sake of creating, devising, as an activity, something
to do.
Because the voice is speaking to him as a second
person, he assumes that the subject matter of the
narrative, the anecdotes, must be about him or the voice
would use the third person. But all of this mental
activity is a "lower order of mental activity (15)" to him
which is good because it offers some degree of company,
a feeling of communion with someone else, himself, his
own multiple consciousness.
The voice comes to him from various quarters of the
room, "from all sides and levels with equal remoteness"
but "at no time from below (43)," reminding him that he
is indeed lying on his back on the floor in the dark with
his ears in the center of the room so that the voice can
94
fill the 180 degrees around his head, on both side of his
ears (44). The voice is sometimes a faint murmur in his
ear, which ebbs farther and farther away (19). It may
change direction or flatten its tone (26). The voice may
retreat into a long silence at which time the man is left
with his breathing. The voice may repeat a story with a
minor variant. It may remind him of the time he had his
own voice, when he could speak in the first person
singular rather than create a voice who speaks about him
as a second person, a "you." The voice affirms, negates,
interrogates, explains and exclaims (26).
He thinks sometimes that he will be on his back in
this darkness and silence forever at which time the voice
returns to penetrate the silence and darkness.
He decides later in the document to name himself as
the one who hears the voice; he is also the one who
breathes when the voice is silent. He calls the breather
H. Aspirate and informs the voice that this is his name.
But he abandons the naming plan because essentially it
really doesn't matter because there is an unnameable voice
and an unnameable hearer and an unnameable breather who
are each part of the one man's consciousness. But he
changes his mind again (59) and decides to call the hearer
"M" and himself, the breather, "W" and the voice remains
the voice. He devises all this not only for the sake of
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company but also for the sake of referential clarity.
He wonders if he should try to utter something
himself, as the breather, the creator, W. His voice would
at least be an addition to the others and hence add more
company. A name is a hook, an organizer, a way to focus.
He concludes that the voice telling the stories about him
must be his own because the stories are so accurate. The
voice must be a device of his own for the sake of company
in the silence and darkness. He concludes "for the time
being" that he is actually "speaking of himself (34)"
"which of all the imaginable positions has the most to
offer in the way of company (35)."
He wants himself as hearer of his own voice to become
more "companionable and human,...more alive (35-36, 45-
46)" by an attempt at "reflexion, recall and even speech
(36-37)." He is looking for some trace of emotional
response, some sign of character. Later, he wonders if
the voice, as well as the hearer, could be improved and
made more companionable, less flat, repetitious, faint
(45). He would like the voice to find an "optimum
position from which to discharge itself with ideal
amplitude for the greatest effect (46)."
When the voice tells him stories about himself from
his past, the stories weary and confuse him. He imagines
himself as the hearer who is apathetic (71) and mentally
96
inert (70) unless the voice is telling a story. He
wonders if all his crawling around in the darkness or
straining his eyes to see in the darkness are things that
could set these creative, storytelling voices into motion.
Taste, touch, and smell appear to have "long-since dulled
(72)" but sight, movement and hearing are still working.
He switches from himself as hearer and voice to
himself as the deviser, the creator, W, and wonders if he
is as mentally active and companionable as he wishes them to
be (72). He sees himself crawling around in the dark
trying to see. The creator in him is mentally alert to
any clues that the hearer or the storyteller might offer
to indicate to him the nature of the place where his
imagination has consigned him (74-5).
The craving for companionship revives when he has
been lying in silence for awhile. He needs to hear the
voice again tell him a story about himself (77). Whether
the voice is telling the truth or not, whether the voice
is selecting and distorting the facts, the creator in him
finds the innumerable ways and anecdotes of the voice most
endearing (78). He learns to permute the three voices in
a companionable way (79) just as he learns to take various
physical positions as he lies in the darkness (80). The
varieties of voices and positions "wax and wane" with each
other (83) and this "waxing and waning," beginning, fading
97
and ending seem to be the only constant. The dialogue of
the voices in consciousness and the change in physical
position and degrees of darkness are what make the void,
darkness and silence less fearsome and more companionable.
He imagines every so often in the dialogue of voices
in consciousness that he is not alone in the darkness of
a meaningless void (86) of consciousness. The others
within him "wax" about their respective interior positions
and points of view until they "wane" into silence and come
together in a unified consciousness, only to split again
and start later. They slowly cease their laboring for
words and images and fabling for stories and dialoguing
about truths and "he in his consciousness is as he always
was... alone. (89)1 1
The diegetic voice tells him that his mind is less
active than it has been but the present "activity of mind
however slight is a necessary complement of company (11)."
The important fact about this document is the dialogue of
the three voices in consciousness which offer different
angles and perceptions, intuitions and insights. The
three voices are complementary in their construction of
narratives and self-concepts.
The value of this document as autobiographical is in
the quality of mind and spirit, the consciousness of the
man and the degree to which the reader is admitted to
98
these acts of consciousness.
Hermione, Tristram and Beckett's man are examples of
the metaphysical, phenomenological compulsion to find and
be true to one's own perceptions. They are each motivated
to discover and uncover an innermost structure to their
consciousness that will unify them. The documents do not
represent "states" of consciousness so much as they do a
dialogue among states of consciousness, which dialogues
are acts of consciousness. The relationship between this
interior life, this dialogue between states of
consciousness, is the story. Hermione, Tristram and the
man in the dark are attempting to come to a
"selbstbesinnung,1,13 an inner, self-understanding of their
own consciousness. The autobiographical writer is
metaphysically urged to search for the interior essence,
the root, the inner self on which a life (and a document)
can be based and built.
A NINETY-FIVE YEAR OLD MAN ABOUT TO COMMIT SUICIDE
Eugene Ionesco's 95 year old man in the play, The
chairs^is also attempting, on the night of his suicide,
to come to some degree of self-understanding as Hermione
and Beckett's man by remembering and examining in a series
13Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography.
(Harvard University Press, 1960), 182.
99
of acts of consciousness, the mimetic details and events,
the intentions and motivations, the raw materials of
various past acts and states of consciousness in his life
with a view to bracketing them and reducing them and
making a diegetic, coherent statement about the meaning
of his life.
He has hired a professional orator, a biographer, so
to speak, who, on the night of this suicide, will deliver
a speech about the meaning of the man's life. But the
orator turns out to be mute which suggests to me that no
one, including the individual, can really capture a
philosophy of life in a diegetic, bracketed evaluation of
that life in a speech or document, in a single narrative
or series of narratives.
The old man has hired the orator to do this because
he says that he has "difficulty expressing himself...it
isn't easy for him. . .but he must tell all."14 His wife
insists that its easy for most people to express
themselves once they've made up their minds to do so.
Diegetic formulations, constructions and deductions about
the meaning and significance of particular events and
experiences come naturally, according to William
14Eugene Ionesco, Four Plays: The Bald Soprano, The
Lesson, Jack, or The Submission, The Chairs, trans.
Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1958), 118-
119.
100
Labov et. al.'s research, from the person's examination
and review of the raw material Of lived experience. The
central irony in this play is that the words which the man
utters about himself are constituted in the raw material
of perceptions and intuitions in the man's consciousness
and they do indeed, contrary to his protests, come easily
for this old man, as in a spontaneous overflow. He
doesn't really need the orator and he can express himself
quite well. The audience listens to the mimetic flow of
the man's consciousness but the man's ability to bracket
diegetically the empirical data of the perceptions and
intuitions of a lifetime into a single message or meaning
is what is difficult for him.
The narrative unit in the play that begins "Then at
last we arrived...(115 ff.)" is the beginning of a story
that lias always made this couple laugh. For the 75 years
of their marriage, she has loved hearing him tell this
story every evening but he has tired of it. She calls
this story, "the story of his life, which fascinates her
(115)" because "its her story too" and she says that she
intentionally makes herself forget everything as though
her mind were a "clean slate (115)."
The raw materials of the sequence of external events
in this story have become lost and distorted. Facts and
numbers do not fit together and the sequence is confused
101
and disordered. The mimetic sequence is not a reliable
representation of what happened. But something about the
story unifies the consciousness of this couple.
The story goes like this: They first arrive at a
fence. They are cold and wet and have been so for a very
long time. "Someone" would not open the gate and let them
into the garden where there was a path that led through
a village to a church. He thinks in diegetic retrospect
that they were in some city which "no longer exists" or
maybe they were in Paris because he remembers the song
"Paris will always be Paris" but he has no idea how they
got there or what road they used or why he remembers this
particular song. The sequence of memory traces in separate
acts of consciousness from separate time periods and
experiences interlace in the man's present act of
consciousness.
As they both lose themselves in the process of
remembering this story, he suddenly remembers why he
started this whole story after all— then at last we
arrived— it was this moment of "arrival" that both of them
will never forget because they "laughed til they cried,
the story is so idiotic." At this point the facts
disintegrate into meaningless units of phenomenological
data, residuum, sedimentation, like "pot-bellied idiot,
trunk full of rice, rice and idiot fall on the ground, his
102
bare pot-belly shows." The phenomenological residuum is
the fact that they always remember laughing hysterically
at this event and its subsequent re-tellings and they
remember the first line, "then at last we arrived."
In terms of phenomenal consciousness as an object of
investigation, this man and woman are trying to recall
something that happened to them 80 years ago but this
"something" has been lost due to the fact that it has been
told so many times that the sequential perceptions and
intuitions of the initial experience which have been made
into this narrative sequence have been lost and all that
remains is selected, isolated facts and this good feeling
that makes them laugh. The story has that mythic element
that often happens when re-told repeatedly. Some event
seems to have occurred but the important facts of the
event have been lost and others re-arranged and
transitions lost such that the mimesis makes little sense.
The construction of the story is a series of acts of
consciousness that each time have reduced it to its
essential nature as a time for them that was and has
remained very important because it has made them laugh and
obviously held their marriage together in some way.
This story sets them off on their hour and a half
attempt in the play to unify their perceptions of their
lives. The old man's wife seems to think that he had some
103
kind of Mideal [or goalj for his life (119)" but "things
were not easy for him (120, 150)" so he couldn't reach his
ideals and goals and he had to settle for the job of
"general factotum (125, 127, 149)," a janitor. He tries
to explain and defend why he had no ambition or will power
and why he didn't get along with various people but again,
these stories also become isolated fragments,
phenomenological data. Multiple events and their multiple
associations and perceptions occurred in his life and he
has bracketed particular mixtures of these intuitions and
perceptions. What has been bracketed and reduced in his
consciousness does not reflect what actually happened in
the external, sensory experience, the mimetic reporting,
but does reflect his diegetic sense of himself.
He recalls a fight with his brother because he said
(and Ionseco has the old man quote his brother directly):
"My friends, I've got a flea. I'm going to pay you a visit
in the hope of leaving my flea with you (119)." Clearly,
something is missing from this story that would cause him
to get so angry with his brother that he would quarrel
with him. All that he recalls is this direct quote. The
quote triggers the feeling. The feeling has become
detached from the actual event and motivates him
permanently to dislike his brother.
Or the story of his anger with a friend, Carel, whom
104
he again quotes directly: "I know just the word that fits
you. I'm not going to say it, I'll just think it (119)."
This infuriated the old man but his wife saw no harm in
either of the comments of the brother or Carel.
With the arrival of each invisible guest during the
course of this evening, more information is given about
the old man. The bits and pieces of mimetic evidence,
direct quotes and traces, accumulate into multiple
phenomena, unbracketed, from the man's conscious
reflections about himself. He is hoping that the orator
will do the bracketing, the reducing, the diegetic
creating of meaning and significance.
The old man has become somewhat "misanthropic" and
reclusive. He seems only to enjoy fishing, reading a good
book and recalling these "memories of a lifetime (126)."
He lives "a modest life but a full one (126)" and he
"spends two hours every day working on his message (126)."
The arrival of a fictional Colonel allows the old man
to tell a "war story" and again there are only fragments
of a story with which to suggest a sequence or meaning.
He can't remember who won the last war but he recalls
"killing 209 of them (129)." He diegetically needs to
prove to himself and the colonel that he was a good
soldier and is still capable of bearing arms.
An old girl friend, Belle, arrives with her husband,
105
a photoengraver, and the old man "can scarcely believe his
eyes (129)" that she is there. His romantic reminiscence
of "when we were young (132)" is a fictional re-creation
of the mimetic events of the past with Belle in an "if
only we had dared (132)" story. The diegetic voice unites
him with the memory of those days, which he has
fictionalized, romanticized, and cannot re-capture. The
diegetic voice remembers and re-tells the feeling as if
it were yesterday. But the mimetic voice is inaccurate.
His feeling for this woman is as fresh and new as ever in
his consciousness and it is this "feeling" that motivates
the fictionalization and romanticization. Time has left
his marks on their skin (132) and destroyed their memory
of the mimetic details and "surgeons can't perform
miracles....When we were young, we were like
gods...perhaps we still can be...if we see into the beauty
of the heart that the skin has lost (13 2)." The man
chooses to select and remember a particularly strong, good
feeling about this romance with Belle that he enlarges to
represent the whole experience.
He then begins his diegetic, philosophical exposition
of his "philosophy of life" (the "message" he has been
working on) to Belle. He tells her what "alone has saved
him...the inner life...peace of mind,...austerity
...scientific investigation,...my message...(133)." The
106
diegetic voice is onethat tries to assign value here.
The room is beginning to fill with more invisible
guests and newspaper reporters and the old man and woman
are finding the "entertaining" tiresome because there are
too many people. He is trying to establish some kind of
order in the room as he is with his life by getting
everyone seated in a "chair." The couple now spend time
selling programs and snacks, clearing the aisles,
introducing people, seating people, giving the impression
of a giant auditorium filled with hundred and hundreds of
people all of whom the old man and woman are trying to
organize and direct.
Guests keep yelling random questions at him to which
he responds and his responses become an accumulation of
more of these isolated, fragmented revelations of his
message, his self and his consciousness. He has formed a
number of beliefs in his life: "uninterrupted
progress;...that lots of money will prevent the
exploitation of man;...that pure logic does not exist, all
we've got is imitation;.. .that dignity is only skin deep
— one always needs to save face (144-145)." He tells one
guest that he has invited them there in order to explain
that "the individual and the person are one and the same
(145)." He says he is "not himself but another" and then
he is "one in the other (145)." In "absolute silence," he
107
experiences life as a "perfect circle. . .complete. . .nothing
lacking...but there are holes through which one can escape
(145)." These beliefs and assumptions are given randomly
and are the raw data, the interior perceptual material for
the conscious construction of a mental state, a system of
belief, a philosophy of life.
During the course of these interchanges, when one of
the guests tries to re-state or interpret something the
old man has said, he quickly corrects any errors he hears
with "that's not my opinion at all (145)." He says that
he's had rich, multiple experiences at all levels of
thought and all walks of life. He's not an egoist but he
wants humanity to profit from what he's learned. He's
perfected a real system for which he has suffered greatly
(146). His system and his instructions will save the
world. He possesses the one truth for all; he's arrived
at a sense of absolute certainty. He is conscious that
his mind wants to take the diverse experiences and combine
and mix them in such a way that they form a system of
belief which synthesizes and centers him and will
immortalize him and mediate his "message" to others.
The surprise arrival of the emperor brings further
acts of consciousness, revelations. The emperor is
clearly a "god-figure" of whom the old man asks mercy and
forgiveness before he dies but in the course of his
108
talking to the emperor other versions of what has been
said and still more raw perceptual and intuitive data
about the old man are supplied.
The general theme of his speech to the emperor is
a diegetic commentary about the fact that he's been
"humiliated (150)" in his life. Nothing has ever really
worked out for him. He is proud to serve the emperor and
he is very glad that the emperor has finally arrived
because they had almost lost hope and the emperor, as God,
is his "last recourse (150)." All the rest of his life
has been suffering and humiliation. People have hated him
for the right reasons and loved him for the wrong ones
(150). His enemies have been rewarded and his friends have
betrayed him. He's been persecuted and never able to
revenge himself (150-151). No one ever pitied him; he was
too good (151). He's been robbed, supplanted,
assassinated— a collector of injustices (151). He wanted
to be a sportsman and attain to great heights in a career
but everything was refused him. He was never given
considerations nor was he sent invitations.
Part of the message that the orator will give, he
says, is the inclusion of these evils that the old man has
suffered in the last quarter of a century. The presence
and approval of the emperor (the god figure) will make his
life, his message and his suicide meaningful, ratified,
109
approved.
The arrival of the orator functions as that moment
of realization for the man and the woman that now is
really the time of their death. Both of them have lived
a life that they have tried to communicate raimetically to
their guests and they want their life to be meaningful,
to have a message for others, which is what the orator
will do. No one could "hope for more (155)," says the old
man, than to talk about his life and have its meaning
explicated and then die happily, peacefully.
The man introduces the orator and proceeds to go
through copious "thank you's" until he comes to yet
"another" speech which is the actual speech that the
orator, or a biographer of this old man, might give. The
old man has supplied the autobiographical raw material,
the phenomenological data throughout the play from which
the oration could be written and this final speech takes
its force.
In his final address, he acknowledges the fact that
their life on earth, mimetically represented in a number
of stories, is over. They have had long and peaceful
years and the years been filled to overflowing and his
mission is accomplished. He does not feel that any of this
was in vain because now other people know about it and
will carry on what good he did.
110
In the play, what is mimetically represented is that
moment of recognition, acceptance, honor, fame when all
who have underestimated this man will see him and his
greatness in truth. He diegetically imagines in this
final speech that his life has somehow been extraordinary
and that his philosophy will illumine the universe. He
would have liked the mimetic sequence of past experiences
to have been different (he would liked to have remembered
it more clearly) but he can now redeem any disappointments
and mistakes with his diegetic commentary and evaluation
about meanings and messages.
In fact, his life was probably just as ordinary as
anyone else's and just as meaningful as the greatest of
lives. He feels that his death is the "supreme sacrifice
(157)" not so much because he is some great person who is
leaving but because, like any ordinary person, he does not
want it to end; he does not want to die and make the
"supreme sacrifice" of having to leave. Whatever his life
was, whatever the sequence of facts and experiences, he
doesn't want it to stop and to say diegetically what it
meant to him, that it was more than it appeared to be or
to say what he was trying to do in it is just a way of
saying that he does not want to leave what has been; he
wants there to be more.
He feels that this time to die is another moment of
Ill
the mimetic sequence and his diegetic comment is that he
will become a legend and have a street named after him
(158). The reality of his life as he revealed it in bits
and pieces throughout the play are idealized in the
illusion that he will have a street named after him. He
even idealizes his marriage at the end. He proclaims that
he and his wife will lie together in unity, in eternity,
just as they had lain together in time and space, in
adversity (158). They will now die together.
He has examined the fragments of his life, various
series of acts and states of consciousness, recalled many
incidents and made diegetic statements about them. The
mimetic reality of his life as he lived it was different
from the mimetic sequencing that he recalled. The diegetic
statement about what it all meant is an idealization
which, if anything, allows the present consciousness of
the old man to surface in the series of acts of
consciousness that remembers, narratest idealizes, unifies
and structures.
The ordinariness, simplicity and the apparently
commonplace uselessness of the multiple events and
continuous experiences in the old man's life, like
Tristram Shandy's, are secondary to his conscious
formulation of the goals, visions and ideals that he
perceived and bracketed for himself, however fictional and
112
modified they are.
HELEN KELLER
Helen Keller experienced a rich interior life of
associations, perceptions, intuitions and attitudes. Even
though she was mute, she, like Beckett's man in the dark,
had a voice within her speaking to an inner ear. Even
though she couldn't see, she crawled around searching and
investigating. Her experience of isolation may not be as
radical as Hermione's nor may her thoughts be as complex
and convoluted as Beckett's man on the floor in the dark
but her autobiographical document, The Story of My Life
represents a series of acts of consciousness about herself
in her own diegetic/mimetic voice.
. . .Many incidents in those early years are fixed
in my memory, isolated, but clear and distinct,
making the sense of that silent, aimless,
dayless life all the more intense.15
When recalling the experience of a canoe ride, she
remembers "fancying" that she could "feel the shimmer of
the moon on her garments (101)." She is conscious of the
spaciousness of the air and "luminous warmth (101)" that
surrounds her. Her impressions and emotions about nature
are those which are most deeply embedded in her
15Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, (New York:
Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1954), 26, 30. All further
references will be to this edition.
113
consciousness as the raw materials about which she feels
most strongly. The "subconscious memories (102)"
(registered there from before her illness) of the "green
earth and the murmuring waters (102)" are common to
everyone and her "darkness did not blot them out (26)" for
her. She believes that this interior activity of
sensitivity to nature is an "inherited capacity, a sort
of sixth sense, a soul-sense which sees, hears and feels,
all in one (102)." Communion with nature, like the
subsequent communion with others which she would
experience when she learned to speak and read, are acts
of consciousness by which Helen emerges from her handicap.
There were acts of consciousness in her before she could
communicate them and her autobiographical document tells
about them.
Maintaining harmony with nature, learning to
communicate, speak, read and write became central goals
in Helen's life. Helen's raw instinct to expand her
knowledge through reading motivated her to "stretch out
her hands (86, 92, 106)" to the Braille letters or the
fingers of her teachers as others "stretch out their eyes"
to print in reading and observation. Helen performs the
series of acts of consciousness which narrate her past
acts of consciousness of her instincts, her desire, her
learning experiences with which she is fondly united.
114
She likens her way of allowing the hand of another
person to brush the letters gently over her hand to the
way sighted people allow their eyes to pass over the
letters of words or, if deaf, to read the quick movements
of lips. She says her "thoughts beat against her
fingertips like little birds striving to gain their
freedom (59, 334-335)," until the prison door was opened
through speech and they were allowed to escape and the
thoughts "eagerly and gladly spread their wings and flew
away (60, 335)." Before she learned to speak and before
she learned to read, all she remembers feeling was the
impulse, the instinct, to do so. She remembers feeling
like she was "creeping" and she wanted to "soar (335),"
thus the frustration and tantrums. She was immersed in
the multiplicity of thoughts, feelings, perceptions and
attitudes which served as the raw material for the
construction of a later perseverance and determination.
She was afflicted with the illness that left her
deaf, dumb and blind at 19 months of age, just when the
"unmeaning babblings of the child were beginning to be
formed into meaningful words (330)" and the initial acts
of consciousness were those where she fought, she
persevered, in her efforts to come out of the silence that
ensued into the world of communication.
This journey of her consciousness through these
115
various stages, acts of consciousness, to full
communication and language acquisition is the subject of
her autobiography and is something with which she was
always united and defined her. The value of
autobiographical documents like Helen's, which Sterne,
Doolittle, Beckett and Ionesco portray fictionally, is
that they are records of interior journeys; the raw
material of Helen's thoughts and feeling along the way.
Being deaf, dumb and blind and emerging from this handicap
into the world of language and communication is an
experience of bracketing and systematizing the multiple,
varied sensations, perceptions and intuitions in acts of
consciousness into a narrative complete with the diegetic
commentary that unites the autobiographer/narrator with
the protagonist/heroine.
As the 19 year old autobiographer, she is in
communion with the consciousness of the six year old
protagonist about whom she is narrating and she can
diegetically pick the best examples to communicate that
consciousness locked in silent detachment and she can
comment and evaluate and highlight these.
She has a funny thought, a state of consciousness,
and she runs about the room feeling the lips and faces of
her parents to see if they are having the funny thought
too (228). She is keenly aware that she is unable to
116
communicate her thoughts which results in increasing
tantrums and crying due to the frustration of being unable
to get these things out. She compares the feeling that
accompanied this interior state of chaos to a ship at sea
in a dense fog, groping its way toward shore.
Her trip to Boston in May, 1888 differed from her
trip to Baltimore two years earlier because on the first
trip she was the "restless, excitable, irritable child
requiring the attention of everybody on the train to keep
her amused (49)" whereas on the second, she sat quietly
beside Miss Sullivan, taking in with eager interest all
that was told her about what was passing. On the one
trip, Helen is overwhelmed by the constant stream of
thoughts, perceptions and awarenesses that were passing
through her and her inability to organize, combine and
correlate this material and this resulted in the panic and
frustration that had become her daily bread. But once she
learned how to direct and modify the information and
communicate through language use, she was less restless
and excitable. She could take the information in her
consciousness, the raw materials of multiple perceptions
and intuitions, and bracket and organize them as she
pleased.
The arrival of Annie Sullivan on March 3, 1887,
becomes then, in retrospect, along with the day that she
117
learned that the finger play meant something else, what
Helen diegetically unites under the title the "most
important day in all my life (34)." Her memory of the
experience of these days is important because they were
the days when she was released from the prison of silence.
She mimetically re-constructs the story, making use of
imagination and memory, to establish the diegetic fact
that this indeed was the most important day of her life
because this was the day that she learned that things have
names. There is a unity of voice in consciousness here.
The actual sequence of the events of those days are
remembered in an undistorted way by Helen because they are
so important to her. She can re-tell the story as
accurately and clearly and truly as can be expected
because there is very little distance from it. The
experiences at the time, on the day, were so keenly etched
in her consciousness that her consciousness brings them
up just as keenly in the present.
When she experienced states of frustration and
discouragement while learning to read, write, speak and
communicate, she would perform the series of acts of
consciousness in which she would steel her patience and
perseverance with the dream, the incentive, that one day
she would be able to speak to people, especially her
mother. The "rugged paths, the obstacles, the backward
118
slips are overcome when the beautiful goal is kept in mind
(335)." Helen's perseverance and singlemindedness of
intention in the pursuance of a goal are conscious
constructs, wilful shapings, that Helen executed based
upon her random memories of her experience of life's
manifold sensory contents.
Helen makes it clear in her autobiography that her
motivations "were strong, active, and indifferent to
consequences and she knew her own mind well enough and
always had her own way (28)." Actions, facial expressions
and gestures invariably indicated states of consciousness
and when she learned to communicate, she became even more
goal-oriented and persevering, doing more reading and more
speaking.
Her philosophy professor at Radcliffe College, Ralph
Barton, points out that
Helen Keller may have lost her sight and hearing
but she did not lose her mind, her consciousness
and her ability to form states of consciousness
based upon activity there. She can think,
compare, remember, anticipate, associate,
imagine, speculate, and feel (16).
Barton notes that when "you communicate with her you know
that you have reached her 'inner ear' and the eye of her
mind (17)."
Helen learned that there was a deaf and blind girl
named Ragnhild Kaata in Norway who had actually been
119
taught to speak and this information fueled the act of
consciousness that motivated Helen to learn to speak. She
started lessons in March, 1890 and in the first hour she
learned six elements: M,P,A,S,T,I. She would feel her
teacher's tongue and lip positions for each sound and when
she uttered her first connected sentence ("it is warm"),
her consciousness was then aware of another new strength,
a new organizing ability, an act of consciousness, besides
the reading, that would free her to express the
multiplicity within in yet another new way (60).
The natural exchange of ideas through conversation,
reading or writing is denied a handicapped person like
Helen Keller. She was only left with the stream of random,
multiple perceptions and sensations which she was unable
to bracket and organize. The blind person is denied
access to the expression on the speaker's face and eyes
which are said to be the "windows of the soul (42)." The
deaf child is denied access to nuance in tone of voice and
modulation. The expression on the face, the tone of
voice, are consequences of acts of consciousness. A reader
is like a blind person in the sense that they too are also
denied access to facial expression and tone of voice
except to the extent that the writer can communicate these
through the words. Therefore, the written words on the
page when carefully selected and structured can fill that
120
gap,created by the physical absence of facial expressions
and tones of voice.15
Helen says that
The great difficulty with writing is to make the
language of the educated mind express our
confused ideas, half feelings, half thoughts,
when we are little more than bundles of
instinctive tendencies. Trying to write is very
much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle
together. We have a pattern in mind which we
wish to work out in words; but the words will
not fit the spaces, or if they do, they will not
match the design (68).
One of the disadvantages that Helen talks about while
at Radcliffe was that she had no time
to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would
sit together of an evening and listen to the
inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears
only in leisure moments when the words of some
loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul
that until then had been silent. In college
there is no time to commune with one's thoughts
(85) .
The same experience occurs with her teachers. She
says that "the lectures were spelled out in her hand as
rapidly as possible, and much of the individuality of the
lecturer is lost to me in an effort to keep in the race
(86)." Helen was learning a great deal of information
from the acts of consciousness of the lecturer but there
are other acts of consciousness of the lecturer which are
outside the realm of academic information; acts of
16Donohue, 12.
121
consciousness that communicate personality and attitude.
If she could have had the information spelled more slowly
into her hand, she might have been able to appreciate the
personality, the character of the teacher and allowed the
material to sift more gradually through her own
consciousness. The particular words that the lecturer uses
and the way the lecturer arranges the words not only
communicate diegetic, bracketed, academic information but
also communicate the flow of the present, mimetic
consciousness.
Besides persons, she learns to communicate with and
understand "abstractions" like love, justice, peace—
those "things" which have no object in nature but can be
"touched" in a different way. When she was stringing
beads, she became frustrated because she kept doing it
wrong, Miss Sullivan requested by spelling into her hand
that she "think." Helen remembers that it was then that
she knew that she could solve problems and have varieties
of different avenues open to her through use of her own
thought processes, through varied acts of consciousness
forming states. Helen's knowledge grew beyond just naming
objects and as more and more words were learned and more
and more connections made in the palimpsest of her
consciousness, more and more questions were being asked
and her field of inquiry broadened as did her motivations,
122
attitudes and interests (40).
Helen's words and actions express the unity of her
acts of consciousness and were empowered by the
multiplicity of sensations, of raw materials, in her
consciousness. Helen has a diegetic point to make to her
readers about her motivations and goals, her heroism, her
values and ideals, which she attempts to construct in the
autobiography and which is based on a multiple interlace
of perceptions, attitudes and intuitions.
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
Christopher Nolan is handicapped by quadriplegia from
birth and he decides to tell the story of that experience
because of the notoriety he had been receiving for a book
of poetry he published. He wants to bracket the person,
foreground and construct the consciousness of himself as
a quadriplegic. Like Helen Keller, he was unable to speak
and communicate until he found a way to type: his mother
holds his head while he taps out the letters on the
typewriter with the help of a "unicorn" stick strapped to
his forehead. He organizes the perceptual/intuitive
elements of his consciousness in the autobiographical
document from the "natural," however different, standpoint
of a quadriplegic. Like the old man in The Chairs. both
Nolan and Keller felt paralyzed at their apparent
inability to communicate their interior lives, their
123
thoughts, feelings, and beliefs; their expectations and
hopes. They need to tell the story about what's going on
inside them.
Unlike Helen Keller but like the old man's orator in
The Chairs. Christopher Nolan, as one state of
consciousness, tells his life story through a narrator and
a persona, Joseph Meehan, as another state of
consciousness. Critics have agreed that it was a wise
decision to separate himself in this way.17 The distance
seems to have enabled him to write more freely than if he
had used his own name and it reflects the detachment of
the autobiographer who stands outside of himself in order
to paint a unified portrait. But in standing outside of
himself, he risks the dangers that the old man in The
Chairs falls into: his voice also "stands outside of
itself" as he speaks from the margin, about himself as a
third person, but still present to his own solitude and
silence where "detachment encounters all of the jangled
emotions it must serve."18
John Carey, a Professor of literature at Oxford,
17John Gross, A Review of Christopher Nolan's
autobiography Under the Eye of the Clock in The New York
Times. February 26, 1988, Section C, 33.
18Patricia Hampl, "Defying the Yapping
Establishment," fThe New York Times Book Review. March
13, 1988), 9.
124
prefaces Christopher Nolan's book much like Radcliffe
professor Ralph Barton prefaced Helen Keller's by saying
that Nolan "plummeted into language like an avalanche, as
if it were his escape route from death— which, of course,
it was."19 John Carey says that words were the things that
freed the consciousness from the prison of paralysis and
silence and so both Helen and Christopher approached them
as another child might approach an overturned truck of
candy. Their autobiographical documents are distinguished
because they come from that unknown planet of the
paralyzed and speechless.
Nolan expresses himself through Meehan as one who
indeed "had honestly yearned for a means of
communication,...(3)." He continually pondered how he
could "overcome his muteness (4)." Like Helen, "Joseph"
developed a "spine of iron (9)" and a "volcanic wish (9)"
to become more adept at communicating. Like Helen's
teachers and parents, Joseph's teachers and parents could
only read the mute Joseph's facial expressions, eye
movements and minimal body language.
19Christopher Nolan, Under the Eye of the Clock: The
Life Storv of Christopher Nolan (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1987), xi. All further references will be to this
edition.
125
When he was accepted into the Mount Temple
Comprehensive School, he was "as one about to levitate.
He felt a surge of happiness rush through his heart, it
melted all over his many rejections and schooled his
resolves not ever to fail...(16)." Christopher Nolan's
autobiographical document captures a consciousness, a
discourse of a mind in diegetic, 'stream of consciousness'
language, as critics suggest, reminiscent of Joyce:
Dark night was always waned by golden
visions and the night of 20 February 1979 was
no different. Just as always happened, Joseph
Meehan saw his life pass before his sensitive
mind's eye. Free-falling, he created grand
gospels of boyish certainty. Washed by
sedentary, snared sacrifice he descended within
easy reach of hell, but severe despondency never
could stop Joseph's mesmerized woldwaddling in
ink-blue heaven's busy mobility of secrets.
Cassettes played back the day's happenings sadly
beckoning him towards despair, but fending off
fright he beckoned instead towards students
frolicking in dreamland and stole yesses from
them before they ebbed notional no (24).
Nolan says that he was really seeing his own life recoil
before him as if he were a third person, an extratextual
diegetic narrator to a story that he was witnessing about
someone else. His document exemplifies more clearly than
the others William Earle's two states of consciousness.
Joseph Meehan is the past consciousness in Nolan's memory
and Nolan the author/narrator is the present consciousness
connecting with and creating the past consciousness of
this character.
126
He liked the idea of casting himself in this frame
of Joseph Meehan and "pranked (28)" himself a storyteller.
Nolan prides himself on the fact that he is a good
storyteller, a good narrator of his own life story, one
who is able to sequence the events and voices logically,
clearly and creatively. He intends the reader to look and
feel deeply the limitations of the handicapped life, the
cruel frustrations of uninvited paralysis and enforced
silence but above all not to look so deeply that, like
Tristram Shandy suggests, they and he be unable "to laugh
the lovely laughter that vanishes the wounds of disability
and pride (28)."
Even in school, his problem was always how to get the
"whet words (31)" out that were entrapped in his mind.
His only language up to this time was "nodding-headed,
eye-darting....eyes busy in conversation (36)." He wanted
so desperately, like Helen, to communicate some of the
more sophisticated discourse of his mind, specific acts
of consciousness that would reveal the intricacies of his
personality and thought. He calls the interior silence:
moments of "fear...mixed with caesuras of
despair...mesmerizing himself with the pleasures of life
(40)." As the poetic muse descended upon him, he "waxed
and waned his creative thoughts in secret (41)." He soon
found release in writing and his subsequent awards for the
127
poetry book and advances in computer science "gave him
voice" and "others who are similarly afflicted with this
intelligence lying dormant, stand the chance of being free
(84)." Quadriplegics are denied freedom of movement; all
they have are "busy, jerky, muffled (85)" movements. But
they have the freedom of the discourse of their minds.
Nolan describes the labored process of communication:
Calling his mother to sit down in front of
him, he got to work with his eyes. He conveyed
to her that he wished to talk about himself. She
nodded and with a broad grin said, "What's new?"
He dismissed her barb and became serious in his
expression. He nodded towards the telephone.
He beckoned her with his eyes to wheel him into
the study. He bowed towards his writings and
then towards his books on his shelf. All of his
clues serve to build up his request to have her
telephone the publisher in London for him (90).
The significance of Christopher's and Helen's
autobiographies is their "birth as authors (92)" as
speakers of the word, as narrators of their own stories.
The acts of consciousness which allow them to acquire
language and so emerge from "the private world that was
so private that the demon despair dallied always at the
door (93)" also allowed them to express the intuitions,
perceptions, attitudes and beliefs which were so integral
to their consciousness of themselves. But now, after
publishing his first book of poems, Nolan "cackled to
himself" because he "shared the same world as everyone
else; he could choose how much to tell and craftily decide
128
how much to hold back. His voice would be his written word
(93)." His "bloody frustrations" were alleviated by
allowing others "inside his frame" where the words arise
from the "depths of his numbness (96)." A "handicap of
the body does not mean a handicap of the mind as well
(98)."
Christopher Nolan invites his readers into the
interior life and consciousness of the quadriplegic but
he ends the autobiography with the suggestion that he,
like Helen, is a person who is motivated to achieve a
great deal and possibly become another James Joyce or W.B.
• • •
Yeats, as the critics have said.
This autobiographical document celebrates this
artist's present consciousness, the creative power to
dramatize himself as hero and present his consciousness
as object. For nothing is more intense and real to a
person than the experience of unique individual acts and
states of consciousness and a perception of those as
having an underlying unity, even if as a quadriplegic.
JOHN STUART MILL
In the narrative unit Chapter Five of his
Autobiography . "A Crisis in My Mental History," John
20Linda Joffee, "A Voice From a Mute World Sings,"
(The Christian Science Monitor. January 27, 1988), 6.
