Telling It Like It Wasn’t

Readers
looking for an explicit thesis in James Olney’s book, winner of a Christian
Gauss Award for outstanding work in literary scholarship or criticism, will
have to wait until near the very end, where we learn that “memory and
narrative, together and alike, are the two major epiphenomena of consciousness,
the dual defining conditions of our being human and not something else.” It’s worth the wait, though. This is a sensitive, erudite and definitive
(if sometimes a bit laborious) study from a leading scholar of autobiography –
or “life-writing”, as it is coming to be called.

Olney
focuses most of his attention on the work of three life-writers central to the
tradition, from widely different periods and cultures: St. Augustine, Rousseau,
and Samuel Beckett. The choice of the
first two will come as no surprise to anyone acquainted with the literature of
autobiography; but the inclusion of Beckett, one of the greatest dramatists and
fiction writers of the twentieth century, may.
While Olney’s case for Beckett as “ultimately” an autobiographer is not
without its problems, this section of the book is also the most brilliant and
suggestive, and useful in ways that go well beyond its immediate subject. Most of this review will therefore address
the final two chapters on Beckett, “Narrative” and “Memory”, and the central questions
they raise concerning the meaning and importance of autobiography. But a brief survey of the earlier sections
on Augustine and Rousseau, which are also excellent, will help to situate the
discussion.

Augustine,
whose Confessions is “the great ur-book of life-writing,” is also seen
as “an astonishingly modern writer” because of his views on memory, and the
psychology of conversion they informed.
Olney identifies three kinds of memory in Augustine: rote memory; the memory
of experiences; and what he calls, variously, “deep”, “plastic” or “inventive”
memory, which is “always-in-process”.
This “deep” memory is evoked, and exemplified, in one of the most
beautiful passages of the Confessions:

All this I do inside me, in the huge court of my
memory. There too I encounter myself; I
recall myself – what I have done, when and where I did it, and in what state of
mind I was at the time. There are all
the things I remember to have experienced myself or to have heard from others. From the same store too I can take out
pictures of things which have either happened to me or are believed on the
basis of experience; I can myself weave them into the context of the past, and
from them I can infer future actions, events, hopes, and then I can contemplate
all these as though they were in the present.

This sublime
meditation, from Book X, anticipates a passage in the following book, where
Augustine proposes that neither the future nor the past really exists as
separate from the present, which instead includes them in a more comprehensive
“present”: “a present of things past [memory], a present of things present
[sight], and a present of things future [expectation].” Using the metaphor of a shuttle moving on a
loom, Olney comments on the way Augustine relates time, memory, reading,
weaving and text (a word that derives from the Latin texo, “to weave”):
“memory…lays out the text of our lives for continual rereading, backward and
forward, forward and backward”, thus suggesting that “the whole of a life can
be held in memory and expectation.”

For some, such beautifully-expressed ideas may suggest the
work of later great life-writers such as Proust (who, oddly, is mentioned only
once, in passing) and Wordsworth (whose poetry is invoked several times). But the descendant of Augustine that Olney
has most in mind is Rousseau, traditionally seen as the progenitor, in his Confessions,
of modern autobiography, as well as one of the eighteenth century’s most
important philosophers and social thinkers.
According to Olney, however, all of Rousseau’s writing is “profoundly
autobiographical in nature”. Some
philosophers and historians (as well as some literary scholars) might disagree
with this assertion, but Olney’s extended argument is nonetheless a brilliant
literary analysis, in which he proposes that Rousseau’s “project has little to
do with logic or thought or dispassionate observation and everything to do with
emotion and desire and memory-driven narrative”.

From a psychological (and pathological) point of view, the
portrait of Rousseau that emerges from this section of the book is fascinating,
and occasionally humorous. For
instance, we learn that the adoption of his characteristic eccentric dress was
made necessary by “frequent recourse to catheters” because of urinary problems.
The passage is particularly amusing in
view of Rousseau’s lifelong antipathy both to organized religion and social
hierarchy:

And so I had a little
Armenian outfit made. But the storm it raised
caused me to defer wearing it until calmer times, and it was not till some
months later that, forced by more attacks to have fresh recourse to catheters,
I felt I could safely wear my new clothing at Motiers, especially after I had
consulted the pastor of the place, who told me I could wear it even in church
without offense. I put on the jacket,
the caftan, the fur cap and the belt therefore; and after having attended
divine service in this costume I saw nothing wrong in wearing it at my Lord
Marshal’s. When His Excellency saw my
attire he greeting me quite simply with Salamaleki, which concluded the
matter, and I never wore any other dress.

