Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography , and: The auto/biographical I (review)

Abstract

RESPONSES AND REVIEWS 261 PAUL John Eakin. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. 249 pp. $29.95. LiZ Stanley. The autolbiographical I. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992. 289 pp. £35. 816.95 paper. In die recent history of the dieory of autobiography, it is possible to speak of two important periods. The first was marked by the "naive" referential approach, when autobiography was seen as a factual genre where the autiior was telling of his or her life from a subjective but sincere point of view. The model for this approach is of course Rousseau, but more recently it is represented by die "first generation" of autobiography theorists—Pascal, Gusdorf, Olney, and Lejeune— who among themselves represent a rich variety of theoretical orientations. The second period was brought about by the poststructuralist revolution, which made suspect all the elements of the autobiographical pact: autos, bios, and graphein, that is, the self, die life, and die writing. In its extreme form, we can only have a text which has no relationship with any kind of "external" reality or real events and in which die audiorial self is purely fictional. Thus there is no referent and no representation, and both die autiior and die reader are free to impute any signification and truth value to any statement or person in the text. Here die theoretical references include Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, as well as Rorty, Austin, White, and Carr. It is difficult to say to what extent autobiographical theory has really absorbed the second period. At least feminist autobiography has adopted diis position quite wholeheartedly, but one can perhaps say that any self-respecting theorist in the field has had to modify his or her own positions because of this assault on the basic tenets of autobiographical writing. On the other hand, it is difficult to point to any actual autobiographies which would be adequate firom this point of view. In fact, even the most central figures of the poststructuralist theses —Barthes , Foucault, or feminists—have in different ways sinned against their own precepts, so that one could speak of a fascination with die forbidden fruit. Recently we have seen a new period, a new orientation emerge: those who wish to resurrect the specificity of autobiography as a genre, still acknowledging to some extent the pertinence of the poststructuralist/deconstructionist critique, but rebelling against it especially in the absolute denial of referentiality. To put it simply, if there is no "my life" that the autiior of an autobiography can tell about, there is no autobiography. But as both autobiographies and biographies continue to flourish, the life must be there, too. The two books reviewed here, Paul John Eakin's Touching the World and Liz Stanley's The autolbiographical I, are good examples of this new orientation, albeit from very different perspectives. Eakin is a theorist of literature who has written several important books on autobiography, discussing in particular the relationship of fiction and autobiography. Liz Stanley is a feminist social historian and sociologist, who has herself written several biographical studies and is especially well acquainted with feminist autobiography and biography (she prefers the term auto/biography, to cover both possibilities). She moves with equal ease among high literary as among unpublished, "ordinary" autobiographies, while Eakin is a purely literary dieorist of autobiographies. 262 biography Vol. 18, No. 3 Both books are extremely interesting and fascinating texts, reflections of the current turmoil in the writing of autobiography and die demise of the poststructuralist orientation in autobiography. In literature theory, it is now commonplace to denigrate the influence of Derrida, Barthes, and Co. as a fashion long since overcome, but it is clear that dieir effects have been much deeper and more permanent than a mere fashion, and diat most of the work related to any kind of qualitative sociology, ethnography, or social history is now more or less informed by dieir conceptual world. They give us, as it were, a set of new stills (to use the photographic imagery of Liz Stanley) of the relatively slow-moving film of autobiography as a genre. Paul John Eakin's Touching the World begins with Bardies and his paradoxical denial of referentiality, which...