Literary theory is a field renowned for its fads and
fashions, and it often gains notoriety for its readiness to deny common-sense
truths. So it is a relief on reading
Richard Freadman’s Threads of Life to find that he defends the idea that
people have the ability to control their own lives, and that autobiographies
can be revealing about how we understand this ability.

Freadman is
professor of English and director of the Unit for Studies in
Biography and Autobiography at La Trobe University, Australia. He has authored or co-authored several
books, including Eliot, James and the Fictional Self and Re-Thinking
Theory, and his interests go beyond the mere interpretation of novels. Threads of Life is at least partly a
work of philosophy as well as a discussion of literature. Against some behaviorist, psychoanalytic,
poststructuralist and postmodern theorists, he defends the existence of the
human will and its freedom, and uses their autobiographies to show the
impossibility of simultaneously denying the will and telling one’s life
story. Autobiography demands that one
uses the concept of will, and furthermore, autobiography enables us to explore
the will fully and richly. Indeed, he argues that,

The very writing of autobiography is itself perhaps
an act of will, a way of imposing a certain shape and meaning on the life that
one has had. We know that this activity
can be therapeutic, “empowering”; in some instances it can even save
lives. (p. 6)

He also suggests that, “one
of the principal motivations for the writing (and indeed the reading) of
autobiography has been to posit the self with reference to the will” (p. 21).

Before assessing whether the book succeeds in its aims, I
will give a rather cursory summary of the contents.

The first
chapter sets out some of the philosophical debate concerning the nature of the
will, although Freadman leaves more technical discussion to an appendix on
“Some Earlier Conceptions of the Will: Mamonides to Mill.” He explains that the nature of the will is
not captured by crude dichotomies between free will and determinism, and
emphasizes, “the place of the will in human life is an immensely complex
matter, both experientially and conceptually” (p. 22). He sets out some of the main debates about
the will and provides a useful guide to the intricacies of the subject.

Chapter two
confronts the theorists of late modernity: Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Freadman explains how these theorists seem
to endorse the will, but in fact only allow for its existence “in the most
qualified and internally contradictory ways” (p. 53). These approaches have been very influential for philosophy,
literary theory, and autobiography. So
too is Sartrean existentialism, which Freadman also discusses, along with
analytic philosophy, Derrida’s postmodernism, and totalitarianism.

It is only
when he gets to the third chapter that he actually discusses autobiographies,
with three thinkers who have denied the existence of the will and also have
written about their own lives: Louis Althusser, B.F. Skinner, and Roland
Barthes. Freadman does not regard these
writers as providing us with great insights into the will, and indeed he argues
that they their narratives contradict their theoretical perspectives. Especially remarkable is his long quotation
from Althusser’s memoir The Future Lasts a Long Time, in which he
describes his murder of his wife. 
Althusser, known for his synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis, also
suffered from manic depression, and his own account of the murder is a
fascinating case of disowned agency.

The fourth
chapter is on the least reflective autobiographer discussed in the book, Ernest
Hemmingway. In A Moveable Feast, Hemmingway is especially concerned with
the notions of fate and luck. Not
surprisingly, Freadman argues that this book is dominated by narcissism. Hemmingway is not sensitive to distinctions
between action and intention, or action and evasion, and it may be that his
elision of these distinctions is self-serving.

In the
fifth chapter, Freadman tackles the autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir. He argues that she uses several models of
the will as she tells the story of her life, and that she refutes her early
existentialist view of the will in so doing. 
Furthermore, her lifelong devotion to Sartre stands in clear tension
with the existentialist model of individualism and self-invention. This her life seems to embody contradictions.

Similar
themes exist in the autobiography of Arthur Koestler, who himself emphasized
the splits in his consciousness. He
quotes him as writing, “The human mind is basically schizophrenic, split into
at least two mutually exclusive planes” (p. 186). Freadman suggests that, “Koestlerian autobiography reports a self
that is compulsively active and pathologically fearful” (p. 199). Freadman concludes that Koestler was too
content with his internal contradictions, and that they undermine Koestler’s
claim to be an agent at all.

About
Stephen Spender, Freadman claims in the penultimate chapter that his work is
thematically focused on education: “about learning what it means to have a
will, and about how to exert the will in ways that reduce the disintegrating
impact of the contingent and dilute the determinative powers of the past” (p.
216). In Spender’s World Within
World, the organizing metaphor is of concentricity, with a central private
self surrounded by more public, external aspects of life, and he is especially
interested in the interplay between the inner and outer circles. But overall, Spender too employs more than
one conception of self, and indeed, Freadman counts at least four at play. Spender’s main concern is about how a person
remains in control of his self, and while flawed, Freadman counts Spender’s
work as “a fine and courageous contribution to the post-totalitarian effort to
imagine new forms of self-world conceptualization at a time when, for many, the
hope of truly civilized polity seemed literally almost unimaginable” (p. 243).

