Henry James's "Obscure Hurt": Can Autobiography Serve Biography?

Abstract

and bibliographies posits the kinship of autobiography and biography, ranging them both under the aegis of history as categories of the literature of reference, kinds of writing determined by their presumed basis in verifiable fact. Yet it is precisely with regard to this central identifying feature of reference to a world beyond the text that theory of autobiography today differs from the practice of biography. Thus it has become commonplace for students of autobiography to assert that the past, the ostensible primary reference of such texts, is a fiction. As Burton Pike puts it, bluntly, past does not exist.' The world of biography, on the other hand, shunning life in the fast lane, seems to have largely maintained the traditional purity of its positivistic allegiance to fact, to the past. as recoverable reality. The lesson of the fictive biographer in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) is all too clear: once admit a doubt about the reality of the past and the entire project of biography begins to disintegrate. Abandoning his study of the Marquis de Rollebon, Antoine Roquentin is reduced at the last in Sartre's deterministic vision to an existence without memory, almost without identity, in which consciousness bubbles up discontinuously, from moment to moment, like gas. This split between autobiography and biography on the issue of reference is unfortunate, for work in each domain has much to offer the other when it comes to defining an appropriate model for life history. For biographers who tend to take reference too much for granted, the theory and practice of autobiography are instructive, for they demonstrate that simplistic notions of biographical fact need to be enlarged in order to include modes of fiction that often constitute the experiential reality of life history. At the same time, the example of biography can help to remind us that autobiography, for all the manifold fictions in which it is implicated, is nothing if not a referen-