<< Feedburner, The Valve's New RSS | Front Page | Syllabus Sharing? >>
Monday, August 28, 2006
Modernist Autobiography: Part I of … However Long It Takes Me
[X-posted to the Acephalous]
I’m not the type who normally thinks about identity, mostly because interrogations of it analyze novels designed to be interrogated by people interested in identity. (I also greet poems written to be read by New Critics with a full-mouthed yawn.) But as I delve into the depths (such that there are) of realist and naturalist literature, I find myself pining for the playful attempts to stabilize identity performed by British, Irish and American modernists.
Take the whole modernist infatuation with "autobiography," which I scare-quote for obvious reasons. What, for example, does Joyce hope to accomplish in the final chapter of Ulysses? To what genre does "Penelope" even belong? Is her lengthy internal monologue a stab at "autobiography"? She narrates her life, questions the import of certain pivotal moments, and attempts to ground her desires in a personality her countrymen would recognize. She attempts, in short, to think herself into a preexisting subject position. Transgression is what she does, not who she wants to be. Which critical mode best accounts for her self-duplicity? Can we also bring it to bear on other modernist "autobiographies"? (Or is this entire line of inquiry wrong-headed? Should we consider her wholly a Joycean construct?)
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—whose cover emblematizes what this discussion addresses—Gertrude Stein writes:
About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe and she has and this is it.
Can you imagine jamming more into a single word than Stein manages to stuff into "simply"?* Stein wants to obscure the obvious here in such a way as to draw attention to it; but she can no more write the autobiography of Alice Toklas than Daniel Defoe can write the autobiography of the fictional Robinson Crusoe. Perhaps Stein meant to allude not to Crusoe, but Alexander Selkirk, the castaway whose four years stranded on the island of Juan Fernandez is thought to be Defoe’s model. Only Stein knows Toklas intimately, whereas Defoe depended on the accounts of Edward Cooke and Woodes Rogers.
I know what you’re thinking: "No one would actually confuse the two, so why press the point?" I press because I care ... and because otherwise brilliant writers have confused these modes in meaningful ways. In Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf wrote
So [Crusoe] proses on, drawing, little by little, his own portrait, so that we never forget it.
The emphasis is mine, and you can guess its import. I inserted "Crusoe" in that sentence because the italicized phrase vanquishes the idea that the antecedent of "he" is "Defoe." What happened here? What confused Woolf?** I would argue that she missed what Stein, with her unsubtle pronomial slippage in the final sentence there, exploited in the passage I quoted earlier:
I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe and she has and this is it.
Stein records herself declaring her intentions, then switches back into Toklas’ voice. In lieu of a conclusion, however, I will leave you with a suggestive (not to mention my favorite) passage from Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography:
Identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself ... you do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself.
The title alone should indicate why it piqued my interest. Tomorrow, I’ll discuss this passage, Woolf’s "A Sketch of the Past," Walter Benjamin’s "The Storyteller," and Emile Benveniste’s Problems in General Linguistics.***
* yes I said yes I can Yes.
** Admittedly, these were unfinished essays published posthumously, so she may have caught the slip in future edits. Still, the slip itself is significant enough to warrant attention.
*** And unlike most blog-promises, I’ll live up to this one. Why should you believe me? I’ve already written it. So this isn’t a promise to do more work—which should never be believed, especially of a blogger—but a promise to post what I’ve already written.
Comments
She narrates her life, questions the import of certain pivotal moments, and attempts to ground her desires in a personality her countrymen would recognize. She attempts, in short, to think herself into a preexisting subject position. Transgression is what she does, not who she wants to be.
I beg your parsnips. But where does she do this? You may be attributing a singular direction to her intentions that is just not there in the text. Unless I’m missing it, which is certainly possible. But perhaps a case could be made that she tries to think herself into such a position and also escape it at the same time? And what would be so unusual about that anyway?
But perhaps a case could be made that she tries to think herself into such a position and also escape it at the same time?
