Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction by Laura Marcus

Abstract

Reviewed by: Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction by Laura Marcus Margaretta Jolly (bio) Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction Laura Marcus Oxford UP, 2018, 168 pp. ISBN 9780199669240, $11.95 paperback. For those in a hurry to know what autobiography is all about, Laura Marcus's Autobiography is the answer. In 145 pocketbook-size pages, one of the field's best analysts distills years of thinking to argue that memory, form, purpose, truth, and above all, the nature of selfhood constitute the core preoccupations of the genre. In so doing, she conjures up as many fabulous worlds as Proust did when he dipped a madeleine in his legendary tea cup. Noting autobiography's coinage in late eighteenth-century England, Marcus introduces the rise of a writing practice of "inward regard" in secular contexts that has become perhaps globally widespread. Mapping this, she ranges across some 135 autobiographical writers and many other thinkers, including philosophers, psychologists, historians, and literary critics, to conclude that even in today's provocative and quasi-fictional modes, this regard sets the genre apart. The classic forms such self-analysis takes—"confession, conversion, testimony"—are considered in the first chapter, which also traces literary autobiography's roots in religious, legal, and historical contexts. Taking us through Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Jane Eyre, Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde, J. M. Coetzee, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Primo Levi, and Otto Dov Kulka, she concludes with the hoax Holocaust [End Page 501] testimony by "Benjamin Wilkomirski" to emphasize that, despite the enormous variety and partiality of such texts, "referential truth continues to be judged as an essential element in autobiography in its role as the literature of witness" (28). The question of self-making complicates this referentiality, of course, and is considered in the next chapter. Here Marcus shows how the metaphor of the journey governs much autobiography, touching on a seemingly essential feeling about the life process in time and space. On the other hand, she connects the metaphor precisely to the advent of travel for pleasure or education, and walking as a valued, rather than simply necessary, activity. Early nineteenth-century holidaying fed, for example, Goethe's Italian Journey and William Wordsworth's "wandering" in the Lake District. This European Romantic idea of self persists in contemporary road trip narratives, nature writing, and urban psychogeography, though its American cousin in Transcendentalist autobiography by Emerson and Thoreau adds the possibility of self-forgetting on the way. Chapter 3 goes further into the question of "autobiographical consciousness," beginning with what philosophers have thought about it. Marcus points out that they often deploy autobiographical writing themselves to do so, delightfully reminding us that Descartes's famous "Cogito, ergo sum" comes nearly halfway through a story of his education and travels. Following Descartes, Marcus observes that, albeit in very different ways, thinkers from Wittgenstein to Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor have connected thought, language, and narrative, thus establishing autobiography as a precondition for identity itself. In an unusually direct moment, Marcus says this doesn't mean we ought to sort our ideas into narrative form (43). Pointing to existentialist autobiographers, including Nietzsche, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Violette Leduc, she proffers a perhaps less often discussed model premised on choice, instead of development/causality as operating principle. Marcus also separates out from both of these schools of thought writings influenced by ideas of the self as a social construct, whether Erving Goffman's "presentation of self in everyday life," Foucault's discursive self, Stephen Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning, or Judith Butler's performative identities, with roots in Dilthey and Hegel. This socially-imagined self dominates contemporary life narrative, but in forms that also reflect the fragmented, fluid nature of today's world. More paradoxical still are life writings by deconstructionist critics Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, where the very point is to dwell on "the problematic relation between a life and a text" (50–51). Marcus's following chapter on psychoanalysis and autobiography also emphasizes self-division and evasiveness. "For so long a cultural ideal," she remarks, the self's unity "is now perceived as a product of a set of obsessions and, in Freud's phrase...