Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts: Versions of Identity from Henry Adams to Nate Shaw (review)

Abstract

Reviews Albert E. Stone, Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts: Versions of Identity from Henry Adams to Nate Shaw. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. 349 pp. $28.50 Since roughly the middle of the 1950's, writers on American culture and society have been centrally concerned with the question of personal identity. Both the theme of search for identity and the term "identity crisis" became very prominent in the 1960's, finding their fullest definition in the work of Erik Erikson, who directly connected them with problems of biography and autobiography. Also since the end of World War II many social scientists and social critics have argued that the question of identity is raised more acutely in America than in other cultures. It is said, for example, that in much American literature the lack of a sense of history and society combines with the pervasive motif of search for the lost or absent father to point up the American hero's need to invent himself from scratch. Similar arguments have been made for American autobiography, which may differ from autobiography in other cultures in its abiding concern with inventing or finding the "self." Often this American self—whether character in fiction or subject in autobiography—seems strikingly isolated and self-preoccupied. It does not, as is more commonly the case in English and some continental literature, find or present itself through evocation of social milieu or cultural climate. Instead, the American self-quester works fervently in the cocoon of his own making, elaborating an often beautiful but solipsistic art. Yet, this very tendency toward self-enclosure may produce the abreaction of the great yea-sayer, the reviews 359 democratic populist American voice speaking to and for the people. The former tendency is well represented by Conrad Aiken in his autobiographical Ushant, the latter in the "barbaraic yawp" of a writer like Norman Mailer m Armies of the Night. Both books, so different in tone and artistry, are maverick American autobiographies treated in Albert E. Stone's Autobiographical Acts and Original Occasions, a major contribution to the developing study of autobiography as cultural history and cultural anthropology. Stone's work begins boldly with a broad survey chapter entitled "Individual Stories and Cultural Narratives: Autobiography in Modern America." Here he elaborates on Alfred Kazin's remark, quoted as an epigraph, that the American is a solitary soul who cultivates autobiography out of his sense that "I am alone in a world that was new to begin with and still feels new to me because the experience of being so much a 'self—constantly explaining oneself and telling one's own story—is as traditional in the greatest American writing as it is in a barroom." The first and final chapters οι Autobiographical Acts are suggestive , richly developed reflections on the contemporary study of autobiography. The dual title of the volume implies that to pursue autobiography is to make an original and originating act which transcends the mere facts of composition and publication of one's life story. To act autobiographically is to stand forth as a unique presence in the world, to celebrate oneself as an "occasion." Each self-chronicler makes his mark in the circumstantial webs woven by his time and culture . As Wilhelm Dilthey stated over a century ago, the forms our life stories take are crucial indicators of the cultural milieu; and, conversely , the milieu largely determines how we conceive of and express the shape and movement of our lives. Human existence, in this sense, is consubstantially historical: every account of it must, whatever its generic features, be rooted in the particular forms of a time-bound cultural situation. In that regard, the myth of the asocial self, so prominent in American literature, reveals something of the society which allows or encourages such representations of isolated, Ishmael-like individualism. Given Stone's assumption that autobiographical texts help us to decipher the culture in which they arise, it is no surprise to find him arguing that a primary function of autobiography today is to allay the anxiety generated by the struggle for selfhood in mass society. Out of the modern American lonely crowd arise cries of artful self-definition designed to...