AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS APOLOGIA

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS APOLOGIARonald Hugar, PhD

On January 23, 1998, at 00:56:36 CST, Victor Vitanza sent the opening e-mail post in, what he terms, a re/inter/view to author Jane Gallop about her book A Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment. In that post, Dr. Vitanza identifies what he calls the “writing protocol” of the book, which he sees as a mix of autobiography and argument: “You [Jane Gallop] combine expressive discourse with expositions of argument. Mostly you use expressive discourse. . . . I think expressive discourse canbe written and taken to be a form of argumentation, say, as an extended form of arguing by way of *ethos*.“ In this opening statement, Dr. Vitanza raises several interesting questions about language use and genre, specifically in autobiography: What narrative function does expressive discourse perform in autobiography? What narrative function does exposition perform?At what point in autobiography does the mix between expressive and expositionary discourse cease functioning as narrative and begin functioning as argument? Is autobiography argument? If so, what form of argument is it? And, how would we know if it is argument or not?

Dr. Vitanza then proceeds to identify two characteristics which appear to rise for him out of the autobiographical portions of Dr. Gallop’s book:

---When re/reading your book, I read or hear two wordsover

and over again. I don’t mean to suggest that you use the words

yourself in a repeated manner, but I mean I find myself saying

the words in between the lines of your writing. The words are

‘nostalgia’ and ‘naive’. . . . What do I mean when I hear the word ‘nostalgia’ when reading your book? Put simply, I mean “1971,”

the date or point in time that you keep going back to and keep

using as a frame of reference for ‘reading’ the eventsin your life

from that point on to . . . “the kiss.” [The act of kissing a graduate

student publicly. The central act around which the controversy

which spurred the writing of the book began.] But actually in your

retelling of a particular narrative, you are in 1991. . . . What do I

mean when I hear the word “naive.” I mean precisely what the

word means! And hence when I read you, I say, ‘You have got to

be kidding!, right? . . . But your performance has tobe more

complicated than merely the apparent collision betweennostalgia

and being (apparently) naive, right? . . . I am confused. You have

put me to the point/less of confusion. Which would beokay under

most circumstances, but this book supposedly is a defense (apologia)

for “the kiss.”Dr. Gallop’s response to Vitanza on this point sheds some

light on the above questions and provides some starting points for a search for answers:

Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 22:36:01 -0600 (CST)From: Gary S Weissman <[email protected]> To: [email protected]: Gallop reply to VV

First of all, I don’t think the book was meant as a defense

(apologia) of the kiss. I didn’t want to defend it; Iwanted

to explore its meaning. I see the book not as an argument,

but as an exploration. . . . It does have the genre mix you

refer to , except I don’t think the non-expressive part is an

argument. . . . Anyway, I wrote this book not to defend my

behavior but to make knowledge from it. To figure outwhat

the complex event might signify. And thus I wrote about

myself not as myself but as someone reading myself (mybehavior, my history, my thoughts). My history & my

actionswere my text & I was reading it. . . .The mix of

genres is actually a genre from literary criticism. The

expressive parts are my presentation of the “text,” the expository

parts are my analysis (interpretation) of the text. In lit crit,

you have to sum up or quote the text before presenting your analysis.

At least if you’re writing for an audience who doesn’t have the

text well committed to memory. . . . As for your two N-words.

First ofall I like to think about their pairing. Second, let

me say that Ifeel positively (not negatively) about both nostalgia

and naiveté.I think both are components of how we process living

in history. . . the most fruitful thing about pairing the terms

is that it bringsout the fact that both have a relation to age & thus

also to history,to what I just called “living in history.” . . . I

think both nostalgia

and naiveté are symptoms of the difficulty of living in history. . .

There are in fact two Janes in the book (or a split Jane perhaps).

Jane is both a character in the story and the narratorwho is

telling the story AND analyzing its meanings. So whenI say

I was naive, or imply I was nostalgic, the analyzing first person

voice is commenting on the suppositions of the character (hence

the past tense). And perhaps your puzzle stems from the fact that

the analyzing first person is trying to be as lucid and knowledgeable

as possible whereas the Jane the agent in the history was not

always lucid and knowledgeable but grappling with realhistorical

life. (emphasis Gallops (Dr. Gallop used the e-mail address of her GRA [Gary Weisman]throughout the re/inter/view))

I have presented both these posts monolithically (although edited somewhat for brevity) rather than in a dissected opposition with commentary format to illustrate the special difficulty autobiography presents when encountered as a text independent of a dialogic context. These two texts appear as the beginning of a dialogue, an interview (or re/inter/view if you wish), but are, in fact, monologues in the true literary sense of the term. They are not composed through a designed coordination toward a known end within a shared master trope, but stand in reflexive opposition to an independent text. Both e-mail posts are searching for a dialogic context by attempting to identify a master trope within which a designed coordination of a dialogue may unfold. The difficulty being grappled with inboth of these posts is that the master trope appears, ostensibly, tied to the master trope of the text of the feminist

arguments of Gallop’s book, A Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment. But because of the autobiographical underpinnings of the book, and the fact that the feminist arguments of the book rest upon an autobiographical/expressive reporting of evidence, a clarification of the motives of the writer of the text seems required in order to identify a context of genre thatwill help identify the master trope sought before the dialogue may proceed.

Vitanza attempts to approach his identification through theidentifying of the differing modes of discourse Gallop used to create her text, expressive and exposition of argument. He senses, however, that this approach is inadequate and reapproaches the problem through his questions concerning a sensed presence of nostalgia and naiveté within the narrative. Significantly, he attaches these two qualities to the writer of the text, Gallop, apparently because of the overwhelming autobiographical tenor of the book. Gallop attempts to point the way to the identification of a master trope by dismissing the argumentative mode as a possible marker of genre and attempts to present history as the correct genre identification when she says, “Anyway, I wrote this book not to defend my behavior but to make knowledge from it. To figure out what the complex event might signify. And thus I wrote about myself not as myself but as someone reading myself (my behavior, my history, my thoughts). My history & my actions were my text & Iwas reading it.”

