Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait

Michel Beaujour

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9780814786116
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire en poésie

A serious and independent contribution to the literature of autobiography.
-- John SturrockFrench StudiesClearly a landmark study. It seems certain to provoke a great deal of productive debate among those concerned with any of the many issues it raises.
-- Comparative Literature

The literary self-portrait, often considered to be an ill- formed autobiography, is receiving more attention as a result of the current obsession with personal narrative, but little progress has been made toward an understanding of its specific features. With Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, Michel Beaujour reveals the hidden ambitions of this genre. From St. Augustine to Montaigne, from Nietzsche to Malraux, Leiris and Barthes, individual self-portraits are analyzed jointly with the enduring cultural matrix from which self-portrayal derives its disconcerting non-narrative structure, and many of its recurrent topics.

PART ONE
Confessions and Meditation

CHAPTER 1
Self-Portrait and Encyclopedia

The Speculum and the Mirror

The self-portrait, then, is a polymorphous formation, a much more heterogeneous and complex literary type than is autobiographical narration. It is easy to see similarities and differences between biography and autobiography. On the other hand, the self-portrait does not appear, at first sight, to be integrated into a vaster discursive ensemble. It is impossible to oppose self-portrayal to the literary portrait in any simple terms. The latter—whether it occurs in a novelistic, biographical, and historiographic context, or whether it becomes, as in the seventeenth century courtly game, a relatively autonomous practice governed by rules—is, nothing more than the development of an energeia, the autonomous blow-up of a figure such as characterismus or effictio, which engenders a precious, playful microgenre with detective or clinical variants,¹ in any case a much more restricted venture than such instances of literary self-portrayal as Montaigne’s Essays and Leiris’s La Règle dujeu. Even if it presents itself as a genre with a descriptive dominant, the self-portrait is not a mere “self-description.” The heuristic limits of the pictorial metaphor (“to paint oneself”) are soon reached. Montaigne and Leiris “paint themselves” according to (nonnarrative) strategies that go far beyond those used by the literary portrait. Must one infer, then, that the self-portrait is isolated in our culture’s discursive economy? Not being a version of autobiography, nor a variant of the portrait, does the self-portrait have no generic counterpart? This odd asymmetry would threaten a structural and typological conception of literature, since, in the eyes of theoretical poetics, discourses take their meaning from being opposed to other types of discourse. But perhaps one should look farther afield.

In Aurora (1927–1928), his first “autobiographical” fiction, Michel Leiris, anticipatorily catching sight of a solution, prompts his anagrammatic hero, Damocles Siriel, to say:

I always have greater difficulty, compared to others, in expressing myself without uttering the pronoun “I”; not that this must be seen as any particular sign of pride on my part, but because the word “I” sums up for me the structure of the world. It is only in terms of myself and because I deign to pay some attention to their existence, that things are. (39)²

This is a rough formulation of a basic rule of the self-portraitist’s game: “I” sums up the structure of the world, as the microcosm does that of the macrocosm. In consequence, the discourse of “I” and about “I” becomes a microcosm of the collective discourse on the universe of things—things being taken here in the sense of res: a subject to be treated, a commonplace, a topos. The self-portrait thinks of itself as the microcosm, written in the first person, of an encyclopedia and, further, as the self-awareness of the attention “I” pay to the things encountered in the process of scanning the encyclopedia. Not a solipsistic—or narcissistic—portrait of an “I” cut off from things, nor an objective description of things in themselves, independently of the attention that “I” turns to them, the self-portrait, rather, is a sustained textual awareness of the interferences and homologies obtaining between the microcosmic “I” and the macrocosmic encyclopedia. It is in this sense that one should see in the self-portrait a mirror image of the “I” reflecting en abyme the encyclopedic mirrors of the “great world.”³

The Middle Ages called an encyclopedic assembly of knowledge a speculum.⁴ When Vincent of Beauvais wrote the Speculum Maius in the mid-thirteenth century, he intended it to be a circle or complete classificatory system of the diverse branches of learning.

A mirror of the subject and a mirror of the world, a mirror of the “I” that seeks itself through the mirror of the universe—what first might have seemed a simple rapprochement or convenient analogy proves, when examined, to be an isotopy sanctioned by rhetorical tradition and the history of letters. It is in the light of this history that one can demonstrate that the literary self-portrait is a transformational variant of a structure that also includes the encyclopedic speculum of the Middle Ages. The distinctive trait of this structure, which one might call a mirror, is that it has a topical dominant: it is entirely opposed to the narrative structure that comprises historiography, the novel, biography, and autobiography. Thus the topical speculum is opposed, in the literary economy of the Middle Ages, to allegorical narrative, just as in the modern period the self-portrait is opposed to (auto)biographical narration.⁵

