University of Oregon

Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts: Versions of American Identity from HenryAdams to Nate Shaw by Albert E. StoneReview by: Patricia Meyer SpacksComparative Literature, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Summer, 1985), pp. 286-288Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771087 .

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

it (and writing it) as an ontological given. "Art is first of all the awareness of misfortune, not its compensation," writes Blanchot; and Bernheimer adds, "Whereas Flaubert's art is an attempt to compensate for loss by dominating the world, Kafka's is an attempt to explore the world of loss so as to illuminate un- relentingly its error" (p. 245). In this comparison at least, Flaubert emerges as the embodiment of Thanatos, and a problematic father-figure to the extent that he also represents the nihilism of those joyless deconstructionists of contemporary criticism whose authority and approval Bernheimer so ambivalently contests and courts throughout his book. As his movingly autobiographical Introduction makes clear (it reads at moments like a Letter to his Father), Bernheimer identifies far more closely with Kafka-the-son, affirming literature's Erotic relation to life, fully aware nonetheless that writing (or criticism) purchases its hermeneutic power only through its allegiance to death.

Bernheimer's command of contemporary literary and psychoanalytical theory is equal to his mastery of the more specialized corpus of Flaubert and Kafka scholarship, and for the sheer breadth of its implications, his study deserves to rank with such works as Edward Said's Beginnings, Leo Bersani's Baudelaire and Freud, and Tony Tanner's Adultery and the Novel. Particularly notable are his superb reading of Bouvard et Pecuchet in the light of the Freudian theory of fetishism and his adroit interpretation of Das Schloss in terms of Benjamin's gnomic formulations of allegory. Bernheimer's Flaubert and Kafka, his first book, marks him as a comparatist from whom we will certainly be hearing more in the future.

RICHARD SIEBURTH New York University

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL OCCASIONS AND ORIGINAL ACTS: VERSIONS OF AMERICAN IDENTITY FROM HENRY ADAMS TO NATE SHAW. By Albert E. Stone. Philadel- phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. xvi, 349 p.

Should we understand autobiography as literary construct, as cultural artifact, as record of personal experience, or as all of the above? Each choice implies a different critical approach. Albert E. Stone, attempting to embrace every possi- bility but leaning toward the second ("Life is the more inclusive sign-not Litera- ture-which deserves to be placed above the gateway to the house of autobiog- raphy," p. 19), fails to avoid critical confusion. The inadequacies of his method- ology underline the complex demands autobiography makes on its critics. Raising epistemological and psychological as well as aesthetic questions, the form both requires and evades the most intricate hermeneutics. Stone's conscientious en- deavor at pluralistic inclusiveness leaves baffling problems unresolved but empha- sizes the vast range of procedures subsumed under the vague genre of autobi- ography.

Stone deliberately chooses a diverse group of twentieth-century American examples from that loose and baggy genre-although he, in fact, does not claim its status as genre ("Autobiography is a content, not any particular form," p. 271). The varied texts he considers share a primary content of concern with the self in society, a content equally attributable, although Stone seems unaware of the obvious fact, to the realistic novel: therefore hardly definitive. Of course autobiography's truth claims differentiate it from fiction. Stone, unlike other re-

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BOOK REVIEWS

cent critics of the autobiographical mode, considers this fact important. The pre- cise nature of its significance, however, eludes the reader. On occasion, Stone employs external evidence to assess an autobiography's factual accuracy. He notes, for instance, important omissions in The Education of Henry Adams: not only the disappearance from the text of Adams's wife and her suicide, but the absence of reference to the writer's publication of two novels. Comparing Adams's account of his childhood with that of his elder brother, Charles Francis Adams, he notes the "surprisingly divergent" nature of the two narratives (p. 51). The comparison, however, generates only the banal conclusion that different members of a family inevitably see and evaluate people and events differently.

