Studies in Autobiography (review)

Abstract

Reviews James Olney, ed. Studies in Autobiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 228 pp. $24.95 Although autobiography has established its own genre, it is still tempting to see it as part of the larger genre of biography rather than as a distinct entity. Both overlap in their insistence on chronology, history, the past tense of verbs, the description of a central character, the further analysis and description of several subsidiary characters, the placement of the individual in particular time and place. This much is obvious. Less obvious is the way in which autobiography depends on biography; and even less obvious is the way in which biography depends on autobiography. The latter is, clearly, not always subjective; and just as clearly, biography is not always (if ever) objective. At their edges, the methods overlap; and yet as this volume, Studies in Autobiography , edited by James Olney, demonstrates, autobiography does have its own disciplines and its own priorities. The volume had an auspicious beginning, the result of the First International Symposium on Biography and Autobiography Studies, held at Louisiana State University in March 1985. The collection brings together seventeen mainly original contributions submitted by scholars and critics from the United States and abroad. The introduction by James Olney, who has been so instrumental in helping to shape autobiography as a genre, sets the tone for the collection. "There are no doubt a number of reasons why autobiography suffered critical neglect for so long until the recent change in its fortunes, but without question the primary reason that this state of affairs has been so dramatically altered and that autobiography has received so much attention in the past few years is that literary historians and theorists have come to see autobiography as a distinct and distinguishable mode of literature with all sorts of complex ties to other, more traditional literary genres and with much to teach theorists concerned with both literary genres and literary history" (xiv). Ira Nadel's brief essay, "The Biographer's Secret," is quite suggestive, since it shows how autobiography is present in biography, even when the latter genre is fre- 268 biography Vol. 14, No. 3 quently described as "scientific" or "objective." And yet as we follow Nadel's argument , we see that biography and autobiography diverge—and they diverge most radically even when they appear to overlap, a paradox that is implicit in the nature of the genres.* Part of the reason is that dependence of autobiography on other genres. One definition of autobiography, by Roy Pascal, is in fact that it must create "a coherent shaping of the past," a phrase that links it to history, to biography, to social and political thought. But as autobiography does shape the past, that past is the singular self isolated or disconnected from his or her historical background, from the general run of social and political thought. The genre creates an intimate dimension which we ordinarily ignore in history or social thought. As one of the contributors, Suzanne L. Bunkers , in "Midwestern Diaries and Journals: What Women Were (Not) Saying in the Late 1800s," points out, Midwestern diaries provide an encoded message by women who were not essentially writers, or even literate. They wrote about ordinary events, but they also implied several things in their lives, often disguised in some way so as to veil what they did not wish to express directly. This is a form of autobiographical writing , although it is not "shaped," and it is also something which dissociates itself from history or social policy. Similarly, John Sekora ("Is the Slave Narrative a Species of Autobiography?") argues that slave narratives are a species of autobiography, on the same order that Bunkers speaks about women's diaries and journals. These slave narratives are not history or social/political tracts; they do something else, which only autobiography, perhaps, can do: "a new literary history will engage in radical strategies to hear the imposed silences of the narratives. It will attend to the gaps, the elisions, the contradictions , and especially the violations. It will decode suppressed texts and recover concealed lives. The narrative [of slaves] is the only moral history of American slavery we have. Outside its pages...