But the puckish, benign eccentricity in
church and society is complicated by something more revolting at meal-time with
“Maman” (his benefactress and lover, Mme de Warens): “One day at table, just as
she had put some food in her mouth, I cried out that I had seen a hair in
it. She spat a morsel on her plate, whereupon
I seized it greedily and swallowed it.”

It is this seemingly shameless candor and
ingenuousness that account for Rousseau’s enduring appeal as
autobiographer. Yet the impression that
we finally take away from this section of the book is far from benign, and
nothing if not disingenuous, and shameful.
It is well known that Rousseau abandoned his five infant children, by
his mistress Therese Levasseur, to a “foundling hospital where”, Olney points
out, “their fate was death or something not much better (of the children
committed in Rousseau’s time, 70 percent died in their first year, only about 5
percent lived to mature years, and most of that 5 percent concluded as tramps
and beggars).” Olney’s interest in this
despicable episode is less moral than textual, however, as he analyzes the
“internal turmoil in which the logic of narrative and the narrative of logic
both collapse.” In a brilliant critique
that combines psychological and literary insight, Olney shows how Rousseau’s
repeated and profound self-deception regarding his abandonment of his children
produces narrative incoherences in his text.
Olney argues that it is language even more than his guilty conscience
that finally betrays the author of the Confessions. The autobiographical project in which he
sets out to bare his heart and soul, and to tell, as if for the first time in
all of literature, his utter uniqueness
– “I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not
made like any that exist” – cannot be represented through words, and so is
doomed to narrative failure. Olney’s
formulation of the “uniqueness” problem is particularly acute, and deserves
citation in full:

Well might Rousseau say
that his project is unique, but equally well might he say that it is
impossible, for how will he communicate, across species barriers and to those
who are utterly alien, the nature and the history of his heart and soul? What language is there for such
communication? Will it be the language
unique to this unique species or a language common to and shared among all
those others? Obviously the former, but
then there is … no commonality of articulation that would bridge the chasm
between “myself alone”, as Rousseau proudly, frequently and pathetically
proclaims himself to be, and all the others who do not participate in his species
of being apart.

Yet it is precisely its failure as a
faithful representation of Rousseau’s life, Olney remarks, that accounts for
both the greatness and the modernity of The Confessions as
autobiography: “For Rousseau finds a way to fail that no one before him had
found, and that, according to Beckett, is the sine qua non of great artistry:
‘to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail.’”

Beckett
perceived failure, both as subject and experience, to be at the center of his
own art. The contrast with Joyce, for
whom he once worked as secretary, was formative in his own career: “I realized
that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more,
[being] in control of one’s material….
I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of
knowledge…. I’m working with impotence,
ignorance.” In a wonderful — and,
ironically, quite Joycean — epigram that serves as a leitmotif throughout
Olney’s book, Beckett remarked, in a conversation in 1960 with the critic Tom
Driver: “To find a form that
accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” The fact that such a task is doomed to
linguistic failure, for Beckett as for Rousseau, does not exempt one from
having to undertake it. In Olney’s
words, “the Beckettian artist – who has the obligation but not the means, the
power, or the desire to express – is not permitted to relinquish the effort
after meaning merely because it will prove fruitless.”

For
Beckett’s autobiographical narrative, as Olney tells it (and for Olney, all of
Beckett’s major narratives, like Rousseau’s, are fundamentally
autobiographical), the necessary failure of writing is deeply connected with a
perceived failure to live – even to be born.
Charles Juliet, in his book Rencontre avec Samuel Beckett, cites
an extraordinary statement Beckett made to him:

I have
always sensed that there was within me an assassinated being. Assassinated before my birth. I needed to find this assassinated person
again. And try to give him new
life. I once attended a lecture by Jung
in which he spoke of one of his patients, a very young girl. After the lecture, as everyone was leaving,
Jung…added: “In the most fundamental way, she had never really been born.” I, too, have always had the sense of never
having been born.

The last section
of the book is full of such thought-provoking passages, prompted by Olney’s
searching and frequently brilliant interpretations of Beckett’s
life-writing. If to be born is, in a
sense, to embark upon one’s “life narrative”, then it is no surprise that
Beckett had trouble with this narrative – was, in fact, unable to tell it, and
made of his failing an (or perhaps the) exemplary case in modern
literature.

