"I am not what I am": Staged Presence in Romantic Autobiography
In 1973 the American popular singer Carly Simon released a recording called "You're So Vain"; its lyrics chronicled the errant ways of an unnamed egotistical, unprincipled womanizer whose high-profile misadventures included jetting to Nova Scotia to watch a total eclipse of the sun and spending questionable time with the wife of his best friend. So self-absorbed is the man that, as the refrain says "You probably think this song is about you, don't you? Don't you?" Not surprisingly, the press had a field day with the song, and more than three decades later, continued speculation has still not established the identity of the object of Simon's scorn, although the leading candidates have always been Warren Beatty (with whom she had had a relationship), Mick Jagger (the Rolling Stone who sang with her on the recording), and James Taylor, whom she had recently married. Simon herself has repeatedly refused to identify any one man as her subject, claiming that the figure was a composite of men she had known.
I begin with this anecdote to raise a question that I shall explore in this essay: what are we to make of the seemingly autobiographical references that authors (and artists) make in the process of literary (and artistic) activities that are not themselves primarily autobiographical in nature? I am thinking here of those instances of "incidental" autobiography that occur essentially as "asides" (in the theatrical sense) within works that would seem to be occupied with matters far removed from revealing the author's own person. How much importance do we attach to the author's implied or asserted presence in, and attitude toward, his or her material when we assess both the "intentional" autobiography (i.e., the traditional, straightforward autobiography or memoir) and the "indirect" or "staged" autobiography (i.e., those authorial comments, revelations, and selffashionings that are ostensibly incidental to other literary activities)? Perhaps more important, how much does the author intend us to do so, and how do we know? To begin to answer this question, we must first consider the nature of autobiographical writing itself, a topic that has over the past several decades generated a remarkable quantity of scholarship, some of it literary-historical, some of it theoretical, and some of it essentially biographical in nature. And we must consider in the process the protocols of reading that govern the ways in which we process what we regard as autobiographical discourse.
In theatre practice there is an expression -- "stage presence" -- that refers to the projected or manifested onstage dramatic, emotional, and psychological stature conveyed by the actor. Sometimes this stage presence involves simply how the individual actor -- or actress -- occupies the physical space and time of the playing area of the stage in relation to other actors: how she or he dominates a scene through the director's blocking of the scene, for example, or through his or her physical appearance, voice, or gestures. At other times, most particularly when the actor or actress is a celebrity -- a "star" -- it also involves the public magnetism of his or her presence, taking the role and identity of a character in the drama while everyone in the theatre is well aware that it is not Macbeth or Hedda Gabler on the stage but rather Laurence Olivier or Maggie Smith. In the discussion that follows, I want to play on the notion of stage presence in autobiographical and pseudo-autobiographical writing. I shall propose that especially in those instances of what I call "incidental autobiography" we witness the "staged presence" (with the "d" conspicuously added) of an ostensibly autobiographical, self-revealing subject in the text. I shall focus less upon any single author than upon larger issues concerning genre and Romantic self-presentation that include self-mythologizing and self-historicizing -- as well as self-concealment -- that are involved in a range of literary (and extra-literary) performances, whether those performances are intentionally or ostensibly unintentionally autobiographical in nature.
Virtually every study of Romantic era autobiographical writing cites James Olney's famous declaration that when it comes to defining "autobiography," "everyone knows what autobiography is, but no two observers, no matter how assured they may be, are in agreement" (Olney 7). But as Stelzig helpfully reminds us, one of the most vexed issues in studies of autobiographical writing involves "the generic boundary line between autobiography and fiction and the richly complex and mutually determining relationship, since at least the eighteenth century, between the kinds of narrative modes employed by autobiographers and novelists" (Stelzig 7 - 8). Jerome Bruner argues that "autobiography is an extension of fiction, rather than the reverse," because "the shape of life comes from the imagination rather than from experience" (Bruner 55). For Bruner and others, autobiographical writing is the record of an attempt to impose order or pattern upon one's unruly life experience. But if this is the case, then one may reasonably ask what separates -- at least at the level of rhetoric and representation -- the confessional writing in Rousseau's Confessions from the no less confessional self-representations in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy? That is, aside from the fact that we know that the former narrative was composed by an actual person and the latter is a fictionalized account of an equally fictional narrator, what is there in the texts themselves to tell us that one is "made up" and the other is not? Or, perhaps more troubling, what is there to establish how much of each work is essentially "made up"? Paul Jay resolves the matter with a dismissive wave of the theoretical hand, asserting confidently that "the attempt to differentiate between autobiography and fictional autobiography is finally pointless" (Jay 16). Such confidence, while it may be reassuring in the short term, is nevertheless of only limited value to all but the most postmodern of us, for it seems to dismiss a central problem -- perhaps the central problem -- in autobiographical writing with the breezy claim that it really doesn't matter.
