L'autobiocritique Literary Criticism as Intellectual Autobiography

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1 L'autobiocritique Literary Criticism as Intellectual Autobiography Holly Franking, PhD L'autobiocritique--Jean-Michel Olivier coined this term to describe the self-reflexive style of Philippe Lejeune's Lire Leiris: Autobiographie et language. i Olivier was not complimenting Lejeune for writing himself all over the text he purportedly was publishing about the lives of Marcel Proust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Leiris. Earlier Claude Mauriac had faulted Lejeune for the same reason, and he even went so far as to tell Lejeune to stop the subterfuge and to write a direct, full frontal autobiography of himself. ii In their criticisms of Lejeune's work, Olivier and Mauriac are attempting to distinguish between pure and impure autobiography. According to them, to reveal one s self directly is pure. But to reveal one s self indirectly under the guise of revealing others is impure autobiography or L'autobiocritique. I came across the word L'autobiocritique while researching the history of Autobiography. I did this research because I thought I could find a way to demonstrate my theory of literary criticism as autobiography. It took me just shy of 20 years to figure how to do it. After all, it took about this same amount of time to develop both the Internet and Adobe Acrobat both ofwhich are the basic features of L autobiocritique. In the mid 1970s I wrote a thesis, The Evolution of the Artist in Joyce. In this work, I used the New Criticism iii theory authored by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren. In 1984 while working on my doctorate at the University of Kansas, I took a class in contemporary literary criticism. There I learned about the new isms such as structuralism, feminism, Marxism, Freudianism, Deconstruction, etc. It was in the early 1990s that I got the idea for L autobiocritique: Literary Criticism as Intellectual Autobiography. I had received my doctorate in English from the University of Kansas in I specialized in critical theory of the novel. 1

2 This new theory of literary criticism came to me when I realized that at various stages of my life I would interpret the same works differently. The most striking example was the difference between my first critique of Thomas Hardy s The Return of the Native iv and my second critique several decades later. My first critical reading was an assignment in high school. When you are 16 or 17 years of age, it is more likely than not that one would side with the young lovers against the elders who try to separate them. If you recall this tragic romance, you will remember that the lovers were Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye. The obstructing elder was Mrs. Yeobright, Clym s mother. My second critique of The Return of the Native occurred when I saw a video of it on PBS about 30 years later. At the end of the video, I was decidedly on the side of Mrs. Yeobright and not the young lovers. In the interim when I was 23 years old, my 24 year-old brother married a woman who was 25 years older. She had three sons who were practically my brother s age. The marriage devastated my mother. My brother s wife would not let him contact us, and he did not seem to mind being estranged. I realized that because of my experience with my brother s marriage that I was now completely on the side of the mother, Mrs. Yeobright. With stunning and surprising clarity, I also realized that life experiences dramatically can change one s interpretation of the same literary work. As I said, my problem then was how to demonstrate this theory. A few years ago, I decided to use The Evolution of the Artist in Joyce as a basis of my new critical theory, for both its content and form. I decided for the form to use Adobe Acrobat. Consequently, I uploaded my James Joyce thesis, which is a pdf file, to the Internet at This format allows scholars and other readers to use the Acrobat commenting tools. This format is similar to the Talmud v. Rabbinical scholars keep a running list of commentary about their interpretations of the first five books of the Old Testament (the Torah) and other scholars comments on each other s interpretations. It is called the Talmud. This introduction is an open invitation to interested scholars and readers to comment on my original thesis about James Joyce s three major novels (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) and on my subsequent reinterpretations of Joyce s novels in the light of recent critical theories. Scholars can also comment on each others comments. Adobe Acrobat makes this 2