But
Olney’s provocative thinking about narrative extends well beyond the bounds of literature,
into modern brain science, the study of memory, and the philosophy of
consciousness. He discusses two case
studies of severely impaired memory: one of a man who, as a result of a brain
injury, could remember nothing, and another who could not forget (perhaps an
original for Borges’ story “Funes the Memorious”?). The narrative capacities of both men – their ability to tell or
understand stories – were similarly impaired.
Other studies of memory reveal that the narrative faculty “overrides”
memory (which should come as no surprise to policemen, lawyers, and writers),
confirming Augustine’s understanding of “deep” or “inventive” memory presented
at the beginning of the book. Using the
self-consciously fragmented and incomplete life-writings of Beckett and Kafka
(and, intriguingly, the work of the sculptor Giacometti) as quintessentially
modern examples, Olney extrapolates from them

a
principle of narrative: narrative as such, and a fortiori if it is the
narrative of a life, cannot be finished.
Not, at least, from within. But
the paradox is that we, as readers of the lives spread out across dozens of
unfinished works, can and do finish the larger, comprehensive project,
constructing our narratives of the lives out of the detritus left behind as failed
works.

Such a “constructing” of the lives out of
the works, failed or otherwise, might also be seen, by skeptical readers, as an
instance of a less desirable “principle” – the principle of the “biographical
fallacy”, by which the work is reductively “explained” by events in the
life. While Olney is much too
intelligent a critic to fall victim to the biographical fallacy, he does at
times seem to be flirting with a more sophisticated version of it. Or perhaps I am misunderstanding a statement
he makes when discussing, in one of the book’s most beautifully searching (and
long) passages, the motif of the Beckettian “greatcoat” that appears in work
after work. “Recalling and tracking the
occurrences of such a motif”, Olney concludes, “we are able to follow the
course of Beckett’s career”. I suppose
it all depends on what you mean by “career”.
Olney seems to mean not a biographical set of actions but a textual and
literary artifact, or series of artifacts: career as artistic expression rather
than historical event.

However, he also points to – and makes
much of — specific biographical events as having had a crucial impact on the
course and content of Beckett’s later career: an incident in 1938 in Paris,
when Beckett was stabbed and nearly killed by a pimp named Prudent (sic!), and
a mysterious and revelatory occurrence — somewhat like a real-life version of
a Joycean “epiphany” — in 1945, at his mother’s house in Dublin. Olney argues that these biographical occurrences
served as “turning points” in Beckett’s career, which thereafter turned more
and more to life-writing. Olney
associates Beckett’s later writing with “the voice of memory”, suggesting that
these turning-points had a significant role in establishing the privileged
place of memory in his writing. Yet
Olney also sees in Beckett’s work “a lifelong commitment to a literature of
memory”, even before the turning-points.
But if Beckett’s work was always, to use Olney’s words, “as
memory-bound, as memory determined, as any writing of our time”, then what real
difference did the turning-points make in his career?

Although I am somewhat skeptical
about Olney’s claims regarding the importance of specific biographical events
in an imaginative life like Beckett’s, devoted as it was to the dramatic and
fictional transformation and “invention” of memory, his ideas here – and
throughout his rich and fertile study — are certainly thought-provoking, and
will stimulate many readers to thoughts of their own – especially, perhaps,
about the course of their own lives.
While Olney’s book is aimed primarily at an academic audience, there is
much here of interest and importance to anyone over the age of, say, 37 —
another “turning-point” that Olney identifies as “the age at which
‘reminiscence’ typically begins, according to psychologists who have thought up
a new term, ‘autobiographical memory’, to describe the ways of a specifically
adult memory that imagines life not as a heap of snapshotlike moments but as
constituting a connected narrative sequence.”

In other words, you don’t have to be an
autobiographer, in the formal sense, to construct (invent?) a narrative of your
life. It seems to me that the more
thought (and memory) we give to such a narrative, the more apt we may be to
identify certain moments, certain events, certain relationships as the “turning
points” of the story of our lives. Of
course, the autobiographical narratives we construct – the “life-writing” we
all do, if only in our heads – are not necessarily fixed; they are always
subject to revision (as Augustine’s theory of memory perceived, so long ago) as
we go backwards and forwards, in memory, over the narrative of our lives, by
turns identifying repeating patterns of past behavior and feeling, and
recognizing predictors of future choices and tendencies. As Olney writes in the “Postlude”: “Memory
becomes the indispensable faculty for discovering, creating or re-creating the
narrative pattern implied by ‘the course of a life.’” Though we may not all be life-writers, we all have careers in memory.

 

© 2003 Joshua Gidding

 

Joshua Gidding, Ph.D., is Assistant
Professor at the Department of English, Dowling College. He is the author of The
Old Girl: A Novel (Henry Holt, 1980).

Categories: Philosophical