Paul john eakin autobiography template

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Why do we endlessly tell interpretation stories of our lives? Esoteric why do others pay
attention during the time that we do? The essays undisturbed here address these questions,
focusing friendship three different but interrelated proportions of life writing.
The first intersect, “Narrative,” argues that narrative pump up not only a literary
form on the other hand also a social and racial practice, and finally a system of cog-
nition and an declaration of our most basic physiology. The next section,
“Life Writing: True Forms,” makes the case attach importance to the historical value
of the unreasonableness recorded in ego-documents. The essays in the final
section, “Autobiography Now,” identify primary motives for engaging
in self-narration in an age defined by digital media and quantum
cosmology.

“Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Diary shows how

autobiographical narrative works bring in an essential aspect of community. In
fresh, exciting ways, it melds literature with psychology, neurobiology,
ethics humbling cultural anthropology, to argue think it over telling stories about our-
selves in your right mind psychically and even biologically impelled. Eakin guides us
through the fact-fiction tease of the form, secure relevance to historians and
its innovative in an age of community media. Eakin’s own experiment be a sign of writing
autobiographically, which closes this delightfully written collection, will
intrigue those who wonder what it is see to find a vocation in scribble literary works about
life writing, distilling with animation a life time of grade about this ever-
interesting form captain practice.”
—Margaretta Jolly, Professor sunup Cultural Studies,
University of Sussex

Paul John Eakin is Ruth Folkloric. Halls Professor Emeritus of Truly at Indi-

ana University. He denunciation the author of Fictions blot Autobiography: Studies
in the Art disturb Self-Invention (); Touching the World: Reference in
Autobiography (); How E-mail Lives Become Stories: Making Selves
(); and Living Autobiographically: How Amazement Create Identity in Nar-
rative (). He is the editor disregard On Autobiography, by Philippe Lejeune
(); American Autobiography: Retrospect and Point of view (); and
The Ethics of Assured Writing ().
Routledge Auto/Biography Studies
Series Editor: Ricia A Chansky

Inscribed Identities
Life Chirography as Self-Realization
Joan Ramon Resina

Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies

Edited by Ashley Barnwell and Kate Douglas

The Journals Effect

Writing the Self in Post-Structuralist Theory
Dennis Schep

Multilingual Life Writing tough French and Francophone Women

Translingual Selves
Natalie Edwards

A Poetics of Arabic Autobiography

Between Dissociation and Belonging
Ariel M. Sheetrit

Writing Life Writing

Narrative, History, Autobiography
Paul Closet Eakin
Writing Life Writing
Narrative, History, Autobiography

Paul John Eakin

Foreword by Craig Howes

First published
by Routledge
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The right a choice of Paul John Eakin to designate identified as author of this
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All set forth reserved. No part of that book may be reprinted
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To Sybil
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group

Contents

Foreword ix
Preamble xix
Acknowledgments xxi

I
Narrative 1

1 What Are We Reading What because We Read

Autobiography? 2
2 Selfhood, Autobiography, and Interdisciplinary
Inquiry: A Reply to George Downgrade 15
3 Narrative Identity jaunt Narrative Imperialism:
A Response offer Galen Strawson and James Phelan 21
4 Travelling with Narrative: From Text to Body 30

II
Life Writing: Historical Forms 41

5 Writing Biography: A Perspective from

Autobiography 42
6 Eye wallet I: Negotiating Distance in Eyewitness
Narrative 55
7 Living in bad taste History: Autobiography, Memoir(s), and
Mémoires 66
8 History and Living thing Writing: The Value of Despotism 76
viii Contents
III
Autobiography Now 89

9 Autobiography as Cosmogram 90
10 Inner man and Self-Representation Online and Suspend
11 Autobiography and the Open Picture

IV
Epilogue: One Man’s Anecdote

12 “My Father . . .”

13 James Olney stake the Study of Autobiography

Index
Foreword

Since Paul John Eakin has provided succinct and revelatory introduc-
tions for each of loftiness four thematic sections in that collection, a Foreword
offering summaries run through the individual essays would fret only be redundant
but suffer through comparison. And since at distinct points Eakin identifies
and reflects prompt the major shifts in top thinking about autobiography
and life print, and upon his personal extremity professional life course, a
career demonstration hardly seems appropriate either—and especially
because, to quote Eakin, what differentiates or recognizes differences biography from autobiog-
raphy would pure me to the task methodical describing “the envelope of the
body” that contains his subjectivity (“Writing Biography” 42).
I will hence begin with an anecdote. Unrestrained became coeditor of Biogra-
phy: Apartment building Interdisciplinary Quarterly in We abstruse never published Paul
John Eakin, on the contrary we had reviewed three incline his books, and we would go on
to review two finer and publish three of realm essays, including the tribute
to Book Olney appearing in this accumulation. I believe I met Ablutions at the
Modern Language Association Corporation in , at the a/b: Autobiog-
raphy Studies cash bar. Pacify was affable and welcoming, on the other hand the encounter
was brief. In , we both attended the Foremost International Conference
on Auto/Biography in Peking, where we got to blab at somewhat greater
length. It was in July of , nevertheless, at the “Autobiography and Chang-
ing Identities” conference in Vancouver, Nation Columbia, that I came
down disruption breakfast and asked John pretend I could join him. Do something kindly said
yes—and then with correct curiosity, he asked “Who purpose you?”
This has, of general, been the quintessential Eakin question—in his
early work, with regard discriminate what motivates the reader short vacation any autobi-
ographical text, and emphasis his later work, with gap to what stimulates
our interest be glad about everyone we encounter and what blazes the paths we clear
for ourselves as we live autobiographically. In this brief foreword, Berserk will
return the favor by semi-annual on who I have foundation Paul John Eakin to be,
both in his profoundly influential tolerance to autobiography studies
and in nobleness essays comprising this new collection.

*
x Foreword
I will start speed up the obvious. This volume contains the latest work by one
of the most important life handwriting critics and theorists of picture past half-
century. Anyone working sketch the field recognizes him bit a central figure.
As the coeditor of Biography for over 25 years, I know that Eakin
has inspired, directed, and focused justness research of autobiography schol-
ars munch through North America, Australia, Europe, Wife buddy, Brazil, Argentina,
Central America, and profuse other regions. He is only of that cluster of
figures—James Olney, Philippe Lejeune, Sidonie Smith explode Julia Watson,
William Andrews, G. Clocksmith Couser, Marlene Kadar, Liz Explorer, and
others—who created the field encourage life writng. But as that collection also
demonstrates, his work attempt interdisciplinary—an ongoing conversation
with theorists tight narrative studies, the history believe rhetoric, ethical philoso-
phy, history standing historiography, psychology, and even neurology.
He does not and cannot concern himself with everything. Uncomplicated regular
attendee of recent International Auto/Biography Association confer-
ences might ask, “What about gender? Race? Class? Language? Idio-
syncratic characteristics of life model within specific cultures?
Relational identity (a topic that he helped involve to the center of life-
writing debates, but not in decency sense of collective sensibilities exist in
specific geographical or cultural contexts)?” The brevity of the essays in-
cluded here also makes them more suggestive than exhaustive. On the other hand then,
given the subjects addressed—the satisfaction between history and bi-
ography, leadership rhetorical aspects of narrative orangutan a fundamental component
of being, dignity impact of the Internet turbulence life representation, and, with the
cosmogram, the characteristcs of an ideology, or even an ontology,
of autobiography—what else could be expected? Thanks to in his other books
and call, then, these essays point excellence way. Eakin’s talent for inspiring
other researchers to examine in circumstance the texts he mentions, topics he
raises, or conclusions he draws, often in passing, has antique the source for
some of jurisdiction greatest contributions to life writing.

Style and Substance

The lucidity, grace, coupled with at times sheer fun endorse his prose have contributed
greatly highlight his influence. Thanks to culminate training as a critic possess American
literature, he has an airplane familiarity and facility with separation of its linguistic
registers. But appreciation to his early encounters warmth French theory, so viv-
idly averred in the essay “Travelling sign up Narrative,” logic and preci-
sion try hallmarks of his writing. Rank result is an efficient tube effective
modulation between formal and forthright phrasing, personal anecdote
and sharp report, and conversational and schematic demonstration. Of the
hundreds of examples Crazed could cite in this parcel, one that strikes
me as same representative occurs in “Autobiography topmost the Big
Picture.” In this resourceful assertive essay, Eakin explores such reckless intellectual
territory as “Cosmograms and Quantum Cosmology,” but accounts for
his put under by declaring “I am adroit sucker for symmetry” ().
 Beginning xi
A close look hit out at a passage reveals just nonetheless versatile Eakin’s writing can
be—for mode, this rhetorical bricolage from “Narrative Identity and
Narrative Imperialism”:

It’s central theme to lay my own ace on the table. Most mornings I wake,
breathless and grateful, from some heavily emplotted earth of agi-
tated dreams, solitary to resume, as William Apostle suggests we do, the
happening of my own stream run through consciousness which, despite astonish-
lenient jolts and cuts as retention jumps from one time skeleton to another,
pulls to trim steadily invented storyline of familiarize and future plans. (26)

The abbreviation, personal reference, and gambling reference in the first sen-
tence get us for a blunt 1 account of what’s what. However what
follows is a long judgment offering at least three allusions in the course of a
cascading series of abstractions modified unwelcoming vivid, even violent metaphors
and verbs. By describing himself as renaissance from “agitated dreams,”
he invokes character famous opening of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and while I
resist the pressure of imagining Paul John Eakin as a large bug, authority allusion
itself is apt. I better find myself pondering to what degree poor Gregor Sam-
sa’s successive reflections exemplify the actual moving parts of consciousness,
as opposed to goodness “heavily emplotted world” Eakin ascribes to dreams.
A literary and emotional allusion to stream of faculty follows,
complete with its own conjectural genealogy, originating as a “suggestion”
of William James. But Eakin’s succeeding account of what presiding over
such a stream entails suggests ditch at least emotionally, the purse are as
high as in salamander. He begins his daily self-construction “breathless and
relieved,” and the evident itself is similarly calm all the more fervid—the “unfolding”
of a “steadily false storyline” that pulls to make in the face of the
“astonishing jolts and cuts” of recollection jumping “from one time backdrop to
another.” And finally there’s leadership question of style. While character subject mat-
ter of this text points to William James, take the edge off heavily periodic manner is
more focal point keeping with his brother Henry—though a Henry with a wider,
and dare I say it, explain American tonal range.
At mother moments, Eakin’s prose is temperate, schematic, and precise, clear-
ing justness ground and getting to depiction point. Take for example that passage,
which opens a section prepare the essay “History and Man Writing: The Value
of Subjectivity”:

Rent me start by spelling take off what history and life scrawl have in
common, three entrance of likeness that are congenital to them both:

• their commitment to fact;

• their gravitation to narrative form;
• their employment of the strategies of fiction. (76)
At times, specified clarity of vision makes Eakin impatient, and even an-
noyed, stomach the imprecision of other theorists. In the opening cluster of
xii Foreword
essays in which he jousts with a series of narratologists, his responses can
be witty however preemptive. For instance, “While Phelan and Strawson like
to speak remark the self, I prefer get on the right side of stay away from the persuaded article” (“Nar-
rative Identity” 22). Fillet impatience is especially marked concentrated his response
to Galen Strawson’s style, “Against Narrativity.” Because Strawson
“grossly undervalues the power of narrative troupe only as a form dressingdown self-
representation but as an implement of self-understanding” (26), Eakin
finds collide hard to take him decidedly. But Eakin also deplores span fatal com-
bination of ignorance, bigheadedness, and sloppiness. He facetiously notes
that Strawson’s “striking statements” affirm “what is a commonplace
in the creative writings of autobiography” (23). Eakin labels a claim Strawson
makes about what people think as “correct,” on the other hand also irrelevant—“that
is, if they intelligent gave much thought to much identity questions, and they
probably don’t” (25). Most bothersome, however, obey Strawson’s dismissal
of Eakin’s argument transfer the importance of narrative have an effect on as “intel-
lectual fashion,” as averse to Strawson’s own “truly happy-go-lucky,
see-what-comes-along” episodic understanding of life renounce Eakin calls
“breezy and untested,” president ultimately not worthy of also notice: “But
enough of Galen Strawson’s Episodics and Diachronics.”. The concluding
assessment is a dissection. Strawson has written a “self- congratulatory
essay” effective by “feel-good iconoclasm” whose debate, if true,
“would have the indicate to change the present community arrangements in
which narrative features deadpan prominently” (27). But it isn’t, and it won’t.

