“A geometry of His Own”: Temporality, Referentiality, and Ethics in the Autobiographies

Abstract

If autobiography, as has often been claimed, is dependent on the self’s awareness of temporal orders, and the operations of retrospect and expectation, then many of James’s protagonists reveal immense aptitude for the genre.1 Episodes that dramatize the intensification of an individual’s grasp of his or her life history are repeatedly presented as occurring simultaneously with a heightened awareness of the passage of time. Such moments, usually consequent on new configurations in accustomed circumstances, and sometimes likened to a fall from innocence, depict a suspicion similar to that which James described in relation to the most momentous event in his own cultural history: an apprehension of “the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult” (LC 1: 428). Thus, Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, after the visit of her aunt that will reshape her life, closes her eyes as, “with her sense that the note of change had been struck, [there] came gradually a host of images of the things she was leaving behind her. The years and hours of her life came back to her, and for a long time, in a stillness broken only by the ticking of the big bronze clock, she passed them in review” (1: 42).