Then, in a move which appears as an attempt to further distance her text from a reading as autobiographic argument, shestates: “The mix of genres is actually a genre from literary criticism. The expressive parts are my presentation of the “text,” the expository parts are my analysis (interpretation) ofthe text. In lit crit, you have to sum up or quote the text before presenting your analysis.” What appears as a confusing of modes for genre is actually meant as a lateral move in classification in an attempt to de-emphasize the expressive discourse of her text as argument by emphasizing the expository discourse of the text as indicative of a species classification of analytical criticism within a genus classification of literary history. But analytical criticism is inherently

academic argument, and autobiography may be based upon history but is not history as constituted academically, which indicates the difficulty in dealing with autobiography as an academic source for making knowledge.

Laura Marcus makes the points that the perceived instability or hybridity of

autobiography as a genre . . . [o]n the one hand . . . makes it a

particularly valuable resource in a variety of argumentative

strategies in relation to such topics as subject/object, self and

identity, private and public, fact and fiction . . .

Autobiography appears in part as a microcosmic version of many of these

concerns, serving to articulate them, and, for some critics, to

offer at least a partial solution . . . On the other hand,

autobiography is itself a major source of concern because of its very

instability in terms of the postulated opposites between self and

world, literature and history, fact and fiction, subject and

object. In an intellectual context in which these are seen as

irreconcilably distinct, autobiography will appear as either a

dangerous double agent, moving between these oppositions, or as a

magical instrument of reconciliation (13-14).

Marcus’s clarification of the difficulties scholars face when working critically with an autobiographical text appears tostem from the observation that the autobiographical “I” collapses the intellectual separation implicitly demanded

between subject and object for an empirically valid critical analysis. The intellectual separation required between the authorial “I” and the apparent object of study within an autobiography, the historical “I,” appears violated through the use of self-reported historical facts to create an historic “I” that are then used to validate the critical observations generated by the authorial “I,” which collapses the empirically required distance for objectivity, the primary validating tenet of empirically oriented knowledge, by invoking the ontologicallythreatening specter of subjectivism. Furthermore, because the present self of the autobiographer performs the functions of analytical criticism on the historic “I” for public consumption,a third “I,” that of performer, the historiographic “I,” appearsto situate autobiography squarely within the political realm of human intent, which, again, appears to violate the primary empirical tenet of detachment for the making of empirically scientific knowledge by raising the question of political subjectivism. All of which implicitly questions the objectivityof the autobiographical analyst, the analytical “I” who generates the material of the autobiographical text. Is an autobiography, then, to be approached by a knowledge making reader as a type of political history, a form of expressive political argument, cultural criticism, or something else all together different?

Elizabeth W. Bruss points out that, “It is only by virtue of the constitutive rules of literature that the features of a given text ‘count as’ signals of autobiography” (6). In this quote Bruss seems to constitute literature itself as a term exclusive of authorial intent. It is the linguistic and compositional features of the resultant text that count as signals of classification. Literature as a phyla classificationappears implicitly posited as an ordering of textual artifacts that represents linguistic and compositional form as a phenomenon, rather than phenomena, formulated by the epistemological requirements of the act of reading. An ambiguity in the nature of the phenomenon of literature arises from the multiplicity of creative phenomena represented by the artifact texts which is addressed by approaching the classification of texts through tacitly assigning primacy of

purpose to the consumption of literature, and all that entails, rather than to the motivational genesis of the production of a text. Thus, the classification of the semantic intent of the literary artifact is determined as of secondary importance to the features of semantic performance in the classification of a literary artifact through a reduction of the purpose of discourse to consumptive use. This is important in that the assumed primacy of the act of reading in the classification of atext as literature not only predetermines the formal linguistic and compositional features of a text as solely constitutive of its classification but conceptually limits the possible intellectual uses of a text.

Marcus implies in the quote above that a great part of the difficulty in critically approaching autobiography lies in the difficulties of classifying an autobiographical text within a classification of literature that is inclusive of all its features and possibilities. Given that the reasons for classifying any piece of literature are rooted in the perceived uses of a particular text, the difficulties in the uses of autobiography that Marcus identifies are uniquely rooted in the conception of literature as a product. Inherent to this approach in classifying literature is that the value of a text is primarily determined by the rules for the act of its consumption, which creates an hierarchized link between the rules for reading a text and the rules for creating a secondary text that, in turn, creates a primal epistemological necessity for an affinity between the textual features defining the classification of the primary text and the purposes for its consumption. The perceived genre instability of autobiographical text noted by Marcus is, in essence, an instability that arises from a criterion of use that ignores theproduction of the primary text as an end unto itself by implicitly regarding the produced text alone as a component within a truncated consumption/production cycle. In other words, the authorial purpose for generating the autobiographicaltext is strictured by the secondary act of consuming the text, which, in turn, is strictured by the requirements of the tertiary act of producing a yet to be produced text. The purpose of consuming a text to generate a text becomes

constitutive of the procedures and requirements for the analytical approach to a text, which generally results in a myopic focus on the text as artifact rather than artifice. The determination of the criteria for classifying a text thereby demands evidence of a homogeneity in rhetorical purpose that is determined by a homogeneity of the discursive form, which is simply not apparent in autobiography. In effect, for purposes of classification and the making of knowledge the useful life ofa text is conceived as beginning with its consumption not its inception.

