The Philosophy of Autobiography

Christopher Cowley, Christopher Cowley

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226268088
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

We are living through a boom in autobiographical writing. Every half-famous celebrity, every politician, every sports hero—even the non-famous, nowadays, pour out pages and pages, Facebook post after Facebook post, about themselves. Literary theorists have noticed, as the genres of "creative nonfiction" and "life writing" have found their purchase in the academy. And of course psychologists have long been interested in self-disclosure. But where have the philosophers been? With this volume, Christopher Cowley brings them into the conversation.Cowley and his contributors show that while philosophers have seemed uninterested in autobiography, they have actually long been preoccupied with many of its conceptual elements, issues such as the nature of the self, the problems of interpretation and understanding, the paradoxes of self-deception, and the meaning and narrative structure of human life. But rarely have philosophers brought these together into an overarching question about what it means to tell one's life story or understand another's. Tackling these questions, the contributors explore the relationship between autobiography and literature; between story-telling, knowledge, and agency; and between the past and the present, along the way engaging such issues as autobiographical ethics and the duty of writing. The result bridges long-standing debates and illuminates fascinating new philosophical and literary issues.

1

Art Imitating Life Imitating Art: Literary Narrative and Autobiographical Narrative

MARYA SCHECHTMAN

Everybody has a story, or so it seems. This commonplace is given formal expression by philosophers in the narrative approach to selfhood and identity. There are many different versions of this approach (e.g., Goldie 2012; MacIntyre 1984; Ricoeur 1994; Rudd 2012; Schechtman 1996; Taylor 1989), and they differ from one another in fundamental ways. What they have in common is the claim that it is illuminating to think about our lives as narratives. While this idea has enjoyed increasing popularity, it has also had its fair share of detractors. Some objections are addressed to individual narrative views, while others are aimed at the very idea that it is useful or accurate to think of our lives as narratives. One forceful objection of this latter sort is developed by Peter Lamarque in “On the Distance between Literary Narratives and Real-Life Narratives” (2007). There Lamarque argues that while many people tend to think that literary narratives are reasonable models for our lives, or to see characters in such narratives as essentially like real people, this attitude is mistaken and potentially damaging. To show this, he provides examples of literary critics at work interpreting canonical texts and demonstrates how different this activity is from that by which we rightly seek to understand ourselves or others. This leads to a kind of dilemma concerning the conception of “narrative” employed in these views: Either narrative theorists claim that our lives are like literary narratives, according to this argument, or they are using “narrative” in some weaker sense. In the former case these views seriously misrepresent our lives, in the latter it is misleading to use the term “narrative.”1

Lamarque raises an important challenge to narrative views of the self but not, I think, one that is utterly devastating. He is of course right that there are vast differences between the lives of real people and the careers of fictional characters and that someone who truly failed to appreciate this would be making a rather serious mistake. It is not evident, however, that avoiding this mistake requires us to draw as sharp a line of demarcation between real life and literary narrative as Lamarque suggests, and so it is not evident that the differences he emphasizes utterly defeat the possibility of a narrative account of self. What they do is to establish a burden of proof for narrative views of self. If they are going to maintain that our lives are somehow like literary narratives while allowing that they are not exactly like them they will need to describe clearly the sense in which they are alike and the sense in which they are different. In this essay I will offer a preliminary sketch of one way of describing these similarities and differences that accepts most of the fundamental assumptions Lamarque makes but nevertheless avoids the dilemma he poses. I will use the film Stranger than Fiction as a jumping-off point for developing this sketch. This film depicts the situation of someone who discovers that he truly is a character in a literary fiction, and reflection on some of its details will provide a useful framework for thinking about the ways in which our lives are and are not like those of literary characters.

I begin with an overview of Lamarque’s argument followed by a fairly detailed summary of the film. Next I analyze the rather complicated sense in which the film’s protagonist has a narrative sense of self, and investigate which parts of his self-conception could plausibly be part of our own and which could not. I conclude that although there are important and deeply salient differences between real life and literary narratives of the sort Lamarque describes, there are also points of continuity sufficient to support a particular kind of narrative conception of the self.