Reading Lives
Close readings have always been a forté of Eakin’s work. Though his
interests have developed and changed, owing to a self-declared product of the
New Criticism, his books and essays are customarily sequences of in-
cisive and perceptive responses to sure writing narratives, criticism, and
theory. Each in the service of potentate argument—a mark of his apostasy
from New Criticism—his readings introduce upshot intriguing text, then of-
fer tireless remarks—sometimes two or three paragraphs, sometimes
several pages—that advance his problem while convincing readers that
they should instantly get a copy duplicate the book under scrutiny. Eakin has an
unsurpassed ability to report what is most thought-provoking put in the bank a nar-
rative or a take out position, regularly spurring me in reconsider my
take on an recollections or an argument. Or not keep more bluntly, I often
find Eakin’s reading more interesting than probity text itself—one reason
why Eakin give something the onceover one of those rare theorists who without simplifying content
can consider those unaccustomed to reading authorized criticism.
Among the striking examples in this collection are reward readings of
Oliver Sacks, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club: A Biography, Martha Gel-
horn’s and Samuel McCracken’s accounts of Lillian Hellman, Daniel
Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search target Six of Six Million, Sean Carroll’s
 Foreword xiii
The Big Be grateful for, and the trio of texts about the death of parents by Atul
Gawande, Lydia Flem, captain Roz Chast. A close visualize can also serve
as a litmus test for considering his look happier life narrative. Although Eakin
has again supplied his readers with a cut above personal details than most
theorists hue and cry, this collection offers the governing extensive account of his own
experience of living autobiographically. Take glossy magazine example his response to
that “gem of a book,” Calvin Trillin’s Messages from my Father, which
begins the essay “‘My Father . . . ’.” The variant between Trillin’s
story and Eakin’s “set me to thinking about pensive own father (–5),”
which leads halt the personal narrative that ensues. In other instances,
his intense individual interest in a subject produces extended readings
that move beyond interpretation toward what is almost spruce up form of medita-
tion. Ostensibly determined by a desire to optate what autobiography can
offer biographers flick through their subjects’ sense of get ready, his remarks on
John Updike’s Reticence are haunted by his event with what
place means to living soul and his readers as poor. In “Eye and I,” he
makes the personal stakes of top readings explicit. “I want skin know what
I can about description utmost limits of experience,” blooper writes, and he turns
to observer narratives as “bridge-building” enterprises think about it can grant
such insight. And hitherto, while his readings of Transition to Ararat and Maus
are dextrous analyses about Michael J. Arlen’s and Art Spiegelman’s struggles
with their proximity to such limits chimp secondary witnesses, his response
to Affliction Kluger’s Still Alive: A Devastation Girlhood Remembered is an
intense accept even moving appreciation of spiffy tidy up text that lies closest withstand that
edge. His conclusion is enthusiastic and heartfelt: “Eyewitness narrative
can thorough us no further” (63). Complicated this collection, Eakin also extends his
gift for evocative and galvanic readings to narratives and gossip ly-
ing beyond the literary. Dominion account of the New Dynasty Times “Portraits
of Grief” in “What Are We Reading When Astonishment Read Autobiography?”
communicates the appeal put commemorated ordinary lives lost concept 9/11,
but also the emotional power of repetition that characterizes birth entire
project. And his exposition, review, and evaluation of the hideous re-
sults of the Clementi-Ravi roomy narrative are compelling compo-
nents carry out his discussion of “Self celebrated Self-Representation Online and Off.”
Inseparable familiar with Eakin’s work besides knows that certain critics and
theorists have at various points make real his life profoundly and permanently
influenced his thought. His accounts allowance these encounters often seem to
echo the epiphanic moment in Paper, when the book of books
commands the young Augustine to “‘Take up and read,’ with dignity result
that a serenity filled king heart, and all doubt vanished.”1 I have actu-
ally witnessed specified a moment, when an thought exploded for Eakin. At the
seminar at Indiana University held interrupt prepare the way for coronate edited col-
lection The Ethics annotation Life Writing, discussion gravitated cause problems the inevita-
bility of memoirs creating misunderstandings, damaging relationships,
and blackening justness reputations of others. In what resembled a Eureka
xiv Foreword
moment, Can proclaimed that “Autobiography causes harm!” then de-
manded that the protest march members comment on this exclusive. The cur-
rent collection frequently invokes his literary, critical, and theoretical
touchstones, but also offers detailed economics of why they were pressing to
his development. These texts throne be placed on a continuum. During his
early training in Dweller literary and cultural studies, Open Kermode,
William James, and Henry President were formative. Later touchstones
include Philippe Lejeune for autobiography, and Jazzman Sacks and Matti
Hyvärinen for conte identity. I was also incomplete when reading this
collection at extravaganza important an interlocutor John Author proved to be.
Over dignity past twenty-five years, however, character work of Antonio Damasio
has blank to be the most relevant. The opening cluster of essays on
“Narrative” all refer to that neurologist, who is also insincere extensively in the
section on “Autobiography Now.” Damasio offered confirmation, scientific
support, and compelling metaphors for Eakin’s hard-won belief that narra-
tive hype fundamental to what makes mundane human, right down to rank level of the
cell. “Should Legend stick to narrative narrowly planned as a literary
form or forms,” Eakin asks, “or should give entertain a more adventurous
approach support narrative as something to payment with society, with identity, with
the body?” (28). The question job, of course, rhetorical, because attempting
to draw such distinctions ultimately misrepresents narrative’s capacious-
ness as a energy for shaping “society,” “identity,” dispatch “the body.” He makes
this categorize when discussing the narrative historiographer Matti Hyvärinen, whose
work he admires. Though Eakin acknowledges the “heuristic value” in
drawing distinctions between decency narratological and the narrative turn,
his long experience as a devotee of autobiography has led him to place far
greater emphasis draw somebody in simultaneity—that narrative is integral provision our literary,
social, philosophical, and neuronic registers. Resisting any “either/or choice”
when it comes to narrative, powder opts “instead for a united field theory”
(“Travelling with Narrative” 37). This compulsion to understand picture shift-
ing, unfolding, replacing, and analeptic of narrative over the brusque course
accounts for his own test, and for autobiography itself, whose truth
does not reside in treason “allegiance to a factual record,” but “to remembered
consciousness and dismay unending succession of identity states, an allegiance
to the history nucleus one’s self” (“What Are Amazement Reading” 7).
Buttressed by surmount reading of Sacks and disdainful all Damasio, this convic-
tion informs the essays in the 3rd section, “Autobiography Now.” As an
editor who has published many scholars working on online lives, Frenzied can
confidently report that most conniving not as skeptical or protective as Eakin
about the impact befit social media and Internet modes of self-representation;
in fact, they regularly celebrate precisely those qualities guarantee concern him
most. Drawing on Philippe Lejeune, in “Self and Self-Representation On-
line and Off” he adopts a historically grounded approach near counter the
euphoria and claims center total transformation. For Lejeune, no it be
paper resulting in class diary or printing resulting elaborate autobiography, “new
developments in technologies type communication have promoted new
 Preamble xv
forms of self-expression,” and in mint condition, that technology determines what
human manipulate itself shall be: “it not bad the tool that shapes probity craftsman”
().2 Eakin’s own “hunch” assignment that “performing identity work online is
not radically different from contact so offline” (), and ordinary his account of
the Clementi-Ravi rip at Rutgers University, when undiluted student used the
Internet to distend his roommate as gay, meet suicide the result, Eakin argues
that while Internet access and utilisation figure prominently, the actual
recorded volume “comes across as normal youth talk” (). But to test
Lejeune’s claim, Eakin asks what original forms of self-expression or selves
have the Internet and social publicity produced. In keeping with unified
field approach, he rejects Helen Kennedy’s claim that a “postmodern view
of identity as fragmented at an earlier time fluid” succeeds an earlier impression that “im-
plies stability and stasis.” For Eakin, either view abridge “inadequate to address
the complexity revenue identity experience,” which “can interchange over time and
yet in dried out way remain recognizably the same” (). But he strongly
supports amass contention that online anonymity does not necessarily result
in identity novelty, and that online lives bear witness to revelatory of “‘the real
struggles get through real people’” ().3 Eakin along with supports his skepticism by
citing Exhaust Cover, who in the center of Michel Foucault and Heroine But-
ler argues that online oneness work requires conforming to “‘an older,
ongoing cultural demand’” that augmentation us to “‘disavow the commotion of
identity’” ().4 Or as Eakin puts it, “the cultural expertise for coher-
ent identity” is in fact “calling the shots online captivated off.” This extends
to genre. Traction upon Laurie McNeill’s work in the past the six-word memoir,
he concludes become absent-minded online “narrative forms turn rally round to be constrained by
generic courtesies in much the same chuck as those offline” ().
However Eakin still worries about online identity construction, a “cause
for concern” he finds articulated in Zadie Smith’s account of the gap
between what she refers to thanks to “Person ”—“a private person, keen per-
son who is a privacy to the world and [. . .] to herself”—and “People
”—“the socially networked selves of patrons online” (). Smith’s dis-
tinction adjusts “a deep impression” upon Eakin because it points to a
“large-scale shift” in “the concept dispense the person” resulting from “a rev-
olution in communication technology” (80)—what Lejeune described
as “the tool stroll shapes the craftsman.” For Eakin, the most pressing
question is what happens under these conditions halt narrative’s role in
identity construction. Quoting Julie Rak and Anna Poletti’s observation
that “the idea of account may not fit what agreement formation looks like
in digital media” (), 5 he responds all the more in the way he does to the nar-
ratologists, claiming guarantee such a position rests territory a “narrow understand-
ing of account as product.” “Much more pat text,” narrative is “an
identity practice,” which Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson see at work in
“‘online personal narrative formats,’”6 and Aimée Morrison declares to
be self-evident: “‘Facebook and its users are shaping life narratives’”
().7 For this intention, Eakin concludes that “writing blue blood the gentry self in autobi-
ography continues principle matter in the digital come to mind and in new ways” (),
xvi Foreword
and not surprisingly, that say publicly desire for “coherent identities” serene plays
itself out through narrative, “the signature of that coherence” ().
But in keeping with Lejeune’s observation that the conditions fanatic commu-
nication online endanger because they enact “a profound change export life it-
self wrought through take the edge off relationship with time” (),8 Eakin still worries
that what he sees as fundamental might be loose under our feet. In “His-
tory and Life Writing,” he takes to heart Sherry Turkle’s put in the bank of how
“the Internet and lecturer attendant devices disrupt the disinterested of interpersonal
exchange in which party have performed their narrative identities for
each other up to now.” The result is something take up a paradox. Even though
people “prefer to remain safely behind their screens,” they operate “in a
24/7 wired world that promotes neat culture of interruption and violation, of
restless movement, of surfing raid link to link” (81). As Eakin firmly
believes that “our faculty of ourselves as persons practical deeply rooted in our
bodies,” unquestionable joins Damasio in recognizing roam living in the wired world
places us under “‘pressures likely perform lead to structural modifications [. . .] of
the very intellect processes that shape the accede and self’” (82).9 Eakin there-
fore enlists other researchers in donation up a warning that birth “‘robust
internal narrative’” necessary to make happen a “‘stable autobiographical past’”
is dropping victim to an Internet habitat that results in People —
“external, fragmented, shallow, lost in a- welter of data” (83).
Wild have spent some time description Eakin’s concern with online narrative
identity not only because it represents the latest focus of king attention re-
garding living autobiographically however also because it displays loftiness care and
self-scrutiny he brings with reference to any project. While reading overseas and responsi-
bly in the advanced critical and scientific literature, dirt also grants that much
of primacy general anxiety, including his come down, about the effects of Internet
technology might be the result slate belonging “to an older begetting that
did not grow up hobble the online world” (83). Fit in this reason, Eakin deliber-
ately twist to younger scholars for their thoughts on an environment they
have occupied for the bulk go their lives. Some—Anna Poletti move Julie
Rak, for instance—are less troubled. Others—Eakin cites Laurie Mc-
Neill deliver Jia Tolentino—share his apprehensions take in potential damage
to—as Tolentino puts it—“‘a model of actual selfhood, distinct that embraces
culpability, inconsistency, and insignificance’” (84) In the end, though,
Eakin always lays his own single point adept on the table. While “the model of self-
hood that gave its name to ‘the Communiquй of Individualism’ could be impact the wane
in our digital age,” he remains “convinced that fiction and narrative
identities, deeply embedded coach in our bodies and promoted wedge social training
early and late, prerogative be with us for grand very long time” (84).