Allegorical narrative (as, for example, The Divine Comedy, The Romance of the Rose, Pilgrim’s Progress, or The Faerie Queene) presents itself as an itinerary punctuated by encounters where the temporal process is dominant, where space, description, and learning are subordinated to a narrative arrangement that progresses towards an end.⁶ The mirror, however, is governed by a spatial metaphor that sets the reader on a course, not necessarily determined by the subdivision of a book, through the compartments of a “space” or a sequence of topics. The specula are groups of places arranged according to a topical metaphor (tree, macrocosm, house, garden, itinerary, and so forth); they furnish (are furnished by) a taxonomy; and each of these places contains, in a virtual sense, the dialectic development of a descriptive or conceptual discourse accessorily susceptible to illustration with exemplary micronarratives. The Mirror, then, does not purport to narrate but, rather, to deploy intelligibly a representation of things or of the self to whom these things are known, all the while preserving the possibility of cross-references from place to place, of amplification in the places already seen along the way. So, to all intents and purposes, the mirror is a spatial form—open to subsequent invention. Or, to put it differently, the topical mirror, as it mimics the acquisition and growth of learning, remains in principle an open-ended, scholarly (philosophic) form, whereas the (allegorical or biographical) narrative is a closed, mainly vernacular, didactic, form. Although the latter may (but need not) be naive, the former never is.

In medieval literature, then, the mirror is the dialectical (or rhetorical) presentation of encyclopedic learning (this is certainly true of such a work as the Speculum Maius) or else a kind of fiction where the conceptual tenor appears thinly disguised by concrete vehicular images or by exemplary scenes displaying stereotyped characters (which may be allegorical personifications) who engage in typical actions (for example, those typical of a virtue or of a vice). This type of mirror, which was written by scholars and, customarily, in the vernacular of laymen for whom it was intended, can be compared to the structure and iconography of Gothic cathedrals. It would survive in the emblematic works of the Renaissance, most often destined for the moral edification of relatively unsophisticated readers.

The encyclopedic specula are organized according to topical divisions, embracing the whole field of the known and knowable during the Middle Ages, inter alia: heaven’s nine spheres; the nine orders of angels; the four elements; the four humors of the body and soul; the world’s four, and man’s seven, ages; the seven virtues and the seven capital sins. Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Maius, for example, is divided into four major parts (the fourth was added in the fourteenth century, after Vincent’s death): Speculum Naturale, Speculum Historíale, Speculum Doctrínale, and Speculum Morale.⁷

For the most part, and often in their entirety, the specula treat of man and his place in Nature and in the divine Plan. It is understandable that their main divisions—as is notably the case with Raoul Ardent—should correspond with the virtues and sins. These theological, ethical, and “psychological” summae describe some exemplary ideal entities—the Virtues—or, conversely, some corrupt entities—Vices, sins, madness—the depiction of which serves, a contrario, as an example and, hence, a warning.⁸ Therefore, the confessor’s handbooks, so numerous in the thirteenth century, need only be a lightened and pragmatic version of such major encyclopedic works as the Speculum Universale. A textual nudge is all it takes to transform a speculum of vices into a portrait gallery of typical sinners: in fact, the exposition of doctrine, which follows dialectic rules, likewise engenders, according to rhetorical invention’s principles (inartificial arguments), illustrations of concrete examples of virtuous or vicious conduct. There is no solution of continuity at all between the conceptual discourse and exempla, between didacticism and fable. This is why we often say pejoratively, inverting the terms, that medieval fictions are “didactic.” If the clercs reserve for themselves in their Latin works the use of dialectic, of the concept, of the scholarly example, their works in the vernacular, intended for laymen, always seek the concept through the allegorical fable. Whence it follows that the opposition between speculum and allegory is not as absolute as has been indicated above: there exists the possibility of an interference, reinforced by the medieval symbolic universe’s relative homogeneity, which underlies the homogeneity of its discursive system.

As a pertinent example, let us take a work that is surely, in doctrine, if not in form, somewhat eccentric: the Confessio Amantis, written in Latin by Chaucer’s friend John Gower.⁹ Rather than a Christian confessor, in this text it is the well-known Genius, priest of Venus, who helps the lover-narrator to conduct a systematic examination of conscience on all points (places) of amorous doctrine.¹⁰ Genius refers implicitly to a “Handbook of Sins Against Love.” a courtly counterpart to a work such as the Manuel des péchés, in Anglo-Norman, by William of Waddinton: the short tales told by Venus’s priest to focus the lover’s examination illustrate the sequence, transposed onto the erotic register, of the seven deadly sins. This systematic account of amorous doctrine, though eclipsed by the stories, is nevertheless copied from Christian doctrine and provides the structure of Confessio Amantis, of which it can be said that it is a courtly (and fictitious) variant of both the speculum of sins and the confessor’s handbook.¹¹