The book
concludes with Diana Trilling’s book The Beginning of the Journey, which
served as both autobiography and biography of her husband, the famous literary
critic, Lionel. She was even more devoted to her partner than Simone de
Beauvoir, and their lives were intertwined. 
They shared the same view of freedom, that it can only exist within and
against a constraining context. Without
some constraint, one has no freedom. 
One of the central themes for Diana Trilling in her account of her
husband’s life, though, was that he was a disappointment to himself, despite
his obvious success in the academic world, because he had not been able to
break beyond the constraints and been more like Ernest Hemingway. Her account of his life is deeply informed
by psychoanalytic ideas, but her view of Lionel’s will seems inconsistent, as
both thwarted and also as deeply in control. 
Like so many of the other authors considered in this book, Trilling
seems to find it impossible to employ one conception of will throughout her
work.

Freadman concludes
his work by suggesting that these accounts show how difficult it is to
conceptualize the will, and that certain problems recur. The autobiographies that he has considered
reflect the state of late modern culture, which he says is “deeply confused,
conflicted, and often wantonly incurious about the will” (p. 283). Furthermore, he suggests that these
conflicts can be traced back to the shapers of late modernist thought,
Nietzsche, Marx and Freud.

Threads
of Life is certainly a well-researched and fascinating work on
autobiography. Freadman’s defense of
the existence of the will is sensible and he makes a good case that
autobiography is an important area of study for philosophers interested in the
nature of the will. The book is full of
material that deserves scrutiny by anyone interested in moral psychology and
personal autonomy. Philosophers may
nevertheless find it a rather tantalizing work, frustrating in that it does not
fully defend any particular view about the nature of the will.

Most philosophical
work on freedom and determinism is interested in rather general forms of
determinism that would apply to everyone – most obviously the determinism that
is implied, or not, by physics. There
has been less consideration of the kind of determinism sometimes attributed to
Freud, where one’s early experiences determine one’s later character, and
traumatic events condemn one to a life of neurosis. Most people, and the
authors Freadman considers, are mostly interested in the issues of freedom and
determinism of the latter kind. It can
be difficult to match up the philosophical discussion of freedom with that by
autobiographers, and it’s not always clear that Freadman succeeds in this
enterprise.

Furthermore,
while Freadman makes a strong case that autobiographers struggle to find
language with which to describe their freedom or lack of it, he does not
demonstrate that this is necessarily a symptom of late-modernity. One might propose a less historical
explanation, that it is simply in the nature of theorizing about the will. It may well be that any reflective
autobiographer, whenever he or she is writing, will have to struggle with how
to understand his or her own freedom, and that a natural response to this struggle
is to adopt a number of different conceptions of the will, sacrificing
consistency for the goal of remaining true to one’s subjective experience.

Some
skeptics about the will may use Freadman’s arguments against him to conclude
that the notion of the will is so fraught with difficulty that we would be
better off without it. Freadman has tried to preclude this conclusion in his
third chapter, where he argues that even theorists whose official position
insists that there is no will nevertheless find they need to use the concept in
telling the story of their lives. I’d
have liked him to expand on this idea though, and give a more sustained general
argument for the impossibility of a reflective autobiography that denies the
existence of will.

Lastly, the writing of an
autobiography is an occasion for a person to reflect on her life as a whole,
and to discuss to what extent she was the author of her life. It is striking that most of the
philosophical discussion of freedom tends to focus on particular actions at
particular times, in a far more atomistic approach. One idea that seems to be lurking in the background of Threads
of Life is that autobiography is especially interesting in that it
articulates a conception of autonomy over a lifetime, and that this autonomy is
over and above the sum of moment-to-moment freedoms in a person’s life. I would have been especially interested to
see Freadman develop this idea more explicitly, because it seems especially
promising and important.

All in all, despite my slight
reservations, this is an excellent book, recommended for philosophers and
literary theorists.

 

© 2002 Christian Perring. First Serial Rights.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College,
Long Island. He is editor of Metapsychology Online Review. His main
research is on philosophical issues in psychiatry. He is especially interested
in exploring how philosophers can play a greater role in public life, and he is
keen to help foster communication between philosophers, mental health
professionals, and the general public.

Categories: Philosophical