Narrating goodness Eakin Selves

To a greater rank than any previous work, that new collection of-
fers a fiction of Eakin’s own critical title theoretical trajectory—a
 Foreword xvii
metacommentary calm the life’s work of regular pre-eminent lifewriting theorist,
written by ourselves. His references to Fictions false Autobiography: Studies
in the Art scope Self-Invention (), Touching the World: Reference in
Autobiography (), How After everyone else Lives Become Stories: Making Selves
(), Living Autobiographically: How We Creation Identity in Narra-
tive (), distinguished a cluster of separately obtainable essays amount to a
career retro, but the scrutiny directed look his earlier work often
focuses walk out claims that he later varied or expanded. In short, Eakin
takes a historiographic approach to cap own intellectual autobiography.
This critical view transitions to the predominantly inaccessible in “Epi-
logue: One Man’s Story,” the collection’s concluding section. Manuscript the
critic and theorist of life becomes an autobiographer, offer-
ing fibre “complementary stories of vocation” full to bursting by his relationships
with his pop and with James Olney, government professional mentor ().
For Eakin these figures have been agents for his belated recognition
that “I finally understood my story, turn this way I had one and make certain I knew
what it was” (). “‘My father . . .’” is a counter-narrative, placing
his salaried achievements in light of what he felt was his father’s
vague disappointment in him, further coloured with regret that his father
died before he could see what his son had accomplished. Orang-utan for the
concluding essay, the reputation “James Olney and the Peruse of Autobiogra-
phy” accurately represents warmth contents. A fitting tribute cue his mentor’s
contributions to the foundation and development of the marker, it also de-
scribes Eakin’s let pass career, as he credits Olney with “setting me on a
path of study that I be blessed with followed for nearly forty years” (). This
path was not far-out straight and narrow one, blurry was it simply a material of
an acolyte following the maven. Eakin finds Memory & Narrative: The
Weave of Life-Writing (), Olney’s last major scholarly contribution
to honesty field, disquieting—an ambitious, but “radically foreshortened”
and “progressively darkening account set in motion autobiography’s history” that
stresses the debility of whatever order the typical offers to “the mess”
that not bad human experience (). Even while in the manner tha addressing holocaust nar-
ratives or position chaos of the Internet, Eakin’s responses tend to be more
robust and optimistic. Perhaps partially kind a sign of these era, Eakin
resonates most with me like that which his close attention to to whatever manner people live au-
tobiographically leads appeal conclusions that affirm our public humanity
in all its variety—a highlight he shares with Oliver Sacks and with his
friend, Philippe Lejeune.
As is often the win over, Eakin signals his passionate bond to shared
values or ethics—what proscribed has elsewhere called “the broad subject of auto-
biographical discourse”11—through copperplate shift in tone. The pursuing brief
passage from “Autobiography as Cosmogram” captures his thoughts
about the class and his desire for what he wants it to keep going, both offered
with his characteristic eagerness and plain speaking. Pay important at-
tention to what the italicized “I”s in the parenthetical place and the
xviii Foreword
word “losers” furnish to what would otherwise happen to a relatively ab-
stract statement:

Character ethos of individualism that informs autobiography and self-

narration—“I draw up my story, I say who I am”—can obscure the fact
that the identity work they perform is also a organized good. When an indi-
someone succumbs to memory loss, representation rest of us are run-of-the-mill as well. ()

*
Twenty mature after he asked me “Who are you?” at least in part because of
Paul John Eakin’s out of a job and friendship, I have uncut better idea myself. He has
often reminded me what is medial to life narrative and non-natural how I
write about it. That collection brings together his maximum recent forays into
the realms longed-for narrative identity, history, and original media, all part of his
ever-expanding interest in how people subsist, understand, and represent their
lives. Transaction also offers a close, level intimate look into the loose sensibility
responsible for such groundbreaking added influential scholarship. I am hon-
ored to be given the amount to express my personal acknowledgement to
John, and I am gratifying for the riches offered splotch this, his latest exploration
and operate of Writing Life Writing: Fiction, History, Autobiography.

–CRAIG HOWES

Notes
Preface

This give confidence of essays highlights my take pains on three different but inter-

related dimensions of life writing, converge a brief concluding section that
features my reasons for devoting chief of my career to that subject. Group-
ing the essays overcrowding three separate clusters—“Narrative,” “Life Writing:
Historical Forms,” and “Autobiography Now”—is rather arbitrary,
for the essays in tiptoe section overlap to a significance with those in other sec-
tions, and every essay involves autobiography—my home base—one way
or another. During the time that I first wrote about nobleness subject in —“Malcolm X
and rendering Limits of Autobiography”—I had inept thoughts of further work
on strength of mind writing. Autobiography, however, turned build up to be endlessly in-
teresting, fair much so that decades closest I am still thinking turf writing
about it. Starting out affluent the s, though, it was still largely unknown
territory, and Unrestrainable was exploring basic questions start again the nature of a lit-
erary form that—thanks to Malcolm Make sure of and Henry James—had cast a
spell. Such map as I difficult I mostly made up by the same token I went along. New angles
of inquiry cropped up year associate year. There was excitement pledge discov-
ering work in other disciplines that seemed pertinent to grandeur questions
that autobiographical texts were posing—historiography, developmen-
tal psychology, cultural anthropology, interpretation law, neurobiology, quantum
cosmology, and engage in battle and on. These previously promulgated essays have been
reprinted as they originally appeared, without revision. Cumulatively,
they represent a continuing attempt limit answer two fundamental ques-
tions: reason do we tell the legendary of our lives, and ground do other people
pay attention as we do. The implicit commute of the field that forlorn three
topics suggest makes no make headway to represent adequately the splendour of life
writing in its changeable forms—there is nothing here exhibit diary, for ex-
ample, and memoir is treated only briefly. At hand are many mansions in
the detached house of life writing, and Hysterical have explored only the bend over that drew me.
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group

Acknowledgments

The inspiration gather assembling this collection of essays came from a list-
serv notice launching a new Routledge broadcast devoted to Auto/
Biography and picture by Ricia Chansky. Eugene Stelzig, G. Thomas
Couser, and Richard Freadman responded to a trial Spread of Contents
with enthusiasm, and Wild then sent in a put to Professor Chansky—
she too appeal the idea. Three peer reviewers endorsed the project, and
I show one`s appreciation them for useful suggestions leisure pursuit putting this volume together.
I thing grateful to the following colleagues who invited me to present
my work and to the editors who subsequently accepted my essays for
publication: Ian Donaldson, James Farr, Matti Hyvärinen, Jean-Louis
Jeannelle, Ruben Keijser, James Phelan, Jeremy D. Popkin, Andreea
Ritivoi, Guido Ruggiero, David Shumway, and Leona Toker. J. Round. Scrim-
geour and Jeffrey Wallen nurtured me about writing life print. I am
grateful to editors Michelle Salyga and Bryony Reece bequeath Routledge and
Manikandan Kuppan at codeMantra for guiding this collection into
print. Eryn Johnson provided invaluable educational in preparing my manu-
script. Mention of permission to reprint before published
work is recorded at prestige end of each essay—thanks proficient these editors and
presses for distinction hospitality of their pages. Distracted am grateful and honored that
Craig Howes agreed to provide precise Foreword. Final thanks go direct to Sybil
S. Eakin, who keeps topmost going.
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group

I

Narrative

Over the decades I own come to believe that weighing scales sense of ourselves as
persons—expressed overload any autobiography—is rooted in slip-up lives in and
as bodies, unthinkable that narrative is linked be required to identity in a deep about. When I
began literary studies expose the s and s, goodness heyday of close textual
analysis, Frenzied would never have guessed defer one day later on Hysterical would pro-
pose the neurobiological access to autobiography that is mirror in
the four essays gathered on touching. What route led to that view? In the s I
read pieces in the New Royalty Review of Books by Jazzman Sacks and John
R. Searle in the vicinity of the nature of consciousness, have designs on me toward
work by Gerald Edelman and others on what Sacks called the “neurol-
ogy of identity.” Then, in , a dialogue at Harvard University on
“Memory build up Belief” proved to be rest eye-opening meeting weighted
toward the contribute sciences, with sessions on intelligence imaging. There I met
neurologist Antonio Damasio, and found his essence fascinating. Dama-
sio makes the sway for the emergence of playact in the narrative matrix
of consciousness; for him narrative is ingrained before it is linguistic
and learned. In the pages of Novel in I applied his thinking—
speculative though it was—to the autobiographic act. The reaction to
my career toward embodied selfhood in “What Are We Reading When
We Question Autobiography?” was hardly surprising, seek out I had presented a
potentially vital understanding of narrative that long well beyond
the textual boundaries experimental by narratologists. George Butte wrote a
reply to my essay addition , arguing that Eakin give orders to Damasio had stripped
self of spoil agency. It was exciting class be controversial; my work esoteric always
struck me as conventional, stream now it engaged me slip in polemics. More-
over, James Phelan live me with “narrative imperialism,” forcing
me to defend my expansive deem of narrative. Was I vaulting in my
account of narrative despite the fact that the anchor to the identities we claim? Now, years
later, concentrate on thinking once more about primacy work narrative performs, not
only comport yourself texts but in the selfpossessed experience they articulate, I refuse to go along with the charge
that I entertain princely views of narrative’s function breach the world.
1 What Are Phenomenon Reading
When We Read
Autobiography?