129
Stuart Mill concisely and clearly narrates the mimetic
sequence of the mental breakdown that he had when he was
in his early twenties but he does so by diegetically
selecting the salient events from the five year
experience. Mill reflects on the multiple perceptions and
intuitions he has about this particular experience and
diegetically brackets some of them into the narrative unit
in his autobiography which he names a*''crisis' in his
mental history."
The predominant voice is the diegetic one, selecting,
commenting, evaluating and naming the crisis and he
presents a unified portrait of a consciousness which
experienced this transition. Hermione's voice, on the
other hand, is more a mimetic overflow of the raw
perceptions and intuitions.
Mill's father had educated him, trained him and
"conditioned (98)" him to be a reformer in Victorian
England but when it came time to move into that society
and participate in the work of reform, Mill lost all
desire or interest in such a pursuit. This loss of desire
and feeling for something for which he had been trained
frightened him. His father had equipped him with a
language system and a set of values with which to express
himself argumentatively and rationally, but which no
longer meant anything to him. Like Helen Keller or
130
Christopher Nolan/ Mill was subjected to silence but
unlike Keller or Nolan, he was subjected to a silence
after being allowed to communicate freely. He needed to
find a new language of his own, new words for new ideas,
with which to express new awarenesses, and new states of
consciousness and so he needed to be silent for awhile.
His training equipped him with an intellect that was
"irretrievably analytic (98)," mechanically conditioned
to analyze, synthesize and associate the "permanent
sequences of nature (97) ." The motivation he lost was his
"delight in virtue (98)" and his concern for the common
good. His attitude toward himself and his interior life
was one which was keenly aware of this loss of a "desire,
drive and motivation (98)." He may "intend" to work for
reform and he may have the intellectual equipment to do
so successfully, effectively, but he did not desire it.
There was a felt loss, a gap, in his consciousness where
something new was being created.
Chapter Five is divided into a series of
significant, diegetic "rays of light (99)" which Mill says
carried him through the crisis. This "ray of light"
imagery throughout the chapter contrasts with the darkness
of the consciousness which experiences itself as having
no motivations, no desires. The darkness, the lack of
interior motivation and drive, actually became the
131
motivation by which he pulls himself out of the darkness.
Geoffrey Loesberg says that Mill's reading of
Marmontel's Memoires is the key event that shook him out
of the crisis and Loesberg connects Mill's identification
with Marmontel based on the mutual death of their
fathers.21 Mill saw himself as heroic as the "mere boy"
Marmontel who, at his father's death, became filled with
a "sudden inspiration" to "be everything" to his family
now by "supplying the place they had lost" in the death
of the father. Mill was "moved to tears" at the "vivid
conception" of this scene created by Marmontel (99 ff.).
His interior "hopelessness and oppression died." The
"vivid conception" which moved him to tears was the
heroism of the boy who would take his father's place.
This heroism so inspired Mill that he too could now "exert
himself again for the public good." He says that he began
to "find enjoyment,... sufficient for cheerfulness."
Marmontel's father died and Marmontel was then called to
a new life, a new role, to which he responded
wholeheartedly; he was called to be a new person in his
household with new responsibilities. Comparably, Mill's
father's language and education had "died" within Mill
zlGeoffrey Loesberg, Fictions of Consciousness:
Mill. Newman and the Reading of Victorian Prose. (Rutgers
University Press, 1986), 58-59.
and, like Marmontel, Mill was called to discover a new
language of his own through which to express new states
of consciousness; he was called to express himself, his
consciousness of his vocation, in his own unique way (99).
He arrives at a major plateau, a first "ray of
light:"
But I now thought that this end [happiness]
was only to be attained by not making it a
direct end. Those only are happy (I thought)
who have their minds fixed on some object other
than their own happiness;...aiming thus at
something else, they find happiness by the way
(100) .
He had previously come to identify his interior
happiness with this one object in his life: his education
by his father to be a reformer of the world. But as he
involved himself in the "cultivation of passive
susceptibilities,... intellectual culture,...dull balance
among the facuities,...(101)." He came simultaneously to
realize that if all the changes and reforms in
institutions and opinions that he wanted were completely
effected, his "irrepressible self-consciousness (94)" told
him that he would still not have "great joy and
happiness." All of his happiness and all of his energies,
his acts of consciousness, he says, were being directed
to the "one" end of reform (93-4). Consequently, and
quite naturally, other states of "irrepressible self-
consciousness" would insist that other energies and
133
interests be recognized.
He was overwhelmed by the demands made upon him. All
of his internal activities and energies were being
directed each day to the external activities of reform
until which time he was forced to realize that there were
more internal activities in other states of consciousness
in him which were not finding expression in external words
and behaviors.
Poetry and art, especially the reading of
Wordsworth's poetry "in the autumn of 1828 (103)" came to
be the second "ray of light (99)" in his progress back to
mental health because of the simple fact that the poems
excited enthusiasm in him. He saw in Wordsworth's poetry
a second key insight that the
imaginative emotion which an idea, vividly
conceives, excites,...is not an illusion but a
fact, as real as any of the other qualities of
objects;...the intensest feeling of the beauty
of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is not
hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is vapour
of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in
a state of suspension (106-7);
Wordsworth's poetry showed Mill that it was possible
to conceive an idea in one act of consciousness that would
excite an emotion as another act of consciousness which
would find expression in a piece of poetry, as a
representation of that state of consciousness which
conceived the idea and experienced the emotion.
134
The action then works in reverse for Mill when he
reads the poem. The poem triggers a series of acts of
consciousness in Mill which action is the exciting of
imaginative ideas and emotions which may or may not be
similar to the one excited in Wordsworth, who wrote the
poem. Mill's excitement of imaginative emotions and ideas
"vividly conceived" is joined by the series of acts of
consciousness that motivate him to communicate this
activity in consciousness and the activity introduces him
to other acts of consciousness in and about himself that
he had never met before because he was singlemindedly1
devoted to the reform for which he was trained. The text
of a Wordsworth poem or Monmartel's Memoirs and the text
of Mill's narrative of his mental crisis are observable,
objective "facts, as real as any of the other qualities
of objects (107)" and they represent series of acts of
consciousness of Marmontel, Wordsworth and Mill forming
states of consciousness about a parent, an idea, an
emotion, a crisis.
The interior activity of the phenomenal consciousness
can be observed scientifically as phenomenon, an object
of study, as this chapter from Mill's Autobiography
attempts to do.
The interior activity in consciousness is complex in
that it involves the formation of ideas and emotions in
135
particular acts of consciousness which are new to Mill and
it involves the formation of the intention to communicate
these ideas and emotions in Chapter Five as another act
of consciousness and the refinement and development of
that intention in acts of consciousness over a period of
20 years.
He compares this diegetic study of his own mental
crisis in Chapter Five to the study of a cloud as a vapor
which is subject to the laws of science and is an object
which has its own criterial list of identifying marks
(107). He is motivated to pursue a scientific,
phenomenological investigation of his own consciousness
as an object of study and he intends to be as exact,
honest and accurate as if he were a scientist studying the
vaporous cloud. The imaginative emotion excited in him
by a vividly conceived idea is just as viable an object
of study as is the cloud beautifully illuminated by the
setting sun. He is motivated to be just as exact, honest
and accurate in his communication of a criterial list of
identifying marks of the emotions and ideas and states and
acts of consciousness within him as he would be to
communicate a criterial list of identifying marks of a
"cloud as vapor." The criterial list expressing Mill's
consciousness in Chapter Five is the diegetic series of
"rays of light" experiences.
136
A third "ray of light" occurred when he withdrew from
his Debating Society in 1829 (110). This withdrawal from
the Debating Society is a significant moment in his
journey towards mental health because it initiates the
period of silent withdrawal and signifies the beginning
of re-examination. He is motivated to communicate the
state of consciousness behind the act of withdrawal.
Basically, he says that he was tired of speech-making
and preferred "private studies and meditations (110)"
where he "wove anew the fabric of his new self and taught
opinions which gave way to new ones in many fresh places
(110)." New ideas were adjusted and juxtaposed with older
ones, particularly his father's theory of government,
since it came into conflict with "other schools of
political thought." His father's theory made no room for
others (110). Mill's crisis, emotionally kindled by
Marmontel and Wordsworth, caused him to return to the
interior world of rationality and cognition and re-apply
the analytic ability which he learned from his father to
his father's own teaching and views. As he read more
widely in political theory and philosophy, he realized
that his father's system had no regard for or interest in
continued experimental investigation and research.
Mill read a critique of his father's "Essay on
Government" by Thomas Macaulay who criticized the document
137
because it was a theory deduced from philosophical
speculation as opposed to empirical investigation. The
elder Mill's premises were too narrow and included only
a small number of general principles on which politics
might depend (110-111). The elder Mill's only premise was
identity of interest between the governing body and the
community at large as the only principle on which good
government depends.
The elder Mill responded to Macaulay's critique and
argued that Macaulay's reasoning was faulty which made the
younger Mill suspect even more strongly that the father
himself was actually in fundamental error based on the
same accusation of faulty reasoning he was levelling
against Macaulay (111). The younger Mill exercised his own
faculty of logical reasoning in which his own father had
trained him and he came to see his father's error which
was the error of using deductive reasoning based on
limited philosophical premises where he should have used
deductive reasoning based on empirical, scientific
investigation and philosophical speculation (111). A true
system of principles for a political philosophy is much
more complex and many-sided (as Mill discovered his own
consciousness and emotions were) than any one system could
hold. A system of principles for a philosophy of politics
needs to supply practical guidelines along with
138
theoretical principles by which governments can constitute
themselves. Part of Mill's progress through his crisis
involved this need to disagree with and re-evaluate his
father's political theory and establish his own.
He was led to a fourth "ray of light" with the
insight that the human mind, consciousness, like political
systems and philosophies, has a certain order or progress,
in which some experiences precede others and some follow
others. He was led to this insight not only through his
reflections on his father's "Essay on Government" and the
varied reading he had been doing in political theory but
also specifically through the "new mode of political
thinking" of the Saint-Simonian school in France which he
had been reading in 1828-9 (114).
The writers in this school of political thought
presented him with a "connected view" of the natural order
of human progress which divides history into organic
periods where mankind accepted with firm conviction some
positive creed and the society flourished and progressed
under this creed until these values and creeds were
rejected and rebuilt during a succeeding critical period.
Greek and Roman polytheism was an organic period succeeded
by the critical/skeptical period of the Greek
philosophers. Christianity was an organic period
succeeded by the Reformation (115). By extension, Mill
139
himself has the organic period of being educated according
to his father's system and this is followed by the
critical period of re-examination, crisis and growth
narrated in Chapter Five. These succeeding "organic"
periods can be understood as "metonyms" in the sense that
they are connected periods of "transition." Or they can
be seen as "metaphors" in the sense that they represent
a critical period in the history of the world or a
particular country but they can replace each other
depending upon the degree of significance and impact.
They would be "synecdochic" if their significance is
unparalleled, as Auguste Comte suggests, and Mill's
"crisis" could be considered synecdochic for his life
since there was not anything else like it for him and it
was so significant in his development.
Auguste Comte, a positivist member of the Saint-
Simonian school of thought, was a fifth "ray of light" who
permitted Mill to see human knowledge as developing
according to three synecdochic stages: the theological
(feudal, Christian and Protestant Reformation),
metaphysical (tenets set by the French Revolution), and
positivist (yet to come) (116). Through Comte, Mill was
able to recognize that the moral and intellectual
characteristics of an age of critical cultural transition
were not the normal moral and intellectual characteristics
140
, of a particular organic period because the age was
perceived as "transitional" and not "organici2ed." Frank
Kermode calls this kind of thinking is "Joachism"22 where
.transitions, organic wholes and parts, normal and abnormal
moral and intellectual characteristics, beginnings,
middles, ends, crises, transitions: are results of acts
of consciousness which bracket external experiences into
these sections. Mill himself was in a metonymic period
of transition during his mental crisis and the Saint
■Simonians' point of view on historical development helped
i
him to recognize and understand his own development and
i
the transitional nature of his own moment of crisis. His
training by his father was an organic, synecdochic
educational experience which was metaphorically replaced
by another organic, synecdochic period.
In keeping with Georges Gusdorf's analysis of the
i . . .
^ importance of "naming," Anne Norton of Princeton
1 University in the Clark Library lecture series of 1987-
i
8823 developed a thesis that the memory of an event or an
22Frank Kermode, The Sense of Ending: Studies in the
Theory of Fiction. (Oxford University Press, 1966), 101.
i 23Anne Norton, "Writing, Violence and Revolution in
Memory," (The 1987-88 William Andrews Clark Library
Lecture Series: "Violence and Order, Revolution and
! Constitution: Bicentennial Reflections," Los Angeles, May
!27, 1988).
141
experience, the memory of a particular act or state of
consciousness, is formed and maintained by the occurrence
of the experience of the act itself in time and space and
then the inscription of it, in contradiction to Plato who
says that the inscribing makes the memory lazy and Derrida
who says the inscribing actually makes the reality of the
event ’ ’absent.*' The narrating and naming of that act in
writing make the reality more fully present. Ms. Norton
says that an act and a written document can be separate
ways of remembering and she uses the examples of the
French people who remember the French Revolution by the
act of storming the Bastille and the American people who
remember the Declaration of Independence from England with
a written document. The event is remembered in the
naming, "the storming of the Bastille," on July 14th the
"signing of the Declaration of Independence" on July 4th.
John Stuart Mill remembers the experience of his
mental crisis by naming different activities during that
period and by narrating them in a written document. The
autobiographer generally is attempting to remember acts
and states of consciousness through inscription in a
document.
Another interior problem which was causing Mill
difficulty at this time was the "incubus" of the doctrine
called Philosophical Necessity which presented him with
142
the absurdity that he was "conditioned by antecedent
circumstances, a slave to them, wholly in their power and
control, having none of his own (118-119)-"
Necessity is a name for the doctrine of cause and
effect but when applied to human action and consciousness,
according to Mill, this definition may be misleading
(119). Character is not formed by the happen-stance cause
and effect of natural circumstances according to Mill but
by the personal desires, motivations and intentions of the
characters who can shape the happen-stance cause and
effect circumstances and hence shape the self. Free will
inspires and enables one to have power over the formation
of character. The doctrine of Necessity, the continuous
flux of cause and effect, need not be fatalistic, as
Tristram Shandy attests to and as Hermione Gart fell slave
to. Mill does not allow the cause and effect randomness
to shape his character and construct a self. He argues
that the person is free to construct a self by picking and
choosing from among the many causes and effects which
randomly occur. The mimetic narrative of Mill's
individual consciousness could have recorded the random
cause and effect sequence of the five years. The diegetic
narrator selects particular "rays of light" which are then
sequenced into the narrative which is Chapter Five of his
Autobiography. He is not a slave to necessity.
143
The sixth and final "ray of light" in Mill's
progress through his mental crisis was his return to
publication in 1830-31 when he wrote five "Essays on Some
Unsettled Questions of Political Economy" and a series of
articles on "The Spirit of the Age (122)" in which he
expressed some of his new opinions about the anamolies and
evils of an age of transition in society and likened them
to some of the difficulties of changing one's personal set
of worn-out opinions for another in a personal period of
transition. An act of consciousness produced a document
for publication after a time of silence and introspection
where the acts of consciousness were examining themselves.
Mill states clearly that "in giving this account of
this period (118)" in his life, the few selected points
that he is including are only a very insufficient,
representative idea of the quantity of thinking which he
carried on respecting a host of subjects "in these years
of transition (118)."
In summary, Chapter Five of Mill's Autobiography
accesses Mill's consciousness of his own mental crisis.
Mill records and illustrates his progress by making a
series of six diegetic points about six mimetic
experiences and concludes with the assertion that he
started to publish again at the end of the crisis.
Rather than an exact, mimetic replication of every
144
I detail in the sequence of the five year crisis, Mill
i
I narrates diegetically, like the old man in The Chairs,
selecting points and constructing diegetic narratives with
which he assertsy these major points about this life
:experience of a "mental crisis."
i
Whether the story is true to the actual life
' experience in all its triviality and detail is not as
i important as Mill's remembrance, reconstruction and re
conceptualization of it. The conscious mind which forms
intentions, makes inferences and draws conclusions is a
consciousness, according to Husserl, who posits a unity
of apprehension about itself, a synthesis of various
modalities with which it identifies most strongly.
j
MAYA ANGELOU
Maya Angelou's narration of being raped by her step
father when she was nine years old is a narrative unit
from the pages of Chapter 12 of her autobiographical
:document, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. The narrative
I
j involves the experience of the adult whose series of acts
j of consciousness examine a series of acts of consciousness
!
[of the little girl which came to be a significant "state"
I
! of consciousness for her. There are a number of voices
i
here. The adult voice narrates mimetically in the present
time and comments diegetically about this experience from
her past while the child's voice is mimetically
145
represented, speaking and diegetically thinking and
evaluating at the time. The adult voice of the
autobiographer is the one who is bracketing and reducing
the experience to its essential core, a detachable mental
state, posited as an organic whole and she remembers
various diegetic comments, evaluations and feelings in the
child as part of the mimetic sequence.
This rape sequence is the story of a child's retreat
into a silence, withdrawal and loss of the use of language
and the inability to communicate, like many of the other
writers I have treated in this chapter. The child loses
her ability to speak, seeks refuge in silence but re-
emerges, re-acquires language, as part of the healing
process. Her consciousness was handicapped in this case
by acts of violence and her acts of consciousness became
limited and secret. Helen Keller and Christopher Nolan
were silenced by physical handicaps which affected their
consciousness. John Stuart Mill's consciousness was
silenced by a mental-emotional breakdown.
There are two points that I would like to make about
this narrative: the child's perception of the rapist, her
stepfather, and then the child's perception of herself.
The autobiographer, the adult, the diegetic narrator,
has the child-protagonist notice that the stepfather's
eyes stare blankly, kind but still and unblinking. The
adult writer captures the child's accurate perception of
the rapist who is radically unconcerned about the child.
She portrays the rapist as at first being gentle,
persuasive and playful but the child's silence and
distance re-inforce that there is something wrong here.
She needs to be forced and she is warned that if she
screams she would be killed and if she tells anyone about
this her brother Bailey would be killed.
Her relationship with her brother becomes an
important thread in this narrative unit because her deep
love for her brother contrasts with the lack of love and
brutality of the stepfather and further forces her into
silence. She doesn't want to lose her relationship with
her brother so she must now hide this important, traumatic
experience and retreat into the silence of repression.
This retreat into silence and hiding suggests that acts
of consciousness are occurring which aren't being voiced.
Angelou charts the child's journey back to self-
expression. As she recalls this experience, she is able
to become one with the time and herself as a child at the
time at the same time that she can separate herself and
comment as narrator. "The child gives, because the body
can't, and the mind of the violator cannot."2* This
z*Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.
(New York: Atheneum Press, 1975), 65. All further
references will be to this edition.
147
sentence is central to the narrative because it portrays
the pain of physical rape mixed with the pain that results
when a child is forced to care for someone in a way that
a child is not yet emotionally prepared to do.
A child should be given to and cared for: a child is
not prepared to be put in a position to care for and feel
responsible for the emotional health of his or her parent
but this is the position in which this little girl finds
herself. She perceives her stepfather as someone who
needs to be cared for but she also perceives this need as
aberrant because he is asking her for this care, which she
thinks she is giving, and then he says that he will kill
her brother if she tells anyone about this love and care
she is giving him. The confusion and fear throws her into
silent re-examination of something she does not
understand.
It is this interior life of the little girl and her
acts of consciousness that are crucial to the mimetic
representation here and the reason why I am using this
unit in this chapter.
In the mimetic sequence of events, she faints and
remembers waking up with her stepfather washing her. He
was shaking and apologizing to her and reminding her not
148
to tell anyone about this. She should just go to the
library as she planned and come home when her mother gets
home and "act natural (66)." All she remembers wanting to
do is sleep (a beginning sign of the retreat into silent
depression) and being afraid to tell him what she wants.
He is not about to meet any of her needs. She is there
to meet his needs. She just doesn't want herself or her
brother physically hurt. As she walks to the library, she
is conscious of the tremendous physical pain she is
experiencing so she just quietly slips back home and goes
to bed.
Her confusion (which first caused her to retreat into
the silence of sleep) now erupts into the natural desire
to run away and if not that, then the desire to die. When
her bed was changed and the blood-stained panties were
found, she was taken to the hospital where the fact that
she was raped is discovered by the doctors. When the
situation becomes public, the retreat to silence is even
more pronounced.
The courtroom sequence intimates, while the little
girl is on the stand, that she doesn't know what rape is
but she does know that her stepfather did something wrong
and she feels that she helped him to do it. Angelou
represents her apprehension and fear as a "whirlwind of
thoughts going round her mind," such that she could only
149
retreat into silence (70). She not only felt that she
might be an accomplice with her stepfather but she also
felt that she would be considered like "the harlot in the
bible (71)" if she said that this had occurred before.
Her mother and her brother would be disappointed in her
and she again feared losing their love. Her brother would
realize that she had been keeping secrets from him at a
time when he thought that they agreed to tell each other
everything (71). So, in the courtroom, on the stand, she
lies and says "no" but a lump quickly thickened in her
throat and cut off her air. The pressure erupted in a
screaming fit of anger at her stepfather because he was
the one responsible for putting her in this silent,
deceiving position.
The stepfather was sentenced to a year and a day but
his lawyer got him released that very afternoon at which
time he was apparently "kicked to death" and dropped in
a field (72). This news contributes to the pressure that
the little girl was already under and now she feels
responsible for his death as well.
She thinks that she is going to feel forever guilty
and lose her place in heaven. She feels the evil in her
body and thinks that if she keeps her t:eeth clamped
tightly shut then the evil won't get out and contaminate
others— thus the silence. She feels that she has sold
150
herself to the devil and can talk to no one because her
very breath by which the words are carried would poison
others. She found that she could achieve perfect personal
silence "by attaching herself leechlike to sound (73)."
Maya Angelou mimetically represents the consciousness
of the withdrawn, sullen child who has removed herself
from all contact with people and people quite naturally
stop talking when they are around her because they feel
sorry for her and want her to start talking. They
understand that her experience was a painfully violent and
traumatic one and it would take awhile for her to process
it and begin speaking again.
But the autobiographer catches the child's
consciousness and interprets the silence from the point
of view of the child. She fantasized that when she went
into a room where everyone was talking and laughing, she
would simply stand there in the midst of this "riot of
sound" until her silence rushed in upon the room "from
inside her and ate up all the sounds (73)." And the room
would be silent because she made it so not because
everyone was looking sympathetically at her, wishing she
would speak, play and run like a normal little girl.
The narrative shows mimetically the trauma involved
in the rape of a child. It shows the discourse of the
child's mind in action. And in so doing, the narrative
151
makes a diegetic point about this handicap of being forced
into silence, however violent the force. Angelou
represents the discourse of the mind of the child, her
consciousness, through the language of the narrative.
CONCLUSION
The fictional and non-fictional documents that I have
used in this chapter are examples of writers who attempted
to integrate and unite William Earle's idea of past and
present states of consciousness which are enveloped in
Jean-Jacques Mayoux' idea of a "thick present" by taking
Gusdorf's suggestion to name those states in the writing
of an autobiographical document.
Each of these writers or narrators was handicapped
in some way. Each of them was immersed in the silent
withdrawal of the "thick present" during which they re
examined their experience of states of consciousness and
were able to understand them, give them meaning, organize
them, integrate them and name them through writing,
through narrative.
The fictional pieces focus on the mimetic chaos‘in
the narrator's consciousness which consciousness attempts
to diegetically separate, organize and unify. Tristram
Shandy wants to tell his own story in his own way.
Hermione Gart is not sure how to tell her story or where
her life story seems to be proceeding. Beckett's man on
152
the floor in the dark is attempting to distinguish the
three voices within and Ionesco's old man is trying to
make sense of his life at its ending.
The non-fictional pieces focus on the mimetic chaos
in consciousness caused by a handicap which forces the
consciousness to re-examine and re-think in silence and
re-emerge in the voice in the autobiographical document.
Helen Keller tells about the journey out of the silence
of being deaf, mute and blind. Christopher Nolan tells
about the same journey for a quadriplegic. John Stuart
Mill tells about the same journey for a person who is
mentally-emotionally ill and Maya Angelou tells about an
experience of violence which forces her into silent re
organization .
I shall now look at what I call the memoirist who
does the same thing but places the focus on the diversity,
the interlaces and braids in the palimpsest of the "thick
present" in consciousness, rather than naming the unity
that is there. The narratives in a memoir name and
represent the different strands of diversity.
"What else than a natural and mighty
palimpsest is the human brain?"2
25DeQuincey, 346.
153
CHAPTER TWO
THE MEMOIR COMPARES AND CONTRASTS
ACTS AND STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings,
have fallen upon your brain softly as light.1
INTRODUCTION
My aim in this chapter is to set first a theoretical
frame for an investigation of autobiographical pieces of
writing which are called (or can be called) memoirs as
distinguished from autobiographies and confessions by
looking at the "layers of ideas, images and feelings"
which have "fallen upon the brain" and which the memoirist
attempts to articulate mimetically and to differentiate
diegetically.
The crucial terms that I will be using are: void
and other. The word "void" will be used when the
memoirist becomes aware of an absence or a gap in some
past act or state of consciousness in a particular
experience. The word "other" will be used when the
memoirist becomes aware of acts or states of consciousness
in a particular past event or experience which were
Thomas DeQuincey, Tales and Prose Phantasies.
Volume XIII, The Collected Writings of Thomas DeQuincey.
ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black,
1890), 346.
154
recognized but not highlighted at the time. The memoirist
often uses the "other" to fill the "void" or replace an
unsatisfactory state.
The critics I would like to use as my focus here are
James Goodwin, Steven Marcus and Jacques Derrida. The
memoirist documents and narratives I will be using are:
Gogo, Didi, and Pozzo in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for
Godot, Tom Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' The Glass
Menagerie. Vladimir Nabokov in Speak. Memory, William
Wordsworth in The Prelude. Friedrich Nietzsche in Ecce
Homo, Maxine Hong Kingston in The Woman Warriorf Arthur
Miller in Timebends. Edmund Gosse in Father and Son and
Mary McCarthy in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.
James Goodwin supports the idea that there are
multiple "other" acts and states of consciousness in
people in his exploration of the myth of Narcissus, who
came to love himself as "another," and Goodwin relates
this myth to autobiographical writing. Steven Marcus
compares Freud's explanation of interior conflicts in
consciousness with Kohut's explanation of these by
asserting that, for Freud, states of consciousness battle
with each other in order to resolve the conflictual others
created in childhood but for Kohut states of consciousness
battle the presence of a void, an absent other, created
by an unmet need in childhood. Jacques Derrida discusses
155
how states of consciousness interact in Friedrich
Nietzsche's autobiography so as to meet and reconcile the
presence of this void within; he contends that the present
consciousness acts in such a way as to formulate a state
to fill voids created in the past.
Samuel Beckett contributes to an understanding of how
acts and states of consciousness come to be compared and
contrasted in an autobiographical document called Waiting
for Godot where he dramatizes the mimetic interactions of
four men in Act One of the play and then dramatizes their
conscious diegetic attempt to remember in Act Two what
happened in Act One. The series of acts of consciousness
performed and states of consciousness formed in Act One
cannot be remembered in a series of acts and states of
consciousness in Act Two. Beckett draws attention to the
fact that a series of acts and states of consciousness in
the one instance can be quite different from a second
series of acts and states of consciousness in the second
instance which is examining the first.
Tennessee Williams contributes to an understanding
of how an autobiographical document can compare and
contrast acts and states of consciousness in The Glass
Menagerie where he dramatizes Tom Wingfield's attempt to
remember the mimetic circumstances under which he left
home to join the Merchant Marine. The series of acts and
156
states of consciousness which led to his leaving are
admittedly not clear to his present diegetic act of
consciousness narrating it.
Vladimir Nabokov, in his autobiographical document.
Speak. Memory. highlights what the "fictional" Tom
Wingfield is doing when Nabokov "stacks" his memories in
a series of chapters but admits that he feels as if he is
falling into a transparent abyss of multiple acts and
states. Nabokov admits that his present dieaetic act of
narration can indeed create stories in these chapters
which appear to represent mimetically past acts and states
of consciousness but he knows that they are just one
version of many possible comparisons and contrasts.
William Wordsworth contributes to the exploration of
the comparisons and contrasts between one act or state of
consciousness and another in The Prelude where he
mimetically portrays himself in a state of depression due
to the feeling that he has lost his creative impulse as
a poet. His solution is to return home where three
separate acts and states of consciousness from childhood
balance themselves against the present depressed state and
he narrates them from that diegetic perspective. These
narratives illustrate how memory can return to various
experiences at different times and see them differently
each time.
157
Friedrich Nietzsche contributes to this understanding
of how memory "eternally returns" to compare and contrast
acts and states of consciousness in his autobiographical
document. Ecce Homo. where he says that every time he
tries to mimetically remember a past act or state, he
diegetically comments that his present consciousness is
in effect returning to the past, as if "eternally," in
order to resolve or end it but actually finds something
new each time.
Maxine Hong Kingston contributes to this exploration
of the eternal return of consciousness to past acts or
states with her "Shaman" narrative unit about her mother
in The Woman Warrior. This narrative evidences how a
series of multiple acts and states of consciousness based
upon Maxine's mimetic experience of her mother are
eternally returned to and diegetically reduced and
bracketed by a series of acts of the narrating
consciousness into a state of consciousness, a narrative,
which represents the mother for Maxine. This narrative
is her way of organizing and conceptualizing the multiple
comparisons and contrasts that she has of her mother.
Arthur Miller contributes to an understanding of how
a memoir compares and contrasts differences between states
and acts of consciousness in one narrative unit from his
autobiographical document. Timebends. where he remembers
158
his relationship with and marriage to Marilyn Monroe in
terms of the movie The Misfits. He portrays himself
mimetically performing a series of acts of consciousness
through which he reflects diegetically on his state of
consciousness about the relationship. As he examines this
relationship and experience, he offers comments and
questions about this past state. He is aware of what was
happening at the time and he analyzes that awareness in
retrospect.
Edmund Gosse contributes to an understanding of the
eternal return of memory to past states and acts of
consciousness in two narrative units from his
autobiographical document f Father and Son. where he
remembers his mother's sickness and subsequent death from
cancer and his baptism. As his present consciousness
performs the series of acts of mimetically narrating and
writing the narrative, he diegetically focuses on the
conflict between a series of acts which led him either to
’ •doubt" or "believe" in God. Gosse's realization is that
his personal life was pervaded by the classical Victorian
conflict between faith and doubt and this war was embodied
in him and in his relationship with his father and his
religion. He compares and contrasts a present state of
consciousness with past states in terms of his
relationship with his parents.
159
Mary McCarthy contributes to an understanding of how
a memoir compares and contrasts act and states of
consciousness in the narrative unit "A Tin Butterfly1 1 in
her autobiographical document. Memories of a Catholic
Girlhood. where she mimetically narrates the story of an
unjust discipline she received from a mean uncle when she
was nine years old. But in diegetic "postscripts" to the
story, other acts of consciousness,question the accuracy
of the representation of the story and her uncle's
meanness. The narrative and its postscripts represent
series of acts of consciousness which are bracketed to
represent attitudes or states and can be returned to later
and re-analyzed from the perspective of a different state
of consciousness and re-bracketed into a different story.
James Goodwin sees the specific aim of an
autobiographical document as a way for the writer to
explore the multiple parts of the singular, individual
self and come to self-knowledge. In such an exploration,
as in a memoir, there is a necessary self-alienation that
occurs when differentiation occurs which is essential to
the process of re-constituting, re-integrating the self,
as in a piece of autobiographical writing. The writer
meets new selves and integrates them in what Goodwin calls
160
a "narcissistic self-objectification"2 which is necessary
for the journey back to integration. Robert Langbaum
notes that ours has become an "identity society,"3 where
people are more narcissistically concerned with personal
consciousness than success at a career. He notes that the
typical patient in psychoanalysis nowadays focuses on this
narcissistic pursuit of self-consciousness and self-
fulfillment. Every interior relation becomes a power
struggle as persons seek to experience and know these
other parts of themselves as real objects, each with its
own multiple parts with whom they can maintain strong
relations. Langbaum, with Goodwin, says that the
autobiographical writer, like the patient in
psychoanalysis, recognizes these radically other selves
as new selves whom the writer wants to know so as to love
the whole self better (88-89).
Steven Marcus gives another perspective on this issue
in his article "The Psychoanalytic Self" where he focuses
on Hans Kohut's thesis that deeply embedded in the
anatomical, physiological, neurological matrix of the
2James Goodwin, "Narcissus and Autobiography,"
fGenre. Volume 12, Spring, 1979), 78.
3Robert Langbaum, The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme
in Modern Literature (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977), 3.
161
| unconscious are these inexplicable blank spaces,
i
i
! inconsistencies, and contradictions which have never been
j
; addressed by the person.4 Goodwin says that the
I
autobiographer is a person who meets these, reconciles
them and comes to love them as part of the self in the
autobiographical enterprise. Kohut says that here may
never be any reconciliation or "love" but only a continual
[dialogue, a Nietzschean "eternal return." Kohut says
that when the individual discovers an irreconcilable
inconsistency or contradiction, these two or more "horns
| of the dilemma" dialogue with each other in the
: autobiographical text or the psychoanalyst's couch.
Kohut disagrees with Freud who says that these gaps,
inconsistencies or contradictions were created in
childhood and the adult attempts to reconcile them. Freud
i
! says that two or more distinct, unconscious states are
formed in the child and evidence themselves in a conscious
i
j way in adult neuroses. Kohut says that the warring states
i
| in the adult are an attempt to supply a state that was
!
| missed, not created, in childhood through healthy child-
J parent interaction. The gap or lack of an important
"state" which was supposed to be created in early
4Steven Marcus, "The Psychoanalytic Self, " (Southern
jReview, Volume 22, #2, April, 1986), 318 ff.
162
childhood and was registered in the unconscious
evidences itself in the adult warring states and dialogues
with various selves in order to fill the blank or resolve
the conflict between two distinct states.
Jacques Derrida in The Ear of the Other addresses
this question of the blank or absent state which should
have been created in childhood with his discussion of
Niet2sche's idea that an individual will "eternally
return" to this state in an attempt to fill it.5 Derrida
accents the idea that the autobiographer playfully
differentiates the multiple selves, the gaps or voids
within, when one "self" giving ear to the other self
creates a portrait of the other self. Derrida says that
the constructed self dialogues with the multiple others
within and another self may be constructed which can again
be deconstructed in a new "eternal return" and re
discovery of someone else. These newly constructed selves
sometimes are used to fill the place of the absent self
when it is recognized.
The problem with the void or the gap within is that
there is nothing, no one, to dialogue with. Derrida
5Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other:
Otobioaraphy. Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy
Kamuf, ed. Christie McDonald, (New York: Schocken Books,
1985), 45, 57-58, 157.
163
compares this to the process of mourning the death of a
loved one (57-58). When someone dies with whom a person
has been particularly close, the person experiences this
as loss and void. There is no one to dialogue with any
more. The person may retreat to the place of silence and
emptiness in the void, the place where the person used to
be, as part of the mourning process, the acceptance of
this loss, the lack within.
Derrida says that a similar process occurs with parts
of the self that have died or never existed. He suggests
that this void within be looked at in terms of the loss
of the loved one where the person needs to retreat to the
silence of the emptiness as part of the acceptance of that
loss, or lack, or void within. Another self can be
constructed to replace the loss or the loss, the void, can
be accepted as part of the structure of the self.
In "The New Model Autobiographer," John Sturrock
reiterates Derrida's point about this fear of death and
extinction, the fear of the recognition of these voids and
gaps within, as the motivation for the autobiographical
act.6 The autobiographer desires to record some form of
a self that will ensure a permanent place in time, in
6John Sturrock, "The New Model Autobiography," (New
Literary History. 9, 1, 1977), 62,
164
historical record. The experience of the void within, as
a death, is countered with the concerted effort of the
self to re-assert existence in the face of and fear of
oblivion. If individuals experience themselves as empty,
void, containing "nothing," the natural desire is to find
a someone, a something to fill this space.
Based on what I have found useful in Goodwin, Marcus,
and Derrida and correlatively in Langbaum and Sturrock,
and as I apply them to the documents and narrative units
chosen, my theory of memoir writing is that it is an
autobiographical document in which the narrative voices
represent a present series of narrating acts and states
of consciousness which compare and contrast the otherness
and/or emptiness of past acts and states of consciousness.
Acts and states of consciousness which seem to be self-
evident in a particular setting are not so self-evident
when examined in retrospect. The act or state that is
remembered overlaps with another act or state and in
effect "buries" its trace on the palimpsest. "Buried" but
not eradicated; there is then the possibility of
retrieval.
GOGO, DIDI, LUCKY AND POZZO
Estragon, P0220, Lucky and Vladimir in Samuel Beckett's
Waiting for Godot, participate in an experience, a series
of acts of consciousness, in Act One which become a vague
165
memory in a series of acts of consciousness in Act Two;
the events are completely forgotten by Pozzo and
remembered differently each by Gogo and Didi as a series
of isolated facts and incidents. Lucky and the audience
are silent eyewitnesses to the "facts.1 ' If there were an
Act Three and an eternal return of Acts and these
characters kept meeting again and again, Beckett suggests
to me that these characters would remember only isolated
metaphoric-synecdochic facts, pieces and traces, about the
previous meetings and the new meeting would create another
set of overlapping metaphors and synecdoches in memory
which they would try to make into a metonymic narrative
of diegetic voices later.