This conceptual limiting of the beginning of the useful life of a text creates a difficulty in creating a generic classification for autobiography that is inclusive of all its discursive features. Bruss proposes a set of conceptual criteria in her book Autobiographical Acts designed to stabilizethe indicators of a genre of autobiography that must accommodatecertain variabilities that may be evidenced in an autobiographical text:“it should be evident that autobiography might be expected to vary in at least four ways while retaining its generic identity.These potential variations include:

1. Variability in the kind of textual features which signalthe function of a text . . .

2. Variability in the degree of integration between the generic function and other

functional aspects of the text . . . 3. Variability in the literary value attached to the

genre . . .4. Variability in the illocutionary value of the genre”

(8).Two of these four variabilities (1 & 3) are solely determined bythe conventions of reading while the other two open the possibility, at least, for consideration of the primary creativeact of writing as a criteria for classification. However, only number two opens the door of ambiguity wide enough for the suggestion that Bruss’s criteria may allow for the considerationof the motivational genesis of the act of textual creation as having any bearing at all in establishing a clearly distinct

genre of autobiography within the classificatory phyla of literature.

The unique formulation of the “I” within autobiography, theway it functions rhetorically in the formation of the narrative through the authorial mix of expressive and expository discourse, makes a stable generic classification of autobiography through the use of readerly criteria as primarily determinate of the constitutive rules of generic classification highly problematic, if not impossible. The academic exclusion of the rhetorical intent of the autobiographer as genesis for the act of writing an autobiography, apparent only in the expressive discourse of the autobiographical “I,” as the primaryconsideration in the classification of an autobiographical text leads not only to an instability of genre classification but is indicative of an epistemological instability of analytical ontology that conceptually restrains the production and consumption of autobiographical text.

The brief exchange between Gallop and Vitanza quoted above pinpoints the use of expressive discourse within a text as the discourse mode which creates the instability perceived as inherent in autobiography. In western culture, expressive discourse has been schematically assigned the rhetorical function of arousing or depicting the passions, which are conceived as intellectually distorting and antithetical to the formation of clear thought. Since the validation of knowledge in the Western modernist tradition is epistemologically tied to the tenets of empiricism, especially scientific empiricism, the expressive discourse within an autobiographical text are either ignored or held as epistemologically unreliable testimony. As aresult, the expository portions of the autobiographical text areontologically privileged in the empirical knowledge making process, to the point of a virtual exclusion of the expressive discourse found within autobiography as providing epistemologically suitable material for the production of knowledge. As a result, autobiography, because of the narrative privileging of expressive discourse in the formulation of the autobiographical “I” as central to the reporting of events and their interpretation, appears to resist all but the most naive of empirical approaches to an analysis inclusive of all the

characteristics of autobiographical texts, which is extremely problematic for the development of knowledge within certain academic disciplines as scientific knowledge, such as history, since autobiography is a, if not the, central resource for the data used to construct the knowledge base for these disciplines.

The perceived knowledge value of autobiography within empiricism depends upon an ontological coordination between the reader and writer of autobiography within conventional schemas of identity formation and narrative historiography for epistemological integrity. However, because the historic “I” ofautobiography is formed expressively, and both subject and object for the historiographic “I,” the ontological coordinationthat must occur between reader and writer can only occur expressively on the part of the reader unless the “I” of autobiographical discourse is intellectually fragmented or ignored by the reader in order to maintain the empirical integrity of the both the reader and the knowledge produced.

The empirically perceived epistemological instability of autobiography lies within the fact that, in essence, there are three “I”’s, three rhetorical viewpoints, at work in autobiography that appear to perform three separate narrative functions by the mixing of expression and exposition. When Gallop reports that “Jane is both a character in the story and the narrator who is telling the story AND analyzing its meanings,” she recognizes this fact but ignores or fails to recognize it when she attempts to collapse the narrator of the story and the analyzer of the story into a single agent. The separation of the historical “I” from the historiographic “I” bythe historiographic “I” to create an analytical distance appearsto collapse within the identification of the analytical “I” as the historiographic “I.” The melding of the identities of the analytical “I” and the historiographic “I”cannot occur without ablatant violation by the analytic “I” of the subject/object separation necessary for a neatly balanced empirical analysis ofthe events that are reported as experienced by the historic “I” as the agents for the formation of the identities of both the historiographic and analytic “I.” In effect, the discourse conventions for the writing of any narrative analysis demand a separation of agency be maintained for empirical validity.

Because of this triple “I” reality, a separation of agencymust be created extratextually by a procedural move that gathersthe tripled “I” in autobiography within a dichotomized subject/object split in order to maintain even the appearance ofan empirical analysis by an analyst. In other words, an extratextual focus is created by the analyst that reconstitutes the totality of the three “I”s into a singular autobiographical “I” as a textual totality and then opposes that totality to another totality, such as the forces of history, the events of history, other texts, the reader, etc. To make such a move, twointellectual strategies are usually employed, or a combination of the major features of both:

1. the motives of either the historiographic or analytic “I” is assigned to the newly constructed autobiographic “I” anddiscerned as either relevant or irrelevant to the reader’s analytic concerns. The only empirically safe grounds available for making such a discernment lies in the expository text of theautobiography, which results in a textual fragmentation or a perceived epistemological instability brought about by generic classification, or

2. the problems of motive are ignored and the text itself or selective features of the text are abstracted as expository objects.

Since the perceived instability of autobiography seem so inextricably tied to the tripled opposition of the “I”s at work in an autobiographical text, an investigation of what traditionally constitutes an “I” needs conducted to continue.