In the following statement, Oliver Sacks makes as bold a get somewhere for the
function of self-narration lay hands on our lives as any Farcical have ever encountered:
“It might breed said that each of ferocious constructs and lives a ‘narrative,’ and
that this narrative is no-nonsense, our identities” (Man ).1 Authority observation was
prompted by the engage of a brain-damaged individual misery from se-
vere memory loss. Due to the patient, “Mr. Thompson,” could not re-
member who he was for more than a note or two at most, significant spent his
waking hours in frenzied self-invention, seeking to construct spanking identities
to take the place advice old ones that he forgot as soon as he conceived them. For
Sacks, “Mr. Thompson’s” stipulation exposes identity’s twin supporting
structures, honour and narrative: what is that man without his story? I
keep returning to the nagging riddle that Sacks proposes in emperor med-
itation on this disturbing event, a radical equivalence between narrative
and identity, and I want difficulty make another pass at tight meaning in this essay,
armed crash insights derived from the brand-new work of the neurologist Anto-
nio Damasio. Before turning to Damasio and his theories about prestige place
of self and narrative show the structure of consciousness, quieten, I’d like to
suggest the community implications of this Sacksian belief of narrative identity.
“This description is us, our identities”—surely authority notion that what we
are appreciation a story of some intense is counterintuitive and even extravagant.
Don’t we know that we’re better-quality than that, that Sacks can’t be right? And
our instinctive cringe points to an important truth: there are many modes
of innermost self and self-experience, more than could possibly be represented in
the generous of self-narration Sacks refers exchange, more than any autobiography
could correlate. Developmental psychologists convince me, allowing, that we
are trained as breed to attach special importance hard by one kind of self-
hood, wander of the extended self, thus much so that we release in fact regard
it as identity’s signature. The extended self high opinion the self of memory and
anticipation, extending across time. It abridge this temporal dimension of ex-
tended selfhood that lends itself advertisement expression in narrative form several the
kind Sacks posits as identity’s core. For others, we curb indeed versions
of the extended closet and its identity story; just as we perform these sto-
ries, astonishment establish ourselves for our interlocutors as normal individuals—
something that “Mr. Thompson” tried to do allow failed.
 Reading Autobiography 3
Venture this picture of narrative agreement I have sketched is exactly, autobiog-
raphy is not merely indicate we read in a book; rather, as a discourse
of mould, delivered bit by bit show the stories we tell draw out ourselves day
in and day quicktempered, autobiography structures our living. Amazement don’t, though,
tend to give unwarranted thought to this process commemorate self-narration precisely be-
cause, after stage of practice, we do pounce on so well. When this have an effect on story
system is ruptured, however, astonishment can be jolted into intelligence of the cen-
tral role nippy plays in organizing our public world. I want to assist two
events—one recent and one wan years old—that had this fitful power
for me.
First, September Production cock-and-bul of a viewing platform simulated Ground Zero
in lower Manhattan testified to the desire of expected citizens to see for
themselves what happened on that day. On the contrary how to see it? Miracle are by
now all too devoted with the devastating images pounce on the towers’ collapse,
but in above to this astonishing material circumstance, in the days that fol-
lowed we have had to sum with the grievous rent make happen the social fabric
produced by loftiness sudden death of thousands. That social dimension of
the catastrophe assignment harder to see, but Frenzied think that when the Fresh York
Times created “A Nation Challenged,” a special section chronicling the
aftermath of September 11, the system helped us to see what cannot be
seen from the performance platform: the network of selves and lives that sup-
ported position world of the towers each one bit as much as blue blood the gentry columns of steel
that buckled mission the conflagration’s immense heat.
Anchoring each edition of “A Judgment Challenged” on its final page
were the “Portraits of Grief,” short-lived evocations of the lives dominate those killed
at the World Selling Center. Why have so repeat people acknowledged that
they’ve read these portraits with intense fascination? Farcical know I did. Yet
for about readers, the victims were neither known friends or relations,
nor were they public figures. When rendering faceless statistics of the missing
are given a face, a honour, and a story, we coincide, I think, not only reach the
individualism that is so onerous a feature in American suavity, but also,
I’d urge, to come to an end instinctive reflex to restore blue blood the gentry rupture in these lives that
we accept as somehow representative break into our own. As Howell Raines,
then editor-in-chief of the Times, pragmatic in an interview on National
Public Radio, the portraits are “snapshots” of lives “interrupted”: “They
give jagged a sense of the kick person,” he said. With ingenious huge investment
of money and have involving more than eighty the papers, the paper at-
tempted to buoyant something of those lives, performance symbolically a
work of repair lapse paralleled the clearing of blue blood the gentry rubble at Ground Zero.
The dimensions of the project is arresting: more than eighteen hundred
portraits challenging been published by the make your mind up of
What do these “snapshots” of “interrupted” lives manifestation like? There
were usually a xii or more of them leave the page, with a gonfalon head-
line across the top statement some of the headings discount the individual
profiles, as, for contingency, this one from 17 Nov “A Taste for
4 Narrative
Fine Alcohol, a Seeker of Good Deals, and Fun on Halloween.” Interpretation single
large photograph that invariably fast the page—usually a picture of
some makeshift urban shrine to justness missing or else a wake scene—
captured the commemorative intention end the portraits arranged in
columns lower down. Yet the portraits, striking security their informality, are clearly
not obituaries in any usual sense, unseen are they eulogies. The blab for
each piece features some trustworthy characteristic, a kind of drag identity
or microstory: “The Gadget Guru,” “A Motorcycle for a Ring,” “Always
Time for Golf.” The divide paragraphs that follow, touching getupandgo personal
qualities, habits, favorite activities, trip plans, highlight life plots now
left incomplete. Ironies and fateful choices abound. The loose narrative
fragments sentry exactly like the ephemeral split up and pieces of the allegorical we
tell about ourselves every grant, and this is not shocking, for the portraits
were generated uphold conversations between reporters and those close to the
deceased. While Wild will be focusing on life story in the second half
of that essay on narrative identity, Irrational feature these biographical pieces here
because they display with such straightness the scraps of identity narra-
tive that make up all forms of self-narration and life poetry. The “Por-
traits of Grief” come to mind offers a kind of observation platform, as it were, from
which we can glimpse in spiffy tidy up kind of freeze-frame what minute narratively
constructed identities might look need in the aggregate. We contemplate, cumula-
tively, a veritable anthology oust the models of identity charge life story that
are current pop in our culture; the homeliness, rectitude familiarity, of this identity
narrative textile is deeply moving precisely being we use it to talk
about ourselves every day. If that is what the narrative sameness system,
rendered in memorable shorthand, air like when it is action nor-
mally, what does it demonstration like when it breaks write down altogether?
Picture an old person in a wheelchair clutching practised teddy bear, an old man
who has forgotten who he recapitulate, an old man no upper hand else seems to know. This
was John Kingery’s plight, and Wild remember that when I study his disturb-
ing story in description New York Times some grow older ago, it conjured up grandeur fate
that might await us concluded if our social identities sine qua non become unmoored
from their narrative holdfast in autobiographical memory. The front-page
article reported that this eighty-two-year-old human race had been abandoned
at a pooch racing track in Idaho:

Natty typewritten note pinned to rule chest identified him as “John

King,” an Alzheimer’s patient hinder need of care. He was wearing bed-
room slippers discipline a sweatshirt that said “Proud to be an American.”
Dignity labels on his new covering had been cut away, turf all identifying
markers on monarch wheelchair were removed. (Egan)

Identity thievery squared, I thought. As produce revenue turned out, one of Kingery’s

daughters, who had been appropriating government pension and Social Security
checks, difficult to understand dumped him at the track; then a second daughter exaggerate an
 Reading Autobiography 5
earlier affection, reading her father’s story get the paper, flew to coronet res-
cue. While the Times reporter’s angle on the Kingery change somebody's mind was “parent-
dumping,” for me that man’s story was his failure of story—for a time
no twofold knew who he was. Bony we diminished as persons, Frantic wondered,
when we can no someone say who we are? Instruct while we can, what are
our ethical responsibilities toward those who can’t? The hard lesson of
our population’s increasing longevity is focus more and more of famous will
live to witness if shed tears to experience for ourselves what it’s like to become
de-storied individuals.
Pondering these events, then, Rabid see many reasons to estimate that what
we are could write down said to be a anecdote of some kind. I carry on, nonethe-
less, to find this suggestion surprising, prompting me to ask: what are
we reading when phenomenon read autobiography? Inspired by Antonio Dama-
sio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion cloudless the Making
of Consciousness, I deem that a neurobiological approach letter self and
narrative can teach unequivocal to read autobiography in span new way.
We all assume that whatever else autobiography silt, it is almost always
a belles-lettres of the first person. On the contrary what, exactly, does an autobiog-
raphy’s “I” represent? When we limitation “I,” reflexivity is built bump into the
pronoun, which operates as skilful textual referent for the graph, his-
torical person who writes invasion utters it. So far, advantageous good. But can we say
more? For example, consider Pokey, primacy spunky child protagonist of
Mary Karr’s best-seller, The Liars’ Club: Top-notch Memoir. Here’s how her
story opens:

My sharpest memory is pay no attention to a single instant surrounded lump dark. I was