The document exemplifies my theoretical perspective
about the memoir, based on the work of Derrida, Marcus and
Goodwin, that these characters in this play are returning
to an experience to make sense of it but the return only
results in a conflict of opposites and missing pieces.
Once familiarity with the remembered circumstances and
details sets in, they may arrive at a narrative like
Maxine Hong Kingston's about her mother which will capture
the essence of their experience for them.
Vladimir is the creative, artistic person as well as
the historical researcher, the investigator, the diegetic
commentator and evaluator. He remembers the significant
166
bits and pieces, the raw materials of various perceptions
and intuitions, and he wants to reconstruct a story, a
metonymic sequence of events, like an historical annalist,
a chronicler, but he is confounded because he gets no
eyewitness support from neither Estragon nor Pozzo in Act
Two and he can't make the metonymic connections between
the events, situations and objects remembered so that he
can bracket them into a sequence of metaphors and
synecdoches representative of experience generally which
give it "meaning."
At the beginning of Act Two Estragon and Vladimir
embrace each other because they have missed each other
after the evening's sleep. There is a general discussion
about their almost being beaten up the day before and
about the general state of their relative unhappiness and
discontent as they wait. Vladimir sees the tree and
recalls that they considered hanging themselves from it
yesterday and so he decides to reconstruct, narrate the
day, based upon the memory prompt of this tree. Estragon
recalls none of this. He embodies Derrida's idea of the
void. He says Vladimir dreamt it. Vladimir is amazed that
Estragon would forget something so serious as wanting to
commit suicide. Estragon says that he usually either
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"forgets immediately,"7 which he did with this suicide
business with the tree, or he "never forgets (39)," in
which case he too elaborates his own "dream" or fiction.
Vladimir wonders if Estragon also forgot about the
visitation of Pozzo and Lucky yesterday. He remembers
Lucky as "a lunatic who kicked him in the shins (40)" and
he recalls that Pozzo gave him a bone. These two isolated
facts in Estragon's memory neither synecdochically
represent nor metonymically capture the sequence of the
experience of Pozzo and Lucky in Act One but they indeed
serve as metaphors of the experience because they are what
give meaning to the experience for Estragon. They become
metonymic when he connects them with other facts and
builds a story. They become synecdochic after the
narrative is created in that they stand out from all the
rest.
The mimetic voice of the narrator attempts to give
metonymic sequence to selected facts by putting them in
an infallible, chronological order while the diegetic
voice of the evaluator attempts to give metaphoric-
synecdochic sequence to the selected facts by admitting
that there are gaps in this order, which make these
7Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. (New York: Grove
Press, Inc., 1954), 39. All further references will be
to this edition.
168
particular facts significant because they were remembered
over the others.
Vladimir and Estragon finally agree that they need
to take things "calmly (40);" it's not enough just to
"live their lives" and "wait for Godot (41)," they need,
somewhat compulsively, to talk about their lives and
reconstruct them, as objects. They want to give their
lives some kind of metonymic sequence, a logical order of
significant events which are metaphorically-
synecdochically representative and meaningful.
They try to start a conversation; they try to "have
an idea, a thought (42)" until which time Estragon asks
Vladimir to try to remember what they were saying when
they began this particular day in Act II. He thinks that
they began this day by trying to recall what happened
yesterday. Vladimir finds this activity of remembering
to be particularly challenging, being the type of a
creative-artistic man and an historian. He wants to
reconstruct the beginning of the day by a kind of
brainstorming, a Shandy-esque word association, by which
he can make sure it existed and can have some kind" of
control over it; "embrace. ..happy
...waiting...happy...tree (42)I" He perceives the tree
differently from yesterday which makes Estragon believe
that they weren't there yesterday; this is a different
tree in a different place.
With the thought of "yesterday," then, Vladimir
returns again to ask himself what he "did" yesterday.
Estragon says they probably just "blathered (43)" about
nothing, like they usually do, waiting for Godot. But
Vladimir, the historian, wants something more specific;
he wants a metonymic sequence of "facts and circumstances"
that he can put his finger on in recall and
synecdochically hang meaning and coherence on— he wants
to know that "something happened" in his life yesterday;
something significant which would indicate that he "means
something." For Estragon, such a series of acts of
consciousness as remembering and reconstructing is
"torment (43)." Like the characters in Sartre's No Exit,
he would rather just eternally get on with the mimetic
sequence of raw perceptions and intuitions gathered from
the field of objects continually passing before him than
stop to examine, analyze, evaluate and re-construct.
Vladimir begins another word association in which
Estragon participates half-heartedly and the word
association this time takes them back to Pozzo and
Lucky..."the bone...the kick...Lucky gave the kick (43)."
Vladimir, the historian, asks Estragon to show the spot
on his leg where he was kicked as proof. Vladimir notices
that Estragon has no boots on and discovers the
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boots are at the place on the stage where they had left
them at the end of Act One when they went to sleep. He
accepts this as historical proof that the two of them were
there in that same spot yesterday with that tree. But
Estragon discovers that they are not his boots because
they are the wrong color. Vladimir wants them to be his
boots because he wants this to be the same spot so that
he can construct his story, his sequence and make his life
meaningful.
So he leaves his role as chronicler and historian and
becomes the novelist, the artist who creates the fiction
that someone came and took Estragon's boots and left
these. These boots, the bone, the kick, the tree are the
metonyms from the mimetic sequence with which Vladimir
will form the sequence of his new narrative and the
diegetic voice endows them with a synecdochic/metaphoric
meaning that they don't have by themselves. They can stand
for each other or replace each other to the degree that
they represent the experience for Vladimir. The tree
reminds him of the suicide. The boots remind him that he
was there yesterday which reminds him that Estragon was
kicked by a lunatic which reminds Estragon that the
lunatic's friend gave him a chicken bone. The "being
kicked" is significant especially since Estragon confuses
it with another beating by another person not witnessed
171
by the audience in Act One.
The next piece of "evidence" is Lucky's hat. Vladimir
finds Lucky's hat and he and Estragon participate in a
pantomime of hat exchanges after which Vladimir decides
that "for something to do" for the sake of "company or
diversity," they could "play" at being Pozzo and Lucky.
They have the "bone" and the "kicking" and the hat as the
facts on which to base their pantomime, their imitation.
But then Vladimir suddenly remembers something else: the
visual image of Lucky sagging under the weight of his
master's, Pozzo's, heavy baggage and so he begins his
imitation of Lucky based upon this visual image. Estragon
does not know what to do; he does not know how "to be"
Pozzo; all he remembers is "the bone" which Pozzo gave him
and so Vladimir must coach him, direct him: "curse
me,...tell me to think,...tell me to dance (47)."
Estragon does not want to play so Vladimir plays both
parts until he realizes Estragon has left, is not
participating in his game, and so misses him and rushes
to embrace him. Vladimir, the artist, re-creates the
moment and the experience by imitating it.
But the mimetic "embracing" and the "waiting," not
the analytical, diegetic remembering or imitating, are the
central issues in this play for the consciousness of
Estragon and Vladimir. The essence of their experience
172
is that they care for each other as they wait and the
mimetic storytelling and diegetic commenting are quite
secondary endeavors which comprise the content of the
caring and waiting. Vladimir does not care to go on with
the pantomime if Estragon leaves.
They go back to their play-acting but this time they
play themselves; they yell at each other and call it
"abuse." They argue with each other and happily call it
"contradicting." They hug each other and say they "made
up (49)." They have experiences; they imitate these
experiences, name them, connect them, narrate them, forget
them, diegetically comment on them and return to them to
fictionalize them.
When Pozzo and Lucky return to meet Vladimir and
Estragon again in Act II, Vladimir sees this staggering,
helpless Pozzo, who yesterday was the triumphant
commandant, and his companion Lucky, and he thinks of them
as "reinforcements, help (49)" while they all wait for
Godot; someone else to embrace, to remember with, to share
stories. "They are not alone (50)" in the wait.
Vladimir thinks that Pozzo may have another bone for
Estragon and Estragon has no idea what Vladimir means by
"bone" when not moments earlier the bone was Estragon's
only memory of Pozzo. Estragon wants proof that this was
really the same man who gave him that bone. Vladimir
173
suggests that Estragon get this proof by "asking him
(50)." Pozzo meanwhile is groping, writhing, groaning,
beating the ground in pain and asking for help. He can't
get up. He is quite radically changed from the day before
but Vladimir and Estragon do not notice; they only want
the bone and see him as a "help" to them.
This persistent memory of the bone makes no sense in
terms of what happened the day before nor does it make
sense in terms of what is happening now, indicating the
possibility that a strong memory may indeed be only an
isolated, tangential, superficial part of the real
experience but an author may make it central in his re
telling of the experience— a synecdoche that has lost its
significance or a metaphor that can't replace.
As the two deliberate about the deranged Pozzo,
Vladimir says he is worried that "Lucky might get going
again (51)." Estragon does not remember a "Lucky." In
fact, Estragon connects Lucky with an entirely different
experience from the day before when we "almost were beaten
up" which the audience did not witness. Estragon is here
confusing two similar events: one of almost being beaten
up and another of being kicked by Lucky. Vladimir points
to Lucky standing immobile and tells Estragon that "here
is the one who kicked you yesterday (51)." He is ready
and willing to "run amuk (51)" again, at a moment's
174
notice. Vladimir and Estragon are not conscious of Lucky
and Pozzo as they are in that moment, on that day; they
only perceive them as they remember them. They can't see
them as they are.
An entirely new scenario of activity and dialogue now
takes place between the four characters which will be the
raw data, the brute facts, for a remembrance in Act Three,
if there was an Act Three. Estragon attempts to kick and
hurl abuse at the motionless Lucky? Pozzo worries that
Lucky will be hurt. Vladimir, the ever-vigilant
historian, again hears this as proof: Pozzo's oral
testimony that this man is Lucky because he called him by
that name, the same as yesterday. Pozzo remembers nothing
of yesterday but he also knows, he says, that he won't
remember anything of today when tomorrow comes. Vladimir
reminds Pozzo about what Pozzo was doing yesterday
bringing Lucky to the fair to sell him along with the
dancing, the thinking, Pozzo was not blind yesterday etc.
Pozzo allows Vladimir his fiction ("as you please (57)").
He just wants to move on into the transparent abyss of the
successive quantity of accumulating moments. He remembers
none of what Vladimir is saying.
Vladimir has created a story which he believes to be
true based upon his eyewitness, first-hand experience but
he receives no support from Pozzo nor Estragon. Vladimir
175
wants Lucky to sing and think and recite again like he did
yesterday. Pozzo has no idea what Vladimir is talking
about because Lucky is now "dumb (57)." Obviously more
than one day has passed for Pozzo because he says "one day
he went dumb,...one day I went blind,...one day we'll go
deaf,...one day we're born, one day we shall die (58)."
For Pozzo, there seem to be many years between the
experiences of Act One and Two. For Vladimir, the day
itself is like many years. He tries to recall every
detail, every event, every moment. Vladimir is like
Beckett's Malone or Doolittle's Hermione who go through
every millet grain of their lives trying to make meaning
out of each moment and sense out of each day and
experience.
Pozzo and Lucky leave and Vladimir, the historical
analyst, wonders if Pozzo is "really blind." He thinks
that the blindness he just witnessed may have been an act,
a pretense of Pozzo's because he feels that Pozzo really
"saw him (59)." Estragon, on the other hand, accepts
Pozzo's testimony on faith; "he told us he was blind
(58)," therefore he really was. If Vladimir doesn't
believe Pozzo and thinks that he really wasn't blind, then
that is Vladimir's own "dream," fictional creation,
diegetic bracket. Estragon believes Pozzo's testimony and
creates his narrative based upon that faith.
176
Vladimir returns full circle and wonders what he will
say about this day and this experience when he wakes up
tomorrow. The waiting...Pozzo and Lucky passing by...in
all of that "where is the truth?... Where is the
meaning?...What have I said;...What will I say (58-9)?"
Will each of them return again tomorrow and not know each
other or will each of them know metaphoric-metonymic-
synecdochic bits and pieces, Derridean traces and gaps,
of the day which each of them will use to construct his
own meaningful, albeit fictional, memoir.
Beckett's play accents the series of acts of
consciousness that eternally return to a previous state
of consciousness to examine the interplay of acts and
states there. In a memoir, consciousness attempts to fill
voids and reconcile opposites.
TOM WINGFIELD
Tom Wingfield performs the series of acts of
consciousness which examine the reasons why he left home
to join the Merchant Marine. He narrates in the present
about his consciousness of this past event. His mimetic
voice narrating in the present constructs a narrative,'an
autobiographical document, in which he represents himself
mimetically speaking and acting in the past event. His
diegetic voice, narrating in the present, asserts that his
memory may be fictionalizing the event. His mimetic voice
177
speaking in the event makes various diegetic comments
throughout as well.
The time of the play is set "now and in the past."8
His present consciousness is performing the series of acts
of remembering, constructing and narrating the past series
of acts.
Williams' description of Scene One says:
The scene is memory and is therefore
nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic
license. It omits some details; others are
exaggerated, according to the emotional value
of the articles it touches, for memory is seated
predominantly in the heart (27).
He describes a "fourth transparent wall and transparent
gauze portieres of the dining room arch (28)." The gauze
portieres and the concept of transparency become
synecdoches and metaphors for memory itself.
Vladimir Nabokov speaks of memory as a "transparent
abyss"9 in his autobiographical document, Speak. Memory.
Nabokov also uses these images of gauze curtains and
transparency for memory when he says that
with lips pressed against the thin fabric that
Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, (New York:
A Signet Book of the New American Library, 1945), 19.
All further references will be to this edition.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak. Memory: An Autobiography
Revisited. (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1947, 1948,
1949, 1950, 1960, 1966), 73. All further references will
be to this edition.
178
veiled the windowpane, the pane through which
nostalgia longed to peer, the windowpane on
which his tongue could only taste the cold of
the glass through the gauze but prevented him
from entering fully into that transparent abyss
of memory. (73, 89, 107)...The cradle rocks
above an abyss, and common sense tells us that
our existence is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness (19).
He writes about remembering the Nabokov family coat of
arms "with great clarity" as a "great chessboard (50)" and
then he corrects the memory because after looking it up
he discovers that only about one sixteenth of one sguare
contains part of a chessboard.
In the following passage, Nabokov attempts to
remember his childhood tutors and the passage represents
how memory can distort and blur the reality. Tom Wingfield
attempts to remember the circumstances around the time
that he left home to join the Merchant Marine and he too
admits the possibility of the same kind of blurring and
distortion but also "an essential completeness and
stability...an innate harmony...gather and fold the
suspended and wandering tonalities. . .into consummation and
resolution (see quotation below)."
In thinking of my successive tutors, I am
concerned less with the queer dissonances they
introduced me to in my young life than with the
essential stability and completeness of that
life. I witness with pleasure the supreme
achievement of memory, which is the masterly use
it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to
its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities
of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation
and resolution of those jangling chords,
179
something as enduring, in retrospect, as the
long table on summer birthdays and namedays used
to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of
doors....I see the tablecloth and the
faces.... exaggerated, no doubt, by the same
faculty of impassioned commemoration, of
ceaseless return, that always makes me approach
that table from the outside,...through a
tremulous prism, I distinguish features,...I
see...I note....the pulsation of my thought
mingles with that of the lead shadows and turns
Ordo into Max and Max into Lenski and Lenski
into the schoolmaster, and the whole array of
trembling transformations is repeated. And then,
suddenly, ...a torrent of sounds comes to life:
voices speaking all together..-the confused and
enthusiastic hullabalo,...like a background of
wild applause (170-72).
Nabakov narrates mimetically to the extent that he
is telling the reader exactly how he remembers these
situations. He looks through the gauze curtain of the
window at his mental picture of the past and mimetically
sees the experiences but when he narrates, he evaluates
diegetically the specificity and clarity of the
recollection and he questions its truth because as he
looks through the gauze curtain at the picture, he feels
as if he falls into a "transparent abyss."
Tom Wingfield also narrates mimetically in that he
tries to remember the mimetic details of a specific
situation and the gauze portieres that enclose the
Wingfield apartment are like Nabokov's gauze curtains on
the windows and Tom, like Nabokov, or later, as I shall
discuss with Mary McCarthy, narrates diegetically through
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them when he questions the accuracy of his memories. As
he looks through the "gauze portieres" into the dining
room of the apartment, this fourth wall is "transparent"
so as to allow him to narrate while looking through it:
I am the narrator of the play and also a
character in it....The play is memory. Being a
memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is
sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory
everything seems to happen to music. That
explains the fiddle in the wings (29-30).
In this opening speech, Tom diegetically explains his
theoretical, diegetic stance before he attempts a mimetic
narration.
Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things
up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage
magician. He gives you illusion that has the
appearance of truth. I give you truth in the
pleasant guise of illusion (29).
There will be reference later in the play to a real
magician, Malvolio, whom Tom sees at stage show. Malvolio
is also the name of Lady Olivia's steward in Shakespeare's
Twelfth Niaht who fantasizes that he might marry her. She
has no interest in him; he is so serious and somber that
he is an easy prey for Sir Toby's elaborate tricks and
jokes. "Shakespeare" is a nickname given to Tom because
he writes poetry. I would like to connect this interlace
of magician, Shakespeare and Malvolio with Tom. They are
different diegetic elements in Tom's consciousness that
compare and contrast who he is. As a narrator who creates
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this story, this mimesis, this illusion, and is able to
make it look real, he is the stage magician. But as
Shakespeare, the artist, the writer, he is able to make
a diegetic point with his narration. As Malvolio, he is
duped into thinking that the illusion is the reality, that
he is responsible for his sister's well-being. Tom, the
writer, magician and dupe, has the diegetic power to
return again and change the mimetic memory, the reality
and create an illusion.
Tom tells his sister that the stage magician Malvolio
poured water back and forth into pitchers and turned it
into wine, which Tom of course volunteered to taste and
as he more often than not does, proceeds to get drunk.
Malvolio the stage magician also gave Tom a magic scarf
which can turn a canary cage into a goldfish bowl and the
goldfish fly away as canaries. He gives his sister the
scarf in hopes that it will be able to make magic in her
life, change her and make her happy.
But the most "wonderfullest trick of all was the
coffin trick (56)." Malvolio was nailed into a coffin and
got out of the coffin without removing one nail. Tom
reflects diegetically at home aloud to his sister that its
easy to get yourself nailed in to a coffin, like he is
nailed into the coffin of his home, the coffin of his own
personal illusions about himself, continually putting off,
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excusing and ignoring the abuse and manipulation of Amanda
and in the process, he walls himself up, nails himself in,
and loses all sense of himself and his own motivations and
needs. He is in many ways "silenced."
Tom comes to his most keen, clear, perceptive
diegetic insight: it's easy to get oneself nailed in,
walled up, closed off, lost, but how does one get back out
of the coffin, out of the corner, out in the open, back
into contact with a healthy sense of self without going
through the pain of removing one nail, without asserting
oneself such that illusions will be shattered. He knows
that by leaving and joining the Merchant Marine, he may
hurt and lose his sister, neither of which he wants to do.
He must "remove that nail" to be free.
Malvolio, the stage magician, makes the reality look
easy. Tom, the magician, makes the illusion that he is
responsible for his sister so difficult to shatter.
Malvolio the magician is, of course, not really nailed
into the coffin; it is a trick, an illusion; he looks like
he's nailed in. So getting out is no problem.
Tom makes it "look like" he's nailed into that house
with his mother and sister; he portrays this illusion. And
if it is an illusion, it should be easy to get out of. The
reality is that he's not forced to stay there; he is free
to remove the nails and leave. He narrates this "reality"
183
that he is free to leave under the guise of the "illusion"
that he is nailed in, forced to stay. Like Malvolio, the
magician, Tom can remove the nails quite easily. Like
Malvolio, the magician, Tom is not really nailed into that
house. He makes it "look like" he's forced to stay there
and he is tied to that illusion as if it were a reality.
He looks like he's really nailed into the coffin of the
house and he believes that he really is; there is no way
to get out. He shatters the illusion, discovers the
reality, and leaves to join the Merchant Marine.
When his mother refuses to believe the reality that
he "just goes to the movies" every night, he creates a
fiction, an illusion, for her. He narrates a long,
elaborate, magical story about himself as an underworld
spy, El Diablo, and other stories about his gang-related
activities. The truth is, the reality is, that he does
in fact go to the movies and get drunk but the fiction,
the illusion, is more fun, more believable, more magical,
more delusional. The truth is that Tom is responsible
neither for his sister's nor his mother's health and
happiness but the illusion that he is responsible for them
makes him appear responsible, caring, even heroic.
Tom later tells his friend, Jim, the "gentleman
caller" who nicknamed him Shakespeare, that he is tired
of sitting in a theater watching the illusions on the
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movie screen of fictional people having fictional, magical
adventures. He is equally tired of the illusion of his own
life. He wants to participate in the reality of "moving"
himself and having a real adventure, a life, for himself,
and so is motivated to join the Merchant Marine. He is
tired of creating stories, illusions, about where he goes
each night and he's tired of living with this illusion
that he is responsible for his mother and sister.
The mimetic sequence of dialogue and words spoken by
Tom in the play are accompanied by a diegetic sequence of
comments and evaluations, especially to his friend, Jim,
on the balcony before the dinner.
The magician image is synecdochic in that it is
representative of Tom generally and Malvolio, the stage
magician, and the writer are metaphoric forms or versions
of that image. They overlap, braid and substitute for each
other. Malvolio, the magician makes the illusion that he
is nailed into the coffin look real; Tom is the magician
who makes the illusion that he forced to remain in that
house look real. Malvolio, in Twelfth Night, creates the
illusion that Lady Olivia loves him and they will marry
and Tom creates the illusion that he is responsible for
his sister when in fact, she is actually quite aware of
her mother's needs and she also has the opportunity to
renew her high-school relationship with Jim and when she
185
learns that he is engaged to be married, she does not
break but manages to survive quite well. She can get
along quite well without Tom.
Shakespeare is the writer who creates mimetic
fictions, illusions, through which he makes true, diegetic
points about real life. Tom is the writer who creates
this fiction of his own life through which he makes a
point about it.
The G]ass Menagerie is an example of an
autobiographical document that is a memoir because Tom is
remembering an event, the circumstances around which he
left home to join the Merchant Marine. He is remembering
the mimetic series of acts and states of consciousness
that he experienced at that time and he is narrating them
in terms of a present series of acts of consciousness
which adds its diegetic commentary and evaluation. He
locates the various conflicts and inconsistencies in his
consciousness and narrates with those in mind. The
circumstances remembered are admittedly illusory dialogues
and situations mimetically created, with added diegetic
commentary and evaluation. The metaphoric, synecdochic
image of the magician/writer is a diegetic device by which
Tom represents various acts in his state of consciousness
at that time. The narrative is a way for him to reconcile
opposites, fill the voids and clarify confusions.
186
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
William Wordsworth returned to the Lake District to
renew "those latent essences by which C his] mind [ was
once] moved with feelings of delight (2, 325-7 )."10 The
Lake District, his "beloved Grasmere," is that place where
he was first "fed by lofty speculation and never-failing
joy and passion (2, 49-51)." So he returns there to renew
those lost essences and his consciousness is once again
fed and moved by lofty speculations and never-failing joys
and passions which were formed in childhood and are again
re-kindled by three childhood remembrances which result
in three separate but, I propose, braided narratives in
The Prelude.
The three narrative remembrances are metaphoric
narratives because they can each replace the other in his
conscious remembrance of his mimetic experience as a child
at Grasmere and they are his diegetic comment about the
source of his creativity. His creative spirit was renewed
in this return to his birthplace. Wordsworth's personal
crisis involved a loss of creativity which led him to
return to the Lake District and there re-discover his
10William Wordsworth, The Fourteen Book Prelude f
edited by W.J.B. Owen, (Cornell University Press, 1985),
Book 2, lines 325-327. All further references will be
to this edition.
187
roots. He "read...with clearer knowledge (4, 212-214)" the
book of nature in his homeland and narrated in his
autobiographical poem, his diegetic interpretation of what
he mimetically saw there. He mimetically re-experienced
the area as a child and he mimetically re-experienced the
perceptions and intuitions recorded in consciousness which
were re-activated again upon the return and diegetically
connected with this loss and retrieval of his creative
impulse. He is experiencing a void, an absence, a lack
of the creative impulse that he had always felt, and he
attempts to fill that void by returning home and the
memories there serve to re-kindle the creative impulse.
He walks about and recalls those "rapturous times
(1,430)" when he was able to be alone with nature and she
"employed such ministry (1,467-8)" on him that his
creative talent was born and nurtured. The elements of
this place animate and agitate his creative spirit with
their "noises, mists, convergences, kindred spectacles of
sound “shape and place (9, 1)." These "unfading
recollections (1,491)" of nature "people his mind with
form sublime and fair and making him love them (1,546)."
These "first born affinities in the dawn of [his] being
constitute [him] in a bond of union (1,555-8)." He
remembers now, as he walks, that nature "spoke memorable
things to him (1,587-8)" then, in his childhood. His hope
188
t now as he walks about is to "fetch those invigorating
I
I
;thoughts from those former years (1,621-2)." He "makes
no vows, but vows were made then for him...that [he]
! should be...a dedicated Spirit." And he walks on in
"blessed thankfulness" that this Spirit still "survives"
in him (4,334-8)." A diegetic voice creates a self-
consciousness based upon past mimetic voices and
experiences.
Wordsworth takes his own advice from his Lyrical
Ballads and recollects himself in tranquillity and allows
this tranquillizing spirit to "press" on him and fill the
! vacancy between his past creativity and present loss
. (2,27-29). These reminiscences of childhood experiences,
I
! former acts and states of consciousness, were stirred in
’ the painful act of returning to interrogate them about the
present loss. An expected anger or discontent results
' rather in a "pleasurable recollection" because he "gives
himself over" to these recollections in pleasure and
| tranquillity such that any pain, compulsion or driven-ness
of an interrogative, angry spirit gives way to a freedom
that allows him to write freely and creatively again.
Walking around the Lake District, he realizes that
he had built his life into a great assembly hall, a
j system, a state, and in so doing he forgot the first
i stone, the cornerstone of childhood, where creativity
I
t
i
189
began (2, 199). He distanced himself from these origins
and took control of his own intellect and powers and
parceled them out by "geometric rules (2,204)." "He had
transferred his delight to "inorganic natures (2,392)" and
he came to commune habitually with little enmities and low
desires (1, 432)."
And so he sits, recollected in tranquillity, and by
his glance, from his particular Husserlean natural
standpoint, his consciousness ceased to be a formed state,
a system, and begins to bend and "act" again as he allows
the beauty and inspiration of the Lake District to re
enter his soul and re-kindle past acts of consciousness.
The conscious act of returning to the Lake District
triggers the unexpected acts of remembering past states
when he returned there after being away at school during
his first year at Cambridge. These two acts of returning,
first as a student and now as the adult poet, parallel and
substitute for each other. He is reminded of this first
exit to and return from Cambridge and he writes the
narrative of that return home after a first year away at
school which is an earlier form of this second, more
significant return. He remembers being so overwhelmed by
a feeling of communion with nature that he made "two
circuits around the Lake (4,13 8)" and was able to "pull
the veil from his soul and stand naked in the presence of
190
God (4,151-2)." This "external scene (4,160)," this place
where he had been born and raised and was separated from
for the first time, tapped his "inward hopes and swelling
spirit (4, 162-2)." As the adult writer who has lost his
creative impulse, he returns and remembers how once before
he had returned and felt renewed. "Lake, islands,
promontories, gleaming bays, a universe of Nature's
fairest forms instantaneously burst" upon him in their
"magnificence (4,7-11)." He "speeds" up "the familiar
hill, with exultation. . .towards that secret valley where
[he] had been reared (4,17-19)." Here was an "emblem
(4,61)" (a synecdoche) of his life. He met and greeted
his neighbors as he "sauntered...like a murmuring river
talking to itself (4,119-120)" accompanied by his faithful
terrier. He recalls these walks "with thanks and
gratitude and perfect joy of heart (4,134-5)."
He returns to the Lake District to be renewed just
as the young Wordsworth, the college student, returned to
the Lake District and experienced renewal. Wordsworth
fetches those good things from his time past in order to
shape them into "novelties," stories like Don Quixote or
an Arabian Knight tale, to nourish him for difficult
times, like the one he is experiencing now.
The meaning or significance of a past experience
accumulates when the experience seems to recur again in
191
other forms. The writing of the narratives about these
"returns" is itself an act of returning and as such is a
meaningful and significant act. The act of returning as
a college student, the act of returning as the depressed
adult, the act of remembering both returns and narrating
them are different acts yet similar in that they
constitute the essential nature of the act of returning
as a significant one in Wordsworth's consciousness.
In Friedrich Nietzsche's autobiographical document,
Ecce Homo. he dwells on this philosophical, theoretical
problem of what happens when individuals "eternally
return,"11 through memory, to re-examine their lives and
re-discover themselves. Personal consciousness is formed
by this eternal return of the memory to past events and
other selves in dialogue.
Zarathustra, Nietzsche's fictional alter ego, is the
"other" whom he says gives him this idea of the eternal
return principle: the continual re-discovery of the self
through the cyclical entrance into Nabokov's "transparent
abyss" and return to exhilaration. The discovery of
Zarathustra, another form of the Wordsworthian creative
11Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Ecce Homo and The
Birth of Tragedyr (New York: The Modern Library, Inc.,
1927), 69, 95, 107. All further references will be to
this edition.
192
spirit, is both Nietzsche's and Wordsworth's "highest
formula of self-affirmation (95)." This ideal spirit
resurrects Nietzsche within himself and the spirits play
and laugh innocently together and this resurrection and
interaction cause him to forget the struggling selves that
had previously occupied him and made him feel so alienated
and estranged from himself. Zarathustra invades
Nietzsche's soul ever so gradually, in a process of
retrogressive, recursive progress as does Wordsworth's
creative spirit re-inhabit his soul in this
retrogressive/progressive return home. Zarathustra was
that essential, comprehensive, stable being who invaded
Nietzsche at a particularly unstable, painful time and,
in the process of dialogic interaction of voices, changed
him. His autobiography is Nietzsche's philosophical
reflection on that process of the eternal return of memory
and his philosophy of memory contained therein is in fact
an autobiographical theory of memoir.
This process of his own re-discovery through the
intervention of his fictional Zarathustra is an example
of the eternal return, the repetitive re-discovery of
other selves at all kinds of levels. The past is redeemed
and transformed in the present return to what seems to be
a compulsive repeat of an apparent death-destruction
experience in the return to some person, place or activity
193
with which one is obsessed but "turns" to a resurrection-
cum-re-creation, a second sight. Nietzsche feels like he
dies and resurrects in the re-discovery. Wordsworth felt
"dead" and was resurrected in the return to the Lake
District.
Nietzsche minimizes any obsessive-compulsive aspect
of the return. Each return results in new discoveries.
The crisis of the self to purge the alien, befriend
stranger within, fill the void, and breathe freely enough
to return to the possession of the healthy self is an
instinctual, natural desire against any further
estrangement, any return to the abyss, any obsessive
compulsivity. Instinct runs from the crisis experience
of estrangement, misunderstanding, discontent and
emptiness to the memory of comforting, rewarding
experiences of past states of Zarathustrian repose,
Wordsworthian creativity, a self-consciousness who is not
a stranger.
But this memoirist concept of the eternal return
involves a repetition of a cycle of healthy self-
consciousness to unhealthy, deadly estrangement. Nietzsche
says that a person must say "yes" to the one in order to
get the other. Through nutrition, climate and pleasant
surroundings, the self recuperates in recreative play with
the variety of others within (30-41, 48).
194
The task of a person like Wordsworth is to determine
who he is, where the creativity is, in all the apparent
chaos of this particular "return." Nietzsche makes it
clear that he himself is not any one of his writings nor
his experiences, nor a composite of them, but parts of him
are discoverable in each and in the stories about the
stories. He hears only that which he is given access to
hear by the experiences that he is given. He can't hear
something about himself if it is as yet absent. He will
need to wait for a return in the eternal turn of the
circle again when something new will come to light through
the descent into the abyss, the dialogue and the rise to
Zarathustrian ecstacy or enlightenment.
When a particular "turn" or re-turn appears to be
"just like" (metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy) a previous
one, Nietzsche says that there is always something new
about this particular turn that makes it different,
special, representative (synecdochic), hence not
obsessive-compulsive, irreplaceable. When he takes the
various unique, yet similar "turns" and connects them
(metonyms), he has a "life story" or a life history as a
narrated series of diegetic insights or points made or
mimetic experiences and voices re-created in narrative.
Just as specific parts of each turn can stand alone as
representative, a synecdoche, so they can replace each
195
other as metaphoric representations.
Both Nietzsche and Wordsworth are narrating and
writing from relatively frozen, fixed points in time in
that they are remembering past "turns" and "returns" to
past moments of crises and repose. The present time of
narration seems to be a suspended, reflective one, like
Wordsworth who has lost his creativity and is suspended
in a particularly difficult, critical "turn."
Edward Said's theory of history repeating itself,
like Nietzsche's eternal return, accents the return and
the discovery of something new. History is not a
"gratuitous series of occurrences of haphazard events nor
* • 12 #
a wholly foreordained blueprint," but an accumulation of
meaning as the weight of past experiences return and
evidence their similarities and their differences.
Reproduction and regeneration of past events in narratives
produce not only similarities between them, a strong
transmission of likeness, but they also produce unique
shadings of difference. Narrative allows a recapitulation
that will accent these differences and similarities and
the creation of the narrative is itself a form of
12Edward W. Said, "On Repetition," in The
Literature of Fact: Selected Essays from the English
Institute. edited by Angus Fletcher, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1976), 138.
196
repeating the experience and discovering the newness, the
differences and the similarities with other experiences.
Like the river (9,1 ff.) which knows that it is
proceeding toward its end in the "ravenous sea" and tries
to turn and "measure back" its course, seeking regions it
once crossed, regions which hold the richest memories,
Wordsworth "measures back" and returns to the Lake
District in an attempt to recapture and re-discover in
the return the roots of his creativity in those memories
of childhood places and experiences.
The stealing of the boat, the horseback ride with the
servant, and the Christmas experience on the crag are
three metaphoric narratives in particular that interlace
as one synecdochic narrative expression of Wordsworth's
return to creativity. They can be read separately and
substituted one for the other as metaphoric
exemplifications of Wordsworth's consciousness of the loss
and renewal of his creativity. Or they can be read as one
synecdochic narrative in keeping with David Fischer's
concept of the braided or interlaced narrative as a
complex interweave of changing perspectives by a self-
conscious mind integrating those perspectives through a
process of re-arranging and interrelating the various
197
details.13
Wordsworth continues "to muse (4,177-8)" and to pass
into "solemn thought (4,190)" as he walks about the Lake
District this second time. And after remembering the
first return as a student, he remembers the time as a
child that he came upon a little boat tied to a tree on
the lake (1, 357 ff.). He remembers and sees himself
untying the boat, getting in and rowing away. He recalls
suddenly being overwhelmed and frightened by a "huge cliff
uprearing its head" and he flees back to the shore. The
act of stealing the boat may be a metaphor locating the
source of his creativity in the young boy who takes risks
and seeks adventure. The huge cliff driving him back to
the shore in fear may be a metaphor for the loss of the
creativity. The act of remembering this event in this way
and writing it out in this narrative may be a metaphoric
way of explaining the source and loss of the creativity
but the conscious act of remembering and writing is itself
the act of renewing the creativity.
He then remembers another time when he went out for
a horse-back ride as a child with one of his father's
13David Fischer, "The Braided Narrative: Substance
and Form in Social History," in The Literature of Fact,
edited by Angus Fletcher, (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1976), 120.
198
servants (12, 225 ff.) and in the course of the ride, he
became separated from the servant. He remembers finding
himself at the bottom of a valley where there was an old,
decayed gibbet-mast on which thieves and murderers were
once executed. Often, the name of the murderer or thief
was carved in the wood of the mast. He recalls fleeing
in fear again, as in the boat experience, and he reascends
to a "beacon" pool "on a summit" where he meets a girl,
struggling against the wind, carrying a water pitcher on
her head. The memory of the experience results in the
creation of a "radiance more sublime (12,267)" in him.
He sees in it a "power...left behind (12, 268-9)" and the
narrative becomes a metaphoric explanation for the loss
and retrieval of creative power as it shows the creative
power in action. After becoming separated from the
servant, he comes upon this place of execution in a
valley, a metaphor of the loss of the creative spirit.
The fleeing in fear and the re-ascension to see the girl
carrying the water is a metaphoric action symbolizing the
renewal of the creative spirit and can replace the same
fleeing and fear in the boat sequence. The narrative act
of combining the elements into this narrative is rooted
in the creative power of his spirit which has been
renewed.
And again, he remembers going out into the fields
199
with his brothers one "tempestuous, dark and wild"
Christmas day (12, 287 ff.) and he recalls stopping to
rest at the summit of a crag "with a hawthorn on his left
and a sheep on his right," each of them surveying the
valley below. He recalls feeling good at this experience.