Within the traditionally modernist conception of the “I,” an essentially transcendent and unique cognitive core of consciousness defines the “I.” This core “I” possesses an arrayof abstract abilities and qualities which are inherent, constant, and unique in their deployment. A fundamental difficulty between the constancy of the forever private core andthe representation of that core in a public comprised of other forever private cores becomes immediately apparent. Consequently, any discourse of the “I” about the “I” from the “I” within this conceptual framework serves as a prima facie qualitative assertion of the constant core, which is a self-authorizing assertion of quality since the asserting “I” serves

as a conceptual framework unto itself, being conceptually cutoff, as it is, from a shaping social collective. Here, an integrity of continuity for all the assertions made must be maintained in both speech and action since the unique core is conceived as constant. Thus, the integrity of the representation is all important. Break that integrity and all semblance of social coordination breaks down. Because of this, the isolated core identity must generate theories of its unique self and then discover information to construct reasons that coordinate the discovered information to the self-theories generated in order to create a discourse that not only meets thecriteria of a generated self-theory but creates a theory of behavior that predicts the behaviors of the disassociated others(Murray 179). Should these predictions prove incorrect or faulty, the integrity of the unique core falls into question andmay be pathologized. Thus, the problematic of the layered “I”s in autobiography becomes a problematic of paradigmatic integrity for both reader and writer of autobiography.

In contrast to this paradigmatic conception of the “I,” RomHarré offers this constructivist conception:

The human individual is, above all, in those societiesthat

recognize autonomy, a moral phenomenon. Even amongpeoples whose cultures and forms of life admit no

placefor autonomy of action, nevertheless, the grammatical

firstperson exists. The residual role seems to be

perceptual:how the world is from the point of view in space and

timeoccupied by the speaker. Sincerity of he/she who sees

or hears, rather than the integrity of he/she who

promises, isthe moral status at issue here . . . ‘I’ is a word

having a rolein conversation, a role that is not referential, nor

is the conversation

in which it dominates typically descriptive fact-stating. It is

a form of life, a moral community that has been presupposed

by the uses of the first person, not a kind of hidden cognitive

engine (26).In other words, the “I” may be formulated as a point of view, a grammatical construction, that entails a pre/existent moral positioning of the individual within that community when voiced.This conception of the “I” changes the problematic of human subjectivity within an empiricist framework for autobiography. The autobiographic “I,” indeed, becomes a totality because the integrity of the point of view from within which the historiographic and analytic “I” speaks about the historic “I” is presupposed as a point of view unified by a pre/existent moral/social framework. The historic “I” shares further in thisintegrity as well since it is no longer formulated as the objectof the historiographic and analytic “I”’s subjectivity but the shaper of it. The discourse of the autobiographer is accepted as self-authorizing, with no ontological stigma attached to thatactivity. What comes into question now is the sincerity, not the integrity, of that self-authorization, which is essentially a political difficulty rather than an ontological/epistemological difficulty.

The implications of this sense of a socially constructed “I” are mapped in greater detail by Kevin Murray who undertook an investigation as to “[w]hy narrative should be the medium in which a social sense of self is constructed” (178, italics mine). Murray argues that the very ubiquity of self-narrative in everyday life demonstrates the basic validity of Harré’s proposition. He points out that the identity of an “I” constructed within the modernist schema described above is constructed within a “paradigmatic understanding of identity” (179). The difficulty, he points out, is that “the processes itposits as the logic of identity formation are unsympathetic to the narrative mode” (179) of identity construction. Murray thenprovides a concise summary of Harré’s conception of how the “I” is constructed. A child gleans possible theories of identity

from its relationship with its parents who are models of competent social actors. “The sense of identity provided by these ‘theories’ is found in the metaphoric relations between them and one’s own experiences; thus, these theories are transformed, from their realization in the collective realm, into becoming part of the individual sense of identity” (179-80,italics Murray’s). In order for this sense of individual identity to become a sense of individual being, ways need to be found to make the metaphoric connections made public. The realization of individual experience in public carries that experience into the social order where, over time, individual paths through the social order “become conventionalized into accepted forms of biography” (180, italics Murray’s).

As Murray points out, “Harré’s conceptualization of personal being is rich in empirical possibilities” (181). Murray observes that Harré’s theory of identity formation makes experience, “that which provides a source of resistance to the social order and therefore the stuff from which a personal identity can be hewn,” more difficult to assign an empirically scientific validity to the processes of identity formation (180). Presumably these difficulties arise from the difficulties inherent in collecting quantifiable data because ofthe nearly infinite possibilities for combination inherent within even a limited data set, which a paradigmatic conception of identity formation minimizes. However, with the opening of these “empirical possibilities” an interesting, but politically dangerous, possibility opens for the analysis of autobiography because the “I”s of the text are successfully gathered and harnessed to a definable intent that is evidenced in the features of the text forming the historiographic “I.”

Since the social being of an “I” resides within a social acceptability of the metaphorical connections an individual makes between personal experiences and the public possibilities for forming identity, any expressive discourse within the resultant narrative must arise out of the social conflicts inherent in the fitting together of the metaphorical connectionsmade privately with the acceptability of the public possibilities inherent in the conventionalized forms of biography. Approached empirically, these expressions are

inherently perceived as critical reactions to the social limitations of those possibilities and politically charged. Theexposition within an autobiographical text, then, appears as thereconciling of the conflicts expressed within the expressive discourse.

