Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction by Rochelle Tobias

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction by Rochelle Tobias Samuel Frederick (bio) Rochelle Tobias. Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction. U of Nebraska P, 2021. 204 pages. Rochelle Tobias’s bold and brilliant new book is an outlier among recent (and even classic) works on narrative and fictionality. Instead of engaging with the field of narratology (in its classical structuralist or postclassical varieties), Tobias tackles some of the fundamental questions of narrative theory by mobilizing concepts and frameworks from continental philosophy, primarily phenomenology. As a work of narrative theory that largely dispenses with the narratological toolbox of the past few decades (and beyond), the book offers a much-needed recalibration of our critical vocabulary with respect to the problems of fiction and narration. Using Descartes, Husserl, Nietzsche, Lukács, Käte Hamburger, and Blanchot, among others, Tobias manages to cut through the narratological chatter of recent years and return us with renewed vigor and curiosity to key questions about what it means to tell a story. The results are, quite frankly, stunning. This is a remarkable, daring, and truly innovative book that, I hope, will have a lasting impact. Tobias’s starting point is the novel’s principle of verisimilitude, its ability to fashion a semblance of the real world. Theorists from Friedrich von Blanckenburg (eighteenth-century author of the first book-length theory of the novel in German) to Käte Hamburger and Dorrit Cohn (each of whom Tobias references, though Hamburger remains her consistent interlocutor) have located the novel’s ability to craft plausible worlds in its unique capacity to convey the inner lives of persons, to provide access to the otherwise opaque minds of others. Tobias takes this insight and turns it inside out, asking us to think about these minds not as the objects of narration but as the subjects or subjectivities that make fiction possible in the first place. To develop this radical idea Tobias looks to a specific form of first-person fictional narrative she calls the “pseudo-memoir,” which is a work of fiction that claims not to be fiction, but the recollection of a real life. In these works we find the narrator’s telling or composing of his story (all of Tobias’s examples have male narrators, though of course the genre is not limited to this gender) central to the narrative itself, such that indeed this dramatized act of telling (diegesis) becomes the main object of representation (mimesis). Tobias’s main innovation is that she appeals to Husserlian phenomenology to describe this structure, [End Page 1054] stressing that the novel’s realism—its presentation of a plausible world—needs to be understood not as the object of the author’s “intent” but rather as the “intentionality” of consciousness, that is, the very phenomenon constituted by the subject and posited with it as the world in which this subject always already finds itself embedded. Pseudo-memoirs are the ideal fictional forms to demonstrate this hypothesis: they dramatize how a single consciousness constructs another world. Tobias is particularly interested in the double structure of this representation as at once the self-reflexive tale of its own telling and the story of the origins of the individual whose consciousness is the ground of the narrative construct. As such a ground, however, it is a problematic one, because ultimately it is also part of a fiction, invented to produce, as Tobias puts it, “not a narrative of life but the semblance of such a narrative.” This doubling complicates both terms, and indeed the works to which she turns in the book’s four main chapters reveal how the “semblance of life gives way to the life of semblance” in ways that call into question the very narrative frameworks that ostensibly contain these doubly feigned lives. The introduction unravels these ideas and their implications with theoretical sophistication and finesse. A short section on the “transactional” nature of fiction (the credit we invest in the artifice of the text) is a tour de force, Tobias’s close reading of passages from Beckett’s Malone Dies dizzyingly smart and satisfying. In the next section, she explores the epistemological problems...