Ten days later his father dies and his consciousness
connects this joyful experience on the crag and with the
death of his father. The "good feeling" experienced and
remembered with the hawthorn and the sheep on the crag
overlooking the valley metaphorically represent the source
of the creative spirit in the feeling associated with the
experience. The death of the father ten days later
metaphorically represents the loss of the creative spirit
and feeling. The conscious act of placing these two
experiences together is itself a creative act explaining
loss of creativity. The impact of the narrative depends
upon the fact that these two events happened and can be
mimetically represented and they can be diegetically
combined by the creative insight of Wordsworth.
Wordsworth's present creative consciousness makes the
diegetic connection between the two events which his past
consciousness placed in memory and so he writes the
narrative with that connection.
There most likely were many other occurrences during
those ten days between the experience on the crag and the
200
death of his father which he could have connected. But
the depressed Wordsworth identifies most strongly with the
depressed boy who lost his father, saw the names of the
murderers on the gibbet mast or fled in fear from the
mountain. Wordsworth is obviously not interested in the
metonymic sequence of every detail in a mimetic narrative.
He is interested in a metaphoric, synecdochic sequence of
details in a diegetic narrative that is an evaluative
comment on his present condition.
These three experiences and their narrative re
creations in The Prelude braid together and illustrate
Wordsworth's conscious realization that his creative
spirit began and was nourished in and by the rivers, lakes
and hillsides of "the dear Vale, Beloved Grasmere." They
also illustrate his consciousness of the loss of his
creativity rooted there in such remembrances as the death
of his father, the gibbet-mast and the huge cliff. By
connecting these experiences in the narratives, he
exercises the very creativity which he thought he had
lost. He is back on the crag with the hawthorn and sheep,
he sees the girl running up the hill, he takes the chance
and steals the boat again. The narratives can be read
together as metaphoric replacements for each other or read
separately as synecdochic representations or read
metonymically as a narrative explanation of Wordsworth's
201
experience in consciousness of the loss and retrieval of
his creativity.
The three childhood narratives along with the two
narratives of return recapitulate a sequence of events
which becomes representative of a the larger issue of
Wordsworth's creativity and they can replace each other
in an explanation of the creativity issue.
In Book 11, he compares his memory to a "nook" which
restores for him the "sacred delight of his infant world
of play (419-20)." These memories of this place are his
"spots of time (12,208)" memories where his life
maintained a distinct pre-eminence, virtue and creativity
which had come to be depressed by "false opinion and
contentious thought (12,211)" but are now preserved and
revived in narrative remembrance. These memories of the
experiences in these places nourishes and repairs his
spirit and allows readers to experience them.
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
Maxine Hong Kingston's mother had an experience as
an adolescent at her girls' boarding school which she
apparently repeated to her daughter because it appears' in
the daughter's memoir as a significant story within that
memoir. Maxine's narrative about her mother mythologizes
the mother by making her the heroine of this adventure
story. The account is as much a biographical statement by
202
Maxine about her mother as it is an autobiographical one
about herself and her roots but the distortion,
fictionalization and mythologizing that are apparent in
the narrative reinforce the fact that when present
consciousness examines past consciousness, the chronology,
the mimetic sequence of events may be lost, distorted or
changed and certain diegetic, mythological, aspects will
stand out as representative.
In representing the mother as a heroine, a woman of
great strength, Maxine gives her ancestry, her roots, the
same heroic stature much like Wordsworth offers his
narrative memories of his childhood in the Lake District
as the source of his poetic power or Maya Angelou
remembers herself as the strong, little girl who survived
a rape experience. These are diegetic comments by these
autobiographers after reflecting on their mimetic
experiences.
The representation of the mother as idealized,
heroic, is a diegetic statement by Maxine about her
feelings about her mother; Maxine recognizes that mimetic
accuracy of detail and factuality may have been
sacrificed. Even though there is distortion and
idealization caused by distance and repetition, Maxine's
personal feelings about herself and her mother as heroines
are not lost.
203
The fact that her mother spent the night with a ghost
when she was a student and was the heroine of the student
body is itself an interesting story; it invites
elaboration, fictionalization and idealization and it is
a memory that asks to be preserved. We all have favorite
stories about relatives that we enjoy remembering and re
telling. Like Edmund Gosse in his Father and Son. Maxine
functions as both biographer for her mother and
autobiographer for herself. Both Maxine and her mother
are "women warriors." Both Edmund and his father lose
their mother and wife and need also to be "warriors" in
the Victorian conflict between faith and doubt that
surfaces in their relationship. I will discuss Edmund and
his father in greater detail later.
In the dormitory where the mother resided as a young
student, there seems to have been a "ghost room" that all
of the students, except Maxine's mother, were afraid to
enter, especially at night. She was willing to show her
classmates that there was nothing to be afraid of by
volunteering to sleep there one night. This gives her
heroic stature in the eyes of her classmates, herself and
later her daughter. Maxine portrays her mother in the
narrative as having a sobriety and realism about this
adventure; she does not have the characteristic fear and
apprehension about the room or the ghost that the other
204
students have. In fact, even when she does confront the
ghost, she still evidences no panic or fear. This
narrative becomes a way for Maxine not only to idealize
her mother but also to memorialize her mother and set her
mother up as model for herself. The experience of the
ghost also serves as a way for the mother to explain to
her daughter how to confront difficult situations.
The legend that there is a ghost in this room in the
dormitory is one handed down to the students at this
particular school through the generations of students who
have attended the school. Stories like these are, of
course, not unusual among children and adolescents. We
have all created imaginary persons, places and things that
become objects or situations to conquer which will then
make us heroes. We each have some kind of story like this
in our past; a story where we participated in an adventure
to a mysterious place to conquer a "monster" and become
a hero or perform some heroic activity that elevated us
in the eyes of our peers. And sometimes we create these
stories about ourselves and our family members, like
Maxine did about her mother, where we create a portrait
of the person by which we will remember the person.
When she returns to her classmates in the morning,
as the story goes, the shaman-mother tells her classmates
that she first needs to participate in a ritual cleansing
205
called an "earlobe touching"14 by which she assures
herself and her classmates that she did not "lose any of
herself" (84) in the experience while alone with the ghost
in the room. She is concerned that the experience may
have caused her to lose some of herself because the
experience was so fearful, anxiety-ridden and exhausting.
So, as the mythological priestess, the shaman, she
leads her classmates in a ritual exorcism with bucket,
alcohol, oil and dog's blood. As priestess, she
"preaches" to them by encouraging them to be unafraid when
they meet their own and other ghosts. They return to the
"ghost room" together where the mother performs as the
high priestess swinging the lighted bucket overhead and
leading the "go home (88)" chant to the ghost.
The mimetic details of the story of the ghost room
in the dormitory as told by the mother and handed down to
Maxine may have been diegetically changed and
fictionalized according to Maxine's need to idealize her
mother and her roots or her mother's own need to idealize
this conversion experience. As the story was repeated and
became more removed from its source, it became distorted
14Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs
of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. (New York: Vintage Books, A
Division of Random House, 1977), 84. All further
references will be to this edition.
206
by memory failure and began to be fixed and have a life
of its own.
After the ritual return, the mother narrates what
happened in the room and her experience of this ghost
sitting on her. This narration of the personal experience
of the mother is central to the mother's public persona
as heroine and shaman to her classmates and daughter.
They know that something happened in that room and they
want to hear about it but only Maxine's mother is the one
who can tell it.
This narrative unit where she describes what happened
in the room, is part of the larger narrative unit called
"Shaman” and can stand alone as representative of the
mother who gives advice and it is also Maxine's way of
talking about how to compare and contrast various states
of consciousness within.
She says that she was initially surprised to learn
that it was going to be a "sitting ghost" whom she manages
to overcome. The trial lasted about an hour and she
narrates this interior unit as one of personal conversion
and trial during which time she experienced "babies
crying, relatives and friends screaming in torture,
energetic amassings of wind sounds, along with a general
malaise and suffering (86)." She says that she "died for
awhile (85)" after having her knife wrested from her by
207
the ghost. She lost her way and wandered in an interior
chaos where "everything turned to sand." She was
determined not to be conquered by this ghost. It was
trying to elicit the necessary fear and anger that would
allow it to take her over totally but she refuses to let
that happen by allowing herself to experience the ghost
as a void, an experience of emptiness or loss, and die for
awhile. She talks to it and tells it that it will not
win. As a diversion, she chants her school lessons and
falls asleep. This ghost and the room become external
objects where an interior crisis and conversion in
Maxine's mother are acted out. The narratives are devices
by which both Maxine and her mother recapitulate the
experience and talk about it. The ghost is that part of
the self which Maxine's mother's consciousness had never
met, Derrida's "other." The act of consciousness was the
act of reconciling other with void. But in becoming
reconciled with the other within whom she had never met,
she also needs to experience states of consciousness which
went from chaos to emptiness. She tells her classmates
that this ghost, this other self within, is by no means
dead and gone. This was just a particular moment of
victory over this particular "sitting ghost (86)." Other
selves will appear at other times with different degrees
of intensity in different kinds of experiences. She tells
208
her classmates that these other selves are serious ghosts
(87); they do not want to be ignored and they will create
the chaos and emptiness to force the conscious person's
recognition of them. They want the gut, the very life, the
surrender of the conscious, controlling self and they will
feed off the panic and fear of this conscious, controlling
self until it gives up, retreats and in effect dies for
awhile so as to allow chaos and void to intervene and then
the 1 1 other.”
This narrative unit within the story "Shaman" in
Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiographical document is rich
in metaphoric, metonymic and synecdochic resonances. This
memory of her mother is essential to Maxine Hong
Kingston's memory of her childhood. Maxine's experience
of her mother is a significant part (metonym) of her life
at the same time that this one narrative is representative
(synecdoche) of the mother's heroism and can replace
(metaphor) other stories where the mother acted equally
heroically. By means of the narrative unit within the
story itself, where the mother mimetically describes the
experience, Maxine diegetically compares and contrasts
states of consciousness which are chaotic, empty or other.
The narrative becomes a diegetic story about her
roots that Maxine can return to and repeat to herself and
the memory can be a source of strength to her. Wordsworth
209
does the same thing in his return to Grasmere; he gains
strength by returning to his roots and re-telling his own
story.
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;15
Even though these experiences may be distorted and
mythologized by the diegetic voice of the narrator due to
time and space distance, some stories like Maxine's and
Wordsworth's retain a mimetic clarity in memory even
though the facts may be fictionally re-arranged. Maxine
Hong Kingston examined, in a series of acts of
consciousness, the great mass of mimetic detail which she
had stored in memory about her mother and she diegetically
bracketed and reduced that material by editing it into
this narrative whose mimetic sequence of events co
operates with the diegetic creativity which makes not only
a good short story but makes a good representation of
Maxine's consciousness of her mother.
15William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," in
The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Volume Two,
fourth edition, edited by M.H. Abrams, E. Talbot
Donaldson, Hallett Smith, Robert M. Adams, Samuel Holt
Monk, Lawrence Lipking, George H. Ford, David Daiches,
(New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1962, 1968, 1974,
1978), p. 217, lines 176-181.
210
ARTHUR MILLER
Arthur Miller returns to the memory of his highly
publicized marriage to Marilyn Monroe but, unlike Kingston
or Wordsworth, who convey the sense of the Nietzschean
eternal return, Miller returns to the memory more like Tom
Wingfield or Vladimir Nabokov, as if through the gauze
portieres into a transparent abyss. In his
autobiographical document f Timebends, Miller's mimetic
voice attempts to remember the mimetic experience of the
writing and filming of the movie The Misfits for and with
Marilyn but his dieaetic voice, as present narrator,
comments on those past acts and states of consciousness
by comparing and contrasting them in the narrative unit
about the experience. He is not "eternally returning" to
something and constantly discovering something new; he is
returning to it as if for the first time and seeing it
through this transparent gauze of memory.
He says that he has lived for more than half his
life, 40 years, in the Connecticut countryside because he
thought he could write better there. But he says that he
really wanted to be in the city "where everything is
happening"16 so he would always talk about this country
16Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove
Press, 1987), 599. /\11 further references will be to this
edition.
211
home as "temporary" but in retrospect he feels that there
is something funny about a "40 year temporary residence
(599)." He feels that sojne "timebends" in life are sacred
because they make us aware that the flow of time is
supreme and deserves our utmost respect. The flow of time
makes him wonder who he really is now in relation to who
he was at other times.
He wrote two plays for Marilyn: After the Fall and
The Misfits. They contain fictional representations of
Marilyn in the characters of Maggie and Roslyn. But there
is a difference between the two. He wrote The Misfits and
the character of Roslyn expressly, explicitly for her as
a factual, real representation of her and as a vehicle
through which she could tap her potential as an actress,
the "greatness of spirit in her, a cra2y kind of nobility
that the right role might release, and if that happened
she might step out of herself and see her own worth (458)"
and this experience would cement their marriage and their
professional, working relationship. She, in effect, would
be playing herself, as he perceived her, the "real" self
that he felt she was unable to find in her own life. * He
saw the play as therapeutic for her as a person, helpful
to her as a professional actress and an expression of
their working relationship as professional, married
partners.
212
All of this, of course, backfired. She methodically
"studied" Roslyn as a fictional character portrait
separate from herself under the tutelage of the method
acting of Lee and Paula Strasberg. She actually became
less co-operative and professional as an actress. The film
almost stopped at many points. And she completely
separated from Miller and lived with the Strasbergs.
But Miller admits in retrospect that both he and
Marilyn had ideal visions of themselves, their
professional lives and their marriage that were impossible
to meet. He wanted to be her savior by writing the
perfect play for her. She would then, of course, play this
part perfectly and in the process re-discover her own true
worth and they would live and work together "happily ever
after." The vision is as idealistic and unrealistic as
it is heroic and mythical and so sets itself up for
defeat.
It was her miscarriage, he says, that caused him to
feel "an urgency about making something for her (458)."
So he began sketching out this screenplay (and the
narrative turns out in many ways to be more of' a
reflection on his process as a writer than his intended
narrative of his relationship with Marilyn) and he recalls
that Marilyn would laugh delightedly at some of the
cowboy's lines but "seemed to withhold full commitment to
213
playing Roslyn (459)."
As the play developed, Miller says his interest
became both "technical" as well as "emotional (459)." He
was constructing a gift for her at the same time that he
was creating a work of art and learning about the making
of a movie. He wanted to give her something to make her
"feel and experience her own worth" and the best way that
he could do that was through the exercise of his own
talent as a playwright. He prepared himself to dedicate
a year or more of his life to her enhancement as a
performer, a person and his wife but he also dedicated a
year of his life to the enhancement of his own writing
skills in a very successful movie. The original desire
to write a play for Marilyn also becomes an exercise of
his own abilities and talents as a playwright.
This narrative remembrance of the creation of The
Misfits in Timebends is synecdochic in that it is
representative of Miller's craft as a writer; his writing
process. It is also representative of the tenor of his
relationship with Marilyn. It is a metonymic narrative
because it captures a five or six year period in Miller's
life that was a significant, sequential "timebend" for
him. It also grants some access to the consciousness of
the writer and the husband.
He wanted the ideal cast, director and script for his
214
"Eastern Western... about the meaninglessness of our lives
and how they become that way (462)," although he doesn't
like to rationalize and explain his work. This diegetic
statement about the theme of the play takes it outside of
his personal life and his relationship with Marilyn into
the realm of literature where he offers it as a narrative
for and about everyman. The play was not iust written
for Marilyn; it seems that it was also written to make a
point to the world about the meaninglessness of our lives
generally. But this theme of meaninglessness and the
plotting of how our lives become meaningless is
representative of the progress of meaninglessness in the
life of Marilyn and her marriage to Miller and her acting
career.
The illusion, the fictivity of the play, finds a
parallel in the reality of Arthur Miller's life and
perceptions. Miller notes that in the filming of the
first scene taken on the bridge overlooking the Truckee
stream in Reno into which divorced women customarily threw
their wedding rings as a celebration of their freedom
(463-4), the character of Roslyn in The Misfits had just
received her divorce but she doesn't throw her ring in the
stream because she is depressed about the failure of the
marriage. The real Marilyn Monroe had also been twice
divorced at the time of filming and the relationship with
215
Miller was rocky and she was depressed about her own
failures and the failure of her career as a "legitimate"
actress and the real Thelma Ritter and Arthur Miller
attempt to cheer the real Marilyn.
In this brief narrative, Arthur Miller constructs his
palimpsest of memory, fact and fiction overlapping,
comparing and contrasting. He braids the truth about
Marilyn and himself with the illusion of Roslyn.
Miller also discovered that his "eye" as a writer is
different from the "eye" of the camera or the director
(485). As a writer, he can control what is foregrounded
and backgrounded with image-describing words. The eye of
the camera and the director change what the writer wants
foregrounded and backgrounded. The situation of The
Misfits is seen differently in the film as opposed to the
written text. Miller also learned by observation that
actors and directors often go through the same kind of
creative process of interiorization and recapitulation
that he goes through as a writer. Each may need to be
self-absorbed and distant as each gives boundaries, shape
and form to their creations. The creative process is a
deeply personal one and his narrative becomes metaphoric
for his creative process generally.
In writing this autobiographical document and the
narrative unit about The Misfits. Arthur Miller distances
216
himself from others and from himself at the time of
writing and looks into the transparent abyss in order to
tap the memory for the comparisons and contrasts.
Contrariwise, he must become "self-absorbed" in the
conscious, creative process of shaping and forming a
series of narrative representations of himself in an
eternal return to the scene.
Arthur Miller's narrative of the writing and filming
of The Misfits is a narration that is an autobiography as
well as a memoir in the sense that it unifies his own
overriding sense of himself as a writer at the same time
it compares and contrasts the acts of consciousness in a
particular past state of consciousness.
He remembers that he wanted the film to end with the
girl and the cowboy staying together (as he wanted he and
Marilyn to stay together) but he knew that the characters
he created had found their own life force and sustenance
on the very indeterminacy and uncertainty of their lives.
The characters had understandably gone beyond his control
and assumed a life of their own and were people who could
not stay together; it was their nature and essence to roam
freely. When Marilyn herself announces that the
characters should break up at the end, Arthur became more
determined than ever to keep them together (as he was more
determined than ever to keep him and Marilyn together) in
217
the face of the bald, logical truth that, according to the
nature of the characters and the natures of both Monroe
and Miller, it makes better sense for them to separate
(474).
At one point, Marilyn had taken to paraphrasing
speeches and omitting words and sentences (476). The
director demanded that she get the words right. This
becomes an instance where Miller as the artist, the
professional writer and Marilyn, the artist, the
professional actress are at odds with each other. Marilyn
said that it was the emotion behind the words that
mattered, not the words themselves. The words, then, of
Miller, as writer, were undermined in favor of the vocal
expression and dramatic ability of Monroe, the actress.
Their professional relationship was at odds and Miller had
hoped that the film would bring their professional
relationship into communion with their marital one.
Miller asserts that he is a professional writer and, as
a professional writer, he must assert the importance of
using the exact words of the writer. He felt very strongly
that the spontaneity and freshness of feeling, the depth
of emotional impact and power comes through the words of
the writer not despite them. Marilyn's foray into creative
improvisation and oral interpretation based upon the
Strasberg's method acting may have been a good exercise
218
for her as an aspiring dramatic actress but not as part
of a finished text in an actual performance.
Marilyn may or may not have been trying to upset
Arthur but these two incidents with relation to the movie
bear strong resemblance and significance to two real
incidents with Arthur and Marilyn. She wants Roslyn and
Langland to separate at the end. Miller does not. She
wants professional freedom in interpretation of the
author's text. Miller does not want his text changed.
The two incidents accent the two major areas of the
marital and the professional relationship. He wanted the
film to unite these and the film actually served to divide
them.
He admits, in retrospect, and as part of the
comparing and contrasting of states of consciousness, that
he despaired at his presumption, his stupidity, that he
could ever "save" her or protect her in any way with this
play and film. He became just as exhausted and hopeless
as she. He became a reminder to her, by his personal
presence as her husband and by his presence in the script
as her writer, that she could not pull herself out of her
old life even when she did at last truly love someone.
Neither Arthur, her husband, nor his script, treated her
like the Strasbergs did, like a star and a good actress.
Arthur and the director and the script treated Marilyn as
219
a fallible, weak, sensitive human being who needed to be
corrected when she made mistakes. She preferred the
infallibility and untouchability of "stardom (483)." She
lived in that reflected glory and not in the endless soul
searching discovery of her real self that Arthur asked of
her as her husband and writer.
And it was at about this time, that an event
happened, which he includes in the memoir for the sake of
contrast, which gave him a central, autobiographical
insight (483-4). He was asked to write a screenplay based
on the Albert Camus novella, The Fall. He was not
interested in writing the screenplay but the story of The
Fall paralleled his own story with regard to this filming
of The Misfits and raised crucial questions for him about
his relationship with Marilyn as husband and writer which
may have occurred to him at the time but he articulates
in the memoir as an important consideration. The state
of consciousness which dictated that he help Marilyn, save
their marriage and her professional life, gave way to a
state of consciousness which made him realize how wrong
he was. He attempted to use a fictional character and
story to reach her as a person, wife and actress and he
saw himself in the fictional character and story of The
Fall.
He realized that the key to Marilyn's salvation,
220
however much he may have cared for her and loved her, was
not with him. His own vanity as a writer was deeply
entwined with his love as husband. If an act of love for
someone else, he says, is really a disguised self-love and
vanity, isn't the love for the someone else nullified
(484)? Can anyone save or help anyone else unless the one
who needs to be saved feels that need? How does one person
bring another person to this desire, this recognition of
the need to be saved?
Marilyn neither felt the need nor the desire for what
Arthur was bringing her. He was bringing her something
that would detract from the glory of her stardom and she
didn't want that. The key insight that he got from The
Fall is that he realized that he would feel the same way
if someone tried to bring him something, to show him
something about himself that would take him away from his
writing. He could not bear the thought of not being a
writer so, like Marilyn, he would reject anyone who tried
to negate or underplay that talent.
Miller closes his memoir by addressing what Jay
Martin calls the central autobiographical question of the
twentieth century: Who Am I This Time? Who was I then?
What I am trying to do now? What was I trying to do then?
Miller addresses these questions on the last page with the
poignant narrative of himself as "grandfather" which
221
dovetails with the narrative at the beginning of the book
about his own grandfather. In this last narrative, he
experiences himself at this particular "bend" in time, the
present time, when he is writing his memoirs, as a
grandfather. When he hears this word "grandpa" over the
phone from one of his son's three children, he resists it
as "not him— My God, I had hardly begun (598)!" He wonders
who these small persons are sitting on his lap lovingly
repeating this "terrible accusation with all its finality
(598)." They "confidently imagine (599)" him to be
grandpa and this makes him wonder who he is. He is aware
of a pleasure he is experiencing in being called grandpa
and a pleasure he experiences in being able to articulate
the word himself over the phone when he calls his
grandchildren and he remembers the pleasure he experienced
with his own grandfather. The warmth of feeling, the
depth of consciousness and personality in Arthur Miller
find expression in the articulation of these roles of
grandchild, husband of Marilyn Monroe, playwright, and now
grandfather himself and in the articulation of the word
itself.
He closes his memoir by shedding the fictions and
roles narrated in the 600 pages and acknowledges the great
mystery of the self. Just as others may wonder who we
are, so do we wonder at ourselves. He remembers himself
222
in a particular role and wonders what he was doing there.
Identity certainly is a mystery but the one truth about
which he feels sure is that "we are all connected,
watching one another...trying to figure each other out,
figure life out and understand the mystery (599)."
At one particular "timebend," he is a 40 year
"temporary" resident of a Connecticut town and a
grandfather and at another he is sitting in fear at a
religious service with his own grandfather and at another
he is the husband of the mythical Marilyn Monroe. There
are 600 pages of such memories and narrations which
compare and contrast other states of consciousness from
other "timebends," other experiences, other relationships
and roles.
EDMUND GOSSE
The narrative units of Edmund Gosse's loss of his
mother when he was seven and subsequent baptism at ten in
his autobiographical document. Father and Son: A Study
of Two Temperaments compare and contrast two states of
consciousness or temperaments: a mimetic narrative of a
father with his son accompanied by a diegetic commentary
on Victorian faith with doubt. The narrative of the death
of the mother contrasts the relationship of the father and
son while the narrative of the baptism contrasts the son's
interior state of doubt versus faith.
223
The death of the mother sequence and the announcement
that she had cancer, are perceived in retrospect as a
"tragedy...which altered the whole course of our family
existence"17 because her death would foreground the
relationship and clash between the father and son.
Gosse remembers the night that his mother arrived
back from the doctor with the announcement that she had
cancer. His father had put him to bed that night which
event itself was "noteworthy" since his father rarely did
that and it contributed to the young Gosse's memory of the
evening. His "crib" was in the same room as his parents
"four-poster." He recalls awakening to see his father
writing at his desk by candlelight. The older Edmund
attempts to narrate mimetically the voice and
consciousness of the seven year old. He recalls that his
mother entered the room and his father arose; the mother
announced that she had cancer and they folded into a
"long, silent embrace" and "sank to their knees" out of
the boy's sight where the "father lifted his voice in
prayer (69)." The seven year old boy went back to sleep.
They did not know he was awake. This section focuses more
on the relationship between the husband and wife than the
17Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two
Temperaments r edited by Peter Abbs (New York; Penguin
Books, 1983), 68. All further references will be to
this edition.
224
son. Gosse remembers his parents as being visibly
"loving" and "prayerful" in this moment of crisis.
But the next morning at breakfast, the son is
highlighted. He recalls that as he sat at breakfast, the
scenario from the night before was in his mind and he
asked what cancer was because obviously it was something
bad since his parents embraced and prayed. It is at this
time at the breakfast that the parents realized the boy
was awake and overheard them talking and they "gazed" at
each other with "lamentable eyes (69)."
There is a sense that the boy knew that he was saying
something significant because he said it while looking
down at his plate and looked up only after he did not get
a response. The adult autobiographer recalls that as the
seven year old boy, he felt "conscious of the presence of
an incommunicable mystery (69-70)." Although "tortured
with curiosity," he "kept silent and never repeated his
inquiry (70)" about the cancer.
This narrative, I believe, begins the diegetic focus
of the clash of two temperaments of the father and son and
the faith and doubt in the son. The fact of the mother's
cancer drew the mother to the husband as wife and
separated them from the son, although they were keenly
aware of the effect that this would have on the son. The
husband would be losing his wife and he would need to
225
become both mother and father to the boy. The fact that
they were going to be drawn so closely together as father
and son highlights the clash that will result.
At the deathbed scene, the little child is pushed
forward at the mother's request and she insists that the
father raise the child in faith. Edmund, in retrospect,
calls this his "dedication (81)" where the seeds of the
clash take root. The father will now feel the
responsibility to be true to the wife's deathbed request
that he raise his son in faith and the insistence will
only divide them from each other and enhance the clash
because the father may only be responding to the last
wishes of the wife.
It is also at this time that Edmund begins to have
the seeds of doubt and questioning, the clash of two
temperaments in himself. This sudden death of his mother
at such a young age causes him to wonder why a good God
would do this to both of them. There may be the clash of
two temperaments within the consciousness of both the
father and the son so that they have no choice but to
clash with each other and the Victorian clash of faith and
doubt itself predominates the scene.
The father's sense of responsibility to be faithful
to his dead wife's last wishes and raise their son in
religion finds it climax in what Edmund, as memoirist,
226
calls a "central event in his whole childhood (156)," his
"public baptism" in Chapter 8. His mother's illness and
death altered the course of his life because it made him
question what place faith had in a seemingly uncaring
universe. And his father's insistence that he study and
be baptized further exacerbated the clash in himself and
between the two of them. The comparison and contrast of
states of consciousness called doubt and faith, father and
son, which Edmund Gosse, the memoirist, records gives way
to the unification of his consciousness of himself in the
state of consciousness represented in the baptism
sequence.
The baptism sequence itself is representative of the
theme of a clash of two consciousnesses. It is a
metonymic narrative in that it unifies the sequence of
events in his childhood. It is a metaphoric narrative in
that it can replace other narratives in the book which
compare and contrast the clash of the two states of
consciousness of interior faith and doubt in Edmund or the
clash between his father and himself. And it is
synecdochic in the sense that it unifies his life through
this "central event in his whole childhood."
The baptism occurred 3 weeks after Edmund's tenth
birthday, October 12, and he remembers it as an event that
was "dazzling beyond words, inexpressibly exciting, an
227
initiation to every kind of publicity and glory (157)."
He and his father and Miss Marks and Mary Grace were
received at the "Room (156)," as he calls it, in an
adjoining town, for the baptism "amidst a blaze of lights,
pressure of hands, murmur of voices, ejaculations, tears
and unspeakable emotion (157)" and they were escorted to
"places of honor (157)" in the front. Again, the boy
Gosse is as central as he was in the mother's death
sequence but he is also as divided in temperament. He "was
the acknowledged hero of the hour (157)" principally
because he had learned all that he needed to know about
baptism in order to be baptized but he had learned
everything so quickly and thoroughly and at such a young
age, indicating his above-average intellectual ability.
The news of this "remarkable ceremony (157)" where a
little 10 year old boy was immersed and baptized like an
adult was a newsworthy fact that spread far and wide so
that the chapel was crowded to the ceiling on this night
and the crowd came "as every soft murmur assured me— to
see me (158)," even though some of them didn't appear to
be all that interested, "sitting perfectly listless,
looking at nothing. .. (158)." He was more proud of the
fact that he had done something that was drawing so much
attention than he was of being baptized.
The small swimming pool in the center of the chapel
228
floor was surrounded by these tiered seats with the
congregation gathered; the equally impressive, "hieratic
(158)" figure of the clergyman stood to address them and
begin the service. There was suddenly this great splash
and a "tall young woman (158)" leapt into the pool, her
arms waving about, her ballooned crinoline keeping her
afloat. This was followed by interminable cries and
shrieks from the crowd and more cries and shrieks
demanding silence. The young woman was subsequently
removed and it was learned that she wanted to be baptized
but such baptism was forbidden by her parents.
The contrast between the pure faith of this woman and
the "performance" by the precocious Edmund is what makes
the narrative representative. The woman was not
intellectually able to learn the dogma and rules but she
certainly had the interior desire and conviction to be
baptized. Edmund was only interested in being baptized
because his father wanted him to be baptized and he would
get a lot of attention.
Some people at the scene maintained that this young
woman fell into the pool by accident while others said
that even though her parents opposed her baptism, God must
have wanted her baptized. Edmund's legalist father
proffered that she could not have been baptized because
her head was not immersed and she must have been
229
deliberately pushed or jumped herself because her head was
not wet and if she had been pushed or jumped herself, her
head woilld have gotten wet. He approaches the question
of this woman's baptism from a totally intellectual-legal
point of view. She is not baptized because her head was
not immersed but Edmund, from his knowledge of theology,
would also offer that she is not baptized because the
words of baptism were not said while she was immersed.
Both of which facts are beside the point for Edmund
because he does not care about baptism anyway.
Mr. Gosse would love his son to have the same
"spirit" as the young woman but he doesn't. The fact of
the woman's head being wet or not depending on whether she
was pushed or not is trivial. She quite simply believes
and wants to be baptized and she knows from experience
that she has to jump into the water to do this. Edmund
does not believe but he knows all the rules and is able
to be baptized.
Edmund was motivated to write about the nature of his
personal conflict of faith and doubt and to represent that
conflict in the relationship with his father. The
consciousness of the father was one represented as
dedicated and religious in contrast to Edmund's which was
critical and skeptical. The love and affection between
them as father and son did not suffer. The purported
230
clash between the two temperaments of father and son was
actually a way for Edmund to write about the clash between
faith and doubt as two states of consciousness in himself.
MARY MCCARTHY
In Mary McCarthy's "tin butterfly" episode, she tells
the story of how her little brother was awarded this prize
butterfly from a Cracker Jack box. The butterfly
subsequently disappeared and the ten year old Mary was
accused of stealing it, which she denied, until it was
discovered pinned under her placemat at the table. She
says that her uncle put it there because he disliked her
and wanted to blackmail her but as she tells the story she
admits that there may have been other motivations going
on.
The first half of the story establishes her dislike
for this Uncle Myers who favors the little brother
Sheridan by giving him the butterfly. Mary's first memory
of "the punitive Uncle Myers" was "the violence of the
whipping"18 she got after defacing the wallpaper in her
bedroom which she says that she did out of boredom.
18Mary McCarthy, "A Tin Butterfly," in Memories of
a Catholic Girlhood. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Publishers, 1957), 56. All further references will be
to this edition.
231
She explains his dislike of children generally
because he himself is "childless and middle-aged (56)' who
was "not the gentleman" that her deceased father was. He
was also a German and a Lutheran which meant that he was
"very outside grace (58)." He ate different meals from the
ones that the children were forced to eat. Aunt Margaret
insisted that the children have a particular diet and
regimen, a program that was meant to keep them happy and
in good health but was actually a way for Aunt Margaret,
according to Mary, to destroy any privacy for the children
(70). She could not understand why her Aunt Margaret,
three years older than Myers, ever married him. They
seemed to be so different and from different backgrounds.
But one thing Mary did discover was the Uncle Myers "liked
to keep smart, military discipline" and exercise his power
over both Margaret and the children (59).
Mary won an essay context in grade school and Uncle
Myers "beat her with the razor strap— to teach her a
lesson,... lest she become stuck-up" and the "usual
tribute" was paid to him as a man of "great discernment."
Mary says that they were beaten "all the time (64)"
as a matter of course it seemed. She says that she felt
like she was in a Dickens novel (64). These punishments
were generally administered as "preventive medicine (64)"
and she was whipped more frequently than her brothers
232
because of her "seniority," and her not setting a "better
example" for her brothers.
Her uncle's "impartial application of punishment...
did nothing for discipline, since we had no incentive to
behave well, not knowing when we might be punished for
something we had not done or even something that by
ordinary standards would be considered good (65)." Out
of fear, Mary says that she became a "problem liar" in
those years in order to avoid punishment.
Thus the stage is set for the tin butterfly episode
(72 ff.). Uncle Myers, during an outing in the park,
bought little Sheridan a box of the highly coveted Cracker
Jack from which he "fished out the painted tin butterfly
with a little pin on it at the bottom (72)." This became
the "immediate cherished possession" of the six year old
Sheridan. Uncle Myers relished Sheridan's performance and
Mary was "disgusted" by the whole thing. This was the
first thing that belonged "privately to one individual"
and so it was coveted but Mary "held herself stubbornly
apart" from the "excited passion" about this butterfly.
Mary's "holding herself apart" thus sets the stage
for suspecting her when the butterfly disappeared. Mary's
aunt insisted that she help look for the lost butterfly
which Sheridan had apparently mislaid or had become bored
with. Mary's "lackadaisical indifference" manifested
233
itself in the search and Aunt Margaret was furious with
her until it was finally revealed that "Uncle Myers thinks
you took it (75)." Her aunt warned her that if she knows
anything about this butterfly and is hiding it, her uncle
will punish her. Mary says she "insists with full self-
righteousness" that she doesn't know anything about the
lost butterfly and this is one time that she will not be
punished.
At dinner, Mary was "exultant" because she was saved
from punishment. Her brothers wondered how she avoided
punishment and Uncle Myers sat with his "cunning look, as
though events would prove him right," which they did, when
the butterfly was discovered pinned to Mary's place under
the tablecloth (76).
This was "grimly conclusive" and after each brother
was questioned by Uncle Myers and the girl who set the
table before dinner testified that it was not there when
she set the table, Mary's "judges" concluded that the
person "slipped it under the tablecloth at dinner (76)."
Even Mary wonders how anybody could be so stupid as to
imagine that she would hide it at her own place where'it
was sure to be found.
After the questioning, and all eyes looked to Mary
as guilty, she was taken to the lavatory to be beaten by
Uncle Myers. Even Aunt Margaret joined in the beating in
234
an attempt to get Mary to admit that she did it. In
exasperation, she finally admitted it and was taken before
her uncle but couldn't admit it to him and was taken for
another beating for disobeying the pact she made with her
aunt to tell Meyers that she did it.
She says that she fell into bed with a "crazy sense
of an inner victory,...for not having recanted...(78)."
She awoke with her"feeling of triumph abated" but she
still walked about "on air, incredulously,...pompously,
seeing myself as a figure from legend: my strength was as
the strength of ten because my heart was pure!" She was
beaten again and the question of the butterfly was closed
forever in that house.
In her first postscript, still part of the original
story, the diegetic voice "connects the butterfly incident
with the subsequent rescue by the Protestant grandfather
the next year (78)." The lawyer who transferred the
children to the grandfather did so on the basis of his
interview with them during which time it was not so much
the story of the tin butterfly as the fact that Mary did
not have her glasses on as a punishment for breaking them
in a fall in the playground. This so enraged the lawyer
that he arranged to have her out of Myers custody.
In a second postscript, still part of the original
story, Mary says that "six or seven years later," she
235
stopped to see her brothers and Preston told her then that
he saw Uncle Myers "steal into the dining room from the
den and lift the tablecloth, with the tin butterfly in his
hand (80)."
In the final postscript, in italics, she reveals that
she since learned that Uncle Myers did in fact have a job
then, given him by the family, soliciting grain shipments
on the road (81) but she still wonders why she remembers
him as being "home all the time (82)" as does her brother,
Kevin.