Lamarque’s Argument

It will not be possible to do full justice to the detail and complexity of Lamarque’s argument here, but the basic idea is relatively simple: Although there are superficial similarities between the characters and events in many literary narratives and real-life people and events, the appearance of sameness is misleading. Life and literature are inherently different enterprises with different rules and different logics. Works of literature are self-consciously created by authors for an aesthetic and (broadly) moral purpose, and each element of such a work is selected to express its themes and artistic visions. Nothing is there by accident, and nothing in a literary narrative “just happens.” Real life, on the other hand, is an unauthored series of events issuing from the action of natural forces. It is full of randomness and happenstance. There is no reason to suppose that there is an overall theme or aesthetic purpose in the unfolding of a person’s life and it is certainly a mistake to assume that each event in our lives happens as it does in order to express such a theme or purpose. To think of our lives as genuinely like literature, Lamarque argues, we need to do one of two things; either we must reduce literature to plot and character—as if the details of presentation do not really matter—or we must think of our lives as full of purpose and meaning at every turn—as if the accidents and coincidences that befall us are really by design. “The more we try to restore the distinctively literary features of [canonical literary] narratives the more remote they become from real life,” Lamarque says. “Indeed a stronger point can be made. To the extent that literary features are brought to bear on real-life narratives they have a distorting and pernicious effect on the self-understanding that such narratives are supposed to yield” (2007, 119).

To show what he means by this Lamarque looks at examples of the kind of work that literary critics do in interpreting and understanding fictional narratives of the sort that might be taken as models for real life, showing that this approach to real-life narratives would be bizarrely inappropriate. He employs different interpretive moves to make slightly different points. To show the difference between literary characters and real people, for instance, he talks about the Veneerings (from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend), who are described as having everything “bran-new” from their furniture to their carriage to their servants. The words used to describe them show how superficial they are, as does Dickens’s choice of their name. It is clear that we are supposed to understand them as deserving of our contempt. Crucially, this is not just Dickens’s opinion of them; it is who they are. He created them and made them superficial; there is no other perspective to take, and this makes their ontology wholly different from that of real people. Lamarque also points to critic W. A. Craik’s interpretation of the importance of the character of Frank Churchill in Jane Austen’s Emma in terms of the way in which Frank explains Emma herself. “Again,” Lamarque says, “just like the Veneerings . . . Frank Churchill in not just a person in an imaginary world, he is also an element in a structured plot” (2007, 126). It would be worrisome to say the least to view other people in the real world as existing only to help explain one’s own nature, but it is perfectly appropriate and highly illuminating as a description of the fictional Frank.

As with characters, events and details in literary narratives must be understood in teleological and aesthetic terms that do not apply in real life. Lamarque points, for instance, to the accident at the beginning of Tess of the d’Ubervilles and literary critic Dorothy van Ghent’s interpretation of the way in which the details of the accident serve to foreshadow and symbolically represent the unfolding drama and themes of the narrative as a whole. Clearly the right way to answer the question of why this accident occurred is in just the terms that van Ghent does. But this is not why accidents happen in real life, and if traffic safety officials looked for these kinds of explanations they would not be doing their jobs properly. Similarly, J. Hillis Miller describes how the mud and fog in the opening paragraph of Bleak House prefigure and represent the state of the world depicted in the novel (Lamarque 2007, 124). This is just the right way to explain the mud and fog in the novel, but it would be a strange kind of explanation to hear from the meteorologist on the evening news.

