Autobiography as Criticism, Criticism as Autobiography

Abstract

Okay, okay, okay, we get it: you stutter and so, irredeemably self conscious, you're devoted to yourself as subject, also as symbolic subject, even as some sort of featured player in collage movie. Don't you finally want to get outside yourself? Isn't that finally what this has to be about, getting beyond the blahblahblah of your endless? Yes, yes, thousand times yes. Or, rather, yes and no. want to get past myself, of course do, but the only way know how to do this is to ride along on my own nerve endings; the only way out is deeper in; the only portraits I'm really interested in are self-portraits as well. I'm just trying to be honest here. I'm drawn to writers who appear to have Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tattooed across their forehead: the perceiver by his very presence changes the nature of what's being perceived. In the Afterword to Lolita, Nabokov mentions a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes which, after months of coaxing by scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal; this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage. admire Hilton Als's The Women, W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and VS. Naipaul's A Way in the World?books in which the chapters, considered singly, are relatively straightforwardly biographical, but read as whole and tilted at just the right angle, refract brilliant, harsh light back upon the author. I only know an object in so far as know myself and my own determination through it, Hegel says, for whatever am is also an object of my consciousness, and am not just this, that or the other, but only what know myself to be. know my object, and know myself; the two are inseparable.