Thus, from the Middle Ages on, the encyclopedia can engender a confessional variant, not so much in the form of an autobiographical and chronological narrative as in that of a systematic examination (of conscience) which is conducted as a survey of the places constituted by the sins and their subdivisions (genus and species). That course produces, in accordance with rhetorical invention, developments articulated along “artificial” dialectic arguments and such “inartificial” arguments as testimonials, examples, anecdotes, and so on. Consequently, the relation established between “discourse” and “narrative” is the converse of that which is supposed to prevail in forms with a narrative dominant, whether or not these forms are allegorical. Although such a text has no post hoc, propter hoc logic at all, it is logically arranged, first under a taxonomy that distributes the encyclopedic parts and the branches of a tree of knowledge and, secondly, according to a dialectic of rhetorical invention that governs the passage from one place to another. One can, therefore, speak of a topo-logy, or spatial logic, as opposed to the chronology of the texts with a narrative dominant. This spatialization confirms Emile Mâle’s well-known hypothesis according to which the Gothic cathedral is the architectural isotope of the medieval speculum.¹² The cathedral is not essentially a “stone Bible” nor is it, more vaguely, a “picture book” designed for the illiterate, but primarily it is an encyclopedia embracing a system of places concretized in architecture and iconography, a system that programs a multitude of cross-references among the images and backgrounds that evoke and point one another out in their symbolic context.

The symbolic itineraries that the specula encode, just like those the Gothic cathedrals impose, do not shut themselves up in a closed and immanent system. They symbolize something else: they always refer to God’s two Books, Creation and Revelation, and, beyond that, to divine transcendence. Places and images always designate, manifestly or obscurely, the episodes of Genesis, the Fall, the Incarnation, and the Redemption. Everything in them evokes (negatively, when it is a question of Evil) the stages of Christ’s mission and the episodes of his terrestrial life upon which the Christian is presumed to model his own existence. ¹³

Thus, the encyclopedic mirror reflects what leads the individual to model himself on Christ; and what draws him away from his model when he, a sinner, allows himself to be inveigled into imitating the Devil. The medieval mirror encodes an ambivalence, and the need for choice—it evokes the risk inherent in every human destiny oriented towards salvation.

For this reason, the mirror can become, by turns, an attribute of the Virgin Mary, sometimes called the speculum sine macula, and of the diabolical sin par excellence, Superbia. The mirror appears in the allegory of ancient Prudence, the one who “knows herself,” but also in that of Vanitas; in which anyone happening imprudently to contemplate himself in it sees the impending fleshlessness of his own skeleton.¹⁴

Roland Barthes, still struggling in his self-portrait, with the ambivalence of the mirror, transposes its Marian and diabolical connotations into the profane and psychoanalytic register: the “maternal” mirror is where the cursed imaginary appears, that imaginary which he, following Sartre and Lacan, mistrusts and opposes to good symbolic and healthy reality. But, while Barthes in principle chooses the Good, he still shifts onto the Other, reader or God, the responsibility for judging what eludes his own self-portrayer’s awareness. And he leaves the rest to the intercession of the Mother, who, as guardian of the mirror, will manage to clear it of its equivocality:

The title of this series of books (X by Himself) has an analytic bearing: myself by myself? But that is the very program of the imaginary! How is it that the rays of the mirror reverberate on me? Beyond that zone of diffraction—the only one upon which I can cast a glance, though without ever being able to exclude from it the very one who will speak about it—there is reality, and there is also the symbolic. For the latter, I have no responsibility (I have quite enough to do, dealing with my own imaginary!): I leave it to the Other, to the transference, and hence to the reader.

And all this happens, as is obvious here, through the Mother, present next to the Mirror. (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 153)

So, the master metaphor of the modern self-portrait as, formerly, of the medieval encyclopedia, will be the mirror whose reflecting function is mimicked in the symmetrical statement: me by me. But the Other (Unconscious, dead friend, reader, or God) remains as judge and security for what the writer gathers and distributes in his self-portrait, which is, after all, a kind of encyclopedia. The antithetical and complementary signifieds of speculum are still co-present in the modern encyclopedic self-portrait: “Like the encyclopedia, the work exhausts a list of heterogeneous objects, and this list is the work’s antistructure, its obscure and irrational polygraphy,” writes Barthes (148). Barthes’s obscure speculum is an encyclopedia with a scrambled taxonomy. The encyclopedia is not the self-portrait’s manifest structure but rather its nontotalizing antistructure, the “last word” of which eludes the self-portrayer. Where transcendent order reigned, That now reigns, an infinite, lackadaisically labeled chaos. But the book qua book must comport a first (and last) word, or at least a first, and last, signifier. With Barthes, for example, the first “word” is an icon, a photograph of the Mother, who, being “present next to the Mirror,” safeguards through her presence the lost, or deliberately misplaced, unity of this double autobiographical and encyclopedic mirror.¹⁵

Let us not fool ourselves. The stake in this present-absent mirror is nothing less than Western and Christian cultur...