Each detail and each event in a literary narrative is chosen, and so each is chosen for a reason; they are not causally necessitated, or random, or statistical probabilities. This means, Lamarque says, that we have to take a completely different approach to understanding events and characters in literature than we do to understanding events and people in our world. If we take “the great literary works to be models for our self-directed narratives,” he concludes, “we are prone to two serious mistakes.” The less serious is “to suppose that literary works are simply stories about people like you and me, a species of real life narratives.” The more serious and potentially dangerous mistake is “to suppose that our own life narratives are mini-works of literature complying with the principles of literary appreciation.” This mistake is potentially dangerous because it invokes a “false image of ourselves as kinds of fictional characters, whose identity rests on narrative description and whose actions are explicable in functional, teleological or thematic ways” (Lamarque 2007, 132).

Lamarque’s observations are incisive, and they raise a powerful challenge to narrative understandings of the self. There are, of course, a variety of ways in which one might try to resist his conclusions, including a rejection of the overall framing of the problem. One might, for instance, insist that all of the events in our lives are directed by a Divine or Transcendent author according to a Purpose or Plan, which makes them meaningful in very much the same way that literary works are meaningful. This is a position that many people have taken historically, and that many continue to take. The disagreement in worldview expressed in this response is about as fundamental as such disagreements get, and I will not attempt to delve into these issues here. Instead I will take up the more modest project of considering whether granting Lamarque his fundamental worldview requires us to give up on a narrative conception of self. The question I am asking is thus this one: Suppose that Lamarque is correct in his basic naturalism. Does it follow that it is inappropriate and potentially problematic to think about our lives in the way that we think about literary texts? I will argue that it does not, but of course everything depends upon what it is to think about our lives “in the way that” we think about literary texts. We obviously cannot think about them in exactly the same way for reasons Lamarque makes very clear. To defend my affirmative answer to this question it is thus necessary to specify the points of overlap. As a first step toward doing so I will look at the fictional (and absurd) case of someone who is a character in a literary narrative in a very straightforward and literal sense. His circumstances will help us to identify a variety of ways of in which one might think of one’s life in narrative terms, making it easier to consider which might reasonably be part of a real life and which could not.

Stranger than Fiction

In Stranger than Fiction Harold Crick, an IRS auditor leading a mundane life, suddenly begins to hear a voice narrating his every action. The narrator describes how he brushes his teeth (counting the strokes), ties his tie (a single Windsor to save time), and counts his steps to the bus. She details his frustration and boredom at work and the lonely life he goes home to. Special attention is given to the wristwatch that controls his time-governed life and will, the narrator tells us (and him), play a momentous role on a fateful Wednesday. Naturally Harold finds this voice extremely disquieting, especially when it utters the sentence: “Little did he know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.”2

As viewers we see that the narrator is Karen “Kay” Eiffel, a brilliant novelist known for killing her characters off in creative ways. Kay is working on Death and Taxes, the novel in which Harold is protagonist. The writing of the novel has stalled because she cannot decide exactly how Harold should die, and for much of the film she investigates different modes of dramatic death—hanging out on the tops of buildings or in hospitals, or along dangerous stretches of road in hazardous weather. Kay insists that Harold’s death must be aesthetically perfect, and assumes that in order to be so it must be realistic with respect to Harold’s character and the conditions of the world in which he lives.

Harold, meanwhile, tries to find the source and the meaning of the narration he hears. After consulting a psychiatrist to no avail he seeks out the help of Dr. Jules Hilbert, professor of literature. Dr. Hilbert helps Harold determine the genera of his narrative, and quickly narrows it down to either romantic comedy or tragedy. He asks Harold if he has met someone who loathes him to the core. In fact Harold has just started auditing a baker, Ana Pascal, who has withheld a portion of her taxes as a political protest, and to whom he is deeply attracted. He reports to Dr. Hilbert that she has told him to “get bent,” to which the professor replies: “Well, that sounds like a comedy. Try to develop that.”

For a while signs are auspicious. Soon, however, Harold misinterprets a gesture of friendship from Ana, making her angry, and the balance of indicators points toward tragedy. Dr. Hilbert recommends to Harold that he go “live his life,” telling him to “make it the life that he wants.” And he does. Having always wanted to be more musical Harold buys a seafoam-green Fender guitar and learns to play; he moves in with a friend from work, and, most significant of all, he pursues and wins Ana Pascal. The moment he recognizes that she is falling in love with him is profound. Kay puts it this way: “Harold’s life was filed with moments both significant and mundane, but to Harold those moments remained entirely indistinguishable”—except for this one.