The key insight in this final postscript is Mary's
realization and admission that, after reading the story
over, she remembered that she started to write a play
about this subject in college. She wonders in the
postscript: "Could the idea that Uncle Myers put the
butterfly at my place have been suggested to me by my
teacher? I can almost hear her voice saying to me
excitedly: "Your uncle must have done it I . . .And I can
visualize a stage scene, with Uncle Myers tiptoeing in and
pinning the butterfly to the silence pad (82-83)."
After this insight, Mary called Kevin to consult with
him about it. He remembers the incident with the
butterfly and the terrible whipping but he does not
remember Preston's comment that Myer's put it there. So
Mary called Preston who remembers neither saying that nor
236
seeing it. She concludes that Preston was only seven at
the time and it "would be unlikely, therefore, to have
preserved such a clear and dramatic recollection (83)."
Mary then thinks that she may have suggested her
teacher's theory and Preston may have agreed with it and
even "have thought, for the moment, he remembered, once
the idea was suggested to him." Mary says that she cannot
remember if she took the course in Playwriting before or
after the night that they all got together and discussed
it. Mary concludes that she has "fused the two memories:"
the discussion on the porch with the brothers and the
teacher's comment.
She still wonders who put the butterfly there and
concludes that it could have been Uncle Myers after all
because he did have a motive and an opportunity and she
wants him to have put it there because she dislikes him
so strongly.
CONCLUSION
I have chosen the foregoing autobiographical pieces
of writing and narrative units as examples of writers who
attempted to compare and contrast past and present acts
and states of consciousness in the documents and units.
Each of these writers perceived inconsistencies, gaps and
contradictions that each tried to reconcile or explain.
Some of them experienced themselves and their
237
consciousness at particular times as empty and at other
times as multiple. The autobiographers in Chapter One
experienced themselves as predominantly unified and
integrated around a particular awareness. These writers
in this Chapter also perceived themselves as unified but
by proceeding first to compare and contrast the various
component parts of that unity.
The fictional pieces accent the mimetic chaos in the
narrator's memory which elements the narrator's
consciousness then attempts to separate, organize, compare
and contrast. Vladimir wants to narrate a unified story
of a day in his life but Pozzo and Estragon point out to
him the contradictions and loopholes in his memories. Tom
Wingfield attempts to justify and explain the reasons why
he left home.
The non-fictional pieces focus on a mimetic reality
which had become distorted with time and the writer
attempts to clarify the distortions in the narrative.
Gosse, Kingston and Wordsworth return to their childhood
situations and significant persons there in an attempt to
decipher, separate and understand. Arthur Miller returns
to a particularly significant relationship and connects
it with his vocation as a writer.
In the next chapter, I will interpret the confessions
of writers who will place the diegetic focus more on the
238
revelation of and explanation of the mimetic acts and
states of consciousness in both the interlaced diversity
of the memoirist and the unified portrait of the
autobiographer. The confessor will focus on acts and
states which have been hitherto unrecognized or
underdeveloped. The memoirist attempts retrieval and
connection; the confessor attempts retrieval and
explanation of the connection that is essential to
understanding and clarity. For the memoirist, the
retrieval is the recognition of what was buried but the
confessor often retrieves anew.
Each succession has seemed to bury all the
before. And yet, in reality, not one has been
extinguished...*
19Thomas DeQuincey, Tales and Prose Phantasies.
Volume XIII, The Collected Writings of Thomas DeQuincey.
ed. David Masson, (Edinburgh; Adam and Charles Black,
1890), 346.
239
CHAPTER THREE
CONFESSIONS REVEAL ACTS AND STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
INTRODUCTION
Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious
handwritings of grief and joy which have
inscribed themselves successively upon the
palimpsest of your brain;1
My aim in this chapter is to set a theoretical frame
for my investigation of pieces of autobiographical writing
that are called or can be called "confessions" as
distinguished from autobiographies or memoirs. The
diegetic narrative voice, narrating in the present time,
in a confession, reveals various motivations and
intentions which constituted the mimetic voice in the
narrative of a past act. The diegetic voice in a
confession also reveals, explains and connects the various
behaviors of the narrating protagonist.
The crucial verbs I will be using are reveal and
explain. In a memoir, acts and states of consciousness
in particular events or experiences are compared and
contrasted and can metaphorically replace each other in
value. In an autobiography, acts and states of
consciousness in particular events or experiences are
Thomas DeQuincey, Tales and Prose Phantasies.
Volume XIII, The Collected Writings of Thomas DeQuincey.
ed. David Masson, (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black,
1890), 346.
240
united and become synecdoches, significant unique moments,
for the writer. But in a confession, the acts and states
of consciousness require a revelation and an explanation
because the words and behaviors do not connect. The
explanations and revelations in a confessional narrative
become metonyms which serve to connect the experience.
The critics whom I would like to use and who have
contributed importantly to this area are principally
Cardinal Newman and Kenneth Burke and secondarily Goran
Hemeren.
In Appendix G of his Apologia on "Lying and
Equivocation," Cardinal Newman discusses the state of a
consciousness of a person who would tell a lie. He
distinguishes between the formal, internal intention,
disposition or motivation to lie and the external,
material act of the particular words of the lie itself.
Newman says that the particular external words or actions
are secondary when they are viewed as the means or tools
to other more important, primary ends, other words or
actions, but he says that those secondary words and
behaviors, the lies, must be at least "equal in value" to
the more important, primary word or action which is at the
end.
Correctively, particular internal acts and states
of consciousness m\jst l?e placed on a similar scale of
241
value in relation to each other. One particular intention
or motivation becomes secondary to the achievement or
recognition of another more significant one. He says that
it is acceptable to utter the words of a lie if someone
else's reputation will be preserved. He also says that
it is acceptable to "equivocate,1,2 that is, allow a lie to
be spoken by someone else to stand as true, if the primary
end is still to protect someone's good name. He also says
that a person may avoid answering certain questions,
"evading," if the answers will hurt someone's reputation.
He uses the example of accidental murder to explain
the difference between formal, interior intention and
material, external act. The actual murder occurred but
there was no formal intention to do so. Similarly an
actual lie may have been told but there may have been no
formal intention to do so. There is a material act of
murder or the material words of the lie but there may not
be the formal act of intending to lie or to murder or the
formal intention may have been to protect oneself or
someone else.
2John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua. ed. David
DeLaura, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1968), 261.
All further references to the Apologia will be to this
edition.
242
My point here in using Newman is to illustrate the
fact that there may be a great variety and hierarchy of
internal acts and states, motivations and intentions which
can be randomly selected and paired with any number of
external words or behaviors which pairing itself then
requires explanation in a confessional narrative.
Kenneth Burke takes issue with this kind of
reasoning. He says that if a murder was committed,
whether accidental or not, the "intention to murder" must
be considered as a part of the internal gestalt of
intentions. The "intention to murder" is to be sure not
primary on the scale of interior intentions but Burke
wants it to be admitted that it may have been there,
albeit unconsciously, preconsciously, subconsciously.
The same holds true of the lie, equivocation or
evasion. The person must intend to utter the words of the
lie as well as protect the reputation of the self or the
other. The protection of the reputation is higher on the
person's scale of values but the fact of the matter is
that the intention to utter the words of the lie is still
present on the scale.
Burke is arguing with the casuistry that can justify
a particular act, of lying or murder, for example, by
randomly pairing it with a particular good intention. He
wants the individual to admit that the words of the lie
243
were uttered or the act of murder was committed whether
that was the direct, primary intention or not.
Burke discusses this in his article "Directing the
Intention" in A Rhetoric of Motives and his appendix on
the "Four Major Tropes" in A Grammar of Motives. When
the particular, formal acts and states of consciousness
which form intention, attitude and motivation combine with
the external, material acts of particular words and
behaviors and are categorized and classified according to
value, they must not be paired randomly; one action cannot
pick a particular intention as its director. The
multiplicity must be acknowledged and respected. There
is a gestalt of "perspectives among perspectives"3 in both
the internal acts and states of consciousness and the
external situation of the words and behaviors. Both the
internal and external forum need to be analyzed carefully.
Goram Hemeren points out that speech act theory's
discussion of illocutionary activity encourages this
exploration of the different kinds and levels of intention
and their distinctions. The crucial question is: is
information about intention relevant to the act committed?
Hemeren agrees with Burke in that intentions and
3Kenneth Burke, "The Four Master Tropes," in A
Grammar of Motives. (Los Angeles: The University of
California, 1969), 503.
244
motivations are important and how they are expressed is
just as important.
Hemeren supports Burke's idea of a hierarchy,
taxonomy or classification of linguistic conventions and
structures which point to intention and motivation. She
gives the example of literary signals like exaggeration,
circumstance, internal clashes, disharmonies, gaps,
ironies, paradoxes, figures of speech, symbols,
traditions, contexts from which intentions and motivations
can be deduced. She elaborates Burke's dramatistic pentad
as a way to access intention.
Gordon Allport also refers to Burke's "perspective
of perspectives" and Hemeren's "taxonomy"4 as a "gross
anatomy of motives"5 underlying words and behaviors. David
Fischer's conceptualization of the "braided narrative"
(which I referred to in Chapter Two in relation to
Wordsworth) encompasses this idea of a gestalt or taxonomy
of motives. An autobiographical narrative, particularly
one which calls itself confessional, is sufficiently
complex as to allow both interior life and exterior words
4Goran Hemeren, "Intention and Interpretation in
Literary Criticism, " fNew Literary History 7, 1, 1975),
72-73.
5Burton Pike, "Time in Autobiography," Comparative
Literature. 28 (1976)^ 326.
245
and behaviors to be represented. The "plethoric,
heterogenous multitude"6 of external facts blends with a
similar multitude in the interior life of individuals.
Fischer points out that narratives are often not merely
a linear sequence of chronological causes and effects
because the event or experience being narrated was not all
that linear. It was a braided, paradoxical, ironic
interplay of opposites. The "new historicism," evidenced
in many autobiographical documents and their narrative
units, attempts to combine the mimetic voice of the
autobiographer's consciousness which recounts the
intentions, motivations and attitudes in the narrative
units with the diegetic voice of the historical analyst
who places them in a gestalt.
Many autobiographical documents and narratives have
contributed importantly to an understanding of the nature
of the confessional narrative as opposed to the memoir or
autobiography, principally because they have called
themselves "confessions" or have in some way indicated and
invited the revelation and explanation of motives and
intentions. For this chapter, I have selected the
following: Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
6Angus Fletcher, "Forward," The Literature of Fact:
Selected Essays from the English Institute, edited by
Angus Fletcher, (Columbia University Press, 1976), xxii.
246
Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
Norman Mailer's Armies of the Niaht. Andrew Greeley's
Confessions of a Parish Priest, and Perry Edward Smith's
autobiographical statement to the court psychiatrist in
Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.
Edward Albee contributes to an understanding of
confessional narratives in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
because he mimetically portrays characters in a stage
drama who not only act out behaviors where motivations are
in question but also portrays characters who are also
authors and narrators telling mimetic stories about
particular acts and states of consciousness in themselves
and their narratives are accompanied by the revelation of
different, internal mimetic acts and states, motivations
and intentions, which accompany the words and behaviors
of the protagonists in the narratives who attempt
dieaetically to explain them. These narratives in this
drama suggest that motivations and intentions in
particular acts and states of consciousness of the
particular characters are multiple and can be juggled by
them when they each narrate their own versions about
these.
Thomas DeQuincey contributes to this exploration of
specific acts of particular states of consciousness which
motivate particular words and behaviors in one particular
247
narrative unit in his autobiographical document. The
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater where he articulates
what his thoughts and feelings were on the morning that
he left Manchester. It is his diegetic conviction based
upon mimetic experience that "once a word is uttered (or
a behavior performed), it is irrevocable."7 The words or
behaviors are irrevocable because they are intimately tied
to, constituted in, this gestalt of acts and states of
consciousness that motivated them and are revealed in a
confessional narrative. Acts and states of consciousness
constituting particular words and behaviors are either
self-evident or they need to be revealed and explained in
a "confession."
Norman Mailer contributes to the exploration of
confessional narratives in his autobiographical document.
Armies of the Night where he reveals his own reasons for
participating in a Viet Nam war protest. His narrative
reveals the mimetic series of acts and states of
consciousness which led him to participate in the various
words and behaviors of the war protest along with his
diegetic comments and evaluations about the experience and
7Thomas DeQuincey, Confessions of an English Opium
Eater. Volume I of The Works of Thomas DeQuincey.
(London: The New Universal Library: George Routledge and
Sons, Limited), 85. All further references will be to
this edition.
248
his acts and states of consciousness while in it.
Andrew Greeley, in a series of mimetic acts of
consciousness in the autobiographical documentf The
Confessions of a Parish Priest, reveals and explains his
own mimetic states of consciousness as a priest, a
sociologist and a novelist and he dieaeticallY explains
that these states and the actions that accompany them are
not mutually exclusive states but certain words and
behaviors which mimetically accompany one state require
a dieaetic explanation in terms of another state because
they appear to be "directed,1 1 justified, by randomly
pairing the ones he is most comfortable with.
Perry Edward Smith contributes to an understanding
of the acts and states of consciousness which underlie
criminal behavior in his diegetic statement to the court
psychiatrist about his mimetic life story and with other
mimetic statements, direct quotations, made to Truman
Capote and included in In Cold Blood. These statements
form a diegetic gestalt, a commentary, which reveal
various mimetic acts and states of consciousness,
intentions and motivations, which have accumulated in
Perry Edward Smith but no amount of revelation of an
interior gestalt of intentions, attitudes and motivations
explains the irrational external act of a murder "in cold
blood;" the gestalt of Perry's interior life merely
249
reveals added dimensions with a view to explanation and
understanding, not necessarily justification.
Based on what I have found useful in Newman and Burke
and these 5 documents and their narrative units, my theory
is that if the autobiographical document or an
autobiographical narrative unit reveals. explains and
describes. the mimetic and diegetic acts and states of
consciousness which underlie a particular controversial
word or behavior, the document or the narrative is a
"confession" as opposed to a memoir or autobiography. The
acts and states of consciousness underlying the behaviors
may have been buried along the way or intersected with
others in the palimpsest of the mind and so covered up.
A confession re-connects.
GEORGE, MARTHA, NICK AND HONEY
When George and Nick are left alone together in Act
One of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
there are two confessions: Nick confesses to the
circumstances under which he met and married his wife and
George tells a story about a young boy he once knew who
accidentally killed both of his parents under separate
circumstances. Later, both Martha and George narrate (in
a different voice) the story of the birth and upbringing
of their son who is supposed to return home for his
eighteenth birthday. Finally, Martha narrates
250
diegetically the story of a boxing match between herself
and George during which narration George gets a fake gun
with which he mimetically pretends to shoot Martha after
her narration.
These narratives represent a mimetic sequence of
external events accompanied by a mimetic sequence of
internal attitudes, motivations and intentions surrounding
the marriage, the accidents, and the boy as well as the
boxing match and the shooting. The sequence of external
diegetic/mimetic voices and behaviors in these narratives
braid with a sequence of internal diegetic/mimetic voices
articulating intentions and motivations in perspective
around the events and circumstances of the marriage, the
accidents, the boy, the boxing match and the shooting.
Nick's story of the circumstances of his marriage is
re-told later in the play by George but both George's and
Honey's diegetic additions as commentators and narrators
changes Nick's gestalt of intentions and motivations in
his narration. George's narrative of the young boy who
accidentally killed his parents is also re-told by Martha
and the diegetic additions of both George and Martha
change the gestalt of intentions and motivations in this
story. George and Martha's illusory, mimetic narrative of
their fictional son is also diegetically added to later
in such a way that the gestalt of acts and states of
251
consciousness accompanying the raising of the son are
changed. The story of the boxing match and George's
pretending to shoot Martha interlace with the other three
narratives and with his actual attempt to strangle her at
one point.
George and Nick have their discussion of Nick's
marriage at a late-night, after-faculty-party visit,
amidst much drinking, at George and Martha's house. They
banter casually about interests, likes, and dislikes.8
George compares his "40 something (35)" year old physique
to Nick's twenty-eight year old physique and suggests that
they play handball together (35). Martha has made it
clear up to this point that George is not "running" the
history department (38) like Nick will be "running" the
Biology department when he's "40 something" years old.
George is highly attuned to his sense of his own
inadequacy and lack of success in his job; he sees that
Nick is in a position to become highly successful and
adequate. George sees that Nick is at the stage where he
will climb the ladder and achieve success which George
can no longer do but George sees climbing ladders and
achieving successes diegetically as "historical
8Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (New
York: Atheneum Press, 1975), 31. /\ll further references
will be to this edition.
252
inevitabilities" (112, 114, 144) that have little to do
with the person's intention or motivation to do so.
People who are successful often say that they were
altruistically motivated and intended to achieve as they
did but George says that there are other motives and
intentions which are unknown and unrecognized as part of
any journey towards apparent success. The person will
participate in certain activities, like "plowing pertinent
wives (112)," and will justify those activities by pairing
them with the heroic desire to succeed and achieve
recognition and status.
George's narrative about the young boy who
accidentally killed his parents was the subject matter of
his first novel which was rejected by publishers
represents his one attempt at success which failed.
George sees himself in the young Nick who is beginning his
career (a kind of "eternal return" for George) and George
knows that this young Nick may do just about anything to
achieve success because George "did just about anything"
to get that novel published when he had to admit that the
boy who accidentally killed his parents was really
himself. The rejection not only turned into a
professional rejection of his work, his writing, but it
turned into a personal confession and rejection of
himself. He wants Nick to realize that as he strives for
professional success, some personal values may have to be
sacrificed and he may have to say and do things that he
wished he had never said and done like telling George the
circumstances of his marriage.
George is visibly angered and insulted by Nick's lack
of sympathy and his "smug, self-righteous, scientific
distance (92)" about the fact that Martha is embarrassing
him and humiliating him in front of them. The natural
reaction, it seems to George, would be one of sympathy.
George wants to elicit some pity, some compassion, some
involvement, from Nick but all he gets is this "pragmatic
idealism (92)" that is "impressed" with George and
Martha's repartee— comparing them to two professional
boxers in the ring (92); Nick admires their "method." He
admires something that he would rather not participate in:
flagellation is not his idea of a good time but he does
admire good, professional flagellators, like George or
Martha (93).
The boxing image recurs, of course, in Martha's story
of her actual boxing match with George at a faculty party
given by her father. Her father wanted George to put on
the gloves and fight but George was not interested and
while the father was trying to cajole George into putting
the gloves on, Martha put them on, and called to George,
who turned, and Martha took a swing at him and knocked him
254
out. The truth is that she knocked him out absolutely
unintentionally. It was a joke at which she laughs
hysterically, not only at the time that it actually
happened but in the re-telling. But the truth might also
be that there were some secondary, possibly
unconscious/subconscious desires to knock him out,
embarrass him, impress her father.
Her narrative of this boxing incident is followed
immediately by the fake gun sequence where, as Martha is
telling the story of the boxing match, gloating quite
gleefully in her knocking the poor George into the bushes,
George has gone to get a double-barrelled shot-gun. He
re-enters the room and points it at the back of her head
at which time Honey and Nick both scream in genuine fear
and shock. He fires the gun and an American flag pops
out. They all sigh with relief and laugh at this
wonderful trick, this illusion. "I really thought you were
going to shoot her (58)!"
The truth is that its a phony gun and he was just
playing a joke, like Martha was with the boxing gloves.
He had no intention of shooting Martha as she had none of
knocking him out. But there may also be the
unconscious/subconscious truth, especially in the context
of the boxing story, that he really does want to kill her
and she really does want to knock him out. Instead of
255
actually killing each other, they figuratively do so by
killing each other's most cherished feelings and
attitudes, shattering each other's illusions, flagellating
each others' desires. George kills Martha by killing her
fictional son and her desire to have had a child. He
kills Nick and Honey by revealing hidden motives and
intentions in their marriage relationship. Martha kills
George by revealing hidden intentions and motivations
behind his "first novel." The boxing match and the gun
sequence are metaphoric versions of the same intention.
George tells Nick that his so-called polite, pseudo
detached non-involvement, in the name of scientific
advancement and research which examines external, material
words and behaviors as entities separate from interior,
formal motivations and intentions is the nadir of
hypocrisy. There are internal, formal intentions and
motivations that succeed each other one after another as
historical inevitabilities in life that can't be
scientifically categorized and researched, they don't fit
into the gestalt of the words and behaviors that accompany
them. The intention to be successful and have a good life
does not fit with the intention of "plowing pertinent
wives" along the way.
George wonders if Nick and Honey have any children
and or if intend to have any (40-41) and Nick reveals to
256
George that he had to marry his wife because she was
pregnant. This confession of this external behavior
naturally invites further conversation and questioning
from George about the internal feelings and attitudes
associated with the behavior. This first pregnancy turned
out to be "hysterical (94) ." She did not conceive then nor
has she conceived since. She is a younger version of
Martha.
Nick does not want to leave the bare, scientific
facts of his confession in a gestalt by itself without
some explanation of the justifying details and the gestalt
of interior motivations and attitudes. He wants to choose
particular intentions and motivations and pair them with
the behaviors to justify them. The fact that they had to
get married coupled with the fact that she was not really
pregnant is joined by Nick's diegetic commentary that
there was never really any "passion (105)" between them
and that there were "compensating factors (103)," other
motivations. They knew each other since early childhood,
played "doctor" together (104) and were always "expected"
to be together in marriage by their families (105).
George suspects that there may have been money involved
(102) so Nick adds the story of his wife's minister-father
who made a lot of money for himself, his family, and God
by building hospitals, churches, "mercy" ships (108). The
257
father-in-law was called to preach, baptize and save when
he was "pretty young" and so he became "pretty famous" and
made a lot of money.
George says that he thinks this story is "nice
(109)" but he will not re-tell it "nicely" later in the
play. He will re-arrange the gestalt and pair the
interior motivations and intentions with the external
circumstances differently in an attempt to shatter Nick's
illusions about himself. Nick says that he was motivated
to marry his wife because she was pregnant and because
they had always known each other and were expected to be
together. Nick presents his motivations and intentions
as relatively honorable and straightforward. He suggests
that he married out of love and that his intentions were
and still are in the right place and he wants to do the
right things. George wants him to recognize that there
may be other intentions and Nick may have to compromise
some of his most cherished beliefs, like George did with
his first novel.
George situates his re-telling of Nick's story in two
contexts: The first is that George has just been
humiliated by Martha with her story which he entitles
"Humiliate the Host." Martha has re-told George's
story of the boy who accidentally killed his parents.
George's story about the young boy who accidentally killed
258
his parents is told by him as a participant-narrator. He
is one of a group of boys who knew the boy. They were the
same age and went to the same Prep school and at the end
of the school year, the bunch of them would go to this
"gin-mill owned by the gangster-father of one of us (94)"
and drink with the "grown-ups" and listen to jazz. They
all knew that the boy had accidentally shot his mother
"some years before (94)" and at this one school year's
end, this boy happened to go with them drinking. He was
"blond and had the face of a cherub (95)" and he ordered
bergin and water which made everyone laugh. The waiter
who took the order passed the word on to other tables
about the laughter until the whole place was laughing,
including the boy, and everyone was ordering bergin. The
ordering of bergin and the laughter continued through the
evening and the next day each of them had a "grown-up's"
headache but George remembers the evening, synecdochi-
cally, diegetically, as the "grandest day of my youth."
Nick wonders what happened to the boy and George
tells him that the following summer, the boy was learning
to drive on a country road with his father and he swerved
to avoid a porcupine and drove straight into a large tree.
He was not killed but his father was and when he awoke in
the hospital and was told what happened, he started to
laugh until he needed to be sedated. When he recovered
259
from his injuries, he was placed in an asylum and has been
there these 30 years and has not uttered one sound.
George claims that the boy's earlier shooting of the
mother was certainly quite "accidental, without even an
unconscious motivation (94)" as was the car accident.
Nick, who is supposed to be so scientifically detached,
sympathizes with this young boy who experienced such
tragedy and lost his sanity.
George narrates the story from a distance. He
observed the boy and he participated in the evening of
drinking and there is not much in the way of his
intentions or motivations as author. George thinks that
this is a good story, worthy of publication, if only
evidenced by the emotional involvement and concern of the
hitherto scientifically detached Nick.
This story is also very important to George because
it is his own. When Martha reveals this information later,
George's physical attack and attempted strangulation of
her is a diegetic behavior which apparently testifies to
the truth of what she is saying. The fact that this was
the subject matter of his first novel and the fact that
some of it was apparently autobiographical and the fact
that this information was mocked by Martha and rejected
by the publishers are facts which, when connected, elicit
this diegetic confession from George in the form of the
260
strangulation attempt.
This is now not just an interesting, sad story of
a boy who accidentally killed both his parents and is now
in an insane asylum. Parts of it come from George's real
experience and attitudes. He wants people to read it, like
it and buy it. Nick's story is also not merely a "nice"
story of a young couple. It indicates motivations,
intentions and attitudes which are important to Nick and
are not so easily explained.
George wants revenge for having his intentions and
motivations revealed by Martha so he takes Nick's story
and reveals other intentions and motivations in a story,
his "second novel," which he calls "Get the Guests (140)."
He says that this second novel is a pleasant "bucolic
allegory... in straight, cozy prose... about a nice young
couple who come out of the middle west (142)." The hero
is about 30, blond, a scientist and a teacher and his
"mouse is a wifey little type who gargles brandy all the
time (142)." The reader/listener now knows, along with
Nick, that this second "allegorical novel" has characters
in it who are drawn from real life. Nick is now aware that
"sneaky" George is making his not-so-ineffectual attack.
The diction George chooses as narrator influences the tone
of the story and riddles it with sarcasm and cynicism and
changes the entire perspective of Nick's original story.
— : 261
George's re-telling is unsympathic.
This couple got together when they was only
teensie little types, and they used to get under
the vanity table and poke around,
and....Mousie's father was a holy man...who ran
a sort of traveling clip joint based on Christ
and all those girls and he took all the
faithful....(142)
Honey now begins to recognize the story in spite of
George's "artistry;" it sounds familiar to her (142); she
feels that she's heard it before and that she knows these
people but George has couched the story in all sorts of
negative, descriptive terms that she's not sure. His
rhetoric distorts, re-arranges.
Nick, Honey and George do not tell their own stories
negatively. They attribute motivations and intentions
which justify their behavior. But the re-tellings by
other narrators change the rhetoric and hence the point
of view and the power behind the voice.
Mousie's papa died and they opened him up
and all sorts of Jesus and Mary money came out.
So Blondie and his frau leave their "plain"
states with all their money and settle in New
Carthage.
Nick does not want George to continue with this story
but Honey likes "familiar-sounding" stories (144).
"Blondie comes to New Carthage 'disguised' as a
teacher and a scientist because he knows that his 'ticket'
has "bigger things written on it....It's an historical
inevitability (144)" that he will rise to great heights
'5 262
of success and recognition. But George says his wife is
now part of his "disguise," some "extra baggage," that he
needs to carry. He needed her money to help him get those
"bigger things" and everybody wondered why he was so
solicitous of this "brandy swilling upchucker." People
wondered why he ever married her.
He obviously married her for the money her father had
made as a minister so that he could advance himself
without having to worry about money and when he had
finished climbing the ladder, he could dump the wife. She
won him by pretending to be pregnant. The detached
scientist has external, material goals to achieve and he
will perform certain behaviors and say certain words in
order to meet those goals. He justifies the certain not-
so-good means (money, pregnancy) because his goal Of
success is more important. Rather than admit that he may
not really have loved his wife, that he married her
because she was pregnant, he may instead focus on the fact
that he did an honorable, heroic thing by marrying her.
Rather than admit that he may have wanted her father's
money or that he was more interested in job success, he
may instead focus on the fact that he and his wife were
always expected to be together and he has always wanted
to be a scientist. The not-so-honorable intention would
have been to admit the mistake, the possible duplicity.
263
Kenneth Burke suggests that the interior intention and
motivation to perform each and every action is somehow,
somewhere present. Nick intends both the not-so-good
means as well as the admirable ends. Although he may not
want to admit it, he will "plow pertinent" wives and
"insinuate" himself in the right circles of people with
the intention of achieving.
When George makes reference to the hysterical
pregnancy in his story, Honey realizes "with outlandish
horror (147)" that Nick has told them "her" story. She
now hears herself being clearly revealed, however
negatively, in George's "novel" which he created from
facts gathered earlier. George makes her aware that there
may have been other, less altruistic, motives and
intentions for her as well (146-7).
Honey rushes out to be sick, her typical behavior,
which George calls another example of historical
inevitability, the pattern of history. Honey has no
control over her getting sick; it is an inevitable
pattern, like Nick's so-called rise to greatness will be
an inevitable pattern outside of his control and, like
history, according to George, itself inevitably proceeds
according to an uncontrollable succession of non-stop
events, accompanied by unrecognized motivations and
intentions.
264
Honey's reaction is itself a diegetic commentary, an
addition to the story, like George's attack on Martha
after the additions to his story, that indicates
intentions and motivations. This marriage and the
pregnancy are very important, central, and deeply personal
issues in the forefront of Honey's consciousness. It was
extremely important to her that she be married and have
children and when confronted with the fact that her
marriage may be loveless and that she may have no
children, she is being confronted with facts that
contradict desires else that are supremely, continually
present to her consciousness. Another woman may not be
bothered by these facts at all because her interior
gestalt of desire is different.
Nick curses George for his "viciousness and cruelty
(148)" for which he says he "will be sorry (149)."
George's narrative is vicious and cruel because it exposes
Qji interior state of intentions and motivations which are
at odds with other, very important intentions and
motivations to both Honey and Nick. The fact that their
marriage may be loveless or that they can never have
children is coupled with the overwhelmingly central desire
to have love and children. It is "vicious and cruel" to
destroy Honey's desire for a loving marriage and a family
when she is faced with the reality that these may not
happen. It is equally "cruel and vicious" to suggest to
Nick that his real motivations are to walk all over
everyone else because he desires personal success, fame
and achievement. According to George, Nick needs to face
reality and re-align his motives. George forces Nick to
do what he himself had to do many years ago when his novel
was rejected and his personal life was revealed. He lost
self-esteem because he compromised values. He used facts
from his personal life, deeply personal facts, as a way
to achieve success in publishing and it backfired on him.
He is telling Nick: make sure you recognize the ulterior,
not-so-good motives so that you're not too shocked when
everything backfires and they are revealed. Make sure you
realize that you may not have loved your wife; you may
have married her for money and you are out to achieve
success and you may say and do things that really go
against your conscience.
George's desire for anonymity in his story and his
desire for success in writing are overwhelmingly central
desires in George's life and he compromised those by
revealing the facts about his personal life and that he
used these facts as a way to achieve success and lost
both.
George warned Nick earlier that he (Nick) would be
sorry later when he hears this story and now Nick warns
266
George that he will be sorry later when Nick finishes
George's "second allegorical novel." George has taken the
facts and construed them in such a way that he has
"created" a gestalt of intentions and motivations for both
Nick and Honey. Nick places George's intentions and
motivations high on the scale by saying that he will
finish the story as George has started it. He will "be
what you say I am (150)." George says that he (George)
will no doubt regret what he has done by creating this
fictional set of intentions and motivations in this way
but he hates hypocrisy (148) and he wants Nick to know
that these may be present and to stop kidding himself and
others. Similarly, Martha revealed Geprge's other
intentions and methodologies and when intentions and
methods are revealed, perspectives change. Nick will now
have to re-arrange his alliances (149), his interior life,
and make the best of things now that other aspects of his
intentions has been exposed. He will have to go to his
wife, for starters, pick up the pieces and create another
game plan by which he can save his marriage and re-start
his climb to the top.
Earlier in the play, Nick "joked" that he would indeed
insinuate himself generally, play around with the right
people, find the weak spots, "shore 'em up" and put his
name plate on them (112). George says that this is not a
267
joke. It really, inevitably, will happen even though
Nick makes a "joke” out of it. The irony is that Nick will
really do what he so flippantly jokes about but with a
complete lack of awareness of intentions and motivations.
He will say: "I am achieving the success I have set out
to achieve (the first and most important motive) by
"plowing pertinent wives" (a secondary and less important
and unrecognized motive). He will become an established
fact on the campus or, as George would say, a recognized
fact, an historical inevitability; "he always seems to
have been here." His rise to recognition is inevitable
and in the process of the rise, he will get caught in the
whirlwind of climbing and pleasing, playing around, and
insinuating that he won't even recognize the intentions
and motivations that George says are there and with which
he creates his "second allegorical novel."
George says that he is trying to teach Nick a lesson
about the recognition and formation of intentions and
motivations. George wants both Nick and Honey to face the
fact that things happen, people get promoted and marriages
succeed and fail not because people intend the promotion,
the success or the failure, nor because people are aware
of their motivations and intentions but precisely because
they are not aware. They allow "the stars" and the "wheel
of fate" to control their lives. Things happen to people
268
as inevitable consequences of unrecognized intentions and
motivations. Nick, the biologist, would rather think
that he has this scientific control and objective
detachment, that he married his wife out of love and
continues to love her but George, as historian, sees that
the scientific detachment of a controlled methodology
sinks into the quicksand of historical inevitability.
Nick is too smug, self-righteous and self-assured to admit
the possibility of any duplicity or hypocrisy of
motivation like marrying his wife because she was pregnant
or because her father had money; but the quicksand of
unrecognized motivations will still suck (115) him in
whether he intends it or not.
George assures Nick that everything does not work out
if "played it by ear." We must be conscious of the
gestalt of intentions and motivations, the unspoken
agenda, otherwise life is just a continually sucking us
into the quicksand of these unrecognized intentions and
motivations. George says that he tried to make contact
with Nick, to communicate with him, to touch him
emotionally, spiritually, interiorly by putting him in
touch with a possible perspective of intentions and
motivations which he may not have recognized. But the
contact was never made because either Nick resisted or
George misread.
: 269
Similarly when Martha pointed out that George's story
about the boy who accidentally killed his parents was
really about George and was the subject of his first
novel, George's involvement in the story changed
i
{ significantly. He was reminded of his darker side,
j another array of intentions and motivations which she
brought into view.
The story of the fictional child which runs through
the entire play fits into the same frame. George and
Martha speak as if they really have a son, complete with
details and commentary about him until which time, it is
revealed that there is no son. George adds the diegetic
comment that all this business about the son is fictional.
He destroys the fiction for Martha by means of a mimetic
narrative of the boy dying in a car crash on his way home
for his eighteenth birthday by swerving to avoid a
porcupine, reminiscent of George's own story about
himself.
The motivation and intention to have had a child is
as high on Martha's scale of desires as it is on Honey's.
She wants so badly to have had a child, that she in effect
creates one and a story to go with it. The confessional
narrative is the revelation of the fact that there are no
children and that they were unable to have any. The
confessional narrative involves the revelation of the fact
270
that Martha's desire, her intention and desire, to have
a child never went away. She has always had that desire
and always will. Both Martha and Honey desire and intend
to have a child and the desire and intention are their
"stories." Martha creates the external narrative, the
illusion, as a fulfillment of her desire and as Honey
listens to Martha's story, her desire for a child re
kindles .
George desires to have been a good, successful writer
who published many books and he created a story to meet
that desire;the story failed but the desire remains. His
"confession" is the revelation of his unfulfilled desire.
Nick's story of his meeting and marriage to Honey and the
hysterical pregnancy contain no particular intentions and
motivations. George diegetically tells Nick, through the
mimetic re-telling, that his real desire, like his own,
is for success and achievement and he may do anything to
get it.
Narratives can be constructed which articulate both
motivations, intentions and desires as well as words and
behaviors but the two do not necessarily mix and they may
not necessarily be real. The words and behaviors about
the raising of the son are illusory and fictional but the
motivations and desires are not. The words and behaviors
about Nick and Honey's marriage are true but some
271
motivations and desires are omitted. My point is that
there are very often two stories that need to be read and
interpreted in a confession: the internal story of the
personal motivations, intentions and desires and the
external story of the words and behaviors of a particular
protagonist.
THOMAS DEQUINCEY
Thomas DeQuincey's "impassioned prose captures a
purer subjectivity, a purer illocutionary act."9 His
"constitutional determination to reverie (102)" is that
interior place where the activity of intention and
attitude formation in consciousness occurs which motivates
DeQuincey. DeQuincey has learned throughout his life that
once a word is uttered as a locutionary act or performed
in a behavior, it is irrevocable because it is empowered
by a stronger, interior, illocutionary act or force in
consciousness and he incorporates that lesson as a major
theme in his Confessions. DeQuincey views his life in the
Confessions in overview but focuses on specific moments
where he made decisions and "uttered irrevocable words."
His desire to leave Manchester and his formation of the
intention to do so are two parts of one decision that once
9Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The
Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 94.
272
made could not be revoked. DeQuincey diegetically analyzes
the mimetic state of consciousness that establishes
certain intentions and motivations for itself.
"That I would elope from Manchester— this was the
resolution (65)." He wonders where the intensity of this
desire comes from and he asks if it is the "first born
(child) of resolution" or was the resolution the first
born child of the desire, the hope. He concludes that the
two go indivisibly together, "like thunder and lightning."
A hope, a desire to do or say something is consubstantial
with the resolution to do it. The formation of the desire,
the resolution and the hope of doing it and the actual
saying or doing it are material manifestations of the same
formal act.
So "to go was settled. But when and whither?
(66) . . .My plan had been to travel northwards to the region
of the English Lakes....(68) in the dream of presenting
myself to Wordsworth (71) who was the attraction that drew
me so strongly to the Lakes (70)."