But it does matter. We all look for both authority and authenticity in reports of all sorts that are presented to us, whether in the public media -- print or electronic -- or in "private" communications like letters and conversations. Moreover, practical life experience teaches us that authority and authenticity are inextricably linked: we "believe" in proportion to the extent to which we account our source credible and reliable. The very fact that an aggrieved party in any argument typically demands to tell her or his "side of the story" reminds us that there is never only one "story" but rather a multiplicity of stories that account for the same phenomena from often widely differing perspectives. Ferreting out the "truth" from these many accounts involves acknowledging immediately that the difficultly lies not in the fact that the "truth" is ambivalent but rather that it is firmly polyvalent. So, too, is autobiographical writing, as I hope to demonstrate in what follows.
In a recent article in The Writer's Chronicle Rachel Graves explains the complexities faced by authors who are trying to write nonfictional accounts of public figures who are little inclined to help and who consequently impede them in one way or another. "They grant some access," Graves writes," but never enough; they pretend to cooperate and then mislead the writer; they are available as public figures but unwilling to share their private lives" (Graves 15). Tellingly, Graves's article is titled "Liars, Manipulators, Evaders." The title is remarkably appropriate for the present occasion, for autobiographical writing, too, is replete with all three, often in maddening combination. I raise this point because in a related discussion about journalism and biography, Janet Malcolm makes the emphatic point that "[w]hat gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self-absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists" (Malcolm 144). We need only substitute ourselves as readers for "the journalist" in Malcolm's formulation to appreciate the sort of dilemma that is posed to us at every turn by autobiographical writing. The autobiographer, like any tale-teller, tells her or his side of the story and asks us to accept that it is the only side of the story -- or at least the only credible side. And here is where the matter of authenticity enters the picture.
Similarly, when Dark explains that her Sonnet XXXVI was "composed during illness" (p. 75), how much do we need (or want) to know about the particulars of that illness in order to "understand" her sonnet? What is the nature of her "pale disease and pain" (l. 5), and why (and how) are her symptoms relieved by hearing (or reading) "the beautiful introductory stanzas to the 'Lady of the Lake'" (note, p. 75)? Is Scott's verse efficacious only when Dark is ill, then? Or only when she is afflicted by these particular symptoms? The very next poem in the collection is inscribed "Night Scene, Oct. 1813," which suggests a significant particularity that is not in fact borne out by the poem's text, which describes a spiritually uplifting sunset that could presumably have occurred with just as profound an effect in April of 1814 or July of 1816. Like Wordsworth's famous sonnet on Westminster Bridge, which was in fact not composed on 3 September 1803, its title notwithstanding, Dark's sonnet involves a dating that pointedly suggests signification without following through and delivering it. Or at least not in any way that we as readers are able to determine. In other words, like Wordsworth's deliberately misleading date-specific title, Dark's apparent specificity belongs more to the poem as performance than it does to the poem as historical record, as "autobiography." It "places" the poem in a way that invites us to work out apersonal (and thus biographical) relationship between the date and the events the sonnet describes, and thus to seem to "know" Dark better.
This gesturing in the direction of signification without finally attributing it is apparent in Dark's concluding poem, whose full title is "On the Birth of My Sister's Little Girl, Three Days after the Funeral of Her Grandfather." Its seeming familial and chronological specificity notwithstanding, the poem provides neither the relevant dates and places nor the names of any of the participants. Of course, a poem of this sort (which is a spiritual meditation on life, death, and continuity under the hope of the eternal life granted by a benevolent God) requires neither names nor dates to back up its universal spiritual message. The specificity of the title, therefore, is yet another gesture in the direction of the "authenticity" I have stressed throughout this discussion. What is "autobiographical" about this concluding poem is, paradoxically, also what is universal: the "local" experience of Dark's family circle provides the microcosmic illustration of a universal pattern of human experience. Like so much of autobiographical writing, the author's disclosures about her life, experiences, and thoughts help us better and more completely to see and assess our own within the broad context of human experience.
Because we know so little about her, Mariann Dark provides a useful test of our responses to autobiographical writing, and the results of the test are unsettling because they are so destabilizing. Even the brief glimpse of Dark and her writing contained in the preceding paragraphs demonstrates that autobiographical writing -- whether deliberate or incidental -- is never wholly candid or straightforward. The self-reflectivity of all such writing is inherently performative, undertaken always with an eye on an intended reader, listener, or viewer upon whom the author or artist has definite designs. In this insistent performativity lie the sources of autobiographical discourse's inherent polyvalence, its dramatic multistability, as well as its clear effectiveness as a vehicle for engaging its audience on multiple levels. In the second of two poems in which she considers her relation to the famous Charlotte Smith, whose Elegiac Sonnets, first published in 1784, had largely resurrected the sonnet in English, Dark lamented her fate as one of those writers who work in obscurity and then vanish without a trace: "I strike the lyre unknown! My very name / Will soon be blotted from this wretched earth".