How Do We Know Who We Are? A Biography of the Self (review)

Abstract

416 Biography 22.3 (Summer 1999) Hall, Stuart. "New Ethnicities." Black Film/British Cinema. Ed. K. Mercer. BFI/ICA Documents 7 (1988): 27-31. _____. "What is this 'black' in black popular culture?" Black Popular Culture. Ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992. 21-33. Higgenbotham, Jr., A. Leon. In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, The Colonial Period. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978. Lopez, I. Haney. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York UP, 1996. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1994. Smedley, Audrey. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder: Westview, 1993. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995. Arnold Ludwig. How Do We Know Who We Are? A Biography of the Self. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.292 pp. ISBN 0-19-509573-1, $27.50. Slow on the heels of postmodernism—the strong form of which suggests that aU reading is a misreading and all interpretations equal— psychology has grown increasingly dazzled by iUusion, nsting perhaps inadvertently to the brink of declaring itself (and the mind) a sort of fantastic lie. We can't say whether memories are true or false. The sources of our actions elude us, so we make them up. The mentally healthy harbor assorted misperceptions about self and the world which the mentaUy unweU lack. And personaUty is a story, a narrative construction more incredible than credible, which we invent sometimes out of thin air. Arnold Ludwig's How Do We Know Who We Are? A Biography of the Self joins this conversation midway through, and represents a kind of proliferating summary of where we stand at present. It's a true, though not exactly new predicament. Is this Ufe a Ue? Can we reaUy pretend to know anything about another person or even about ourselves? Is multipUcity or unity of self the native state? Are there acts but no doer, thoughts but no thinker, just like the Buddha proclaimed roughly 2,500 years ago? Or are we simply spinning our wheels, promiscuously doubting something impUcit in the very act of doubting? Is the doubt itself just a symptom of exhaustion? The fundamental problem seems to be this—can we find anything about the self to believe in? It is easy enough to doubt, especially in this age of arch irony. The true challenge is to beUeve. But Ludwig's book isn't about only the self. It's also about the self's biography. In exploring the latter, Ludwig has managed to Reviews 417 assemble a bevy of noteworthy biographers—Leon Edel, Peter Gay, Donald Spoto, David McCullough, and others—whom he questions, somewhat Columbo-like (the niggling, nimbly skeptical psychologist), about their efforts. Formally speaking, this is a strength and a weakness. The reprinted transcripts of those conversations never fail to interest, and the responses offered by the biographers range from uncannUy astute and subtle to remarkably psychologically naive. But interjected into the narrative as they are, they sometimes land on the page lumpily, uneasUy assimuated into the flow of the prose. That can make for a kind of schizophrenic reading experience, and sometimes one feels that the book is operating at cross-purposes. We look very much forward to hearing from these biographers—who function like a Greek chorus, tethering abstractions to more mundane realities of unpacking a life and constructing its narrative organization—but leaving them to get back to the question at hand occasionally requires a fair amount of attentional refocusing. To his credit, Ludwig does not turn a deaf ear to this difficulty. His introductory comments record the struggle of finding a suitable format for the book. And to be gracious about it, the problem is mostly an embarrassment of riches. The interviews with biographers are too good not to include—they reaUy do amount to a treasure trove of information not easüy come by under ordinary circumstances—and so, short of writing two books, Ludwig seems to have accepted the best possible compromise. Two books in one is better than one bad book any day, provided the...