Until "at length all was ready... arrangements...had
been finished (76)." Nothing remained to be done and yet
(he) "lingered as under some sense of dim perplexity
(77)." When he realizes that the particular day on which
he was to leave had arrived, there was a "sadness of
heart" that prevailed. A "secret sense of farewell or a
273
testamentary act (synecdoche) is carried into every word
and deed of the memorable day (77)." And so DeQuincey
recounts the details of the "morning which would launch
him into the world."
He tells the story of this morning in retrospect, 19
years later, and as he diegetically gathers the memories
and recollections before setting them into writing. He is
moved by the synecdochic realization of how important this
decision was and what an impact it had on his life. He
tells this story of the day he left Manchester because he
wanted to communicate the insight which he had learned
from experience that particular desires, intentions and
attitudes formed in consciousness are those which unite
and form the force behind words and actions and are their
genesis. He narrates the sequence of events of that
morning as an interior monologue, a sequence of thoughts
and feelings, motivations and perceptions, the mimetic
voice standing in the room on the morning that he was to
leave which is also the diegetic voice of the commentator,
the evaluator, thirty years later. The narrative then is
a way for DeQuincey to bracket or frame this particular
experience as a detachable mental state which he could
apply to other states.
His "whole succeeding life has in many points taken
its coloring (83)," from that morning which was to launch
274
him into the world and the many consequences of that
world. He "was firm and immovable in purpose, but
agitated by anticipation of uncertain danger and troubles"
to which the "deep peace" and silence of the early morning
presented a contrast.
He dressed and lingered in this room that had been
his "pensive citadel" of study for nearly a year and a
half. He remembers this time as composed of "happy hours"
and he fears that he may never see their like again. He
almost "receded from his plan" but "no retreat" was now
open and "in this condition, this distracted view," he was
thrown into despondency for one-half hour and he "dreamed,
wrapped in a sort of trance, a frost of some death-like
revelation" which he recalls as a "hateful remembrance
derived from a moment left behind." His focus on time
accents the mimetic elements of the narrative.
He remembers that, on this morning as he was to
leave, as he was standing in his room, he remembered a
visit with a friend to the Whispering Gallery at St.
Paul's cathedral two years earlier. The present series
of acts of consciousness of the autobiographer,
remembering and writing the narrative of the day he left
Manchester, includes in it another series of acts of
consciousness of the autobiographer, remembering a visit
to Saint Paul's Cathedral, which remembering was part of
275
the morning of leaving.
The Whispering Gallery of Saint Paul's Cathedral is
a place of distinction because of its acoustic ability to
echo back a sound with great clarity and his visit to it
plays an important part in this narrative. DeQuincey is
conscious of the fact that a word or question uttered at
one end of the gallery "in the gentlest of whispers, is
reverberated at the other end in peals of thunder." This
act of leaving Manchester is an act which may reverberate
loudly at the end of his lifetime as a mistake.
Before he and his friend entered the Cathedral, they
paused "beneath the dome...on the very spot where rather
more than five years subsequently Lord Nelson was buried"
and where "flags captured" from France, Holland and Spain
"floated." These "solemn trophies of chance and change
amongst mighty nations" occasioned another moment of
dreamlike reverie in him during which he was "persecuted
by a thought" based upon the great, biblical, Roman
warning: Nescit vox missa reverti (that a word once
uttered is irrevocable), accompanied by the thoughts that
"fatality must often attend an evil choice (85)." The
flags of the conquered nations and the tomb of Lord Nelson
remind him that they made a wrong choice in their decision
to do battle because they met with the "fatality" of being
conquered.
276
He then personalizes the insight with regard to his
own decisions and choices that seem to have contributed
to personal fatalities.
The conscious decision to leave Manchester results
in the arrival of the day on which he will actually do so.
The arrival of the day and the act of leaving occasion
this memory of the previous act of visiting Saint Paul's
Cathedral and the conscious examination of that visit and
its attendant thoughts and insights. The key, synecdochic
insight is that some acts do result in fatalities because
they are prefaced by inadequately formed intentions,
motivations and attitudes to substantiate them. The
formation of the intentions, attitudes and motivations
constituting irrevocable decisions, words and behaviors
are the root of the problem when a decision, word or
behavior goes awry.
He was "already at fifteen...deeply ashamed of
judgments. . .pronounced, of idle hopes.. . ,false admirations
or contempts...(85)" Standing there under the dome of St.
Paul's, he concludes that there have been and would
continue to be acts and decisions which he would never
really feel quite sure about and the "doubts" would never
really "wither" with the successions of years because the
"principles,1 1 the intentions and motivations, upon which
the decisions were based and the "inevitable results," the
277
consequent, fatalities, of these decisions were at the root
of the doubt.
Decisions and actions are based upon the formation
and recognition of a hierarchy of intentions, attitudes
and motivations. The degree to which there are doubts and
questions about particular motivations and intentions, the
degree to which they outweigh the consequences because
they are not equal in value to the consequences, and the
intensity of those doubts and questions with regard to the
sincerity and honesty of the decision and action to be
taken is the degree to which the doubts, questions and
reservations will echo in loudly in and through the course
of the inevitable, sometimes fatal consequences.
These "sentiments" cause DeQuincey to "recoil from
any word or deed" which would recall and reawaken in him
the slightest twinge of doubt. And this sentiment was re
confirmed as he and his friend proceeded to walk into the
Cathedral and to the Whispering Gallery where his friend
"softly" whispered "a solemn but not acceptable truth,"
which "ran the walls of the gallery,.. .and "reached me as
a deafening menace in tempestuous uproar." If a word is
uttered or a decision enacted with great solemnity and it
is not equal in value and solemnity to the intentions that
motivated it, then the word uttered will reverberate as
a tempestuous roar and a deafening menace because it is
278
not constituted in an intention and motivation that is
equally strong and solemn. Decisions based on the
formation of a recognized gestalt of attitudes,
motivations and intentions minimize subsequent doubts,
questions and fatalities because the intentions, attitudes
and motivations will return to the person with their
"original crispness and clarity," re-constituting the
decision.
The conscious act of remembering the visit to St.
Paul's returns "ominously" to him as he stands in that
room on the morning that he was to leave and the words
"once you leave this house and a Rubicon is placed between
thee and all possibility of return (86)" echo in his mind.
His consciousness, after having accumulated a wealth of
perceptions and intuitions, feelings and thoughts while
standing in that room, brackets the raw material into an
act of consciousness which tells him that what he is about
to do may not be "altogether approved in thy secret
heart:...At the other end of thy life-long gallery that
same conscience will speak to thee in volleying thunders."
The fact is that this is a "once for all" decision,
an act which distinguishes itself 19 years later, "at the
other end of his life," when he is writing his
Confessions. The scene emerges with a metonymic clarity
and synecdochic/metaphoric significance. His realizes
279
that most of the mistakes in his life were made because
of inadequate formation of intentions and motivations,
inadequate reflection.
A noise on the stairs broke his reverie and the
"dangerous hours were now drawing near" so he "prepared
for a hasty farewell." In the narrative, the diegetic
voice says that he could see this moment of 19 years
earlier "as if it were yesterday, ..." especially that last
moment, as he left the room and fixed his parting gaze,
the natural standpoint of consciousness, on the picture
of a lovely lady which hung over the mantelpiece, a
portrait from which he had a thousand times gained
consolation as if from some patron saint, her countenance
so radiant with divine tranquillity. As he gazed, he
recalled that the clock outside struck four. He began this
morning reverie at 3:30 by gazing at the same church tower
that was now tolling the hour of four A.M.
This autobiographical narrative unit is a mimetic
sequence of interior voices representing various acts of
consciousness which are reflecting on the formation of
intentions and motivations. DeQuincey uses the mimetic
voice to represent the acts of consciousness, occurring
for the two and one-half hours that he stood in the room,
along with his own diegetic commentary at the 19 years
distance. A diegetic voice, as part of the mimetic one,
280
represents the series of acts of consciousness which
remember, comment upon and evaluate a visit to the
Whispering Gallery of Saint Paul's Cathedral. Another
diegetic voice represents the series of acts of
consciousness which remember and comment upon the entire
morning. I believe that this confessional narrative of
DeQuincey reveals and explains how motivations and
intentions are formed.
Leaving Manchester, visiting the Whispering Gallery,
seeing Lord Nelson's tomb and the flags were significant
actions, events, in DeQuincey's life to the extent that
they caused him to focus on his own hierarchy of attitudes
and intentions, their formation and execution.
The utterance of these words in this autobiographical
narrative are constituted in 19 years of decisions and
actions based upon formations of degrees of sincerity and
honesty and hierarchies of intentions and motivations.
Leaving Manchester, visiting the Gallery and the tomb, and
later, taking opium, are synecdoches representing
DeQuincey's life and the point he is making in this
narrative unit in his Confessions is based upon his
personal experience and his moral-ethical realization that
"once a word is uttered, it is irrevocable." Utterance
of the words "to leave Manchester or to fight or to take
opium" is constituted in the formation of sincere and
281
honest intention, based on a gestalt of attitudes and
motives, hierarchized and categorized, and the words
uttered will return to confirm those intentions, attitudes
and motivations. The degree of strength of motivation,
sincerity and honesty and the hierarchy of equally
valuable intentions testifies to the accompanying degree
of failure, doubt, "fatality" or success, surety and
productivity because the interior act of consciousness
which forms, hierarchizes and evaluates constitutes the
exterior words and actions.
NORMAN MAILER
Norman Mailer begins his confessional Armies of the
Night with the one page article from Time magazine which
portrays him as the‘ drunken, incoherent "publicity hound."
Mailer proceeds with his 300 page defense with the words:
"now we may leave Time in order to find out what
happened. "10
Hierarchies of personal intentions and motivations
can be distorted and re-arranged in any number of ways.
For the writer of the Time magazine article, Norman Mailer
was a drunken publicity hound.
The papers distorted one's actions and that was
painful enough, but they wrenched and garbled
10Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night (A Signet Book
from New American Library> 1968), 14. All further
references will be to this edition.
and twisted and broke one's words and sentences
until a good author always sounded like an
incoherent overcharged idiot in newsprint...the
motive for their action was distorted and their
words were tortured; (80)
So Mailer situates his words, actions and motives in
his own way because "if we are not loyal to our own
unendurable and exigent inner light, then some day we may
burn (54)." Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night becomes
a confessional narrative in which Mailer attempts to
answer the distortions of the press by sequencing his own
mimetic voice and diegetic commentary.
In his book, The Rhetoric of the Other Literature.
Ross Winterowd examines Norman Mailer's Armies of the
Niaht as a "confession." He places Mailer with DeQuincey,
Rousseau, and Augustine in terms of the "semantic
intention," to reveal the self "(or a persona, and in
principle it makes no difference...) with a candor that
"confesses" to great ability, to genius, as well as to
baseness."11 Winterowd compares Rousseau's candor to
Mailer's honesty and DeQuincey's addiction to Mailer's
"dipsomania (28)." "In the confession, the focus is
sharply on the author in propria persona as he or she goes
through a central experience (of conversion,
1XW. Ross Winterowd, The Rhetoric of the Other
Literature. (unpublished manuscript, forthcoming 1988),
Chapter 3, page 27.
283
disillusionment, enlightenment etc) (29)."
I would like to elaborate on Professor Winterowd's
distinction that "autobiography can be impersonal; a
confession cannot." Autobiography is "impersonal" in the
sense that it can unify and idealize particular apparently
heroic states of consciousness; the autobiographer
narrates a story about the self as heroic other; whereas
the confession can never be impersonal because it reveals
and explains motives, intentions, attitudes and desires
which may not be so heroic.
The Time magazine article portrays the predominant
impression of Mailer as the "drinker, stumbling and
spewing obscenities (14)" and gives only parts of his
speech at the protest in which the article intimates that
Mailer participated because he is a "publicity hound
(13)." Mailer will address these personal questions of
his drinking, the obscenity and his desire for publicity
as he proceeds to examine his motives in greater detail.
He admits at the outset that he was not "particularly
pleased" about "standing in a large meadow listening to
other men make speeches (19)" but he "warily accepted" the
invitation to speak at what he felt would be a "wasted
weekend (20)."
— but wit or no, grace or grace failing, it was
bitter rue to have to root up one's occupations
of the day, the week, the weekend and trot down
to Washington for idiot mass manifestations
284
which could only drench one in the most
ineradicable kind of mucked-up publicity...He
wondered if he would burn or surrender his own
draft card if he were young enough to own one
and he did not really know the answer. How then
could he advise others to take the action, or
even associate his name? Still, he was going
to be there....he could hear the sound of his
own voice and it offended him. It seemed weak,
plaintive,...phony (30,32).
There was a clearly a problem with his enthusiasm about
this endeavor and his honesty about it. But the thought
of a "captive audience" who would "titter and rise"
appealed to his "showman's instinct" and so he supports
the press belief that he may indeed be somewhat of a
publicity hound (39), although he prefers the word
"showman."
He became very involved in the drama of the event,
the staging. At one point, as he waited in line and
someone started shouting to hurry up and get moving,
Mailer reflected that the voice was not right, it didn't
have the right "ring" to it and the unsettled, wrangling
dialogue of the marchers to "hurry up" was "wrong." Mailer
wanted to re-write the script of the march (129) so as to
make some kind of deeply felt intentional-motivational
consciousness ring from the protestors mouths.
He was fond of speaking in public because it was
thus near to writing. An extravagant analogy?
Consider that a good half of writing consists
of being sufficiently sensitive to the moment
to reach for the next promise which is usually
hidden in some word or phrase just a shift to
the side of one's conscious intent (40).
285
Mailer was concerned about what he would say and how
he would look and he has varieties of speculations about
himself as a "fair country orator (49)" or a "frustrated
actor (65)." He jokingly talks about himself as being as
"full of shit as Lyndon Johnson (63)" and then in the
privacy of the confession, he admits quietly that "that
is probably exactly what you are at this moment (63)."
He admits at the beginning of his book that he is writing
the history of an event as a person who was not central
to the event which he says brings "competence and
honorability of motive into question (67)" and he resolves
to "look at his mind," the intentions and motivations
therein.
Mailer detested the thought of getting through
the oncoming hours. Under the best of these
circumstances the nature of these heroics was
too dry, too dignified, too obviously severed
from bravura to make the Novelist happy (69-
70),...
He admits that he is "sufficiently devil-ridden to need
a little action from time to time (83)." He reflects on
the fact that he, Lowell, and MacDonald are "liberal
academics...certainly not suited for jail...and aware of
how their careers may be diverted and impeded...but they
were each attempting in some way to break the mold of
their own security (92)."
He also wanted to get back to New York in time for
286
a dinner party on Saturday night and didn't want to risk
an arrest that might inconveniently carry over into Sunday
or Monday (100). He indeed did not want to risk anything
more than a few days. He was "secretly afraid that too
much would happen or too little" but he was sure that he
had "one decent motive" and that was to give "good example
to others and excite others to further effort (137-8)."
One did not march on the Pentagon and look to
get arrested as a link in some master scheme to
take over the bastions of the Republic step by
step, no, that sort of sound-as-brickwork logic
was left to the FBI. Rather, one marched on the
Pentagon because...because...and here the
reasons became so many and so curious and so
vague, so political and so primitive, that there
was no need, or perhaps no possibility to talk
about it yet, one could only ruminate over the
morning coffee (102-103).
Using the mimetic device of dialogue between himself and
a reporter, he states his intentions and motivations
followed by a paragraph of diegetic commentary:
"Why were you arrested, Mr. Mailer?"..."I was
arrested for transgressing a police line."..."I
am guilty," Mailer went on. "It was an act of
protest to the war in Vietnam."
"Are you hurt in any way?" asked the reporter.
"No. The arrest was correct."
He felt as if he were being confirmed.
(After twenty years of radical opinionism he was
finally under arrest for a real cause.)....now
he felt important in a new way. He felt as if
he were a solid embodiment of bone, muscle,
flesh and vested substance (157),...
This excerpt illustrates my point that a mimetic
narrative, complete with dialogue and direct quotation
287
which is confessional is also accompanied by a diegetic
narrative or commentary on the mimetic, which is
explanatory. Another significant fact about Mailer's
motivations lie in the very title of the book itself. He
had this fantasy that "before he was done, he would lead
an army (107)." Ironically, they are protesting armies and
war and they become an army themselves.
His speech upon release from prison is motivated by
a desire to say the right thing because the media is
there, the world is listening, history is being made and
he wants to say something important, significant, and
persuasive against this war. He is the publicity hound
that Time magazine says he is but he has other motives as
well which take precedence over the public recognition.
He feels that one of the most effective ways to make
a point about the horror of this war is to make some
reference to religion and the religious life of the
nation. He intends to say something significant to the
media and contribute to the end of the war and he feels
that a religious frame would win the hearts of his
listeners.
But the fact of the matter is that Mailer is
admittedly not very religious nor has he shownany interest
in religion. He decides to mention that his wife is
Christian which fact should give him a right to talk about
288
Christianity. It does not matter that he is not a
Christian nor that he knows little about his own wife's
Christianity. The references will serve his final goals
(publicity, end the war) so they are of use. His
motivation is as follows:
A protest movement which does not grow loses
power every day, since protest movements depend
upon the interest they arouse in the mass media.
But the mass media are interested only in
processes which are expanding dramatically or
collapsing. Active civil disobedience was
therefore essential to give glamour and
publicity to the demonstration— a page-one story
for Washington must instead become a page-one
story for the world (259).
Therefore, how can Mailer get a page-one story out
to the world? What could he say to have that kind of
impact? Maybe by making reference to Christianity based
upon the fact that this is Sunday and most people are in
church praying and loving each other while we are "burning
the body of Christ apart in Vietnam (239, 240)" might be
a good opener. The country is basically built on Christian
ethics and values, "the foundation of this Republic, which
is the love and trust of Christ (239)."
There are a hierarchy of values and goals here and
a hierarchy of intentions and motivations about those
goals. His first priority is to contribute to an end of
the war in Vietnam by participation in this protest. He
is motivated to participate in the protest and risk being
289
jailed or having his reputation ruined. He hopes that an
occasion will arise when he can give a speech and make a
significant statement that would make front page, world
wide news. He himself admits that there is something
strange about his reference to Christianity and bringing
his wife into the speech, especially since he never really
talked to her about her Christianity. He admits this by
ending his speech with the editorial diegetic comment: "He
was silent. Wow. And Boyle gave him a sidelong look, as
if to say, "Watch it, old buddy, they put junior reverends
in the cuckoo house for carrying on (239)."
My point in using Mailer is that the media may cause
the reader to see Mailer as a drunkard, a publicity hound
and a manipulator. His confessional narrative does not
necessarily remove these, it just develops them, explains
them and connects them more clearly than the media does.
His narrative makes the reader more sympathetic than does
the bare, factual statement of brute facts by the media.
Norman Mailer speaks in his own voice. He re-
,presents his own voice as he remembers hearing it in the
I
'protest. He comments on the voice and the motivations and
j intentions of the protestor behind the voice. He tells
|
what his acts and states of consciousness were at the time
i
,in the face of newspapers and magazines who were telling
| the world what they thought they were. His
I 290
autobiographical document is a confessional defense which
.reveals and explains motives and intentions.
ANDREW GREELEY
Andrew Greeley entitles his autobiographical document
Confessions of a Parish Priest which document miraetically
and diegetically explores the states and acts of
consciousness which accompany the unification in one
person of three vocations of priest-novelist-sociologist.
He explains how the acts and states of consciousness
appropriate to a parish priest mix with the apparently
j contradictory acts and states of consciousness of the so-
jcalled "dirty1 1 novelist and sociological researcher. He
;attempts to put them in a perspective and hierarchy that
will satisfactorily reveal and explain his position.
I
j He states near the beginning that he is first and
;foremost the parish priest to which the novelist and
i
1 sociologist are subordinate/complementary roles:
I'm a priest. Not a priest-sociologist or a
j priest-journalist, or a priest-novelist, or any
! multiple variations of these hyphenates. I'm
| a priest, a parish priest. The other things I
do in life: sociological research, journalistic
] writing, storytelling, are merely ways of being
j a priest. I decided I wanted to be a priest in
second grade, have never changed my mind, and
have never had any doubts.... Only the innocent
or the ignorant will deny that priests have been
artists, scholars, storytellers, writers,
journalists, tentmakers, fishermen, kings,
architects, stained-glass makers and virtually
everything else that is human in the course of
! 291
! Christian history.12
I
! He proceeds to explain the consciousness of the priest who
j
I writes dirty novels and the priest who conducts
sociological research which research will upset the church
l
1 hierarchy and who was apparently "out to get Cardinal
'Cody (410)."
He says that "the sheer raw vividness and power of
i his memories are what constrain him to turn to fiction
writing (15)." The so-called "steamy" novels are not
dirty or pornographic, they are just an expression of the
"imaginative dimension of his personality (87)," his
vision of God, life, the church, on which his memories
feed. He devotes an entire chapter to a study by a
Professor Ingrid Shafer and a sociological study he
himself did on his own work to find out what his readers
’ really feel.
He correlates the secular storytelling of the novelist
with the religious storytelling of the priest by saying
that religion itself finds its origin in storytelling and
the use of this raw power of imagination and memory to
transmit heritage (87).
Quoting the theologian James Dunn, Greeley "defends"
12Andrew Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest:
An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1986), 32,
72. All further references will be to this edition.
292
i
ihimself as a novelist:
i . . .the life of the Christian Church can go
i forward only when each generation is creatively
able to reinterpret the gospel and common life
! out of its own experience of Spirit and word
which first called Christianity into existence.
(317)....To understand how a parish priest
became a novelist as part of being a parish
i priest, you have to realize what twenty years
of reflection on the sociological approach to
, religion did to my thought processes, my
perspectives, my imagination, my prayer life.
I was trained in the seminary to reflect on
t religion from the top down— from dogma and
theology down to practical programs— and learned
in Christ the King (parish) to work with
religion from the bottom up— from human problems
' and needs to religious responses. Sociology
! taught me to reflect on religion from a yet
third perspective— from the empirical evidence
; of the sacred to the articulations, imaginative
and propositional, by which we try to share our
experiences with others and to represent them
to ourselves (317).
i ' '
;Sociology, religion, memory and imagination, feed his
I
'novel writing. The sociological research taught him to re-
,think his religious life, especially the function of
j storytelling in that life. He predicts that storytelling
!in novels and screenplays will soon come into alignment
i
! with church ministry and evangelism as valid ways of
|proclaiming the good news (231).
i
! The social sciences were a new way for him to reflect
| religiously upon the idea of the sacramentality of the
;created world. Jesus is the "sacrament of God" and Jesus'
i parables, his stories, are the best insights into his
jperson, his consciousness, the divine and human natures.
1 293
i
| Greeley says that he learned from Mircea Eliade that myths
i
were not fictions but stories purported to tell about the
Really Real, the essentials (225). Greeley sees himself
as a Catholic presence, a sacrament of the created world
in the created world, in the secular academy through his
I
;sociological research and his novels. He is intense about
his community and institutional loyalties even though
institutions and communities have marginalized him.
There is then a variety of intersections of states
of consciousness: the priest-sociologist-novelist triad
interacts with his perception of himself as marginal to
each of those communities. He says that he is "marginal"
simply because he is this "odd blend" of priest-
sociologist-novelist. "My canonical status was moving me
I
' to the fringes of the institutional church at the same
i
:time that my professional standards and intellectual
concerns were pushing me to the margins of the priesthood
(249)." He considers those "blessed" who are on the margin
as he is (419) and with his appointment to the University
!of Arizona and the Diocese of Tuscon, he perceives himself
j as a marginal member of different communities and cities.
i There came the time then when his "energetic, self-
1
; confident intelligence" indicated to the seminary and
church officials that he was "up to something (156)."
People became suspicious of him; he became more and more
marginal and he had to defend himself. In retrospect, he
is impressed with how naive, unsophisticated and youthful
his early books are but he still stands by them as right
(161-2). He had things to say then and he wanted them
said.
Greeley feels that there are myths that have been
propagated about him and this autobiographical piece of
writing is in many ways a defense, as much as it is a
memoir and an autobiography, where he reveals and explains
the states of consciousness from which each of the "myths"
emerge. His sociological writings and studies and his
novels are acts of consciousness themselves which attempt
to clarify points of view taken which he felt were
important (174). "This volume Chis Confessions] is
primarily an articulation of my own spiritual development
and self-awareness (193)."
He takes all the negative criticisms and myths about
himself and turns them around not only by quoting Mircea
Eliade's definition of myth but also Oscar Wilde who said
that myth and caricature are the compliments that
mediocrity pays to the genius, the marginal man (195).
The basic thrust of his chapter on "The Unmaking of
a Cardinal" is of course to clarify the myth that he had
a poor relationship with Cody and was "out to get him."
"We were both out to get each other," he says. And of
295
course if the story is a myth, then there must be some
grain of truth to it. His relationship with Cody was not
"mediocre" to be sure. But the point is that Greeley was
demanding a confession from Cody and he here confesses
that he demanded this confession.
Are you not ashamed of what you did to Cardinal
Cody? I'm frequently asked....Can't you leave
the cardinal alone now that he's dead? Haven't
you done enough to harm him already?
My intent is not to do anything to the
cardinal. It never was. My intent was and is
to tell the truth, not because it will have any
immediate practical consequences, but so that
it will be on the historical record (407).
His directed intention is to "set the record straight
and tell the truth" not to "do anything to the cardinal."
If he is going to set the record straight and tell the
truth, there will have to be some defamation of the
cardinal's character. He (and the Chicago Sun-Times)
gathered all of their information about the Cardinal— poor
administrator, unpopular, racist— and got a Federal Grand
Jury Investigation going during which time, not
surprisingly, the cardinal died and the case was dropped.
Interestingly, Greeley still does not want it dropped
because this "monumental antisocial character" has "harmed
the church in Chicago (419)" to such an extent that it
will take "long after the end of this century (419)" to
repair and the "bland mediocrity" of the present
administration who has "buried it I the Cody scandal] in
296
cement.."
At the same time that Andrew Greeley feels as
strongly as he does about this anti-social man who
destroyed 'his' Chicago, he also wants to redeem himself
of any implications that he set out to ' ’get" Cardinal
Cody. He wants to get rid of the myth that he did have
something to do with it. But his own story in his own
autobiography confesses that there was some degree of this
motivation evidenced in his private papers marked
"Personal and Confidential." And his own admission about
the value of storytelling is that where there is myth,
there is some truth.
The details of the Cody myth go like this (416 ff.),
according to Greeley: A staff member from the Notre Dame
alumni magazine asked if he could do an article on Greeley
for the magazine. Greeley consented to week long
interviews and then allowed the staff member to return to
Rosary College and gave him permission to look at the
manuscripts of his books. It seems that the writer also
looked at his diaries and personal papers marked "Personal
and Confidential" from which the news writer gathered his
information about a "plot" by Greeley to "get" Cody.
Greeley phoned Rosary College and asked why this writer
was given permission to see his personal and confidential
papers and diaries. The answer he was given by the
297
librarian suggested to him that she was "out to get him
(417)." Greeley requested the return of his property
which the writer denied.
The writer then produced a 100 page document linking
Greeley with a plot to get Cody but it was never accepted
for publication. No link has ever been made, and "none was
or can be (418)," asserts Greeley. Greeley says that the
editor of the Notre Dame magazine and this writer violated
his trust but I say there was obviously something in those
personal papers, letters and diaries which indicate that
Greeley would have been highly motivated to "get" the
Cardinal even though no proof can be supplied that he made
any efforts in that direction. The very language used and
the general sentiment of this chapter on "The Unmaking of
a Cardinal" indicates Greeley's deeply-felt hostility
towards the man for "destroying" his home town. Greeley
is the villain "on the margin" in this chapter on Cardinal
Cody in which he makes Cody the apparent villain-
protagonist, who, also unconsciously is made a marginal
man and a kind of tragic hero whose flaw may have been his
anti-social character defect and Andrew Greeley's tragic
flaw may be his need to have the last word, "be right,"
and save Chicago.
My point is that Greeley's unsympathetic attitude
belies the desire, if not the actual machinations, of a
298
plot to get the cardinal. One marginal man is out to get
another. He may have intended to free himself from
implication in a plot to get Cardinal Cody but in many
ways he freed Cody himself from the myth that Cody himself
was so tyrannical. Besides having varieties of intentions
where some of the less honorable ones serve the more
honorable ones, Greeley also has intentions about which
he is unaware. He asserts so strongly and confidently,
with great sobriety, rationalism and logic, that the
church, especially the church in Chicago, needs to be re
vamped and run in very particular ways. He offers
legitimate criticism of Vatican II and it's
implementation, the procedure for the election of popes
(since he experienced three popes in one year, and two
elections) and Cody.
I think that the myth of Greeley and Cody is set in
fact and as much as Greeley may have tried to diffuse it,
the fact underlying the myth remains that Greeley
certainly would have liked "to get" Cody, as Mary McCarthy
would have liked to get her mean uncle Myers. And his
guidelines for running the church are all indeed
wonderful, well-thought out, "sociological," but I think
there is not enough accent on the faith and trust that is
willing to give oneself over to a fallible, human system
as it is and not as one wishes it to be or predicts that
299
it will be or demands that it should be in the light of
Vatican II. Like the King in his own parable with which
he ends the book, Greeley wants to take a little bit of
his own little kingdom with him.
PERRY EDWARD SMITH
Truman Capote braids into his non-fiction novel, In
Cold Blood, a number of autobiographical pieces by Perry
Edward Smith among which is Smith's own written statement
to the court psychiatrist in which he explains his life
in an attempt to redeem the criminal act. Part of Capote's
activity in the novel is not only to give a "true account
of a multiple murder and its consequences" but also to
investigate the state of a consciousness that would murder
"in cold blood." Capote interlaces the pieces of writing
by Perry with direct quotations by Perry taken from
Capote's interviews with him and other documents not
included in the novel like the pile of letters written to
Capote by Smith over the 5 year jail period before Smith's
execution and a final 100 page document written by Perry
about the philosophy of George Santayana.
Capote gives voice to a formation of and hierarchy of
motivations and intentions underlying Perry's criminal act
and his criminal state of consciousness. The nature of the
criminal consciousness rests with the criminal's life
experience of rejection and hatred which distorts desires,
300
motives and intentions. Because of Capote's five-year
personal relationship with Perry, he is able to show the
other side of consciousness, the unseen and unformed
motives and intentions, which are at odds with the
criminal acts and motives. The inclusion of various
documents and quotations is to "create an impression of
character rather than narrate an event."13 Capote suspends
the mimetic narrative ordering of events surrounding the
murder so that he can diegetically expose the "depth and
complexity of the character of Perry Smith" through
autobiographical materials and quotes. Capote
"characterizes Perry in depth," at the same time and
"inseparable from" his revelation of Perry's violent
actions in the Clutter home.14 The "strongest element in
the book" is the "extraordinary access"15 that Capote
gained to the criminal mind represented in the many
viewpoints given about Perry. Capote exemplifies in
Perry Kenneth Burke's "complexity of perspective" idea.
13Donald Pizer, "Documentary Narratives as Art:
William Manchester and Truman Capote," Journal of Modern
Literature. 2:105-118), 114.
14 , 116.
15Jane Howard, "Horror Spawns a Masterpiece," Life,
60, (January 7, 1966, 58-76), 70.
Capote selects certain primary source materials and in so
doing captures fragmentary perspectives about Perry's
mimetic acts of consciousness that Capote diegetically
unifies and directs.
Perry is the most interesting character in the book
because Capote "always had a feeling for the loner, the
lost one, the unloved, the fatherless"16 based upon his
own unhappy childhood. Perry Smith is
perfectly, patly, and in almost every detail a
spooky embodiment of Capote's earlier fictional
creations. He has all the right
characteristics: a rich and childish
imagination, his dreams...his physical
deformity...his sensitivity...even his family
background.17
In the light of Capote's earlier work, Smith is "the total
symbol of exile, the alienated human being, the grotesque,
the outside, the quester after love, the sometimes
16Tony Tanner, "Death in Kansas," in Truman
Capote's In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook, edited by
Irving Malin, Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing
Company, Inc., 1968, pp. 98-102. (Reprinted from The
Spectator. CCVIII, March 18, 1966, 331-332), 100.
17George Garrett, "Crime and Punishment in Kansas:
Truman Capote's In Cold Blood." in Truman Capote's In
Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook, edited by Irving Malin,
Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc.,
1968, pp. 81-91. (Reprinted from The Hollins Critic. Ill,
February, 1966, 1-12), 86-87.
302
sapient., sometimes innocent, sometimes evil child."18
Capote admittedly agreed in an interview that "Perry was
a character that was also in my imagination...[he] could
absolutely...[ have stepped] right out of one of my
stories. "19
He presents a
premeditated murder performed in cold blood. . .as
an unpremeditated murder performed in a fit of
insanity...by imparting conscience and
compassion to Perry... inner sensitivity, poetry
and a final posture of contrition in his hero.
[Butl the presence of the Clutters and their
brutal murder within the same pages as the men
who so vagrantly murdered them denies us, or
should, recourse to sentimentality...to any
special call on our tenderness towards them
...Perry Smith's life story is "so casebook as
to be a cliche...21
Capote's predominant attitude towards Perry is that he is
18Garrett, 90.
19Jack DeBellis, "Visions and Revisions: Truman
Capote's In Cold Blood. (Journal of Modern Literature.
7, 519-536), 533.
20Phillip Tompkins, "In Cold Fact," in Truman
Capote's In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook, edited by
Irving Malin, Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing
Company, Inc., 1968, pp. 44-58. (Reprinted from Esquire,
LXV, June, 1966, pp. 125,7,166-171), 57.
21Diana Trilling, "Capote's Crime and Punishment,"
in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook,
edited by Irving Malin, Belmont, California: Wadsworth
Publishing Company, Inc., 1968, pp. 107-113. (Reprinted
from Partisan Review. XXXIII, Spring, 1966, 252-259),
109, 111.
303
indeed one of the world's poor unfortunates who was
"unloved, unaccepted and had a hard life" and so developed
into a criminal whose consciousness then told him never
to submit to anyone because no one loved or accepted him.
The criminal consciousness required that Perry fight for
attention, acceptance and love by the anti-social,
criminal behavior.
Perry supplements a narrative that his father
submitted with his reminiscence that before his father was
able to bring him home, a series of Catholic orphanages
became homes for him where he was beaten for bed-wetting
and for being an Indian (his mother was an Indian). These
autobiographical testimonies obtained by Capote in
interviews with Perry contribute again to Capote's
contention that the criminal consciousness is formed by
continued experiences of being unloved and rejected
resulting in the compulsive need to be one's own boss and
the equally compulsive need to work for acceptance and
love. He kills the Clutters because they were there and
he could vent all of the pent up anger.22 He kills the
Clutters in an act that in and of itself says, "I am not
well; I need help; I don't know how to ask for and accept
2ZTruman Capote, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a
Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (A Signet Book: New
American Library, 1965), 69. 326, 338.
love and recognition."
Perry remembers his father as someone who was perceived
by others as strange. There is the emotional affinity of
father for son but there is also an emotional distance
that suggests that they were afraid of each other because
of this strangeness and their needs to be their own
bosses.
Perry sees himself as the prisoner and criminal. In
his autobiographical statement to the court psychiatrist,
Perry recalls being "frightfully scared (308)" when his
father beat his mother or he was pushed away by his
brother as being "too small" to shoot a B.B. gun. He
testifies that incidents like these only contributed to
the keen insight he has about himself that his "mounting
anger (308)" finally vented itself on the innocent
Clutters. The "mounting anger" is the result of these
years of rejection and hatred. He is angry because he has
spent his life working compulsively for a love and
acceptance which most people come by naturally in the
family unit.
When a person does not receive love and acceptance,
as when he doesn't get food, clothing and shelter, he will
fight for them and work for them because he needs them.
Most healthy people give and take love and acceptance
naturally, freely. When there has never been this free,
I
305
i
!natural give and take, then the compulsive, unnatural give
and take of the criminal is the solution. Perry behaves
!compulsively, unnaturally and he knows it because he feels
it and so the "anger mounts." His overall point of view
itowards his own life is based on his experience of it as
* "a hard one." The mood of his autobiographical statement,
its tone, is intended to elicit pity and mercy from the
court for a person who "knew not what he was doing." He
was acting compulsively. His autobiographical statement
i is reliable in that it expresses as closely as possible
i
what he feels generally about his life and because it was
i
’written at this very significant, critical, self-
! interested moment. Perry takes the facts as he remembers
I them and selects and organizes them around a unified,
conscious perception of his life as "hard, difficult."
He is a man who has been formed into one who wants to
I"do something" to "all people who made fun of him (310)."
^ He demolished a Japanese cafe, stole a Japanese taxicab
and had "many violent outbursts of anger (310)" while in
I
.the service. He ends his statement by saying that he has
imuch more that he would like to tell the psychiatrist but
I
f
j the statement needs to be concluded. Truman Capote
i
supplements the "much more" about Perry in his non-fiction
I novel.
{
; Capote permits the reader to experience Perry as a
i
306
! person who was unable to form intentions and motivations,
who did not know his own consciousness, except the
compulsive motivation to be loved and accepted,
obsessively intended and obtained.
Capote selects other little memorabilia articles
' which build his inferred point of view about Perry. He
includes an interesting segment based upon this theme of
"few people really knowing him" during which Perry told
Capote what he would say if called upon to give a speech.