Such anticlimax recurs, and also the wavering perspective from which it de- rives. Stone appears to believe that investigation outside Adams's text will clarify the accomplishment of The Education; on the other hand, since he acknowledges the special nature of "autobiographical truth," he can finally claim only that ex- ternal knowledge may clarify the distinction between one man's "truth" and another's. Dealing with the architect Louis Sullivan's Autobiography of an Idea, Stone finds himself again in difficulties. First he uses psychoanalytic and ecologi- cal theories of Phyllis Greenacre and Edith Cobb to "open up" (his term) the

autobiographical text. These theories encourage the critic to concentrate on mani- festations of infantile impulse and details of childhood experience and to discover "the pregenital experiences and emotions at the core of [Sullivan's] creativity" (p. 114), a method revealing unexpected forms of coherence in the architect's narra- tive. In his conclusion, however, Stone confuses the issue: "Nevertheless, this narrative is not the case-history of a psychoanalysis any more than it is the biog- raphy of an entire career. Hence many questions to which either the clinician or the art historian might wish answers cannot be found in it. Other approaches would doubtless provide different, more socially meaningful answers" (p. 118). The argument trails off into discussion of yet another essay about the childhood of artists, followed by a rather desultory treatment of possible relations between

biography and autobiography. Stone's methodological uncertainties-his nervousness over the fact that differ-

ent approaches yield different answers-derive partly from his apparent yearning to cover all bases. His analysis, he says at the outset, will "be particular, plural- istic, proportioned, and comparative" (p. 19). He organizes individual chapters around pairs or triads of autobiographies similar in theme (spiritual reflection: Black Elk and Thomas Merton; retrospective views of extended public lives:

Henry Adams and W.E.B. DuBois; the struggle to define womanhood in a male- oriented society: Margaret Mead and Anais Nin), in emphasis (the youth of a

genius: Louis Sullivan and Richard Wright; the consequences of traumatic vio- lence: Alexander Berkman and Conrad Aiken), or in technique (collaborative autobiography: Ossie Guffy, Nate Shaw, Malcolm X; "fictionalizing": Norman Mailer, Frank Conroy, Lillian Hellman). His imaginative choice of texts, and the provocative conjunctions it generates, provide potential critical excitement. To think of Thomas Merton and Black Elk together reveals in the most persua- sive terms that "spiritual autobiography," once understood as a form governed by severely limited conventions, can in fact cover diverse experience and generate different forms of narrative. The kind of violence central to Conrad Aiken's life

(his parents' double suicide during his childhood) and that elected by Alexander Berkman (an anarchist jailed for his attempted assassination of the financier

Henry Frick) resemble one another only marginally, but Stone demonstrates that both organize memories and interpretations in the autobiographical act. The

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

critic's acknowledgement of autobiography's diversity, his insistence on avoiding easy generalization, command respect.

On the other hand, Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts may well leave the reader baffled about its fundamental purposes. Stone suggests no basis for assessing one work as superior to another. He does not discriminate among Berkman's secondhand rhetoric, Nin's posturings, Hellman's lucidity. On occasion one might think it the aim of his procedure to discover an autobiographer's mo- tives. Of The Education of Henry Adams, Stone concludes (in a sentence ex- emplifying also his uncertainty of tone), "the modern reader might imagine him- self sitting at table with the cagy old author, who alternately denies and exposes his motives for writing" (p. 39). Later, however, he suggests that "Adams's hypotheses about American life in the Gilded Age" provide the center of interest; the reader would need to compare Adams's text with other works from the same period to test these hypotheses (p. 48). Discussing Richard Wright's use of fire as metaphor, Stone sounds as though he believes such a metaphor is in itself an

appropriate end for critical investigation: he praises Black Boy above all other autobiographies by American blacks because it powerfully illustrates a "pro- found observation" by Gaston Bachelard about the richness of "the explanation by fire" (p. 142). Alexander Berkman's memoir appears valuable because of its social revelations, suggesting "why anarchism as an American radical movement aroused ... almost hysterical opposition" (p. 168). All "personal histories of mod- ern women must be approached ideologically" (p. 197). Yet the most emphatic point Stone makes about Pentimento is personal: he locates a crucial pattern of

"rage and love emerging together under the precarious control of words" as "Lil- lian Hellman's identity theme" (p. 314).

Of course one can readily acknowledge the accuracy, even, sometimes, the

penetration, of such multifarious observations. Autobiography in fact functions both as cultural testimony and as personal narrative of identity; we may wonder about an autobiographer's motives and/or value his or her imagery. No single critical approach, it may be, could comprehend every autobiography. Yet one longs for a more determinate guide through the mutiplicity of American self-portrayals in print. This book calls attention to a group of memorable texts, but its wavering focus leaves the reader more confused than enlightened about those texts in rela- tion to one another and to autobiographies of different national origin (a matter never mentioned). If a "tradition" of American autobiography, a tradition dis- tinct from other autobiographical traditions, exists, its lineaments remain difficult to discern.

PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS

Yale University

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