However, the prevalent construction for identity within western culture is presently paradigmatic. The integrity ratherthan the sincerity of the discursive “I” is the problematic thatmust be resolved to reconcile the perceived generic instability of autobiography and validate its epistemological uses. Becausethe historiographic “I” presents the historical “I” in autobiography through expressive text, as Gallop’s passage aboveso clearly indicates, both “I”s can be made epistemologically relevant to each other only through an expository discourse of the analyst “I” that presents a logically supportable reasoning for the connections made. To read an autobiography empirically requires intention be shackled to reasons “externally related toactions and the acts they accomplish” (Harré 30), but the exposited reasons supplied by the analytic “I” for the actions of the historical “I” in autobiography are made suspect by the empirical unreliability of the expressive discourse of the historiographic “I.” As Rom Harré points out: “Intentions are normally related to actions and to the acts they may be used to accomplish. This is a conceptual rather than an empirical relation, so is not disturbed by such observations such as ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ The answers, both to what you would have done and to what you did do, are given byreiterating your intention. It is thus a conceptual point that intention is ineliminable from any account of action” (29). Thus, from an empirical standpoint, a reading of autobiography that accepts any exposited reasons for the actions of the historic “I” supplied by the analytic “I” of an autobiography without a questioning of the intent of the historiographic “I” presenting the historic “I” expressively, or not to question theexpressed intentions of the historiographic “I” as reasons for the actions of an historic “I”, ontologically constitutes a naive, incompetent, or self-indulgent reading regardless of the presence or absence of an overt statement of expository intention. Thus the potential for an empirically correct

critical analysis is ontologically/ideologically bound to excluding the expression of the historic “I” by the historiographic “I” as objectively valid because of the questionable intent of the historiographic “I,” regardless of that “I”’s stated expository intentions.

Expressive discourse is conceived as notoriously self-serving and, therefore, unreliable for supporting analysis from any empirical perspective, ostensibly because expressive discourse entails the very real possibility of an unreliably evaluative assessment on the part of the reader of the writer’s purposes for discoursing. This inherent entanglement of “I”’s and their expression in autobiography would seem to preclude thepossibilities for any authoritatively empirical analyses truly inclusive of all the discursive elements found in an autobiographical text from a scientifically empirical perspective, which forces a fragmentation of the features of theautobiographical text for fruitful disciplinary analysis. The very real result of this “necessary” fragmentation is an ontological/ideological suppression of the proliferating possibilities of the politicization of knowledge inherent in thesocial conflicts marked by the expositionary reconciliation of expressive discourse in an autobiographical narrative. The shackling of the “I”s in autobiography to the paradigmatic conception of identity formation provides an epistemological route for safely isolating the political dimensions inherent in any autobiographical text.

Murray’s statement about the role of experience in identityformation as “a source of resistance to the social order and therefore the stuff from which a personal identity can be hewn” points to the Foucauldian concept that “Power becomes a central relational attribute of any inquiry directed to self-knowledge” (Parker 67). Power is conceptually related to conflict. In essence, then, either real conflict or the potential for real conflict would appear to lie at the heart of the formation of a public self-identity narrative. This does not mean that privateconflict may not exist at the heart of the genesis of the formation of a private self-identity narrative. Freudian based theories make that possibility very clear. However, even here it is the very real conflict between the privately constructed

narrative of self and possible public narrative forms that formsa privative narrative of social being.

If the potential for conflict between the possible forms ofprivate and public narratives is understood as inherent in the act of shaping the experiences of the individual into a coherentnarrative within socially accepted forms of biography, an autobiography would appear conceptually as an argument for the social acceptance of the connections made by the individual as constitutive of a socially legitimate way of social being. However, the present uses of autobiography appear to preclude the generic classification of autobiography as argument because the autobiographical narrative appears to develop dramatically within an historic narrative rather than argumentatively. In other words, because of the narrative form and historical content of autobiography the purpose of any argument perceived within the text of an autobiographical narrative may be considered incidental to the proscribed purposes of presently conventionalized narrative forms.

The linguistic and compositional characteristics of the genus of argument within the present system of literary classification are rigorously defined by the canonized rhetorical divisions of classical political forms of argument. The developmental schematic of these divisions of classical argument predetermines the “I” of the auditor of an argument in a socially dominant relation to the “I” of the discourse. The “I” of the auditor presumably holds something or is capable of performing something that the “I” of the discourse wants. This situation makes the classification of autobiography as a form ofargument difficult because the canonized forms of argument prescript the placement and use of expressive discourse as a politically charged sentimental plea to be employed for the purpose of insinuation, which from a paradigmatic understanding of identity epistemologically establishes both “I”s involved in the discourse as politically self-referential in the assignment of semantic meaning to expressive discourse. Their wants and desires are either in conflict or hold the potential of conflict. Thus the sincerity of the plea becomes directly attached to the social/moral integrity of the pleader, which is reflected in her adherence to the classified forms for the

development of argument. The sincerity of the plea, then, hinges upon a schematic reconstruction representative of the social/moral integrity of the pleader. While the purpose of discourse remains primary to the discoursing “I,” the form of the discourse is shaped by the auditing “I,” which accounts for Vitanza’s statement that “expressive discourse can be written and taken to be a form of argumentation, say, as an extended form of arguing by way of *ethos*.“ The problematic of human subjectivity in discourse returns but revealed as political. The possibilities for an empirical interpretation of the argumentative text , however, appear severely bound by the schematized expectations of the reader, which are shaped by the criteria of classification, which, in turn, are bound to a paradigmatic perspective of identity formation.

Thus the schematized purpose of classical forms of argumentwould appear to have little to do with the shaping of social being as a possible primary function of autobiographical discourse. The existence of that being is determined as pre/existent and responsible for the social consequences of thatdiscourse, which reveals the paradigmatic conception of identityas instrumental in shaping the form and function of modern argumentative discourse. However, an ancient form of argument, the apologia, opens the possibility for consideration of autobiography as argument. The conception of the rhetorical role of an “I” in the ancient formulation of apologia is appreciably flexible and different than the “I” of today.