The text of Perry's "spontaneous" speech begins with
the assertion that he would pretend that he forgot what
he was going to say when in fact it was written down and
prepared long ago. There is an interesting interplay here.
He has written out a "spontaneous" speech which he has
memorized and would pretend to say if he spontaneously is
called upon to "give a speech."
This fictional creation of a speech and a group of
people who love and care for him and are honoring him at
a dinner is in ironic contrast to the fact that there is
not only any such group of people who love him and care
for him but there is no group who would ever "honor" him;
they only want to execute him. Perry creatively takes what
would be the mimetic circumstances surrounding a
spontaneous moment of speech-giving and diegetically
imagines and structures the spontaneous moment from the
I
! 307
facts where he would really give a speech to a group of
people who cared for him and loved him and have gathered
to honor him.
The overriding, predominant feeling of the speech is
that he is "very, very glad at this wonderful, rare moment
1
for which so many people are responsible (170)." In terms
of point of view, this anecdote is indicative of a
.consciousness that wished it was otherwise than it was;
he wished that people knew him and fantasized that many
people did know and love him because he had this speech
prepared and written in which he thanked these people for
their love and honor. His actual point of view as a
i
' criminal is that no one loves him or honors him and he is
I prepared only for that spontaneous hate which erupts not
I
! in a speech but in an act of murder.
1 On the other hand, the consciousness that prepares
I
i a speech to be given at a banquet in his honor by people
, who love and respect him is the obvious complementary
i
point of view of one who feels that he is lovable and can
love others in "spontaneity" and freedom. In one place,
| Perry remarks that "few people actually know him" and in
;another place he points out that he is capable of "being
| known" and is capable off a "rare and wonderful moment"
i
! in his honor. His point of view that "few people actually
I know him" is complemented by the fact that Capote knew him
!
I 308
I
j and loved him and allowed him to speak spontaneously and
jfreely for five years.
The narration of a set of facts about a particular
'experience or person from a particular point of view is
' what makes up the narrative voice with its variety of
; intentions, motivations and desires. These
autobiographical documents selected by Capote for his
; book are part of a precious group of autobiographical
memorabilia, a "bulky, messy, assorted archive" which was
! an "apologia and a guarantee of identity for this man,"
and it was difficult not only for Capote but for Perry
1 himself to try to decide what to throw out and leave
I
behind— books, maps, letters, songs, poems, souvenirs—
j "the stuff of which Perry feels he is made and the stuff
of which biographies and autobiographies are
I written....the stuff always set his emotions racing— self
-pity, love, hate and released unwanted memories of his
childhood (152)."
i
Truman Capote, over the five to six year period that
he spent researching this novel, developed a love for
lPerry Smith that was reciprocated. His point of view
|
i towards Perry was influenced not only by his investigative
| research but also by his personal experience of and
feelings for Perry. Capote made a diegetic statement
;about the nature of the criminal consciousness at the same
; 309
, time that he made a mimetic statement about the real Perry
Edward Smith; he gave voice to Perry Edward Smith in a way
that the newspapers and courts didn't and couldn't.
I
Essentially, the criminal consciousness is one that
! is unable to submit to or take orders from anyone else and
r
so takes whatever it wants and removes anything that
i
stands in the way. Capote bases this conclusion on the
fact that a criminal is raised from earliest days without
i
’ love, without affection, formed m hatred and so the
! criminal, by his behavior, is in effect fighting for this
| love, affection and acceptance that he never got. But
!there is one major difference with Perry Smith that Capote
i
accomplishes in this book. He proves that Perry is
;capable of a submissive-loving relationship with him as
the novelist. He proves that Perry was able to submit to
I
him and form a relationship based on love, acceptance and
affection where the need for criminal, anti-social
behavior recedes into the background and a co-operative
Perry Smith emerges. Perry worked together with Capote in
;the writing of this novel and some limited experience of
love, acceptance and happiness were the by-products for
both of them.
CONCLUSION
The confessional mode of autobiographical writing is
the most stimulating because the reader's curiosities are
; excited by the prospect of a confession where answers,
[
: revelations and explanations are expected. If a writer
contracts a "confession" in the title in some way, then
readers, expect to hear clarifications and connections
i
' about intentions and motivations behind particular words
and behaviors about the person which are or were
confusing. The autobiographical piece of writing is
1 confessional when the voice mimetically reveals as best
as it possibly can the actual experience, the series of
i acts and states of consciousness in the experience, and
when the voice diegetically comments on, evaluates and
, explains the accuracy of that mimetic voice.
Edward Albee's fictional piece focuses on the
i
i
| multiplicity and complexity of connections and interlaces
i
in the palimpsest of the confessional consciousness. The
i
mimetic interaction of George, Martha, Nick and Honey in
j the drama itself consists of narrations of other mimetic
j interactions and diegetic commentaries on those
I
! interactions of intentions and motives in those
I
narrations.
The non-fictional pieces of course focus on the real
! confessions of real people and their real lives. Andrew
I
! Greeley justifies the unhappy alliance of
I
! priest/novelist/sociologist. Norman Mailer defends
j himself and his involvement in a war protest against the
311
inaccuracies in the newspaper reports. Thomas DeQuincey
explains the state of consciousness that would lead to a
need to justify, defend, apologize for or confess to and
Perry Edward Smith, through and with Truman Capote,
obviously tries to explain why he murdered the Clutters
"in cold blood."
In each case, new traces and connections are revealed
in the gestalt of consciousness. The feeling is that some
aspect of the person's consciousness was asleep at the
time and they were acting under some other impulse and the
confession seeks to reveal and explain the gestalt of
these buried or sleeping acts and states of consciousness
underlying a particular behavior.
In my final chapter, I will interpret Cardinal
Newman's autobiographical writings as confessions where
he justifies and defends his conversion, autobiographies
where he portrays himself as the student and scholar, and
memoirs where he compares and contrasts perspectives in
his attempt to come to certitude about his beliefs.
"They are not dead but sleeping.1,23
23DeQuincey, 346.
312
CHAPTER FOUR
JOHN HENRY CARDINAL NEWMAN:
AUTOBIOGRAPHER, MEMOIRIST, CONFESSOR
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood,1
Certain sections from the autobiographical writings
of John Henry Cardinal Newman articulate particular states
of Newman's consciousness through which articulation he
balances, unifies and harmonizes his consciousness of
himself, as in an autobiography; he compares and
contrasts. noting the gaps, conflicts and inconsistencies,
in himself, as in a memoir; and he reveals and explains
and defends particular states in greater detail as in a
confession.
These illustrative sections will be selected from
three pieces of Newman's autobiographical writing: The
Apologia Pro Vita Sua. his novel Loss and Gain: The Story
of a Convert, and Henry Tristram's compilation of some
lesser known, shorter pieces of Newman's autobiographical
writings.
My point is that one particular autobiographical
xRobert Frost, "The Road Not Taken," The Norton
Anthology of American Literature. Volume II, edited by
Ronald Gottesman, Laurence Holland, David Kalstone,
Francis Murphy, Hershel Parker, and William Pritchard
(New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979), 1117.
313
document of one particular author, whether it be an
edition of letters, journals or diary entries or a volume
that the writer publishes as a "memoir," "confession,” or
"autobiography," will contain varieties of narrative units
whose mimetic/diegetic voices will attempt to unify and
balance the consciousness of the writer, or compare and
contrast different acts and states of consciousness of the
writer or will reveal, explain or defend particular acts
and states.
In other words, just because the Apologia is a
professed defense of Newman's conversion and fits quite
neatly into the "confession" category, there are other
narrative units and subsections which also contain a
unification and balancing of consciousness proper to
autobiography, as well as a comparison and contrast of
various states proper to a memoir. I will point out
similar stresses in the other two documents.
I will be using certain sections from each of these
volumes to indicate where Newman is portraying a unified
self-consciousness, where he is comparing and contrasting
states and where he is confessing and defending. The
Autobiographical Writings compiled by Fr. Henry Tristram
were pieces that Newman wrote late in his life for his
biographer. It contains his narrative of the story of his
illness in Sicily which is a synecdochic, representative
314
narrative, which Newman separates as significant. He also
narrates in Father Tristram's compilation the story of his
invitation to found and govern a university in Ireland,
which story is similarly synecdochic. Finally, throughout
these short pieces to his biographer, he draws attention
to the fact that the single, most significant quality of
his life and person was his vocation to be a student and
scholar.
In these shorter documents that Newman wrote for his
biographer and which Father Tristram published, he talks
about the "change in his state of mind"(about himself as
a student and scholar) that took place in him in the
autumn of 1821, and he says that he described his own
feelings at that time in the following mimetic passage of
his novel Loss and Gain.
He (Charles Reding) recollected with what awe
and transport he had at first come to the
University, as to some sacred shrine; and how
from time to time hopes had come over him that
some day or other he should have gained a title
to residence on one of its old foundations.
One night, in particular, came across his
memory, how a friend and he had ascended to the
top of one of its many towers with a purpose of
making observations on the stars; and how, while
his friend was busily engaged with the pointers,
he, earthly-minded youth, had been looking down
into the deep, gas-lit, dark-shadowed
quadrangles, and wondering if he should ever be
Fellow of this or that College, which he singled
315
out from the mass of academical buildings.2
Newman diegetically expresses his unified sense of
his own consciousness of himself as a student at Oriel
through his own writings to his biographer as well as
through passages like the above from Loss and Gain.
STUDENT AND SCHOLAR
He says in his advice to his biographer and in his
writings for his biographer that from the time that he
took the stage as the acknowledged leader of the
Tractarian Movement, he carefully preserved his
correspondence and diaries as the raw material for his
biography. He wanted his personal history to be narrated
through the medium of his letters. He envisaged his
biographer as an editor whose function it would be to
arrange the letters in their temporal sequence and furnish
them with a simple narrative for coherence and
intelligibility (Tristram, 23, 145). This was his idea of
an ideal biography. And the Apologia is his idea of an
ideal confessional defense because he followed the same
procedure that he recommends to his biographer.
2John Henry Newman, John Henry Newman
Autobiographical Writings. edited by Henry Tristram (New
York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 49. All further references
will be to this edition.
316
Although he wrote the Apologia according to the same
method, that is, by reviewing, summarizing and quoting
from his letters, he sees this document, this biography,
as quite different from the Apologia. He did not want his
biography to be a "panegyric, which would be sickening,
but a real, fair, downright account of me according to the
best ability and judgement of the writer (Tristram, 24)."
His idea was that this volume should be "brief and should
consist of the Memoir amplified by family letters,
(Tristram, 26)."
His attempt to control the writing of his biography
was thoroughgoing. He had a series of school exercise
books which he labelled "Personal and Most Private."
These consisted of recollections of thoughts and feelings
on religious subjects from boyhood which he afterwards re
read and destroyed, transcribing some into another book
while preserving only the covers of the originals. He was
very concerned about who would read and interpret them and
he wrote that he wanted them destroyed; he wanted "whoever
found them to burn them without reading them, as the
finder would desire in the fulfillment of any wish of liis
own, concerning earthly matters after his death (Tristram,
145)." Obviously, then, one wonders what Newman wrote in
these pages that would be so personal, private and secret
that he would wish no one to read them. There seems then
317
to be an autobiographical ideal self, the unwanted
panegyric, that Newman wants in the biography by the fact
that he is hiding some things as so personal and secret.
In the shorter documents written for his biographer,
he indicates that he wants himself portrayed as the
student and founder of the university and leader of the
Tractarian movement. These are diegetic summations
indicating the unified consciousness found in an
autobiography. He wants himself portrayed as the student
whose "heart boils over with vainglorious anticipations
of success (Tristram, 59)." He says that he "devoted
himself to the sordid ambition of success (Tristram, 58)."
His one desire was to get into Oriel College and
"obtain a prize for his Essay." He portrays himself as
a "good classical scholar...in mind and powers of
Composition, in taste and knowledge, decidedly superior
to competitors (Tristram, 64)."
In his "Memorandum: The Catholic University," he
portrays himself, using the words of Dr. Cullen, as "an
accomplished scholar and profound divine of our age who
has been persecuted and deserves our sympathy and support
(Tristram, 64)" and should be appointed the first Rector
of this new Irish university. His reminiscence of "My
Illness in Sicily" also portrays this balanced, unified
view of self as one for whom "God still had work for him
to do (Tristram, 123, 136)." He felt that this illness
had a remarkable effect on his life story since it
occurred at such a crucial point, just before his return
to England and the beginning of the Tractarian Movement
in which he played such an important role and from which
questions about his later conversion arose. The illness
in Sicily is then seen diegetically, retrospectively, as
a synecdoche. It was one event in his life that he
separates as significant and representative of his
importance.
The founding of a university and the leader of the
Tractarian Movement are equal in value and both depend on
the recovery from the illness. They are metaphorical then
in the sense that they can replace each other as
representative of his life.
Newman interprets the illness* as a time when "God
was overpowering his self-will" and he experiences his
own "hollowness." He felt little love for others and was
unwilling to deny himself. He had come to his
intellectual conclusions and convictions based upon one
o
or two truths and no one would sway him from these. He
acknowledges that he was rightfully accused of preaching
himself and putting forth his own peculiarities as high
excellences. Like his reminiscence of his early days as
a student and the days when he started the university in
319
Ireland, these days of his illness in Sicily are also
remembered and interpreted in terms of this unified
portrait of himself which continues in the Apologia where
he portrays himself as one who is an intellectual leader
able to reach certitude about his faith and conversion
based upon deduction from rational probabilities and his
right to make such deductions for his own life.
These kinds of narratives are at odds with the
subsections in the Apologia and Loss and Gain. Loss and
Gain is his fictional representation of the conversion
process and it contains sections that portray Charles
Reding, the protagonist, as having a unified, balanced
self-consciousness as well as an awareness of the
multiplicity of points of view which are compared,
contrasted and commented upon but neither of these focus
on his illness in Sicily nor his founding of the
university. Both of them, though, are mimetic indications
of his diegetic assertion that he was called to be a
student and scholar.
I will be using parallel passages from Loss and Gain
to support my points about Newman so I need first to
clarify his relationship with this novel and its
protagonist.
The following tale is not intended as a work of
controversy in behalf of the Catholic religion,
but as a description of what is understood by
few, viz.,the course of thought and state of
320
mind,— or rather one such course and state,—
which issues in conviction of its Divine origin.
Nor is it founded on fact, to use a common phrase.
It is not the history of any individual mind
among recent converts to the Catholic Church.
The principal characters are imaginary, and the
writer wishes to disclaim any personal allusion
to any.3
This preface indicates that this fictional conversion
in Loss and Gain is also going to be a memoir and an
autobiography of Charles Reding since it will describe the
"one course and state" of one mind but in the course of
discovering this unified state there will be comparisons
and contrasts with other states of minds and other courses
of action. In other words, Charles Reding's story is
similar but quite different from Newman's. Newman
acknowledges the obvious similarities:
...it is impossible that the ideal
representation should not more or less coincide,
in spite of the author's endeavor, or even
without his recognition, with its existing
instances or champions (Loss, 2).
And Alan Hill contributes the following helpful
information in his "Introduction" to the 1986 Oxford
University Press edition of Loss and Gain:
Newman's own relationship with his
fictional hero will always remain something of
an enigma. This indeed is part of the
fascination of the novel. To what extent is it
autobiographical? Charles Reding certainly has
3John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a
Convert. edited by Alan G. Hill (Oxford University Press,
19 86), 2. All further references will be to this
edition.
321
much in common with his creator...ascetic
ideal,. ..tastes in music and
literature,...Romantic temperament — ...Reding
belongs to a younger generation ...arrival at
Oxford in 1840...totally different stage of
development from what Newman had by then
reached. The chronology of the novel,...1840 to
autumn 1846, is carefully worked out to
correspond with the period of Newman's
abandonment of the Anglican Via Media to the
aftermath of his conversion, and Reding's
development has been simplified and speeded up
to fit into this six-year period.
The novel is not exactly a trial run for
the Apologia. Nor can Charles Reding be taken
as a "portrait" of Newman,..., Some incidents
are pure invention...In other places, however,
he relies almost entirely on memory and
introspection fLoss. xiv-xv).
THE QUEST FOR CERTITUDE
Certitude gained from accumulated probabilities is
a doctrine that runs through both Loss and Gain and
the Apologia and contributes to a unification of his
consciousness. Absolute certitude, according to Newman,
results from the assemblage of concurring and converging
possibilities, a cumulative force which takes the
possibilities one by one and sees them as only isolated
probabilities which together constitute the mind and will
of the person.4 Certitude is a "divinely intended
(Apologia. 157)" habit of mind and a point reached where
multiple propositions, a procession of a series of
4John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Suaf edited
by David DeLaura (New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
1968), 29. All further references will be to this
edition.
322
possible doubts, unfolds into a perspective, a point of
view, a unified consciousness, that gives the person a
sense of confidence and surety that what is said in fact
is what is right for the person (Apologia, 157). This
theory receives full treatment in Newman's Grammar of
Assent. For Newman, this "certitude" was a psychological
condition, a "constitution of the mind," while "certainty"
was a quality of the propositions, tautologies, empirical
arguments used to arrive at certitude.5 The certainty that
unites consciousness of the self in autobiography comes
from the comparison and contrast of multiple points of
view in the memoir and both serve the revelation and
explanation in the confessional defense.
Newman's consciousness of himself is as of one who
can shape himself and his church by logical arguments into
an intelligible, unified, consistent system (Apologia.
64). Sound judgement, patient thought, discrimination, a
comprehensive mind and an abstinence from private fancies,
caprices and personal tastes give him this divinely
intended wisdom and certitude of soul (Apologia, 64). He
bases his conversion on this confidence in this somewhat
fictional surety that he can have such clearness and
5Harry Epstein, "The Relevance of Newman's Apologia
to its Modern Reader," (Southern Humanities Review. 10),
208, 212.
323
firmness of intellectual conviction. This interior
motivation to be sure, to be certain, to prove that his
conversion was right for him creates the illusion that he
is indeed certain and can prove it; but he is fully aware,
as he proceeds through the Apologia. that such proof is
virtually impossible. He realizes that he will need to
discuss the various circumstances and contexts,
hierarchies and perspectives, in an attempt to situate his
conversion but he is plagued by this ideal that he can
have certainty, that he "know that he knows" (Apologiaf
176). He denies any influence of memory or emotion, any
conviction due to whim or caprice, that would upset an
idealized, consistent system with which he can convince
his opponents.
His fictional Charles Reding in Loss and Gain follows
the same process. Individual creeds of different churches
are the consequence of historical interpretation and
development, as apostles succeed apostles, popes succeed
popes, heresies and schisms break off and form new
churches, new creedal interpretations develop. Antiquity,
the first apostles and fathers of the early church, did
not have a creed, argues Charles, they had "principles"
contained in the Scriptures by which they lived the
Christian lifestyle.
Loss and Gain allows Newman to extrapolate
324
differently than he does in the Apologia. The Apologia
was written quickly and explicitly to counter the
accusation made by Kingsley that "truth was not a virtue
with Newman."6 He researches his correspondence at the
time and writes a philosophical exposition and theological
treatise explaining his position and defending his
integrity. Loss and Gain allows him to employ a plot
line, a mimetic sequence of events, focusing on a
particular character. The general pattern of each chapter
in Loss and Gain is the presentation of a opening gambit,
an issue to be treated, followed by a dialogue about that
issue by the characters.
Charles argues the ideal, unified vision in Loss and
Gain that there is one visible church and the Anglican and
Roman communions are parts of that one Church. A kingdom
may be divided and distracted by parties, dissensions,
heresies, sects but it is still a kingdom, a church. The
external, received creeds of particular churches are
cumulative interpretations of revealed doctrine based upon
accumulated probabilities leading to reasonable certitude
regarding dogmatic assertions.
Charles is convinced that common sense tells him that
6"The Basic Texts of the Newman-Kingsley
Controversy" in Apologia Pro Vita Sua. edited by David
DeLaura, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1968), 297.
325
when a particular system is consistent, it does not
condemn itself. If a system or person intends to deceive,
it defeats its own ends. Charles looks at the Anglican and
Roman Catholic systems as consistent, probable systems and
Charles looks at himself and the system of his own mind
as consistent, based upon common sense and rational
probability.
The fictional idea that persons like Newman and
Reding can be considered unified "systems" in themselves
is the one that gives the Apologia and Loss and Gain their
autobiographical impact. Newman is motivated to examine
his consciousness as a unity and bracket each part in its
place. He has synthesized, organized and constructed his
defense so it will be a convincing portrait of an
integrated, sincere person. The gaps, inconsistencies and
conflicts are not left to stand; they are reconciled and
harmonized in some way. His intention to portray himself
this way is the overriding motivation behind the Apologia.
Newman re-plays his defense through the mimetic voice
of his fictional Reding in Loss and Gain when he has
Reding say that his decision to convert is based upon the *
fact that he believes that Christianity does not reside
in a particular creed but in the principles contained in
Scripture. Creeds, sects, are the result of historical
development, interpretation of Scripture by scholars,
326
popes, theologians and the development of dogma through
successive ages. But in antiquity, for the apostles and
early church fathers, there were no creeds; they based
their life and reflections on the principles contained in
scripture (Logs, 87). There was then (and still is) one
visible church. The English and Romish churches are parts
of the whole (Loss, 209). The distractions of parties,
dissensions, factions, and heresies throughout history
does not deny a unity at the beginning. It is when groups
align themselves with a particular preacher or
dogmatic/moral stance that religion becomes "party-like"
and political. The unified autobiographical consciousness
vies with the comparative-contrastive consciousness of the
memoirist.
Newman, through Reding, argues that we must allow the
fact that there are many metaphoric, interlaced,
comparative-contrastive branches to the one church and to
one consciousness. The autobiographer focuses on the
oneness and the memoirist focuses on the division. The
church is in fact divided but he also says that we need
to maintain the doctrine or theory that the church is,
should be and will once again be one (Loss. 211).
Individual consciousness is also divided, multiple and
inconsistent but such division is organically
interrelated, connected, united, however irreconcilably
327
at times.
The variety of dogmatic statements, rules and theories
that a particular church group lays down is based upon
that particular group's interpretation of scripture.
Another group may disagree and so break off and become its
own church with its own interpretation. The "whole word"
in scripture, at its beginning, is given to a whole church
for interpretation but the "whole" church consists of many
parts and sects, each offering its own interpretation
(Loss, 261). The external received creed of a particular
church is a cumulation of revealed doctrine, a cumulative
wisdom and experience of the fathers, the founders, of
that church, built upon probabilities which caused those
fathers to believe that they were "reasonably certain
(Loss. 263)" that their dogmatic pronouncements were
correct. Scripture itself as a unified document, the word
of God, a consistent system, comes from a variety of
sources from different communities of authors.
Through Charles Reding in Loss and Gain. Newman again
asserts his primary belief that the Church is one from the
time of Christ, the apostles and the fathers. The word
was handed to them and has been handed down through the
centuries resulting in the creation of sub-sects,
"parties," other churches.
The unified consciousness discovers a certitude, a
328
finality, a coherent system through a comparative-
contrastive analysis of probabilities. But in the course
of this examination of probabilities, there is the
realization that there is a core, a Derridean center, that
is unreachable,surrounded by voids and others. Newman can
never construct the clear, coherent, organized system of
himself that he would like so what he defends in the
confession is his right to have this blank space, this
incoherence, which he calls his right to that inexplicable
personal judgement, a right to privacy.
THE EXAMINATION OF PROBABILITIES
I wish to look at two parallel passages in the
Apologia and Loss and Gain: one where Newman recounts a
brief history of dogmatic conflicts in the church in the
Apologia and another where he has the many different
visitors from the different sects visit Charles in Loss
and Gain. Then I wish to look at the public opinion about
Charles Reding's conversion and the public opinion about
Newman's conversion as perspectives out of proportion.
The public comparisons and contrasts made Newman and
Reding stand out as aberrant and separate perspectives.
Newman's point in the recounting of church history is that
the nature of a comparison and contrast is that one or
more perspectives will stand out of proportion to the
others but especially to the publicly accepted one.
329
The historical summary in the Apologia is a
predominantly diegetic comment which compares and
contrasts various states of consciousness which came into
conflict in church history. The conflicts in church
history are similar to the conflicts an individual might
participate in while attempting to reconcile two or three
contrasting states. The conflicts in history or in an
individual might also have overlapping, comparative
points.
The microcosmic Newman or Reding compare themselves
with the macrocosmic history of the church. Each conflict
can replace the other as metaphors for doctrinal conflict
generally. On the other hand/the dogmatic declaration of
infallibility at Vatican Council I is a synecdochic event
to the extent that it stands alone as representative of
a significant moment. The various conflicts and crises
that led to both Newman's and Reding's conversions are
similarly metaphoric and replaceable but the conversion
itself is a synecdochic, significant event for each of
them.
In the narrative unit in Loss and Gain. Newman uses
the mimetic voices of Charles and the various visitors as
his dieaetic representation and commentary on the
different states of consciousness as they compare and
contrast with each other.
330
By means of these analogous passages, he links past
church conflicts with his present state of affairs. The
brief history of dogmatic conflicts in the church and the
section in Loss and Gain where the different visitors from
different sects visit Charles serve as part of Newman's
own plea for tolerance, acceptance and understanding when
diversity, conflict and multiple perspectives emerge.
In the one case, the "whole" idea or concept of a
church unified from antiquity through scripture braids
with Newman's own desire for personal unity in his
decision. He recalls conflicts in the life of the one
church where heresies were countered and new sects were
founded and compares and contrasts them in a perspective,
a frame, a horizon of relationships, however conflictual.
In Loss and Gain, the "whole" idea of Charles' unity of
consciousness about his conversion is juxtaposed with the
series of visitors representing different sects who try
to make him convert to their sect.
Newman feels that the problem of the unity of one
church from the beginning, rooted in scripture and the
church fathers, and the development of various dogmas,
creeds, and heresies throughout history, revolves around
the fact that individuals are first of all free to think,
inquire and theologically speculate and he asserts that
the one church represented by Rome has always allowed such
331
freedom in exploration of issues. There is no one and
only way until as many probable avenues as possible have
been explored. Similarly, Newman comes to a certitude in
his decision to convert based upon his personal freedom
to explore probabilities and possibilities in his own
personal consciousness.
In the Apologia (203), Newman points out how St.
Augustine formed the intellect of Christian Europe and
brought Latin ideas to Africa from which ideas the
heterodox Tertullian arose. Origen in the East was
influenced by Rome and he in turn influenced the Roman
Hilary and Ambrose. The independent mind of the Scripture
scholar Jerome enriched the understanding of Scripture
through his commentaries. Malchion met and refuted the
heretic Petrarch at the Council of Antioch and St.
Athanasius intervened at Nicea from which council came the
Nicene Creed. St. Anselm set himself against the Greeks
at another Council and Bonaventure had an important effect
on the development of the dogmatic statements at Trent.
Newman himself was invited to Vatican I as an observer.
Church authorities are slow to intervene and force
infallible statements with regard to dogma and morality.
Propositions, controversies and probabilities are allowed
to ferment in healthy dialogue. Priests, professors, and
lay persons dialogue at various levels and stages of
332
learning. Theology faculties at universities consider the
questions. The issues are well-ventilated and turned over
before reaching Rome for any decision and then that
decision may be put off for many years which postponement
encourages further dialogue and clarification. Pope
Zosimus treated Pelagius and Celestius with extreme
forbearance; St. Gregory was equally indulgent with
Berengarius; John Paul II, in our own day, has been
equally tolerant and patient with the moral theologian-
priest, Charles Curran, and the arch-conservative
Archbishop LeFebvre, who wants to break off from the Roman
Catholic Church and return to the church as it was before
Vatican II with himself as Pope J and the theologian of
papal infallibility, Hans Kung,has been allowed to write
freely.
Newman's brief historical overview in the Apologia
parallels his own personal dialogue with himself as he
came to his decision. He views the whole problem of the
unity of the church in terms of its history, citing the
various councils and figures, and he views his own problem
of conversion and the unity of his consciousness in terms
of his own personal history, citing various letters and
relationships. The comparing and contrasting of the parts
of consciousness (of the church) contribute to the
unification of the whole of one's consciousness (of the
333
church.)
Charles Reding's voice must emerge in contrast to
and comparison with other voices of other sects who are
trying to get him to join their group (Loss f 277 ff. ) .
The first visitors are Irvingites who want Charles to join
their group so that he can restore the church to its true
scriptural state by developing his own dogmas. They know
what he wants and they offer it to him. Charles tells the
Irvingites that if they are really interested in staying
as close to Christian roots as possible, the Roman
Catholic Church is the church that they should join. The
next visitor is a young lady from an unnamed sect who also
invites Charles to join and develop and define his own
doctrines and dogmas. Then a newspaper reporter arrives
for an interview but is actually a convert to Judaism who
believes that Judaism was the first religion, not
Christianity, which he diegetically considers to be an
"episode in history." Mr. Batts arrives as a member of
a society devoted to extend to all classes of society the
pursuit of truth and they voted to have Charles join them
when they heard about his desire to seek the truth. But
Charles does not care to align himself with Emperor Julian
who appears on the group's crest. Mr. Batts defends
Julian as one who followed the truth as he thought and
conceived it; the important point being that he pursued
334
truth. Finally, Dr. Kitchen arrives with his Spiritual
Elixir, a document, when read, that is sure to cure all
spiritual ills. Kitchen invites Reding to write his own
such document, start his own denomination and cure the
spiritual ills of society.
Both passages fictionally give that sense of the
multiplicity of voices and the variety of points of view
but the novel does so with a Shandyesque sense of
absurdity and humor. Each voice contrasts strongly with
what Charles wants to do and believe in but they also
compare favorably in that they offer Charles what he
wants.
Newman summarizes dogmatic conflicts in history and
gives them perspective just as he goes through his own
"history of his religious opinions" and gives them
perspective. Reding is reminded by all of his visitors
of the issues and controversies in his Victorian England
and situates his own voice among them.
But each voice, each perspective, at one time was
separate, unique and controversial. Both Newman and
Reding, along with each of the figures in the historical
narrative in the Apologia and the fictional ones in Loss
and Gain, have their perspectives magnified and distorted
for a time because they appear to be so conflictual and
inconsistent.
335
Both Newman and Reding have close friends who love
and respect them but can't understand their extremist
conclusions (Loss, 251). The question on everybody's
lips, started by Charles Kingsley, was "What exactly does
Dr. Newman Mean?"7 Charles is also confronted with the
same conflict with his personal friends and acquaintances.
He confesses that he, like Newman, is acting after "great
deliberation and over a year or two f Loss. 252) ." The only
real motive to justify this conversion is that "one's
salvation depends upon it (Loss, 252)." But they both
still became marked men by their friends and the public
and "stray remarks that he made were treasured up against
him such that people seemed to know more about him than
he knew about himself."
Charles Reding was considered by the Vice-Principal
of the University to be a "young man of promise, ability
and morals who should not be guilty of so great an evasion
of the authoritative documents of the Church, an outrage
to common sense...clear proof that his mind was perverted,
debauched, sophistic, subtly Jesuitical (Loss, 167-68)."
The newspaper account of Charles' conversion is given
as follows:
7Charles Kingsley, "What, Then, Does Dr. Newman
Mean?" in Apologia Pro Vita Sua. edited by David DeLaura
(New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1968), 310.
336
DEFECTION FROM THE CHURCH: — We understand that
another victim has been added to the list of
those whose venom the Tractarian principles has
precipitated into the bosom of the Sorceress
Rome. Mr. Reding, .. .the son of a respectable
clergyman of the Establishment, deceased, after
eating the bread of the Church all his life, has
at length avowed himself the subject and slave
of an Italian bishop. Disappointment in the
schools is said to have been the determining
cause of this infatuated act (Loss, 246).
Charles then had to carry this secret around within
him but he realized that some day he would have to tell
(Loss, 175) and face the fact that he may not be
understood and accepted even though he may be able to
supply every convincing reason and logical argument (Lossf
178). Logical arguments are misconstrued and either mis
interpreted or re-interpreted and come to sound as absurd
to Charles as do the newspaper reports when they are
juxtaposed with the strength of his interior convictions
and feelings (Loss, 191). He knows full well the misery
he is causing, the ties he is breaking, the loss of
esteem, sympathy and friendship, the invitation to exile
(Loss, 235). His friends warn him of the Becket-complex
of doing the right thing for the wrong reason:8 "The
greatness of the sacrifice (and like Norman Mailer, the
greatness of the publicity), stimulates you; you do it
8T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral. (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 44.
337
because it is so much to do."
Newman goes through the same kind of public scrutiny
at the pen of Charles Kingsley who analyzes his language
with such care and detail that one begins to wonder what
Kingsley's motives are. In the midst of the suspicions
circulating about him, Newman's Anglican bishop (unlike
Charles' Vice-President) writes him a letter in which he
expresses his confidence in Newman's personal integrity
and Newman includes part of this letter in the Apologia:
So many of the charges against yourself and your
friends which I have seen in the public journals
have been, within my knowledge false and
calumnious, that I am not apt to pay much
attention to what is asserted with respect to
you in the newspapers. .. .therefore I at once
exonerate you from the accusation brought
against you in the newspapers (267-68).
The flurry of public attention gives both Newman's
and Reding's conversions a notoriety that does not allow
them to be a "perspective among perspectives." Newman's
historical narrative summary in the Apologia and his
fictional narrative of the visitors in Loss and Gain show
how memory may either allow a particular perspective to
be placed in a comparative position among other multiple,
diverse perspectives or how memory may fictionalize and
idealize a particular stance by placing it in sharp
contrast to others. The narratives show that one
particular perspective or stance, that was entirely out
338
of proportion and perspective (Newman's and Reding's
conversions), becomes in memoirist retrospect an important
part of an entire gestalt of relations, a palimpsest of
overlapping braids.
Newman admits that the recollections and reminiscences
which he wrote for his biographer are only "irregular
glimpses (Tristram, 130)" which seem to vanish in the
haze. He experiences a "dreamy confusion" when trying to
interrelate his memories into a unified consciousness. He
says that during his illness, the events of his life came
"thick" before him such that he could not recollect the
"state of things (Tristram, 134)," that is, he could not
give them any autobiographical order or coherence nor
could he put them in perspective in memory. He was so ill
from the continual pain that many of the memories appear
now as "absurdities" and "fantastic dreams (Tristram,
134)." He is amazed that he cannot even remember how he
got sick; he only remembers the sickness as significant
in retrospect in terms of the rest of his life.
Where he admits that there is a fuzziness and
distortion to the memories about his illness in Sicily as
well as his early school days and the later days of the
founding of the university in Ireland, there is at once
a clarity of self-concept, an idealized portrait that
Newman gives to himself as student, leader of the
339
Tractarians and first Rector of the university. As the
memoirist, he may juggle perspectives and admit confusion
but as the autobiographer, he emerges with an absolute
consciousness of himself as student, writer and educator.
As the confessor, he clearly and adamantly defends his
right to private judgement and decision.
THE RIGHT TO PRIVATE JUDGEMENT
I would like to situate Newman and Reding in my
theory that a piece of autobiographical writing is
confessional when it reveals, explains or describes an
act or state of consciousness which accompanied a
particularly controversial event. The acts and states of
consciousness which led to Newman's and Reding's
conversions from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism are
revealed, explained and described in the Apologia and in
Loss and Gain.
But I would like to focus on a few specific moments
and passages which reveal, explain or describe a specific
act, state or attitude which occurred along the way to
conversion and was instrumental in effecting it. Newman's
most insightful, crucial moment was his realization that
he has a right to make a private judgment and decision in
his own life and he uses the parable of the Pharisee and
340
Publican from the gospels9 to make his point. A similarly
crucial moment occurs for Charles Reding when he confronts
the multiplicity in his own heart.
In the Apologia Pro Vita Sua. the theme of the value
and respect for private judgement rings loudly. Newman
defends the fact that at one time he argued against
Liberalism in the Anglican Church during the Oxford
Movement; he "denounced and abjured (Apologia. 306)" the
"right to private judgement (Apologia. 223, 308)" but then
uses the same principle to defend his own right to seek
his own point of view, to act according to his own
beliefs, based on private judgement. Charles Reding is
called "too viewy (15)" because he won't reveal the core
of his private judgement; he just continually examines
probabilities and possibilities and seems to make a
random, haphazard decision; and Newman uses the parable
of the Pharisee and the Publican and his own parable of
a poor beggar woman to indicate that externals do not
reveal the heart. Ultimately, amidst all the perspectives
and probabilities, there is that place, that center, the
core, the heart, which is inexpressible. In the Apologia,
Newman is attempting to convince his friends and the
9The New Jerusalem Bible (New York: Doubleday and
Company, 1985), Matthew 21:31 on p. 1644.
341
public that he is doing the right thing but he comes to
the ultimate realization that he can't do it. There is
that private place in the interior of one's consciousness,
a center, that can never be put into language. So he ends
up defending his right to have that private place and
confessing that he has done his best to explain his
position.
The confessional, apologetic voice is of course the
strongest one in Newman's autobiographical writings. He
is motivated to defend his right to private judgement
against all the rumors and gossip about him and his
judgments. The autobiographical writing that unites and
balances states of consciousness or compares and contrasts
them is left aside here as Newman attempts to defend his
right to private judgments and feelings which means that
he is free not to reveal, confess and explain. He has
learned the importance of "weighing words and being
cautious about statements (Apologia. 20)." People's
faults and failings always draw the attention and
excitement of the public (Apologia. 46). The accused are
then called to defend themselves. Newman wonders why he
has been called to reveal and explain his private
decisions publicly (Apologia. 138,140) especially when he
feels that those private actions and decisions are his
own, "deeply personal (Apologia. 140)" and none of
342
anyone's business (Apologia, 13).