Well, a case could be made, and I admit to not having made it yet. That said, I think the “playful” in “playful attempts to stabalize identity” addresses this question. I’m not speaking to its effectiveness here so much as its intent; the way Molly dives back into history; recalls her life; considers whether her activities that day made her a “bad wife” and whether she ought to fix Leo breakfast; &c. What I mean is, she’s tortured by the drift and attempting to fix herself to, well, something. Such, at least, is what I’m going to argue.
Not that it’s effective, merely that it’s attempted.
Emile Beneveniste
You are a fundament of wonderment, SEK. Beneveniste! Where-how’d you find out about him? But he did all that stuff about . . . .
Scott, sure. I can accept that she’s trying to fix herself into something; I just don’t see how that something is “a preexisting subject position,” or not entirely, anyway.
I admit that I’m also confused by whose intent you mean here, Joyce’s or Molly’s. Do you mean Joyce is trying through Molly to stabilize his identity, or stabilize “identity” as a concept, or do you have in mind Molly’s intent in the chapter to stabilize her identity? If both, what’s the relationship? Or do I just need more coffee...?
We don’t ask these kinds of questions about Anna Livia Plurabelle. Or do we? I have become ever more skeptical about any naturalistic intention in Ulysses. It may be a joke.
bob, don’t you think there’s a difference between the narrative of modes of Ulysses and FW, such that one invites this sort of “naturalist” investigation?
Thers, actually, I think you’re in the spirit of it. I’m moving towards a discussion of the way Joyce constructs an “autobiographical” voice; that is, a particular style which “authenticates” even fictional autobiographies, such that people comb “Penelope” for clues to Nora’s life, &c.
Bill, I know, I know, he’s a student of Saussure, and Barthes is a fan...but I think his model wonderfully accounts for the way the modernists were playing with pronouns. I was introduced to him in a class on memory and narrative I took with James Olney. We read Benveniste alongside Becket’s Not-I and The Unnamable, and I’ve always thought that, its general unapplicability notwithstanding, it’s a beautiful way to frame how these problems were tossed around in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s.
. . . its general unapplicability notwithstanding . . .
Who said anything about unapplicabity? I think his treatment of personal pronouns worthy of serious consideration. I also think it’s old and needs to be redone, but, hey, that’s my stock thought about a lot of stuff. I quote him as an epigraph to First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction.
”...such that one invites this sort of “naturalist” investigation?”
Yes, but that is why I mentioned jokes. I don’t know, I just asked myself if the stream of conciousness really depicted the way people actually think. Especially with all the variance among chapters. The internal monologues are pretty different in Proteus and Ithaca. If not, why do I think so? If Joyce is not actually depicting a “person”, but trying to make me think I see one, what exactly is he doing and why? Besides having Joyce-fun.
Especially since you have the schema and styles and all the other stuff in Ulysses. Now I have only read Malcolm Lowry, and so may be ignorant, but it felt to me like Lowry was doing something very different in “Under the Volcano”, for instance. Something actually more like what Joyce was presumed to be doing in Ulysses, but wasn’t.
I don’t know, I just asked myself if the stream of conciousness really depicted the way people actually think.
Whenever I am teaching Joyce, I make a point of prohibiting the phrase “stream of consciousness” from our discussion. It is shorthand that may have had value once upon a time, but now blocks analysis and abridges understanding.
I’m with CR here; the discussion of the different representations of internal monologue is far more productive, esp. since “stream of consciousness” implies a lack of authorial consciousness, almost as if the author, Plato-like, channels the muse with reckless abandon (and no skill).
I’m with CR and Scott.
Also, check out this article by Eleanor Rosch, (semi-famous) cognitive scientist (and Buddhist):
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Rosch_97.html
You need to explain what you mean by this:
Take the whole modernist infatuation with “autobiography,"
I don’t see how it applies to Ulysses at all or modernist fiction in general.