The classical historians of Greece and Rome, for example,

could temporarily adopt a rhetorical first person for the sake

of a more vivid commentary, but the author in no way claimed

to have been actually present . . . in the events he described

in this way . . . The Psalms formed a body of liturgical poetry

to be used by any speaker, on any appropriate occasion--the

emotions and experiences attributed to the “I” were purely

potential. What is autobiography for us may have originally

been only the byproduct of another act, an apology undertaken

in self-defense or a self-exhibition for the sake of selling the

man himself, as an instructor in the rhetorical skillsexemplified

in the text (Bruss 6).The final clause of the above quote arises from an unquestioned acceptance of the identity of the “I” as formed paradigmaticallythat results in a misunderstanding of the many possible uses of the apologia undertaken in antiquity. Martin Heidegger, in his treatise Parmenides, illustrates some of the discourse uses the ancients conceived as inherent in the form, which reveals the epistemological distortion of the discursive uses of argument arising from the modern paradigmatic “I.” In Parmenides, Heidegger undertakes an exploration of the introduction of a myth told by Socrates to Glaucon in the concluding passage of Plato’s dialogue, Polis. The passage quoted in Heidegger’s texttranslates as “But in the meantime I will not tell you the storyselected for the king Alkinoos (the king of the Phaiecians) but an [apologia], an apology (defense) of a brave man, Er, Armenio’s son, one of the tribe of Pamphyliers” (Heidegger 98 [all spelling of Greek words are rendered in Heidegger’s original text in Cyrillic, which I cannot reproduce with this word processing program. All words appearing in Heidegger’s textin Greek will, therefore, be rendered in italicized and bracketed Latinate translations]).

But Heidegger’s analysis of the passage makes clear that the modern translation of apologia as a defensive argument is severely limited.

This play on words introducing the [mythos] is not at all playful; it is

supposed to indicate the essence of the [logos] about to be narrated,

i.e., the essence of the [mythos]. This [logos] is called [apologia], [apologia] is used here [the passage quoted above] in an essentially ambiguous sense, and indeed in a different verbal construction each

time . . .an [apologos] ‘for’ Alkinoos versus an [apologos] told

by a brave man. In the first case, according to the meaning of its

root [apologeia], to assort, to select, [apologos] means something

chosen for the pleasure of Alkinoos. In the second case, where

it is properly meant, the same word [apologos] means apology

by which the brave man sets apart what he says from everything

else that is told and thus preserves it in its specialtruth (98).Within Heidegger’s explanation of the discursive possibilities inherent for the ancients in apologia we can see the parallels of purpose between modern autobiography and ancient apologia, and that the conflict assumed as inherent in the modern understanding of the “defensive argument” nominative used today to define the ancient category of apologia is conceived as essentially pejorative because of the canonized categorization of the purpose of argument as disputational.

In actuality, however, the above passage indicates that theancients conceptualized a category of argument which reserved epistemological space for a non-politicized argument as a presentation of self. The ancient Greek conceptualization of apologia recognizes the possibility of the “I” as non-paradigmatic, identity as a matter of positioning one’s individual view of the world within the order of the world. Much more is going on within the ancient conception of apologia than “self-defense or a self-exhibition for the sake of selling the man himself, as an instructor in the rhetorical skills exemplified in the text (Bruss 6). A sales job may indeed be the impetus for an apologia but it is not the selling of a “man himself” or his skills, rather, it appears as the selling of a

perspective on a life. The buying of the “man himself” or his skills may result from the presentation of his apologia but those appear as possible byproducts, not the purposed end product, of the discourse.

The modern day difficulties with the integrity of perspective within autobiographic discourse were irrelevant to the ancients since the entire purpose of all public discourse, especially argumentative discourse, was oriented toward the defining of a perspective. The political/moral concern for the ancients was one of sincerity, not integrity. “Sincerity of he/she who sees or hears, rather than the integrity of he/she who promises, is the moral status at issue here . . . ‘I’ is a word having a role in conversation, a role that is not referential, nor is the conversation in which it dominates typically descriptive fact-stating. It is a form of life, a moral community that has been presupposed by the uses of the first person, not a kind of hidden cognitive engine” (Harré 26).

By referring back to Harré’s formulation of the “I,” we cansee that the ancients constructed the identity of the “I” in just this way, as a positioning of the individual within the possibilities of the collective whole. Since empiricism did notreign epistemologically among the ancients, the expressive discourse of an “I” served as the voicing of a morally prevalidated perspective within the social whole rather than as markers of an integral conflict of formulating a moral social being within the limiting possibilities authorized by a society.The argument inherent in apologia was an argument of respect, a plea for the respect of a perspective on the ordering of a life rather than acceptance, social or otherwise. (The use of the term “plea” here is problematic. “Plea” carries a connotation intoday’s world that renders an interpretation within a legalisticcontext, which is not appropriate to an understanding of the word here. A secondary choice might be “statement” but the term“statement” as used today does not convey the argumentative connotation needed to convey the special privileging of belief held by the ancients. If the assertive aspects of the nominative term “statement” as understood and defined in formal logic can be melded in meaning with the argumentative overtones of the term “deposition” as used legally, removed from the legal

or confrontational context and understood as the totality of an argument rather than the component of an argument, a glimmer of the meaning of the rhetorical function of apologia for the ancients might be grasped.)

But, the practices and beliefs of the ancient world are epistemologically remote from the practices and beliefs of the modern world. How can autobiography be approached as an apologia in the ancient understanding of the category?

Carolyn Steedman marks a point of negative convergence between the motives of modern autobiography and ancient apologiawhen she says of her writing of Landscape of a Good Woman: “What I had to engage with in working-class autobiography were: notions of cheerful decency, poor-honest-but-happiness, everything embodied in the titles I evoke in the first chapter of the book. I think that it [Landscape of a Good Woman] is a book that is designed to hurt, to tell them (who are ‘them’?) that they have not experienced -- have not had, can’t ever have -- that which places you on the outside, and makes you bitter and envious enough to hurt in this way” (43, insertion and italics Steedman’s). This quotes expresses the demand (plea?) that respect and privilege be granted to an experience of perspective on life upon which judgment cannot be passed until and unless experienced in its particulars. Steedman’s statement is politicized through her anger because her request for respectis implicitly socialized as a demand which, perhaps, cannot be respected. Significantly, the social reality which lead to her anger and sensed denial of respect appear to arise from a conception of history, both personal and social, as objective reality.

