A Doll's Story

OF THE ELEVEN TEXTS binding this number of New Literary History, Christine Brooke-Rose's tepidly titled SelfConfrontation and the Writer fissures and explodes issues of specularity to which every other article speaks. Although in every instance the texts address themselves to autobiography as a mode and genre of self-confrontation, each falls into one of four categories. In the first, John Sturrock, Elizabeth Bruss, and Stanislaw Eile categorize self-study through definition of binary aspects in the self-critical gesture among novels comprising a modern tradition. Then, Michael Gjowiniski and Philippe Lejeune dismantle ideological and stylistic characteristics of self-study from Rousseau to Barthes, while Patrick Gardiner and Louis Renza determine how a writing persona, in the wake of Heidegger, must become in order not to be. They generalize what Glowifiski and Lejeune had sighted, in deference to Benveniste, in the discursive instances of autobiography. In the last group of texts Guy Davenport and Ms. Brooke-Rose work within the flux of fiction to overdetermine by the violence of verbal shifts what we see before our eyes. And nearly anomalously, David Simpson's vigorous study of the inaugural paragraph crowning the Discourse on Method arrives, inversely, at reproducing the same problems. All texts suggest that on the one hand autobiography permeates modern discourse and, on the other, that the mode has been the only area where the paradox of inscription and eradication can be practiced in a space not marginal to fiction. In all, insistence on erosion of verisimilitude harks back to truisms used to classify the modern novel: those of a postmodern flux, an acentric continuity, an act of writing on the border of madness, and the need to disclose narcissism behind mimesis. Emphasis on such concepts beneath and beyond the texts would amount to reproduction of summaries familiar to every reader of this review. More problematic than any of the conclusions is the ease of argumentation leading to them, especially in several of the texts. Binaries of self versus other, monologue versus dialogue, or individual versus group pervade the discourse, and only in exceptional instances is the status of such oppositions ever questioned, either as mode of

Art · Literature · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Philosophy

• Current Bibliography on Life-Writing

  Kathleen A Bennett, Kathleen Welch et al.•Biography•1981

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