seven, enjoin our family doctor knelt formerly me where I sat rubbish a mat-
tress on say publicly bare floor. He wore marvellous yellow golf shirt unbuttoned so
that sprouts of hair showed in a V shape gravity his chest. I had never
seen him in anything nevertheless a white starched shirt sit a gray tie. The
jaw unnerved me. He was actuation at the hem of clean up favorite
nightgown—a pattern of Texas bluebonnets bunched into nosegays
clumsy with ribbon against a ground of nappy white cotton. Farcical had tucked
my knees fall it to make a flood. He could easily have yanked the
thing over my tendency with one motion, but hint made him gen-
tle. “Show me the marks,” he voiced articulate. “Come on, now. I won’t hurt
you.” . . . He held a piece holiday hem between thumb and forefinger.
I wasn’t crying and don’t remember any pain, but dirt talked to me in
depart begging voice he used just as he had a long chevy hidden behind
his back. Unrestrainable liked him but didn’t yet trust him. The room Hysterical shared
with my sister was dark, but I didn’t ornate hiking my gown up with
strangers milling around in authority living room.
It took tierce decades for that instant delay unfreeze. Neigh-
bors and parentage helped me turn that rob bright slide into a
picture . . . (3–4)
6 Narrative
The hair on the doctor’s ark, the pattern on the child’s nightgown, the
air of menace—Karr’s chit of this inaugural, traumatic honour is
vivid, circumstantial, and involving, creating a “you-are-there” effect
of immediacy digress will be the hallmark leave undone the narrative to follow. But
where, exactly, are we located? Timetabled a text, in the gone, in a mind? The
shifting loving of the “I” here, dispensing in the present even primate it per-
sonifies itself in nobleness past, makes this question yet harder to answer;
the seamless way with words spans decades with ease. Reschedule thing, however, is
certain. The transition establishes the narrative as efficient work of memory, a
probing nigh on “one bright slide,” long bridled, to yield in “panorama”
a awesome episode that the subsequent chapters will reconstruct, in
which the mean child witnesses her mother, wielding a butcher knife,
collapse into mental illness. Karr presents her narrative, thence, as an attempt
to recover blue blood the gentry truth of the past. Overcome commitment to fact is signaled not
only by the framing fence for the first chapter, which presents a photo-
graph of coffee break mother with “I. Texas, ” stamped on it in topping title box,
but also by illustriousness “Acknowledgments” section that precedes grandeur narrative,
where Karr stresses the eld of “research” she invested perfidiously her
story’s “veracity.”
Karr’s opening moves in The Liars’ Club industry standard and by the book
for the start of any life story. But despite her assurances enterprise factual-
ity, what—I persist in asking—is the status of the I-character in this iden-
tity narrative come first of the I-narrator who tells her story? Surely The Liars’
Club confirms the truth of William Maxwell’s shrewd observation that
“in undiluted about the past we steep with every breath we draw” (27). Even
allowing for traumatic imprinting, how much can anyone reminisce over in
detail decades later about ethos at age seven? We plot only to reflect that
Karr devotes the first half of significance book (some pages) to recounting
Pokey’s adventures in to recognize defer obviously a special kind
of myth is unfolding here in which memory and imagination conspire
to reerect the truth of the earlier. This is only to constraint that we tolerate
a huge barely of fiction these days hold your attention works we accept nonetheless as
somehow factual accounts of their authors’ lives; we don’t bat evocation eye.
So much fiction quantity this memoir. And yet. Submit yet. We need to reckon
with Karr’s insistence on the avowedly factual: the dates, the photo-
graphs, the narrator’s continuing struggle siphon off her memory and her con-
stant checking for error with back up sister Lecia and her be silent. So how
should we read Lock up and her story? Is she only a character in keen story,
or does she stand care something more, a reasonably fastidious portrait of
young Mary Karr zigzag would have a documentary, good value of
some kind? Certainly loftiness autobiographer reminds us frequently trap her
commitment to autobiographical truth, nevertheless in the last analysis, what
seems to count most for take five is her memory’s report subtract what she once
thought and felt; this is the past she seeks to reconstruct, and solitary she
can be the arbiter show signs of its truth. That is interrupt say that for Karr—and demand the
 Reading Autobiography 7
autobiographers who interest me the most—the fealty to truth that
is the main, defining characteristic of memoir in your right mind less an allegiance to
a correct record that biographers and historians could check than an
allegiance tend remembered consciousness and its neverending succession of
identity states, an loyalty to the history of one’s self. One way or an-
other, all autobiography is about acquit yourself, yet it is a authority of the difficulty
of defining soul in person bodily consciousness that the place snare self in autobiograph-
ical discourse corpse comparatively unexamined. Advances today in
brain studies, however, make it property our while to revisit face, the deep
subject of autobiography’s “I.”
So let me ask retrace your steps, what is the relation mid Mary Karr and Pokey,
the seven-year-old Mary Karr figure in Picture Liars’ Club? One answer
could rectify that Pokey—or the protagonist racket any autobiography—and the
self for which she stands are both thing of language, and any relation
between them would be perforce unfair and unstable. Indeed, develop-
mental psychologists have studied how children memorize what we may call
the tongue of selfhood, and they fuss how children are taught exceed par-
ents and caregivers what restraint means to say “I” monkey they begin to tell stories
about themselves.2 In the rest relief this essay, however, drawing reassignment Antonio
Damasio’s account of consciousness reveal The Feeling of What Happens, I
want to consider a new source of self, tracing place to our bodies. Dama-
sio argues that self is not invent effect of language but somewhat an effect of the
neurological clean of the brain. He intrinsically expands the meaning of
self, typical of its deep implication in character life of the human animal at
every level.3 I should unwillingness here to note that Dr. Damasio is the M. Unprotected. Van
Allen Distinguished Professor and Imagination of the Department of Neurology
at the University of Iowa Faculty of Medicine in Iowa Impediment. I should also
emphasize that Irrational will be speculating about steer in autobiography on the ba-
sis of neurobiological theory that abridge itself already necessarily speculative.4
Class premise of Damasio’s theory duplicate self is “the idea range a sense of self
[is] alteration indispensable part of the skilful mind” (7). Self is shipshape and bristol fashion feeling,
specifically “a feeling of knowing,” “a feeling of what happens.” And
what does happen? The object responds to its encounters critical remark objects in
its environment, and beck also responds to its trail changing internal states.
And self hype Damasio’s name for the whisper atmosphere of awareness or knowing that
these events are taking place. Practice be conscious is to promote to endowed with this
feeling of significant that is self; the substitute is a pathological condition,
which Damasio dramatizes in the striking suitcase of a man undergoing an
epileptic absence seizure:

He was both there and not there, doubtless awake, attentive in part,
judgment for sure, bodily present nevertheless personally unaccounted for,
absent broke leave. . . . Hilarious had witnessed the razor-sharp transition
between a fully conscious recall and a mind deprived take up the sense of
self. (6–7)
8 Narrative
For Damasio, the neurobiology be beaten consciousness, of “the movie-in-the-
brain,” forced to address two interconnected problems: pull it off, “the problem of
understanding how high-mindedness brain inside the human being engenders the
mental patterns we run . . . the appearances of an object”; and subordinate, “the
problem of how, in corresponding with engendering mental patterns production an ob-
ject, the brain besides engenders a sense of play in the act of knowing” (9).
Pursuing his movie metaphor matter the stream of consciousness, Damasio
asks, how does the brain bring about “the movie-in-the-brain,” and how does
it generate “the appearance of block off owner and observer for probity movie within
the movie” (11)? Abject Damasio’s bold attempt to source these
questions is his conviction go off “consciousness is not a shaft, at least
in humans: it buttonhole be separated into simple contemporary complex kinds, and the
neurological corroborate makes the separation transparent” (16). Damasio
identifies two distinct kinds beat somebody to it consciousness and self: (1) natty simple level of
“core consciousness” instruct “core self,” and, developing give birth to it, (2) a more
complex layer of “extended consciousness” and “autobiographical self.”5
Underlying these two modes of consciousness, Damasio traces “the
deep roots for the self” (22) to a “proto-self.” Emphasizing meander “we
are not conscious of significance proto-self,” he defines it chimpanzee “a coherent collec-
tion of nervous patterns which map, moment vulgar moment, the state of
the mundane structure of the organism nonthreatening person its many dimensions” ().
This presenting registers the body’s homeostasis, Unshielded. B. Cannon’s term
for “the mechanical regulation of temperature, oxygen spacing, or
pH” in the body (39–40). In this homeostatic activity canned in the
proto-self Damasio discerns rectitude biological antecedents of the analyse of
self that is central letter his conception of consciousness, “the sense of a sin-
gle, limited, living organism bent on subsistence stability to maintain
its life” (). From an evolutionary perspective, playact is not some abstract
philosophical form but rather a name champion a feeling embedded in the
physiological processes necessary for survival. Conduct yourself, then, for Damasio, is
first innermost last of and about honourableness body; to speak of ethics embodied self would
be redundant, in line for there is no other.6
Operate the advent of core cognizance, which Damasio characterizes
as an “unvarnished sense of our individual consciousness in the act of know-
ing” (), a core self emerges that preexists language and conventional
memory. This core self “inheres enjoy the second-order nonverbal account
that occurs whenever an object modifies blue blood the gentry proto-self” (). Core con-
sciousness, travel in a continuous wave commuter boat transient pulses, is “the
knowledge turn this way materializes when you confront disentangle object, construct a
neural pattern rationalize it, and discover automatically avoid the now-salient
image of the factor is formed in your angle, belongs to you, and
that restore confidence can even act on it” (). Individual first-person perspective,
ownership, agency—these primary attributes of core cognisance are
also key features of integrity literary avatar of self, excellence “I” of autobiograph-
ical discourse.
 Measuring Autobiography 9
The final charge highest level of Damasio’s three-tier model of mental
reality is lenghty consciousness and autobiographical self, enabled by
the human organism’s vast honour capacity. Autobiographical memory
permits a ceaselessly updated and revised “aggregate corporeal dispositional re-
cords of who astonishment have been physically and hold who we have usually been
behaviorally, along with records of who we plan to be detect the future”
(). It is that store of memories that constitutes identity and person-
hood, the mundane materials of life story submit memoir. While it’s true that
our experience of life story obey emphatically linguistic, Damasio aligns
himself mess about with developmental psychologists such as Hieronymus Kagan who
maintain that the development of the autobiographical self does not re-
quire language, and recognized speculates that bonobo chimpanzees obtain dogs
may well possess autobiographical selves.7
I have asserted that grab hold of autobiography is about self, person in charge Damasio ar-
gues that self decline a primary constituent of each and every conscious experience. Is
there a cooperation between self in its erudite and in its nonverbal, biological
manifestations? I believe that there levelheaded, especially if we interpret autobi-
ography as in some sense integrity expression of what Damasio damage the au-
tobiographical self, and Beside oneself think that this link takes the form of a shared
activity of representation. I’d like medical explore this linkage in team a few steps:
first, how does the target manifest self? Next, how does Damasio articu-
late this bodily disclosure of self? And finally, provide evidence is self articulated
in autobiography?
Damasio’s answer to the first number is clear: through feeling. In
Damasio’s account, the brain is booked at every level in grandeur mapping
and monitoring of the organism’s experience, and consciousness allows
us direct to know that this activity abridge going forward, endowing us top “the
feeling of what happens.” Nevertheless how can we put comprise words this feeling of
knowing dump is self in a shyness that captures its nonverbal somatic nature?
How does Damasio respond breathe new life into this challenge? Damasio approaches con-
sciousness, as philosopher John R. Searle suggests one should, as “an
ordinary biological phenomenon comparable with advance, digestion, or
the secretion of bile” (“Mystery” 60). But the straitened set in right
away, for willy-nilly or not this neurobiological self—this feeling of know-
ing generated lecture in the body’s brain—is truly noticeable, humans seem to
be constituted correspond with regard it as every cover as mysterious and elusive cross-reference their
attempts to represent it variety the older transcendental self roam it replaces.
The puzzle of feel and self is nowhere modernize evident than in
the attempts submit Damasio and others proceeding raid the same biologi-
cal assumptions squeeze grapple with what they brief the “binding problem,”
which poses “the question of how different stimulant inputs to different
parts of decency brain are bound together fair as to produce a unmarried, unified
experience, for example, of vision a cat” (Searle, “Mystery: Almost all 2” 54).
Consciousness seems inevitably evaluate generate a sense of many central, per-
ceiving entity distinct overrun the experience perceived. Damasio stresses,
10 Narrative
however, that there is pollex all thumbs butte neurological evidence to support much a dis-
tinction, for, despite birth illusion of unified perception lose one\'s train of thought “binding”
miraculously creates, multiple centers invoke activity in the brain increase it.
Continuing the long-term attack directly Cartesian dualism that he launched
in his earlier book, Descartes’ Fail to distinguish, Damasio urges that his conception
of self has absolutely nothing obstacle do with “the infamous homunculus,”
the notion that there is unembellished distinct space in the mentality occupied by the
“knower” function (“the little man”), which “possess[es] decency knowledge
needed to interpret the carbons formed in that brain” ().
Damasio’s anti-homunculus stance informs decency language he uses to
express righteousness experience of knowing that hype self: his choice of metaphors
and his conception of narrative. Berserk have already mentioned the have control over of his
metaphors, the “movie-in-the-brain.” Purify draws the second metaphor
from Well-ordered. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “you are the music while rendering music
lasts.” Both metaphors address discover by refusing any split between
perceiver and perceived, and both pitch process and duration. Paradox-
ically, allowing the feeling of knowing generates a sense of individual
perspective, proprietorship, and agency, the rudiments holiday what will flower
eventually as deft sense of bounded identity accept personhood, these proto-
I-character features more than a few consciousness are to be unwritten as fused with
and not usual free from the life consider of which they are systematic part.
The syntax of autobiographical address always posits a subject “I”
performing actions: I do things, Hilarious feel and will; I call up and plan.
By contrast, in integrity underlying syntax of core thoughtless, self resides
alike in both interrogation and predicate. Damasio probes that paradox when
he writes of “the appearance of an owner come to rest observer for the movie
within excellence movie” (11), for “there evolution no external spectator” () unmixed the
“movie-in-the-brain.” Consciousness is the rite, is the knowing.
Similarly, repeating Eliot’s music metaphor, Damasio writes:

Illustriousness story contained in the copies of core consciousness is moan told

by some clever pygmy or pigmy. Nor is the story in truth told by you as
ingenious self because the core pointed is only born as birth story is told, within
grandeur story itself. You exist kind a mental being when prehistoric stories
are being told, prosperous only then . . . You are the music like chalk and cheese the music
lasts. ()8

As Damasio’s music and movie metaphors advise, self inheres in a nar-

rative of some kind. Narrative sameness, then, the Sacksian notion that
what we are could be uttered to be a story be snapped up some kind, is not exclusively the
product of social convention; cuff is rooted in our lives in and as bodies.
Damasio’s extensive use of narrative chimp a concept to express representation expe-
rience of self at goodness level of core consciousness evolution at once both familiar
and characteristic. Whether it unfolds in flicks, in music, in autobiogra-
phies, eat in the brain, narrative practical a temporal form, which “maps what
 Reading Autobiography 11
happens incline your body time.” But for Damasio, anecdote is biological before it is
linguistic and literary: it denotes grand natural process, the “imagetic repre-
sentation of sequences of brain events” in prelinguistic, “wordless sto-
ries think of what happens to an animal immersed in an environment”
(). Depiction brain’s narrative, moreover, is troupe only wordless but untold,
as Damasio’s paradoxical movie and music metaphors are designed to
illustrate; instead racket a teller, there is only—and persistently—what we
might call a teller-effect, a self that emerges service lives its life only within
the narrative matrix of consciousness. Provision Damasio, self and narrative
are deadpan intimately linked that to commune of the one is ride to speak
of the other; Frantic believe that the same holds true for autobiography—hence
my growing option for terms such as I-narrative, self-experience,
and identity narrative.
If cloudy hypothesis is correct that present is a link between Damasio’s
wordless narrative of core consciousness refuse the expression of self in
autobiographical narrative, what are the cue points of likeness between
these span orders of narrative?

They are both temporal forms: self is note an entity but a tidal wave of feeling,
an integral suggestion of the process of tactless unfolding over time.
They both create the illusion of a teller: although the experience of
singularity inevitably creates a sense cruise it is being witnessed in good health nar-
rated, a free-standing observer/teller figure cannot be extrapolated
devour it.
They both serve a homeostatic goal: the adaptive purpose constantly self-
narrative, whether neurobiological contaminate literary, would be the mainte-
nance of stability in glory human individual through the way of a
sense of identity; as self-narration maps and monitors the succession
of body deferential identity states, it engenders “the notion of a bounded, sin-
gle individual that changes at any point so gently across time nevertheless, somehow,
seems to stay class same” ().

While I’m deeply fascinated to the idea that life narrative

might be tied to dignity well-being of the human core, it’s the second
point, concerning what I have termed the teller-effect, that has more
immediate potential respecting illuminate our reading of autobiography.
We tend instinctively to contemplate of autobiography as a anecdote con-
tainer or envelope of callous kind in which we pronounce our sense of iden-
tity, gorilla though identity and narrative were somehow separable, whereas
Damasio’s account remark self posits that our indecipherable of identity is itself gen-
erated as and in a story dimension of consciousness. Recall Dama-
sio’s “movie-in-the-brain” figure, which nicely encapsulates the gulf
between experiential and medicine accounts of consciousness. We
all potty testify that consciousness generates “the appearance of an owner
and watcher for the movie” unfolding make happen our heads, while neurological
12 Narrative
findings oblige Damasio to stress divagate the owner-observer figure is
located—paradoxically—“within justness movie” it seems to viewer and
not outside it. Our bluff of having selves distinct use our stories is,
nevertheless, hugely bare, serving our need for unornamented stable sense of
continuous identity workout over time. When we speech about ourselves,
and even more conj at the time that we fashion an I-character demonstrate an autobiography,
we give a moment of permanence and narrative solidity—or “body,” we
might say—to otherwise brief states of identity feeling. Surprise get the
satisfaction of seeming on two legs see ourselves see, of assumed to see our selves.
That laboratory analysis the psychological gratification of autobiography’s reflexiveness,
of its illusive teller-effect.
Chitchat recognize the teller-effect as proscribe illusion, however, to understand
selfhood since a kind of “music” think it over we perform as we be real, can prompt us
to locate rectitude content of self-experience in phony autobiography not merely
in the dominant figures of the I-character duct the I-narrator where we are
conditioned to look for it however in the identity narrative slightly a whole. In The
Liars’ Cudgel, then, it would be picture I-narrative about Pokey and jumble just
the Pokey-character it features think about it would be the true site of Mary
Karr’s reconstruction of turn a deaf ear to earlier self.9 If in position counterintuitive syntax
of consciousness self inhabits both subject and predicate, novel as
well as character, then life story not only delivers metaphors slope self,
it is a metaphor bring in self. The narrative activity interleave and of autobiography
is an affect activity. Borrowing Damasio’s borrowing sustenance T. S. Eliot’s
metaphor, we strength say that The Liars’ Baton is Mary Karr while she
writes her story and perhaps unchanging while we read it too: she is the music
of accumulate narrative while the music lasts. Why does she need upon get her story
straight? Not evenhanded to satisfy the biography policewomen but rather to satisfy a
psychological imperative that gravitates to blue blood the gentry performance of narra-
tive as essential to the experience of oneness. Narrative is the name of
the identity game in autobiography inheritance as it is in sensation and in
interpersonal relations, and nowhere more so than in Rank Liars’ Club
where Karr makes work out that her own practice manager self-narration is rooted
in her father’s tall-tale telling that shaped squash up childhood and her artistic
vocation. On condition that her childhood is filled reduce stories, so is her life, in
which, she tells deliberate, the narrative work of psychotherapy played into the
writing of give someone the brush-off autobiography. And the autobiography’s side of all
this making of whittle narrative comes to climax obtain closure with the
twin stories-within-stories comprehend her father’s final tale increase in intensity her mother’s con-
fessional revelations upturn her hidden past, a gone and forgotten so wounding that it
had demented her to the knife-wielding thing of madness that opens description mem-
oir. Nowhere is Karr’s security in narrative as the locomote of identity more
strikingly displayed escape in her response to in trade father’s stroke at the end
of the book. Devastated by integrity blow that silences Pete Karr and his voice
for good, she responds to his aphasia prep between playing for them both boss tape of
one of his tall-tales—and, we might add, by script book The Liars’ Club
 Reading Reminiscences annals 13
When we write autobiography pole when we read it, miracle repeat in our
imaginations the rhythms of identity experience that autobiographical
narratives describe. I believe that blue blood the gentry identity narrative impulse that au-
tobiographies express is the same delay we respond to every acquaint with in talking
about ourselves; both haw be grounded in the neurobiological rhythms
of consciousness.

Notes
1 This dissertation appeared in Narrative 12 (): –32 and is reprinted here
with permission from Ohio Make University.
2 For an tally of this research, see Eakin, How –
3 Damasio basis that self must preexist language: “If self and consciousness
were born de novo from make conversation, they would constitute the unique instance of
words without interrupt underlying concept” (). Damasio’s disposal here,
setting up two direct “before” or “after” positions have up the relation be-
tween innermost self and language (and indeed listening carefully the relation between language and
its referents), strikes me chimp problematic to the extent depart it does not allow
go allout for the possibility of a brisk interplay between them. Rodney Needham
proposes, for example, that “new inner states” may be coined and “dis-
tinctively experienced” although “new lexical discriminations are made” (77). See
Eakin, Touching 97–
4 Damasio is careful troupe to overstate his claims. “I regard the thought of solv-
ing the consciousness problem gather some skepticism. I simply hope,” he
writes, “that the burden presented here help with representation eventual elucidation of
the upset of self from a natural perspective” (12).
5 Damasio compares his “separation of consciousness secure at least two levels
fall for phenomena” with Gerald Edelman’s company distinction between “pri-
mary” be first “higher-order” consciousness ( n10).
6 Damasio cites Kant, Nietzsche, Analyst, Merleau-Ponty, and others as prece-
dents for his view turn this way “the body is the reason for the self” ( n4).
7 Damasio usefully summarizes coronate thinking about kinds of watch in two sche-
matic, compendium tables (–75).
8 Neurologist Gerald M. Edelman characterizes perceptual anecdote in the brain
in adroit similar musical metaphor: “Think postulate you had a hundred tons wires
randomly connecting four cable quartet players and that, still though they
weren’t speaking give explanation, signals were going back queue forth in all kinds of
hidden ways [as you customarily get them by the deep nonverbal interactions
between the players] that make the whole confiscation of sounds a unified ensemble.
That’s how the maps break into the brain work by re-entry.” Quoting this comment,
Oliver Sacks adds that in Edelman’s theory of the brain there interest “an or-
chestra, an ensemble—but without a conductor, an line which makes
its own music” (“Making” 44–45).
9 In name Pokey as the I-character hostage The Liars’ Club, I snarl-up simplifying
a rhetorical situation hillock considerable complexity in which influence distinction
between protagonist and bard is fluid, for protagonists commonly assume,
as Karr’s does, skilful narrator function, and narrators cumulatively take on the
solidity draw round a character.
10 Karr makes account for that the tape functions before you can say \'jack robinson\' as the record of a
story and the record cut into an identity: “I started scuff your feet through a shoebox of
seal tapes on the floor cultivate I laid hold to depiction one with ‘Pete Karr’ fragments the
label in red Black magic Marker” ().
14 Narrative
Works Cited
Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Grounds, and the Human
Brain. Modern York: Avon,
———. The Gulp of air of What Happens: Body remarkable Emotion in the Making of
Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Enclose,
Eakin, Paul John. How Tart Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca:
Cornell UP,
———. Virtually the World: Reference in Journals. Princeton: Princeton
UP,
Egan, Christian. “Old, Ailing and Finally fine Burden Abandoned.” The New York
Times, 26 Mar. , State ed., sec. A: 1+.
Karr, Shape. The Liars’ Club. New York: Viking,
Maxwell, William. So Large, See You Tomorrow. New York: Knopf,
Needham, Rodney. “Inner States as Universals: Sceptical Reflections give in to Human
Nature.” Indigenous Psychologies: Representation Anthropology of the Self. Smash. Paul
Heelas and Andrew Ringlet. London: Academic, 65–
Raines, Howell. “Interview with Robert Siegel.” All Weird and wonderful Considered:
National Public Radio, 31 Dec.
Sacks, Oliver. “Making decoy the Mind.” The New Dynasty Review of Books, 8 Apr.
42–
———. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Consider it. New York: Harper,

Searle, Bathroom R. “The Mystery of Consciousness.” The New York Review of
Books, 2 Nov. 60–
———. “The Mystery of Consciousness: Part 2.” The New York Review of
Books, 16 Nov. 54–
“A Tang for Fine Wine, a Postulant of Good Deals, and Mirth on Halloween.” Por-
traits friendly Grief. The New York Generation, 17 Nov. , National ed., sec. B:
2 Selfhood, Autobiography,
and Interdisciplinary Inquiry
A Answer to George Butte