This modern conception of history is ontologically formulated, which epistemologically places the modern autobiographer in a radically different relation to audience than the ancient apologist. In the modern conception of history, history functions phenomenologically as a natural forcefunctioning as law unto itself, to which the individual is subject. The opening epigraph of the first book of Herodotus’s history shows a very different conception of history by the ancients: “These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby

preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, andof preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud” (1). As the epigraph reveals, history, for the ancients, was constructed as an apologia, a conscious setting apart and preserving of a special truth as a justification for an honored perspective on reported events. History was not conceived as a phenomenology but as a phenomenon of human activity. That this purposed perspective on history atavistically remains in modern autobiography is evidenced in the following quote from Steedman:“I have never been angry with history, in the way philosophy hasme mad, many Marxisms and post-structuralism’s and feminisms have driven me to fury, for I have always assumed that even though the historical tale is about a King, a Queen, a battle, areform act, plagues . . . that I am somewhere there, in the story” (10). Consequently, “It seems probable that history cannot work as either cognition or narrative without the assumption on the part of the writer and the reader of it that there is somewhere the great story, that contains everything there is and ever has been . . . from which the smaller story, the one before your eyes now, has simply been extracted” (10). Steedman uses the word extracted to denote a purposed ignoring of personal history within history conceptually constituted as phenomenology, which signifies the epistemological problematic of autobiography because the word could easily denote, in fact connotes within Steedman’s context, the presumptive ontological extraction of personal history as history, a distancing of perspective which is not actual to the experiencing, in order toconstitute history as a phenomenology. From this historical perspective, the perceived entanglement of the “I”s in autobiography smells suspiciously of fiction, if not fictive literature.

“So,” as Steedman concludes, “anger or irritation at the absences in written history seem to me not to be the point at all. Rather, now, the task is to recognise [sic] the form and function of historical narrative, work out what kind of culturalform it shows itself to be, as a way of thought and means of cognition. I think the contemplation of these questions leads

us to another form--cultural form and narrative form--that behaves epistemologically much like history” (10-11). Thus, theepistemological difficulties in approaching an autobiographical narrative would appear to be rooted in the epistemological linksbetween the conventions of narrative form and the conceptual phenomenology of history. Since “history and autobiography workin the same way as narrative; they use the same linguistic structure, and they are both fictions, in that they present variations and manipulations of current time to the reader” (Steedman 48, italics hers), Hayden White’s study of narrative history in his Metahistory:the Historical Imagination in Ninettenth-Century Europe would appear to offer an empirically valid jumping off point for distinguishing the critical differences and similarities between narrative history and narrative autobiography.

Hayden White appears to have undertaken the first intellectual steps in the task proposed by Steedman in his work Metahistory in which he attempts to forge an epistemological link between literary narrative studies and the empirical study of history that may serve to identify the form Steedman seeks inautobiography already formulated as apologia.

White notes that: It is sometimes said that the aim of the historian is

to explainthe past by ‘finding,’ ‘identifying,’ or ‘uncovering’

the ‘stories’that lie buried in chronicles; and that the difference

between‘history’ and ‘fiction’ resides in the fact that the

historian‘finds’ his stories, whereas the fiction writer

‘invents’ his.This conception of the historian’s task, however,

obscuresthe extent to which ‘invention’ also plays a part in

thehistorian’s operations. The same event can serve as adifferent kind of element of many different historical

stories,

depending on the role it is assigned in a specific motific

characterization of the set to which it belongs . . . The

historian arranges the events in the chronicle into a hierarchy

of significance by assigning events different functions as

story elements in such a way as to disclose the formalcoherence of a whole set of events considered as a comprehensible process with a discernible beginning,

middle,and end (7).

In other words, White points out that meaning in history is the construct of a human agency, which suggests that history itself may be a phenomenology, an objective force that is a law unto itself, but the meaning of history is always a subjective construct.

White goes on to explain that the relationships of meaning found in an historical narrative are the result of the process of selecting and coordinating isolated events within the historical record. This very process contains a discernible bias of perspective on the part of the historian which can be discerned by the aware critic. “Providing the ‘meaning’ of a story by identifying the kind of story that has been told is called explanation by emplotment. If, in the course of narrating his story, the historian provides it with a plot structure of a Tragedy, he has ‘explained’ it in one way; if he has structured it as a Comedy, he has explained in another way” (7). Inherent within this emplotment, whether conscious or unconscious on the part of the historian, is an expression of the perspective the historian has taken toward the events reported. White goes on to indicate that: “In addition to the level of conceptualization on which the historian emplots his narrative account of ‘what happened’ there is another level in which he may seek to explicate ‘the point of it all’ or ‘what itall adds up to’ in the end. On this level I [White] discern an operation which I call explanation by formal, explicit, or discursive argument” (11).

From here White constructs a very strong formalist argumentin his introduction that has great value for a critical approachto autobiography but which is not directly relevant here. The critical point to this argument comes in White’s text where he states that

Before the historian [or autobiographer] can bring to bear

upon the data of the historical field the conceptual apparatus

he will use to represent and explain it, he must prefigure the

field--that is to say, constitute it as an object of mental perception.

This poetic act is indistinguishable from the linguistic act in which

the field is made ready for interpretation as a domainof a

particular kind . . . This prefigurative act is poeticinasmuch as it is precognitive and precritical in the economy of the historian’s own consciousness.It is also poetic insofar as it is constitutive of the

structure that will subsequently be imaged in the verbal model

offered by the historian as a representation and explanation of

‘what really happened’ in the past (30-31, italics White’s).This observation leads White into a discussion of literary tropes and the function they play in the interpretation of history. He observes that “[i]t is imperative, therefore, when analyzing putative ‘realistic’ representations of reality to determine the poetic mode in which its discourse is cast. By identifying the dominant mode (or modes) of discourse, one penetrates to that level of consciousness on which a world of experience is constituted prior to being analyzed” (33, italics White’s).