3 Talmud format possible. I have put my original James Joyce thesis on a web page. Commentators can use Adobe Acrobat pdf tools to make their comments. All they will need is the Adobe Acrobat Reader which is free as a download from In order to comment on L autobiocritique, you will need to register so that the website can keep track of your comments. You may use your real name or a pseudonym to log in, but please be consistent with your user name, type of commenting tool, color and font. There is no way that my company, Diskotech, Inc., can make a dime off this published work. I often tell people that Diskotech, Inc. is a not-for-profit company anyway (LOL). However, if L autobiocritique is used as a classroom project, you will need to pay a fee per student. At one point, I thought that the history of Autobiography paralleled the history of the concept of the self. The bibliography of this work includes an extensive list of references that will provide interested readers a review of the history of Autobiography and might help explain how two such divergent definitions of pure and impure Autobiography evolved. However, that discussion is not the main purpose of L autobiocritique. My purpose here is first, as in logic, to use two other writers conclusions as a premise for my own argument. I will use William Spengemann vi and James Olney s vii conclusions that all writing is autobiographical. Therefore, since literary criticism is a form of writing, then literary criticism is also autobiography. I will narrow the definition of autobiography to intellectual autobiography or L autobiocritique. To begin, some definitions are in order. First, autobiography will be defined as a temporary intellectual space where a critic resides while critiquing a literary work. Second, this paper will demonstrate how this insight affects a critic s relationship with a literary work in a given time frame. Third, William Spengemann concludes in his work that the forms of Autobiography, since its earliest beginnings to the present, have defied attempts to restrict it according to subject matter, form and genre. It is easy to see how scholars of Autobiography can be working with such different definitions of what constitutes Autobiography. The more one knows, the murkier the lines between pure and impure Autobiography blur. Perhaps it would be clearer to simply agree with Spengemann and Olney that all writing is 3

4 informed by autobiographical motives. Then it is possible to discover how autobiographies can be classified according to other standards fiction or nonfiction being the broadest categories. As a result, regarding Autobiography, the categories are back but with a crucial difference. Various types of writings can no longer be judged according to older standards of fact or fiction. L autobiocritique challenges these two categories of writing. Instead of an objective, exterior, a priori standard by which to judge writings, we are left with what many literary scholars have been decrying for decades, since the demise of New Criticism. That if there are no standards, then everything is relative. which means one writing is just as good as anything else that is published. Therefore, Eminem would be considered just as good as Shakespeare. There would go literature, the humanities, education all sucked into the black hole of relativity and chaos. However, L autobiocritique challenges this conclusion because what is relative and not absolute on one level of investigation can be so at another. For example, Pro-choice and Pro-life views will not mean much in the life and death of the human species in the fulfillment of human history. But it means a lot to Mrs. Murphy who feels she will go to hell for aborting a fetus she could not afford. Like the sciences that are also dealing with Chaos viii, it turns out to be simply the end of current theories that no longer apply and the beginning, if we don't panic, of new theories that deal with all those bits of information that we furiously have been collecting over the last several decades. So Chaos becomes the earthquake that shatters the old and makes way for a richer more complex concept of a higher or, at least, other order. There are a lot more variables than any theory can account for at any given time. Therefore, theories work only for so long at a specific level or scale. This reveals that the old standards were not objective or unbiased. They were a status quo, a White-European-male-status-quo that suppressed minority voices. At this point, I am agreeing with Spengemann and Olney, that if all writing is autobiographical in some ways, it is possible to claim that Literary Criticism is also Autobiography. Literary Criticism is simply individual readings by individual readers who did, for example, what Sigmund Freud did, take an interesting notion and try to generalize it into an ism. Often these literary critics are of equal genius to writers of literary texts--after all, literary criticism is fiction too. The genius of critics like Harold Bloom, Louise Rosenblatt and James Olney is that they use language as compelling and ideas as clever as literary authors. These critics illuminate the literary work, and the literary work illuminates them. 4

5 The problem comes when individual critical theories become the status quo. My theory as presented herein, L autobiocritique is that Literary Criticism is not an objective standard by which to interpret all literary texts. The following work will demonstrate my theory. i. Jean-Michel Olivier, "Lire Lejeune," Diagraphe (1980), pp ii. Claude Mauriac, "Michel Leiris en manuel," Le Figaro, 22 November 1975, p. 15. iii. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, iv. Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native. New York: Harper & Row, v Rabbinical scholars keep a running list of the commentaries about the interpretations of the first 5 books of the Old Testament (the Torah). This commentary is called Talmud. vi Spengemann, William C. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, vii. Olney, James, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981 viii Stewart, Ian. Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos. Wiley-Blackwell,