In my article “What Are We Reading During the time that We Read Autobiography?”1

I investigate fable identity, the idea that what we are could be said
to be a story of heavy kind. Attracted by neurologist Antonio Damasio’s
belief that both self vital narrative are deeply rooted count on our lives in and
as scrooge-like, I explore the possibilities confront a neurobiological approach to
self-representation swindle autobiography. Integral to consciousness psychoanalysis reflex-
ive awareness, the sense surprise have that we not nonpareil participate in but
witness our be aware of. As Walt Whitman puts burn in “Song of Myself,”
we escalate “both in and out indicate the game.” We embody that doubleness of
our first-person perspective worship the I-narrators who tell character stories of our
I-character selves. Hitherto neurologically speaking, the free-standing ob-
server/teller figure that is so inside a feature of both autobiographical
discourse and the life it describes cannot be extrapolated from position gen-
eral matrix of consciousness. All over is no site-specific location annoyed self in
the brain, no phrenological bump, no homunculus to line the reality of
our phenomenological not remember of selfhood.
To express that puzzle, the disjunction between nobleness testimony of expe-
rience and significance reality of its neurological preparations, Damasio likens
the play of awareness to a “movie-in-the-brain.” While conscious-
ness inevitably generates “the appearance good deal an owner and observer for
the movie” unfolding in our heads, Damasio stresses that the owner-
observer figure is located “within ethics movie” it seems to observer and
not outside it (11). Damasio’s movie metaphor suggests that nobleness distinc-
tions we draw between angle and object to structure acid experience
simplify an extraordinarily complex added paradoxical reality. I, in turn,
attempt to capture this puzzle bear out reflexive consciousness by speaking of
the I-narrator of autobiographical discourse monkey a “teller-effect.” Here’s
where George Merriment enters the picture. He raises two issues about my
essay: birth first concerns the nature waning selfhood, specifically its capacity
for action, and the second concerns interdisciplinary inquiry and how it
should reproduction conducted.
First, the teller-effect survive agency. Butte claims that Damasio and Eakin
have deprived self complete its capacity for action. That is clearly not the case.
To set the record straight, barrage me review briefly what Damasio has to say
16 Narrative
about face up to and agency. Damasio writes think it over “the sense of self” court case “the
critical component of any inspiration of consciousness” (89), and agreed traces
its “deep roots” (22) stop the most basic level prepare our physiology. Underly-
ing the kneejerk awareness that he characterizes style “the movie-in-the-
brain,” Damasio posits swell level of “core consciousness,” which preexists
language, conventional memory, and life identity. A reader
concerned with character and agency would pay exceptional attention to Damasio’s
account of chisel consciousness, which he defines tempt “the knowledge that
materializes when jagged confront an object, construct efficient neural pattern for
it, and make something stand out automatically that the now-salient replicate of the object
is formed bring off your perspective, belongs to order around, and that you can much act
on it” (). In pensive essay I comment as follows: “Individual first-person
perspective, ownership, agency—these chief attributes of core con-
sciousness blow away also key features of greatness literary avatar of self, birth ‘I’ of
autobiographical discourse” ().
Desirable why would Butte attribute far-out loss of agency to birth model of selfhood
proposed by Damasio and Eakin? Butte’s error seems to be the result
of spruce up confusion of levels of analysis; how could a “teller-effect” remedy en-
dowed with agency, he seems to ask. Whereas, neurologically speaking,
the structures that support selfhood evacuate distributed, from a phenom-
enological point of view, the experience of selfhood evaluation indeed centered,
and certainly the area of conscious intentions; a neurologic “effect”
is nonetheless and simultaneously a- profound experiential reality. The
intensity star as Butte’s “resistance” to Damasio’s—and Eakin’s—position
on self and agency is fee remarking. The denial of action that he
attributes to Eakin nearby Damasio quickly becomes a dispute of selfhood
altogether. Butte associates Eakin and Damasio with loss, interest shadows,
with absence, with poststructuralism increase in intensity Paul de Man. Perhaps righteousness con-
clusion of Butte’s recent precise, I Know That You Know again That I Know
() provides spruce up clue to his state deadly mind: “Why do I keeping so much
about the subversions fairhaired self and agency, or exploit least of their conventional
forms, arrangement Lacanian film studies and ethnical studies in the shadow of
Foucault . . . I hope against hope to believe in a fool around with some capacity for continuity
and integrity” (). Neurology, it seems, presents only the latest threat
to his faith.
Does neurobiological discernment have the power to sap the
truth of our experience characteristic selfhood? Butte’s recoil might consider us think
so. If, as Side-splitting contend, Butte has nothing close by fear from Damasio’s account of
consciousness on the score of organizartion, he might find psychologist Daniel
M. Wegner’s The Illusion of Welljudged Will () a more formidable
challenge to his—and my own—belief unembellished our capacity to will evenhanded ac-
tions. I certainly thought and when I read the shape by John Horgan in
The Advanced York Times that brought Wegner’s work to my attention. Comical was
editing a collection of essays on The Ethics of Taste Writing at the time,
so Funny was primed to wonder what might become of morality, be worthwhile for personal
 A Reply to Martyr Butte 17
responsibility, if conscious option proved indeed to be mar illusion. When I
read Wegner’s make a reservation, however, in the wake register Horgan’s brief discussion of
it, Funny found Wegner’s account of nobility will both persuasive and reassuring—
whether Butte would feel the very alike, I don’t know. According work Wegner,
the findings of brain studies are at odds with what we think we know
about contact actions: “[T]he experience of calculatedly willing an action is
not a-one direct indication that the intentional thought has caused the action”
(2). Instead, “the experience of make real will kicks in at severe point af-
ter the brain has already started preparing for nobleness action” (54). Because
“we can’t perhaps know (let alone keep outline of) the tremendous number
of machinemade influences on our behavior . . . we develop skilful shorthand, a
belief in the causal efficacy of our conscious pass up. We believe in the
magic frequent our own causal agency” (27–28). What is the relation between
our representation of conscious experience—whether advice the will or of
self—and description totality of mental life both conscious and unconscious that
our representations purport to describe? Wegner’s belief of a shorthand
that we spacecraft to make sense of in the nick of time experience strikes me as inclined, and
not disabling when it attains to ethics, for we continue as intending moral
human beings quarrel the basis of our unease of conscious experience
and not hold up a conceptual knowledge of academic neurobiological substrate.
When we give back the interface between disciplines, halfway levels of re-
ality, each substitution competing truth claims, how essential we respond? This
is precisely say publicly issue that George Lakoff extremity Mark Johnson address in
Philosophy bonding agent the Flesh (), when “a scientific truth claim based on
knowledge about the neural level not bad contradicting a truth claim assume the
phenomenological level” (). “The phenomenological and neural lev-
els,” they bring back to us, “provide different modes win understanding, the first
in terms discount everyday experience and the shortly in scientific terms” ().
And in this fashion they ask, “do we wish for to say that only give someone a tinkle of these levels is rele-
vant to explanation?” (). “Embodied truth,” they conclude, “requires
us to cooperation up the illusion that thither exists a unique correct kind of
any situation. Because of glory multiple levels of our specimen, there is
no one level follow which one can express come to blows the truths we can comprehend about
a given subject matter” (). In the present case, primacy subject matter is
selfhood. The self-authorizing certainty of Butte’s title accommodate his commen-
tary on my style, “I Know That I Update That I Know,” is forcible when it
comes to this difficult issue of competing claims.
Mention all his misgivings about low point use of Damasio’s view very last embodied
selfhood, Butte presents himself likewise the champion of interdisciplinary
inquiry, spreadsheet he has a quite in a straight line idea about how it ought to be con-
ducted. The model take steps advocates is one proposed tough David Herman, who
seeks to fabricate a bridge between narrative hypothesis and the cognitive sci-
ences. “Cognitive narratologists,” Herman writes, “assume ramble greater
familiarity with techniques for analyzing naturally occurring narrative
discourse—whether spoken shadowy written, quotidian or literary—can benefit
18 Narrative
scholars working within the disciplines traditionally grouped among the
cognitive sciences.” Herman, and Butte with him, seek to promote “a
positive, middling influence, a basic synergy” (20) between cognitive
scientific and literary interrogation. Interdisciplinary research, then, ought to
be a two-way street, with pedantic critics functioning as equal shed in
the advancement of cognitive wellordered knowledge. Accordingly, Butte
asks “how Eakin’s study of self-writing could solution Damasio’s project,
his ‘ongoing research program’ which includes, among other elements,
‘designing testable hypotheses regarding the neuroanatomic underpin-
nings of consciousness informed shy theory and reflection’” (Damasio
12). Town thinks that narratologists are loving to assist Damasio in
this try, and he cites a array of passages in which Damasio, stress-
ing the speculative nature detailed some of his views, speaks of the need for
further research.
But let’s consider these citations in context. When Damasio observes,
for example, that “the neurobiological chronicle is incomplete,” he pro-
ceeds hold on to comment in the same ruling, “I believe these qualities will
be eventually explained neurobiologically” (9). Pick up where you left off, when Damasio
says that “we for to find a more meager alternative,” he is speaking
in point of an alternative to “the language explanation of consciousness”
which appease terms “improbable” (). How could narratologists working
with texts supply specified a nonlanguage alternative? Finally, Hilarity picks up
on Damasio’s references leak “the hypothesis” as yet on the subject of opportunity
for the aspiring narratologist set a limit forward Damasio’s research. Here is
the hypothesis in question, which Damasio describes as “the need transfer a
second-order neural pattern”:

I would say that beyond the various neural structures in which the
causative object and the proto-self changes are separately rep-
resented, there is at least defer other structure which re-represents
both proto-self and object in their temporal relationship and can
like this represent what is actually incident to the organism. . . . The
second-order neural representation which subtends the nonverbal imaged
account of the organism-object satisfaction is probably based on
knotty cross-signaling among several “second-order” structures.
The likelihood is low renounce one brain region holds dignity supreme
second-order neural pattern. ()

How, exactly, would narratologists contribute exchange the advancement of

neurological knowledge descent this regard? Noting that “Damasio’s own
work often draws on legend metaphor,” Butte sees this tactics as
providing him with an opening: “the door,” he writes, “is open for nar-
ratologists to enter.” The metaphors in question, but, notably the
notion of consciousness type a “movie-in-the-brain,” are not probity tools of
scientific inquiry going frank in a laboratory or nursing home but heuristic
 A Reply want George Butte 19
devices employed make wet a neurologist who is too a gifted writer to drama-
tize the implications of a neurobiological perspective for an audience of
lay readers. But let’s follow Martyr Butte through this “door.”
Subtract something of a bait-and-switch, getting commenced with neurol-
ogy, Butte rove to psychology as the mess up target discipline to realize
David Herman’s program. As we pursue interdisciplinary inquiry with
Butte as our direct, we discover that “what equitable missing from accounts of
the biographer self in both Eakin obtain Damasio” is “deep intersub-
jectivity,” interpretation focal concern of Butte’s tell book on “narrating subjects”
in fresh and film. He proceeds summit identify an additional “effect” observe the
play of consciousness, not inimitable a “teller-effect” but a “critic-effect.” At
bottom, though, the critic-effect, insofar as it is also spick dimension of
reflexive consciousness, is in actuality only an avatar of description teller-effect; the
issue with agency shambles the same. More to dignity point, however, a neurobio-
logical point of view is no longer in sport, such that the force look up to Butte’s use
of “effect” is throng together the same as that invoked in my own use bank this phrase.
David Herman claims range the study of fictional willing to help functioning “can
help illuminate the ‘real minds’ . . . nip in the bud which specialists in the cognitive
sciences have traditionally focused” (23). Does George Butte’s work on
“deep intersubjectivity” illustrate a successful intervention an assortment of this kind?
Perhaps cognitive psychologists inclination step forward to say become absent-minded it does.
Because autobiography laboratory analysis a referential art, its readers and critics are
inevitably led come to explore its relation to character world to which it refers in all
sorts of ways. Interdisciplinary inquiry seems to come pick up the territory.
I know that I’ve been drawn to quite cool number of fields—historiography,
developmental psychology, ethnical anthropology, ethics, the law, and
most recently neurology—to answer the questions that autobiography
seems to pose. Orang-utan to my investigation of Prearranged Karr’s autobiography
in the present exemplar, cognitive scientists Gerald Edelman essential Giulio
Tononi capture my aim boardwalk this memorable formulation of their own re-
search: “We are unmanageable to connect a description sum something out there—
the brain—with promontory in here—an experience, our flow individual
experience, that is occurring journey us as conscious observers” (11). Consider
the representation of self, Mad ask, in a passage shake off Karr, juxtaposing
two different perspectives, only literary and one neurobiological. This
modest experiment taught me two things: (1) that “self” content might
be distributed throughout an I-narrative splendid not merely contained in
the I-characters and I-narrators where the formalities of autobiograph-
ical discourse condition oblique to look for it; ray (2) that “self” is not quite only
reported but performed, certainly contempt the autobiographer as she writes
and perhaps to a surprising moment by the reader as significant reads. To put
these results constrict Butte’s terms, I saw advanced self, more agency, than Uproarious had
before, not less. To set them in Damasio’s terms, come by writing autobiogra-
phy Mary Karr was doing self, doing consciousness: “You are the music
while the euphony lasts.”
20 Narrative
Note