This would seem to suggest that the unconscious perspectivean historian takes toward the construction of meaning, reflectedin her choice of discourse mode, is a reflection of her

perceived personal relationship to cultural norms that may be revealed by her choice of narrative emplotment. In other words,any selective recounting of events as history reveals the embodiment of a personal perspective on the perceived relationship between the writer of history and current cultural norms. Within an empirical, paradigmatic conception of identitythis positioning is inherently judgmental, and therefore, political, whether meant as such or not. All of which explains Vitanza’s seizing upon the words “naive” and “nostalgia” to describe Gallop’s text, since Gallop’s exposition appears to position herself politically within her narrative as a tragic victim. However, her choice of expressive discourse to report events of her personal history suggests she truly positions herself as a politically savvy comic hero who transcends the tragedy of her recent experience through the ontological integrity of her morality, although that morality may be identified as “alternative” to culturally dominant ontological formulations of morality. An integral conflict seems apparent in this disparity. This leads Vitanza later in his post to say, “There has got to be more to all this then [sic] your being Naive. This cat does not meow! Nor does this dog hunt!,” because her exposited perspective on the meaning of the events reported appears to clash with the perspective suggested by the ordering of events inherent within her chosen mode of discursiveemplotment. By denying the possibility of reading her text as an apology, Gallop denies herself the grace of an empirical ambiguity that would allow a reconciliation of the apparent discordant perspectives into an harmonious one.

White’s statement that “By identifying the dominant mode (or modes) of discourse, one penetrates to that level of consciousness on which a world of experience is constituted prior to being analyzed” in conjunction with his recognition of the fact that the prefigurative act of composing an historical text “is poetic inasmuch as it is precognitive and precritical in the economy of the historian’s own consciousness” would suggest that the writing of autobiography, if not history, is essentially a poetic enterprise. Poetry is nothing if not a highly individualized linguistic and expressive perspective on the ordering of life. Narrative confessional poetry is most

certainly a highly individualized linguistic and expressive perspective in the ordering of a life, and is undeniably poetry even though appreciably different in linguistic and compositional form from traditional classifications of poetry. What makes a poem a poem is the special truth of a personal perspective the poetic discourse sets aside and preserves linguistically. A very slight shift in the boundaries of literary perspective, a recognition of poetic intent as equally constitutive of genre as form and a traditionally gratuitous expansion of what may narratively constitute literary reality, allows for the unqualified classification of narrative poetry aspoetry rather than, say, a short, short, short, short story.

Apologia, as the ancients conceived it, offers the possibility of extending the same traditionally authorized gratuitous expansion of genre granted narrative poetry. Hayden White’s identification of poesis as the foundation of a precognitive framework in which all narrative history appears tobe formed loosens, if not eliminates, the necessary tying of empirical inquiry into narrative history to paradigmatic imperatives for empirical validity, as does Harré’s formulation of the social identity of the “I” for autobiography. The “I”s of an autobiography read across these formulations may appear asfanciful in their sincerity but, as such, they remain morally integral and indicative of a valid reality as perceived from theviewpoint of the autobiographer, which automatically identifies the discourse as inherently political, although not necessarily disputational. The form of autobiography suddenly appears as integral, inclusive, and distinct, meeting all the qualifications of a cultural form and narrative form, separate from the ontology of history but epistemologically congruent.

“The telling of a life story is a confirmation of that selfthat stands there telling the story” (Steedman 49, italics hers). As such, autobiography implicitly embodies a “cultural form and narrative form--that behaves epistemologically much like history” (10-11) when the social being of an individual is understood as a making public of the metaphoric connections madeas a child to construct an identity for an “I.” That process can be understood as a poetic process that attempts to unify theintermingling of past experience understood as history, the

conflicts between those experiences and the possibilities of social being available in socially and culturally conventionalized forms of biographic expression, the mythos of cultural traditions, the desire for empowerment, in a voicing, adepositional statement, that sets aside and preserves to possessthe special truth of a perspective of a life on a life. The autobiographical act is both an honoring and a request to honor the preservation of that perspective. It is an apologia in the true sense held by the ancients.

WORKS CITEDBruss, Elizabeth. Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situationof a Literary Genre.

Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976.Gallop, Jane. “Gallop reply to VV.”

gopher://lists.village.Virginia.EDU:70/11/pubs/listservs/spoons/pretext.9801Harré, Rom. “Ego Identity and Explanatory Speech.” Texts of Identity. eds. John Shotter and Kenneth J. Gergen. NewburyPark: Sage, 1989, 20-35.Heidegger, Martin. Parmenides. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.Herodotus. “The First Book, entitled Clio.” The History of Herodotus. eds. William

Benton, et al. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago:Encyclopaedia

Britannica, 1952.Marcus, Laura. “The Face of Autobiography.” The Uses of Autobiography. ed. Julia Swindells. Bristol: Taylor & Francis, 1995, 13-23.Murray, Kevin. “The Construction of Identity in the Narratives of Romance and Comedy.” Texts of Identity. eds. John Shotter and Kenneth J. Gergen. Newbury Park: Sage, 1989, 176-206.Parker, Ian. “Warranting Voice and the Elaboration.” Texts of Identity. eds. John Shotter and Kenneth J. Gergen. NewburyPark: Sage, 1989, 56-70.Steedman, Carolyn. Past Tenses: Essays on writing autobiography, and history . London:

River Oram P, 1992.Vitanza, Victor. “VV>jg: attitude.”

gopher://lists.village.Virginia.EDU:70/11/pubs/listservs/spoons/pretext.9801White, Hayden V. Metahistory:the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-

Century Europe.Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1973