This is the key point in the Apologia; it is not so
much a revelation and explanation of the acts and states
of consciousness that led to the conversion as it is a
defense of his right to such explanations and revelations
and keep them to himself. Newman says that there are many
things that a man may hold which the public has no right
to know and which, in fact, the man has no business
telling (Apologia. 158).
Newman proposes his Apologia precisely to prove that
the accusation of theological treason is a violation of
his own selfhood..."an invasion of privacy."10 These
reasons, in keeping with his appendix on "Lying and
Equivocation," are obviously an evasion, an avoidance of
the central issue that the conversion is inconsistent with
earlier behaviors and beliefs and his silence or his
defense still leaves the fact that he acted
inconsistently. He himself knows that when he says that
no one else can enter his mind and heart but himself that
this is obviously an evasion. And part of the confession
is the admission that even he can't totally enter his own
mind and heart; only God knows him completely.
10Jan B. Gordon, "Wilde and Newman; The Confessional
Mode," (Renascence 22), 185.
343
This issue of private judgement and personal privacy
is the key paradox in Newman's position which makes his
confession most significant. He categorizes his own
intentions and motivations and those in favor of the
Anglican church, that were valuable at one time, but are
not as valuable now as his feelings about the Roman
Catholic church. It is as if, according to Sydney Mendel,
each man, before going to bed, needs to
determine whether his church is in good standing
with God...Newman wants to be guided by reason,
not imagination, duty, not feeling, but what is
one man's reason but a private judgement and
how can one know one's duty without exercising
private judgement?11
Newman compares his situation to that of the publican
and pharisee in the bible and Jesus' warning that harlots
and publicans are entering the kingdom of heaven before
scribes and pharisees and this parable points up this
central issue of respect for interior life and convictions
(Apologia. 191). The sheeplike heart of the publican or
prostitute is helpless in the face of their sin. They
appear to be condemned sinners, rejected by God, but Jesus
is saying that no one knows their hearts where there is
the inexplicable possibility of change. The wolf like heart
of the scribe or pharisee seeks to pile up religious acts
uSydney Mendel, "Metaphor and Rhetoric in Newman's
Apologia." (Essays in Criticism, 23)», 369.
344
so as not to appear sinful. They appear justified before
God but Jesus is saying that no one knows their hearts
where there may be no possibility of change.
The formal, interior, constitutive act of the Scribe
or Pharisee is that which says that the external, material
act of accumulating religious acts for others (and God)
to see will win interior justification and conviction.
The formal, interior, constitutive act of the harlot or
publican or sinner is that which says that the admission
to the external, material act of sin wins interior
justification and conviction because it reveals the
interior state of openness to conversion, where salvation
occurs. There is no interior conversion activity in the
scribe or pharisee who say that the conversion activity
takes place in the obedience to external laws. The
interior state of the sinner is one that is helpless and
defenseless in the face of the personal sin, the fault.
The interior state of helplessness and defenselessness is
the state of "wisdom and innocence"12 (the title of his
controversial sermon)13 that motivates change. The
12John Henry Newman, "Note C: On Wisdom and
Innocence," in Apologia Pro Vita Sua. edited by David
DeLaura (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1968), 233
ff.
13John Henry Newman, "Wisdom and Innocence," in
Victorian Literature: Prose, edited by G.B. Tennyson and
Donald J. Gray (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company,
Inc., 1976), 280 ff.
__________________
345
recognition of the interior, formal state changes the
exterior, material behavior.
Newman also gives his own example of the "lazy,
ragged, filthy, story-telling beggar woman if chaste,
sober, cheerful, and religious, had a prospect of heaven,
such as was absolutely closed to an accomplished
statesman, lawyer or noble, be he ever so just, upright,
generous and honorable, and conscientious ....(Apologia r
191)." Newman compares himself and his conversion to these
people. He stopped being an Anglican because he
experienced within himself that helplessness and poverty
that lets go of a long-held tradition and retreats to
silent contemplation and confusion, a searching of that
interior poverty to find his real point of view, his real
intentions from which and by which he can re-constitute
himself and his beliefs and religious practice.
When he enters the experience of silent submission
and withdrawal from Saint Mary's for two years, he
realizes that all the scribal proofs and Pharisaical
defenses and logically consistent treatises and certitudes
will convince neither God nor his accusers that he is
doing what is right for him. The root lies in the very
private, personal, interior awareness of his own
346
helplessness where pre-verbal, pre-conscious, unconscious
judgments form the center of his conversion and this root,
this center, is certainly unable to be articulated and in
effect is inaccessible.
Newman admits that his behavior had that "mixture of
ii
fierceness and sport...it gave offense (Apologia, 48) and
he says he does not intend to defend it or explain it away
in the Apologia. His duplicit, confusing behaviors did
indeed happen but he is at least going to tell the story
from hi.s point of view. And so he sets out in the Apologia
not to create controversy about any particular church or
theological stance but to "relate things as they happened
to him in the course of his conversion (118).” His
complaint is that he does not want to be forced to feel
guilty about things he said in the past or retract his
words now that he is a Roman Catholic ( ' Apologia. 161). He
meant them at the time and they stand now for that time.
He says that leaving a church that one so
wholeheartedly loved and defended demands an immense and
painful soul-searching and the ultimate decision to change
rests with private judgement. He needed to come to some
conviction about his beliefs in retreat (Apologia. 147).
The "springs of his conversion" began in intellectual
investigation and rational study (Apologia, 191), a need
for certitude about the evidence, but this ultimately gave
347
jway to the need to make a decision, take a stand, state
jhis convictions, and convert. His need for intellectual
certainty kept quelling the "driving force" of his
I
conscience, his private judgement, the personal,
confessional voice of his heart with new arguments and
diversions until which time he came to realize that his
personal salvation, his relationship with God, depended
on this decision.
He says that the greater the truth that is involved,
j the greater the act to be done (like this change of
churches), the greater risk there is of gossip, libel,
i
j slander and misinterpretation (Apologia, 158) because to
reach and express the core is impossible. He could
| pretend to convert in order to further his career in the
church. The Roman Catholic Church will have better
opportunities than the Anglican. He could pride himself
on the fact that he was able to defend so clearly and
logically his decision as if there were no presence of
mystery involved,
j The newspapers reported Newman's intentions to
| convert, especially when he left St. Mary's. His silence
and retreat merely caused more mystery and question about
i
! what he was doing and what he meant and the road was open
I
I to gossip, prejudice and misunderstanding (Apologia, 169).
They remember his strong devotion and defense of the
348
Anglican church against the Liberalism of the time and his
involvement in its defense in his writings of the Tracts
of the Times. They remember that he said that people
needed to listen to the Anglican church authorities and
not depend on their own private judgement.
Newman portrays his fictional Charles Reding in Loss
and Gain as one who was perceived by his fellows as "too
viewy (Loss, 15)." Charles was always critical and
impatient to reduce things to logical, clear systems. He
was too fond of argument and did not lay very much to
heart. Charles is unable to take his final examinations
at Oxford because all the opinions and arguments had
caused him to doubt the Thirty-nine Articles of the
Anglican Communion and in order to graduate, a student
needed to assent to these.
Chapter Three of Loss and Gain reflects on this idea
of "too viewy" and it is Newman's fictional opportunity
to consider the perils of any complex, minute examination
of motives, of private judgments and multiple views. When
a person penetrates a world like politics or religion, or
the multiple world of motivations and intentions in
consciousness for the first time, "all that they find
there meets their mind's eye as a landscape addresses
itself for the first time to a person who has just gained
his bodily sight...there is no perspective (Loss, 15)."
349
Connections and relationships between names, persons and
events are not made. There is no sense of history; the
present stands as "round and full, like the moon" and
passes before the person like the wind, nothing makes an
impression, nothing penetrates, no name, event or person
takes on any significance. There is no consistency to
argument; they are indirect, random and change from day
to day; they diverge and converge; nothing comes to a
point. There is no center in which the mind can sit and
on which private judgement can rest and decisions proceed.
Reding reasons that it could appear that these people
are "unfettered, moderate, dispassionate, that they
observe the mean, that they are not "party men;" when in
fact they are the most helpless of slaves; for our own
strength in this world is to be subjects of reason and our
liberty to be captives of truth (Loss, 16).
And Newman captures this state in an interior
monologue of Charles' (Loss, 203) where Charles admits
that he wants to be settled in some church, whether
English or Roman, but he is so confused at this time that
he doesn't even know what Christianity is. "All the paper
arguments in the world are not equal to giving one a view
in a moment (Loss. 203)." Coming to have a point of view,
a perspective, a conviction about something is a process
that is separate from intellectual conclusions made from
350
premises in syllogisms. Charles can't will to believe in
a moment nor can he "achieve" belief by logical argument.
In paper arguments, the "words signify the argument on the
paper," they stand for "things" rather than representing
his feelings, intentions and the convictions of his heart.
In the Apologia Newman says that he "had a great dislike
of paper logic....pass a number of years, and I find
myself in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper
logic is but the record of it (Apologia. 136)." He
concludes in the monologue that he must allow the
intellectual-emotional inquiry into his motivations and
intentions, goals and ideals, to proceed freely at its
own pace.
The character "Freeborn" in Loss and Gain says to
Charles;
'First, it is evident that it is not mere belief
in facts, in the being of a God, or in the
historical event that Christ has come and gone.
Nor is it the submission of the reason to
mysteries; nor, again, is it that sort of trust
which is required for exercising the gift of
miracles. Nor is it the knowledge and acceptance
of the contents of the Bible. I say, it is not
knowledge, it is not the assent of the
intellect, it is not historical faith, it is not
dead faith: true justifying faith is none of
these it is seated in the heart and
affections' (101).
Both Charles and Newman, like Eliot's Becket, are
torn with the fear that they may be "doing the right thing
for the wrong reason." A "lust for salvation that is
351
ultimately egoistic" may inspire their conversions. The
characters in Loss and Gain want to know "what Charles
means" as do the persons in Newman's life want to know
what he means and intends. What are their views and why
do they hold them? Are they trying to win salvation and
justify themselves before God? Are they trying to make
a good impression on earth and get a better job? Or are
their words and actions motivated by heartfelt convictions
and affections that are in effect inexpressible? Newman
was trying to do what Derrida argues is well nigh
impossible: to get to the core, the center and construct
it. Newman's confessional defense more realistically set
the various perspectives in a comparative-contrastive
gestalt where he is always aware that there is one piece
missing yet at the same time that he is quite conscious
that he is doing the right thing.
CONCLUSION
In this final chapter on Cardinal Newman, I have
attempted to show how his autobiographical writings
contain narrative units that unify and balance
consciousness as in an autobiography, compare and contrast
consciousness as in a memoir, and reveal, explain and
defend states of consciousness as in a confession or
apology.
The documents construct an autobiographical portrait
352
of a man who saw himself as one who could achieve some
degree of certitude with regard to his faith and his
conversion by means of an intellectual analysis of
probabilities and possibilities (autobiography). At the
same time, another voice in the documents confesses to the
impossibility of constructing such a portrait because
there are inconsistencies and gaps about his conversion
(memoir) but he defends his right to categorize and
evaluate his personal motivations and intentions according
to his own private judgement and the right to act on that
judgement (confession). He remembers the details of the
crisis and attempts to compare and contrast them as
perspectives among perspectives, varieties of states and
acts of consciousness.
Near the end of his life, Newman returned in
consciousness to the time and place, where the religious
road diverged in the woods and he chose Roman Catholicism
over Anglicanism in the 184 0's. He returned to the time
when he wrote the fictional account of such a choice in
Loss and Gain in 1848. He also returned to the time when
he was called to defend his conversion in the Apologia in
1860 and he finally returned to it when he wrote some
documents for his biographer in the 1870's. Each time he
returned to the point of decision where the two roads
converged in the wood and he realized that the one he
353
chose made all the difference. In each return, he comes
to a nexus, a deeper sense of himself, so he is able to
expose the various levels of inconsistency and conflict
inherent in the conversion and asserts his right to
determine his own motivations and intentions, to choose
which way he wants to go based upon his right to judge and
decide privately about certain things.
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.14
14Frost, 1118.
354
CONCLUSION
A PHILOSOPHY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING:
A METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE
Individuals render themselves, their consciousness and
personality, present in a special, unique way in
autobiographical writing. I would like to use Jacques
Derrida's idea of a "metaphysics of presence"1 as the
basis for a systematic philosophy that constitutes
autobiographical writing. "Consciousness offers itself
to thought as self-presence, says Derrida, "the self
perceives itself as present to itself through thought and
consciousness."2 Jane Tompkins puts Derrida's same
sentiment in other words: "I think "consciousness" by
thinking that I am in some way present to my "self":"3
Derrida's metaphysics of presence is a "self-proximity
:that gives privileged position to the absolute now, the
life in the present, the living present....the very
1 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 74.
2Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. (The
University of Chicago Press, 1972), 16.
3Jane Tompkins, "A Short Course in Post-
, Structuralism," (College English, 50, 7, November, 1988),
1 746.
355
essence of presence is presence... i ' A A principle of
identity is the founding principle for a philosophy of
science or a metaphysics of presence which is a presence
of consciousness, a "Being as presencef 1,5 embodied by the
words used in an autobiographical document.
As Gayatri Spivak says in her introduction to her
translation of Of Grammatology: "Derrida's trace is the
mark of the absence of a presence, an always already
absent present,..**6 She writes in her introduction that
his is an "ethics of presence, an ethic of nostalgia for
origins,...a science of presence."7 And Derrida himself
says in Of Grammatology: "I have identified logocentrism
and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful,
systematic and irrepressible desire for such a
signified."8 Questions of origins, he says, carry with
^Derrida, Of Grammatoloay. 309, 311.
5Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. (The
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 207, 213, 277.
6Gayatri Spivak, "Translator's Introduction" to Of
Grammatoloay, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1974), xvii.
7Spivak, xix, xxi.
8Derrida, Of Grammatoloqy. 49.
j 356
them a "metaphysics of presence." I feel that the person
! is made present in the autobiographical document,
i In order to establish this Derridean metaphysics of
presence which constitutes autobiographical writing, I
will define the key terms that Derrida uses to support
ithe system: the always already absence and presence of
a force at a center; the construction and deconstruction
dilemma; the free interplay of traces and differences;
and the natural attitude. I will apply these terms to
ithe documents discussed in this dissertation.
i
Derrida's "natural attitude"9 is that which respects
t
*
j the deconstructive-constructive freeplay of the different
j traces in consciousness which construct and deconstruct
but this also involves a violence, a destruction of the
i
;natural attitude of respect, done to the force and center
! of that consciousness when consciousness attempts to
i
J construct an autobiographical narrative of its traces and
differences. For Derrida, as each narrative of the life
story is constructed, rendered present to consciousness,
I it signifies the absence of some other part of the life
!story.
i
| "Natural writing in keeping with the natural
attitude is that which is in communion with the unity
9Derrida, Writing and Difference. 144.
Heidt 357
! of breath and voice; the pneumatological and the
grammatological.1,10 The science of language and the
metaphysics of presence that Derrida is talking about
must recover the natural that is, the simple
and original . . . natural bond of sense to the
sense and it is this that passes from sense to
sound: "the natural bond," Saussure says, "the
only true bond, the bond of sound (p. 46 [p.
25]. The natural bond of the signified
(concept or sense) to the phonic signifier
would condition the natural relationship
i subordinating writing (visible image) to
speech.11
Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Hilda
Doolittle's Hermione Gart approximate this natural
attitude. Tristram Shandy approaches his life story and
determines to tell it in whatever way he pleases and he
hopes that the reader will follow along. Hermione Gart
not only tells the story of her experience of interior
!chaos and confusion; she actually represents that
confusion in the text.
j
j Inscribing the life story on paper in narrative is
| an example of a violent "rupture" of these "natural
'attachments."12 Lawrence Watson says that
I
| The individual returns to the phenomenon
10Derrida, Of Grammatoloqy. 17.
nDerrida, Of Grammatoloqy. 35.
lzDerrida, Of Grammatoloay. 46.
; 358
itself, the particular life experience, as an
object of consciousness...where the individual
reflects on the experience... and transforms
what was originally the natural attitude into
the phenomenological attitude.13
An autobiographer's "natural attitude" of respect for the
| sequence of events in the life story is an attitude which
i plays with the various traces left in memory about the
t
particular experience from the past. The violence occurs
|when an autobiographer forces the construction of a
system, a narrative, to represent the essence of the
i
|particular experience or even the life itself. The
;person writes a narrative of the experience and in so
I
jdoing renders the life, the consciousness of the
experience narrated, present at the same time that the
narrative renders absent other traces of the experience
not included in the construct. Derrida's natural
attitude is discarded when the autobiographer assumes
what Watson calls the "phenomenological attitude" and
,sets out to write an autobiographical narrative of a
[particular experience.
William Wordsworth is confused by the loss of his
13Lawrence C. Watson, "Understanding a Life History
as a Subjective Document: Hermeneutical and
Phenomenological Perspectives," (Ethos, 4, 1976), 99.
j
I —
359
creative powers and his drive to write poetry, especially
i
j at a time when he wanted to write a great poem, a
philosophical epic. He quite naturally returns to his
home at Grasmere and as he walks about his creativity is
re-kindled and he sees and remembers childhood
experiences from this renewed point of view. His natural
attitude takes on a phenomenological one when he
constructs narratives about childhood remembrances which
narratives change the nature and focus of the original,
natural experience.
The deconstructive freeplay of traces and differences
at the center ceases in the construction of the
narrative. Just as the person is made present in the
representation of consciousness in the narrative so some
F
! of the person is absent from the construct and the
I autobiographer must return to the natural attitude of
jrespectful, deconstructive freeplay.
I
j The natural attitude or point of view respects the
j ongoing process and movement of becoming until which time
the autobiographical consciousness feels the need to
|bracket or construct a system or story about some
i
iexperience. For Derrida, this constructing is a violent
process of "dismantling and dispossession" or
360
!"dissimulation or oppression of the other by the same."14
I
!Being dissimulates itself in its occurrence and
originally does "this first violence" to itself in order
i
that it might state itself and appear real; in order to
be a "first epiphany of Being."15 The autobiographical
|piece of writing "is the dissimulation of the natural,
primary, immediate presence of sense to the soul within
j the logos."16
Waiting for Godot represents this deconstruction of
I the natural attitude and perspective. As the characters
I
■re-assemble in Act Two and attempt to re-construct what
I
!happened in Act One, they actually deconstruct the truth
I of the natural experience and re-construct a new
'experience through re-arrangement of facts and
!
jinterpretation of those facts.
I
1 Derrida elaborates another of his key notions called
! "trace" in his article on "Freud and the Scene of
Writing" where he indicates that he got the idea of
"trace" from Freud's writings, and most especially
14Derrida, Writing and Difference. 82, 129.
15Derrida, Writing and Difference, 147, 149.
16Derrida, Of Grammatology. 37.
361
Freud's idea of the Mystic Writing Pad.17
The trace is not only the disappearance of
origin within the discourse that we sustain
and according to the path that we follow it
means that the origin did not even disappear,
that it was never constituted except
reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which
thus becomes the origin of the origin.18
There is an
illumination, a flash of light which inundates
us. This flash, however, is not at all
lasting, it is already hidden at the very
moment it represents itself to the mind. Yet
it leaves traces (vestigia) or impressions
(impressiones) in our memories which constitute
a kind of prelinguistic and purely mental
writing.19
Arthur Miller captures a bit of the feeling of the
trace in the last pages of his autobiography:
...I have heard the word "Grandpa!"
from...Bob's kids.
There was no denying my resistance to that
word my God, I had hardly begun! What are
these small persons doing on my lap lovingly
repeating that terrible accusation with all its
finality? How confidently they imagine I am
Grandpa. And this makes me wonder who I imagine
17Derrida, Writing and Difference. 22 3.
18Derrida, Of Grammatology. 61.
j 19Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other:
IOtobioaraphy, Transference. Translation, translated by
Peggy Kamuf, edited by Christie McDonald, (New York:
iSchocken Books, 1985), 80-81.
! 362
I t ^ 20
j I am*
According to Derrida, Freud discusses the mind or
the psyche in terms of the three levels of conscious
perceptions, unconscious recordings and preconscious,
pre-verbal sensations. Freud's mystic writing pad is his
metaphor for describing how perceptions are imprinted on
the mind. "The alterity of the unconscious makes us
concerned not with horizons of modified— past or future-
-presents) but with a "past" that has never been
present,.."21 (because it has been inscribed in the
.unconscious).
Nabokov is aware that the Derridean natural attitude
of respectful freeplay of these elements is present but
'in his autobiography Speak f Memory he proceeds to take
Husserl's natural standpoint and bracket the significant
:people and experiences of his life into the chapters of
-the book. But in some places, he captures both the
Derridean natural attitude of freeplay and the Husserlean
J natural standpoint which re-constructs the phenomenon as
j he does in the passage about his tutors which I quoted
i
earlier in Chapter 2, pp. 178-9.
i
I
I --- ------------------------
! Z0Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life. (New York: Grove
!Press, 1987), 598.
21Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. 21.
363
I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement
of memory, which is the masterly use it makes
of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold
the suspended and wandering tonalities of the
past...I distinguish features,...I see...I
note. . .the pulsation of my thought mingles with
that of the lead shadows and turns Ordo into
Max and Max into Lenski and Lenski into the
schoolmaster, and the whole array of trembling
I transformations is repeated.22
! The cover sheet of the writing pad records the
,initial perceptions and intuitions on consciousness at
the time that the experience is occurring but then some
of these perceptions and intuitions are imprinted
permanently on the wax slab (unconscious/preconscious)
underneath the sheet. When the perceptions are recorded
and the cover sheet is lifted, they are erased and the
i
cover sheet is a tabula rasa again, ready to receive new
»
| perceptions and intuitions from new experiences. But the
wax slab underneath, the metaphor for the unconscious and
:preconscious, has retained some of these writings as
l
traces which intersect and overlap as they accumulate.
The "palimpsest" of the Middle Ages is an earlier
I
| version of this same thing. Writing surfaces were
i
scraped or washed and used again but the traces still
remained and modern chemical methods make it possible to
I 22Vladimir Nabokov, Speak. Memory; An Autobiography
Revisited. (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1947), 170-172.
j “ 364
]recover some of these texts.23 Thomas DeQuincey uses
i.
j the palimpsest image which I quoted in the epigrams and
postscripts to my chapters, like Freud's mystic writing
pad, as a metaphor of the mind which is an interlace of
intersections, much like a road map.
i
What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest
is the human brain?... Everlasting layers of
ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your
brain as softly as light.24
Derrida considers these "traces" recorded on the
palimpsest, the mystic writing pad of the mind, and calls
them the "grammes"25 that appear as writing on a piece of
;paper in an autobiographical narrative. He talks about
I
the traces in consciousness as these grammes on the piece
jof paper as "breaches" or paths, which break through upon
jeach other and conduct to other traces. Meaning is
j
'created by "enregistering" it to an "engraving, a groove,
a relief, to a surface whose essential characteristic is
1
23William Flint Thrall, Addison Hibbard and C. Hugh
Holman, A Handbook to Literature. (New York: The Odyssey
Press, 1936), 336-337.
i
I 24Thomas DeQuincey, Tales and Prose Phantasies.
!Volume XIII, The Collected Writings of Thomas DeQuincey.
edited by David Masson, (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles
!Black, 1890), 510.
25Derrida, Writing and Difference. 205.
the infinitely transmissible."
365
26
Freud forges the hypothesis of "contact-
barriers" and "breaching" (Bahnuna. lit.
pathbreaking) of the breaking open of a path
(Bahn)...Breaching. the tracing of a trail
opens up a conducting path...breaching without
difference, resistance, is insufficient for
memory.27
This "breaking a path against resistance, rupture and
irruption becoming a route, is a violent inscription of
a form."28 Derrida compares this breaking a path,
breaching, to the furrow that a ploughman makes in a
field which opens the land for cultivation and
fertilization just as the furrow made by the writer are
the lines written on the pages of paper, opening the mind
to cultivation and fertilization of thought.29
Cardinal Newman is that autobiographer who feels
that this demand made upon him to explain a deeply
personal, religious decision is in effect a violence to
his own right to a private judgement. Norman Mailer
writes his defense of his involvement in the VietNam war
1
.protest in order to clarify and explain the violence done
25Derrida, Writing and Difference. 12.
27Derrida, Writing and Difference. 200-201
28Derrida, Writing and Difference, 214.
29Derrida, Of Grammatologv. 287.
I
366
1 by the misrepresentations in the newspaper and magazine
i
< accounts.
!
Autobiographers write their narratives, which
themselves are "traces," or "grammes." The trace
intersections in the palimpsest of the mind and memory
which appear as the grammes (the words, clauses,
sentences, phrases, narratives, the autobiographical
documents themselves) on the written page are ways of
separating and breaking apart the traces in
i consciousness. This setting apart and arranging and
i
| constructing into autobiographical narratives on written
i
pages is a violent process that forces the self into a
Jnarrative mold which does not really represent it. What
I
I
: is not respected and is forced into the mold is the force
jat the center which is never reached but always
approximated. The effort to get to this force and center
i
iand separate it from the ’ ’always already”30 consciousness
is a violent act. The paths resist and counter each
l
other; one ruptures the other. The paths, the traces,
1
ithe inscriptions, the grammes on the page are ruptures
Ion the text of the mind as they are on the paper. One
narrative opposes, complements or reveals another. Mary
30Derrida, Writing and Difference. 74, 165, 178,
211, 213, 219, 226. Of Grammatoloay. 7, 9, 47, 49, 66,
73, 84, 106, 112, 280, 289-290, 304.
I
(
i 367
I
jMcCarthy writes the story of her mean uncle who accused
her of stealing her little brother's toy tin butterfly
but in the story itself she questions the accuracy of her
memory and her motivations.
This inaccessible force at the center, an
unreachable origin, is never present for Derrida except
in the interplay of these differences among traces in the
conscious, subconscious, preconscious, unconscious mind.
The trace is the "simulacrum”31 of a something
dislocated from itself, displaced, "under erasure;"32 it
j is and it is not. As Gayatri Spivak says; "The sign
»
imust be studied "under erasure" always already inhabited
by the trace of another sign which never appears as
I
; such.1,33 The narrative units in an autobiographical
i
i
document are traces which synecdochically juxtapose with
each other and metonymically differentiate and re-connect
■with each other or metaphorically replace one another as
representative of the person.
The autobiographical document and its narrative
units themselves are rupturous, violent events for the
31Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. 24.
32Derrida, Of Grammatology. 60.
Spivak, xxxix.
! 368
r
j autobiographer; some moreso than others. An
:autobiographical document or a narrative unit in a
document is a violent act because it takes the
i
"untouchable, untranslatable, absolute nonpresence,"34
the ferment and internal dialogue and discernment,
[between conscious, unconsciousness, preconscious and
attempts to express them in writing and in so expressing
them, destroys them, makes them completely other and
absent.
...irreducibi1ity of intentional
incompleteness, and therefore alterity; and by
showing that since consciousness is
irreducible, it can never possibly, by its own
essence, become self-conscious,...35
i
t
Maxine Hong Kingston attempts to reduce the
•untouchable, untranslateable reality of her mother in the
jnarrative "Shaman."
] In "Genesis and Structure," Derrida makes the point
i
jthat the structure, the text, is motivated by this
! dynamic action or movement of the being at its center,
i
the source, the force but this dynamic activity stops,
the process of becoming stops, when it is forced into a
bracket or box, into a state of being, an object, that
34Derrida, The Ear of the Other. 114-115.
35Derrida, Writing and Difference. 120.
I
! is not becoming; the autobiographical writer is still
‘moving and growing and the autobiographical document
becomes something quite alien to the autobiographer
because it represents someone whom the autobiographer is
not any more. The naming in the document represents the
chain or "system of roots"36 of differences linked into
a narrative and in all the diversity of the interlink and
network, the thing, the autobiographer, is never the
same.
John Stuart Mill recounts the story of his mental
|breakdown or crisis in terms of a system of roots, an
I interlinking network of influences. "Linguistic
l . . . . .
[identity does not reside m substance; it resides m
irelationality...Identity... is a function of positioning
jwithin a system."37 Christopher Nolan and Helen Keller
|write from the point of view of their handicaps.
The rupturous event, the violent act, for an
|autobiographer, is the attempt to inscribe and structure
the indeterminate center of the self, to separate the
i
'self from a system of relations. The metaphoric,
|
infinite substitutions (stories that are alike or tell
36Derrida, Of Grammatoloqy. 102.
37Tompkins, 737.
j 370
■similar stories) which never signify the force at the
j
I center (the essence, the movement) are violent actions
|
iwhich attempt to totalize by adding up a bunch of seminal
i
I traces (narrative units, autobiographical stories) and
i
I naming them.
i
The unconscious and preconscious compilation of
traces, like the conscious ones from which the
,autobiographical narrative is written, are a network of
weaves of their own meanings and forces which affect the
way that the conscious mind of the autobiographer
brackets those weaves and traces into narrative. The
jarticulation of these traces through the words of the
i
|narrative, whether voiced or written, is essentially the
!idea behind Derrida's metaphysics of presence and
iconsciousness. Derrida admits that the interlace and
!
!weave of traces and differences in unconscious,
jpreconscious and conscious mind in an "always already"
[present, "energetic" act of becoming is essentially
inaccessible and irreducible.
Rousseau...articulates the chain of
significations...on the classical metaphysics
of the entity as energy. encompassing the
relationships between being and time in terms
of the now as being in action (energeia):38
"Eneraeia of speech (a word's capacity to make the image
i
38Derrida, Of Grammatoloqy. 311.
371
I
! of the thing present to the mind) , ...1,39 through the
i
I"eternal return" and- the re-writing, re-editing, re-
l
jvocalizing, new traces and differences are discovered,
always "supplementing and compensating for what is
■ lacking in the previous articulation"40 in an attempt to
jbracket the "plenitude," the fullness, the essence of
a particular experience or person when in fact there will
.always be some trace that is absent.
i
...this sequence of supplements... is an
infinite chain, ineluctably multiplying the
supplementary mediations that produce the sense
of the very thing they defer: the mirage of the
• thing itself, of immediate presence, of
imaginary perception.41
i This "movement of supplementary representation approaches
the origin as it distances itself from it."42
i
1
In Newman's quest for certainty regarding his
conversion, he examines the range of possibilities and
probabilities. The quest for certainty is Newman's
j attempt to discover the Derridean center or core and the
iexamination of the range of possibilities and
t
I ---- — -------------------------------------------------
39Derrida, The Ear of the Other. 137.
40Derrida, Writing and Difference. 212.
41Derrida, Of Grammatoloav. 157.
42Derrida, Of Grammatoloqy. 295.
372
probabilities are examples of the Derridean multiplicity
jof construction around the origin.
Derrida's roundtable discussion of Nietzsche's
j
iautobiography Ecce Homo (1927) in The Ear of the Other
! and Nietzsche's problem of the "eternal return"43 accents
i
i
this idea that "the basis of this unfolding of the same
as differance, we see announced in the sameness of the
differance and repetition in the eternal return."44 But,
i
"rather than a repetition of the same, the return must
be selective within a differential relation of forces."45
i
Derrida uses the Tower of Babel example from the
bible to illustrate this untranslatable confusion.46 God
interrupts and deconstructs the tower and in so doing he
|insists that people not impose a single meaning or
I
j structure but that they must submit to an untranslatable
plurality. All people can do is keep trying to translate
t
:meaning and experience the differences. Attempts at
translation establish links, a network of traces. The
I
i
43Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Ecce Homo and The
Birth of Tragedy. (The Modern Library, Inc., 1927), 69,
95, 107.
44Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. 17.
: 45Derrida, The Ear of the Other. 45.
!
46Derrida, The Ear of the Other. 96.
373
ears of the others within the self and outside hear the
multiplicity and difference in the selves.
The self is always seeking the "asemic" kernel
"beneath the shell of the text,"47 the core, the center
which eludes absolute, untouchable non-presence. "The
totality of hereditary characteristics are enveloped in
the germ."48 If such a center can be touched the person
feels that he or she will experience wholeness and
integration. Derrida quotes Jean Pepin who said that
"hermeneutics is not so much a return to an uncovering
by way of exegesis, the kernel or hidden meaning within
the shell of the text, but an act of extroversion, a
natural vocalization of that kernel."49 When the
autobiographer engages in this freeplay, there is the
truth that this center probably won't be touched but the
autobiographer also risks facing the void there, the
absence of the part that died. The autobiographer may
also attempt to represent the center, the core, the
kernel in various narrative units but will discover
that this does not at all capture who he is. He
47Derrida, The Ear of the other. 80, 113.
48Derrida, Writing and Difference. 23.
49Derrida, The Ear of the Other. 136.
374
eternally returns looking for that synecdochic narrative
that will establish a differential of forces from which
something new can be drawn. The radical alterity, the
always present void within, surrounded by multiplicity,
is of great concern to the autobiographer because it
suggests that there are parts of the self in the
unconscious, subconscious and preconscious mind which
will always be radically other and there are parts of the
unconscious, subconscious, preconscious and conscious
mind which are identifiably blank, voiced. The
autobiographer realizes that there were events in
childhood which have been traced in the unconscious or
subconscious to which the autobiographer feels that he
was not really present at or involved in because his
conscious mind had not yet developed.
Construction of an autobiographical document is an
expansive, creative, active freeplay of traces. The
autobiographical document, as a repository of truths and
definitive statements, will always break down and give
way to a new logic, a new synthesis, interpretation and
vision, thus multiple autobiographies. This freeplay
becomes work for Derrida when it is forced into a
particular structure. Richard Ohmann, whom I quoted in
my introduction, calls this constructive freeplay the
discourse in the individual mind of the autobiographer,
375
an innate language unique to the person. The person
discourses with the multiple selves around the
indeterminate center affirming that center by
recognition of its continued absence.
Samuel Beckett's man lying on his back in the dark
in Company listening to a voice, his own voice, tell his
life story exemplifies this point. Ionesco's man in The
Chairs is waiting for someone to tell his story.
In "La Parole Soufflee," Derrida suggests
autobiographical activity with his words "vainly seek a
place that is always missing."50 If the presence
articulated in the autobiographical narrative implies an
absence, then a process of deconstructing the presence
in the narrative needs to be undertaken in order to
perceive the absent parts. The traces present reveal the
traces and connections hidden. If traces and differences
can freely dialogue with each other and construct a text,
they can also dialogue with each other and deconstruct
that text. The constructive act is as violent a rupture
as is the deconstructive one. The autobiographical
document as a construction asks to be deconstructed to
the extent that it fails to capture some other trace,
some other presence. Once the person or situation is
50Derrida, Writing and Difference. 178.
376
captured as an entity, a product, a passive, static,
stagnant noun, the reality of a living being is lost.
In what I believe to be a prototypical, Derridean
autobiographical document, the self is a person comprised
of multiple others in dialogue, each listening to the
others? the person tells the life story to the other
selves who listen and take their turns telling their
version. These "ears of the others"51 within seem to
divide irreducibly, Zeno-like, such that each of them is
* • • < 2
not only radically other but "irreducibly secondary."
The key ideas that makeup his metaphysics of presence
as they apply to an autobiographical document are that
the natural attitude of the autobiographer is one which
constructs the self in a narrative and then deconstructs
the self made present in various other narratives in the
document and in so doing draws attention to various
absences in the freeplay of traces and differences
represented in the multiple narratives. The process of
writing the autobiographical document and its narrative
units is a rupturous, violent one because it attacks the
ongoing process of movement, growth and becoming at the
51Derrida, The Ear of the Other. 35, 49-51.
52Derrida, Writing and Difference. 178.
377
center at the same time that the document and its
narrative units finds its source and origin in this force
at the unreachable center.
Perry Smith wants to explain why he killed the
Clutters and Tom Wingfield wants to justify why he left
home. Edmund Gosse wants to talk about the conflict
between faith and doubt in his soul which conflict he
incarnates in the clash of his temperament with his
father's. Maya Angelou wants to talk about the sexual
abuse she received as a child. Each of these are violent
realities and the natural attitude which wants to look
at them and re-create them is itself violent as well.
There is always something missing, not quite clear,
another point of view that can be taken. Some of the
person is rendered present but rarely, if ever, the
whole. The phenomenological object that is rendered
present in what I believe is a a good autobiographical
narrative is the force of intentionality and motivation
that constitutes the person's unreachable center.
378
LIST OF REFERENCES
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An
Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1961.
Albee, Edward. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? New York:
Atheneum Press, 1975.
Angelou, Maya. I Know Whv The Caged Bird Sings. New York:
Bantam Books, 1970.
The Basic Texts of the Newman-Kingsley Controversy." in
Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Edited by David DeLaura. New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1968.
Bates, E. Stuart. Inside Out: An Introduction to
Autobiography. New York: Sheridan House, 193 7.
Beckett, Samuel. Endgame: A Play in One Act Followed by
Act Without Words: A Mime for One Player. New York:
Grove Press, Inc., 1958.
. Malone Dies. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1956.
. Company. London: Jack Calder, 1980.
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