In addition to the obvious reasons for being thrilled by this development, Harold also takes it as evidence that he is in a romantic comedy after all. This elation is short-lived, however. As he shares this information with Dr. Hilbert he recognizes Kay’s voice in a television interview, and learns from the professor that she always kills her heroes. Harold refuses to accept this, and sets out to find Kay to see if he can convince her to spare him. Just at that moment, however, she has an inspiration about how Harold should die. By the time Harold finds her she has outlined his death. Both Harold and Kay are uncertain what to do. Ultimately she gives him the manuscript to read. Unable to look at it himself he takes it to Dr. Hilbert, asking him to let him know how his demise comes so that he can avoid it. When he returns Dr. Hilbert tells him that he has to die. The book is an incredible masterpiece, “the most important novel in her already stunning career and it can only end one way.” To Harold’s protestations Dr. Hilbert responds that he absolutely will die one day anyway and, he assures him, if he does not accept the death Kay has written for him the one that he has will not be nearly as meaningful or poetic.

Harold takes the novel and reads it on the bus, eventually showing up at Kay’s house and telling her that he thinks it is beautiful and that she should write it as planned; he is willing to accept his death. We then see Harold move toward his planned doom. Because his wristwatch had malfunctioned days earlier he asks a stranger for the time. Because the stranger’s watch is running three minutes fast Harold happens to be at the bus stop earlier than usual on the fateful Wednesday, and because of this he is present when a child on a bike darts out in front of an exhausted bus driver. Harold runs in front of the bus to save the child and is himself struck.

We soon discover, however, that the ending has been changed from the original conception. Harold is in the hospital, alive but severely injured. He will make a full recovery. He should have died, but a bit of his wristwatch broke off, blocking a torn artery and preventing him from bleeding to death. The watch that was to have led to his demise by getting him to the bus stop early in the original version saves his life in this one. Harold and Ana are blissfully happy about this turn of events, but Dr. Hilbert is clearly disappointed. The novel, he tells Kay, is “okay” but it is not a masterpiece, and certainly not her best. The ending, he says, does not go with the rest of the novel. Kay is unfazed. She will, she says, rewrite the rest of the novel to go with the ending, explaining that she needed to save Harold not because he was real, but because he knew he was going to die and was willing to anyway, knowing that he could stop it. She asks, “Isn’t that the type of man you want to keep alive?”

Harold’s Narrative Self-Conception

In some ways Stranger than Fiction serves as a perfect illustration of Lamarque’s point. The comedic aspects of the film reside precisely in the bizarre application of techniques of literary criticism to a human life (consider, for instance, Dr. Hilbert’s twenty-three questions aimed at categorizing Harold’s genera, including: “Has anyone recently left any gifts outside your home? Anything? Gum, money, a large wooden horse? Do you find yourself inclined to solve murder mysteries in large, luxurious homes to which you may or may not have been invited? On a scale of one to ten, what would you consider the likelihood you might be assassinated?”) If we look more closely, however, Harold’s narrative self-conception actually involves a great many facets, some ridiculous and some familiar. Untangling these will provide a useful framework for thinking about the relation between real life and literary narratives.

To begin we can distinguish between Harold’s belief that his life is a narrative and what I will call the “narrative attitude” toward his life this belief engenders. Harold, that is, thinks of his life as a narrative in the very straightforward and literal sense in that he comes to believe that there is an author scripting his life for the purpose of creating a literary work for dissemination and consumption. This belief has a profound and, as it turns out, overwhelmingly positive impact on Harold’s life. Before hearing Kay’s narration Harold’s existence is decidedly unliterary. He eats alone, lives alone, and his social interactions seem limited to amusing his colleagues by multiplying large numbers in his head. While brushing his teeth, an activity during whic...