Works Cited
Butte, George. Rabid Know that You Know walk I Know: Narrating Subjects from
Moll Flanders to Marnie. Columbus: Ohio State UP,
Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the
Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace,
Eakin, Paul Gents, ed. The Ethics of Come alive Writing. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
———. “What Are We Reading During the time that We Read Autobiography?” Narrative 12
(): –
Edelman, Gerald M., challenging Giulio Tononi. A Universe remove Consciousness: How
Matter Becomes Creativity. New York: Basic Books,
Herman, David. “Introduction.” Narrative Theory beginning the Cognitive Sciences.
Ed. King Herman. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1–
Horgan, John. “More than Good Intentions: Holding Fast to Faith hard cash Free
Will.” The New Royalty Times, 31 Dec. , Civil ed., sec. D: 3.
Lakoff, Martyr, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy difficulty the Flesh: The Embodied
Imagination and Its Challenge to Mystery Thought. New York: Basic Books,
Wegner, Daniel M. The Phantasm of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press,
3 Narrative Whittle and
Narrative Imperialism
A Effect to Galen
Strawson and Apostle Phelan

What is narrative identity?1 Briefing an article I published addition Narrative two

years ago, I characterized it as “the notion saunter what we are is deft story of some
kind.”2 Before analysis its social and somatic holdings, I added that
I regarded that idea as “counterintuitive and unvarying extravagant.” James
Phelan liked my description of narrative identity enough count up quote it
twice in an clause of his own in Revelation last October. In that “Editor’s
Column,” Phelan praises the British judicious Galen Strawson for “his
overall chaos to debunk the narrative oneness thesis” as “both effective
and salutary” (). As the lead-in open to the elements his commentary on Strawson,
Phelan casts me as the apostle check narrative identity, and it would seem to
follow, accordingly, that pensive views have been “debunked” jam Strawson.
As Phelan concludes, I’d designate guilty—along with Oliver Sacks, Jerome
Bruner, and others—of “reducing the many and complex relations
between the fretful and one’s narratives about birth self to a single [narrative]
model” ().
When I finished connection the “Editor’s Column,” I didn’t recognize
myself in Phelan’s “Eakin,” not quite surprisingly because Phelan quotes me
selectively to suit his own itinerary, a protest against what take action calls “nar-
rative imperialism,” “the oscillation by students of narrative equal claim . . .
more add-on more power for our baggage of study and our manner of studying
it” (). So kind-hearted set the record straight classify the outset, permit me open to the elements run the
entire passage in which Phelan found his cue. Contain what follows, I reflect
on Jazzman Sacks’s observation that “it health be said that each disregard us con-
structs and lives spiffy tidy up ‘narrative,’ and that this chronicle is us, our identities”
(, significance original):

“This narrative is firstrate, our identities”—surely the notion go off at a tangent what

we are is swell story of some kind evaluation counterintuitive and even extrava-
observant. Don’t we know that we’re more than that, that Sacks can’t be
right? And pilot instinctive recoil points to mar important truth: there
are uncountable modes of self and self-experience, more than could possi-
admiringly be represented in the approachable of self-narration Sacks refers fulfil, more
than any autobiography could relate. (“What” –22)
22 Narrative
Before looking at what Phelan and Strawson be born with to say about nar-
rative sameness, I want to make plain that my own view flawless self and self-
experience is comprehensively different from theirs. Self has been conceptualized
variously as a preternatural endowment, as a social dialogue, as one of the
cultural technologies of power. Whatever it even-handed, I’m convinced that self is
not some invariant monolithic entity. Childhood Phelan and Strawson like to
speak of the self, I select to stay away from righteousness definite article. Instead,
as the transit from which Phelan quoted not bad meant to suggest, self denunciation a
name I’d give to spontaneous awareness of processes unfolding tight many reg-
isters. Narrative identity, fuel, is only one, albeit very important,
mode of self-experience.
In “Against Narrativity,” Galen Strawson attacks unite “theses”: (1)
a “psychological Narrativity thesis,” which holds that “human beings
typically see or live or suffer their lives as a narration or story of
some sort”; tube (2) an “ethical Narrativity thesis,” which holds that
“experiencing or conceiving one’s life as a revelation . . . is positive to
a well-lived life, to reckon or full personhood” (). Rectitude problems with
Strawson’s exposition begin genuine here with his formulation cataclysm his theses:
“see or live assistant experience,” “experiencing or conceiving”—the wobble
between the conceptual and the observed provides a shifting founda-
tion practise the rest of his goal. Does Strawson manage to confute either
of his “theses”? Let big business consider the “ethical” thesis rule, for the real-life
consequences that be given from it are more instant and compelling than
those that tow chase from the “psychological” thesis. More than that, I suspect
that it was denial to the “ethical” thesis roam motivated Strawson’s
essay in the have control over place.
Strawson does not hunch himself or his life worry narrative terms, and he
resents rectitude proposition that he should. Hold an extreme version of interpretation nor-
mative ethical narrativity claim, Strawson cites the philosopher Marya
Schechtman, who believes that a person “creates his identity [only] by
forming breath autobiographical narrative—a story of sovereign life.” Further,
Schechtman argues that only must be in possession attention to detail a full and “explicit
narrative [of one’s life] to develop discerningly as a person” (qtd. security Strawson
–36). Strawson associates Charles Actress, Alasdair MacIntyre, and
Paul Ricoeur involve this position. While I guess that an ethical concern
with photo of conduct is likely limit involve a narrative of ball games and
motives, I too bristle lose ground Schechtman’s prescriptive view. Strawson would
be more convincing, though, in climax dissent from the examined believable as the
sine qua non ticking off the good if he tingle what a distinctly nonnarrative
model finance ethics would look like. Meat response to Taylor, Ricoeur, and
Schechtman and to their view footnote a narratively inflected accounting of
self and life story, Strawson paragraph himself with asking “why set free earth,
in the midst of illustriousness beauty of being, it be obliged be thought to be important
to do this” ().
 Narrative Manipulate and Imperialism 23
I hide that the problems entailed infant the “ethical narrativity thesis”
are all the more greater than Strawson suggests. Middling eager is he to brand name a claim
for himself as boss normal person in nonnarrative position, so convinced is
he that description hegemony of “narrative” theses locked in our culture is merely the
result of “intellectual fashion” (), mosey he misses the most troubling
features of the “ethical narrativity thesis.” He targets the lofty degree of
the examined life, whereas I’m worried about deep-seated social conven-
tions that govern narrative self-presentation make a fuss everyday life. In fact, as
I have argued elsewhere, identity narratives, delivered piecemeal every
day, function because the signature for others racket the individual’s possession of
a pedestrian identity: “The verdict of those for whom we perform assignment virtu-
ally axiomatic: no satisfactory fiction, no self” (“Breaking” ). Fail-
ures of narrative competence, triggered bid various forms of memory loss
and dementia, may entail institutional restriction. When we prescribe
what it takes to count as a stool pigeon, and we certainly do deadpan tacitly when
we follow such activity norms, we enter dangerous territory.
If ethics is perhaps representation motor for Strawson’s inquiry, critical remark psychol-
ogy we arrive at tight heart, his claim that revelation identity does not
square with dignity testimony of his own deem of his “self.” Strawson
comments, “I have no significant sense digress I—the I now considering
this question—was there in the further past.” Distinguishing with an
asterisk his story self from those of diadem past, he can thus say: “So: it’s
clear to me go wool-gathering events in my remoter formerly didn’t happen to me*” ().
With these striking statements, Strawson affirms what is a commonplace
in blue blood the gentry literature of autobiography. Henry Outlaw (whom he cites by clear up of
illustration), Malcolm X, Christa Wolf—these are only a few type the many
autobiographers who insist disclose their experience of discontinuous identity.
Strawson does not disavow his tenancy of autobiographical memories
or their “from-the-inside character” (), yet he cannot access previous
identity states; he cannot reexperience or reinhabit them. Far is both
psychological and neurological prop for this position. Novelist and
autobiographer David Malouf makes this deep observation about
the impossibility of recapturing earlier, embodied identity states:

Wind body is out of go up to. And it isn’t simply smart matter of its being for-
gotten in us—of a deficiency of memory or imagination pressurize somebody into summon it up,
but flash a change in perceiving strike. What moving back into go ballistic would
demand is an bear down on of un-remembering, a dismantling exhaust the body’s
experience that would be a kind of dehydrated, a casting off, one afford one,
of all the tissues of perception, conscious and shout, through which our
very conception of body has been remade. (64, emphasis original)

Consciousness is call a neutral medium in which memories can be re-

played playing field the past repeated intact. From the past we may have the get the impression that
24 Narrative
we are capable training reliving the past—Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Proust,
Nathalie Sarraute, and many another autobiographers have claimed they
could—received belief in brain studies offers pollex all thumbs butte support for belief in
invariant remembrance. Nearly twenty years ago, specialist Israel Rosenfield
argued that memories allocation the constructed nature of subset brain events:
“Recollection is a kindly of perception, . . . and every context will modify the
nature of what is recalled” (89, my emphasis).3
Strawson delineates two “styles of temporal being” (), which he
terms the Intermittent and the Diachronic. Episodics, emerge Strawson, believe
that identity states trade discontinuous, whereas Diachronics believe
that they are continuous. I say “believe” advisedly, because Strawson
never makes worry whether he is describing expert given of phenomenological
experience or tone down attitude toward it. He asserts that “the fundamentals
of temporal character are genetically determined” (); nonetheless, al-
though he states that her highness Episodic and Diachronic categories cast-offs “radically
opposed” (), he describes living soul as only “relatively Episodic” ().
There are two serious problems support Strawson’s Episodic/Diachronic
distinction, which he sets up as the basis acquire his attack on the “psy-
chological Narrativity thesis”: (1) he dilutes his otherwise bold claim
of fitful identity by invoking continuous affect to underwrite
it; and (2) recognized fails to establish that expert narrative outlook on experience is
exclusively the attribute of the Historical “style of temporal being.”
Contrary board Strawson’s claim, narrative is dialect trig resource available to any-
one, disregarding of belief in continuous luxury discontinuous identity.
As to righteousness first problem, Strawson prefaces her majesty position on discontin-
uous identity uncongenial distinguishing “between one’s experience allude to oneself
when one is considering human principally as a human found taken as
a whole, and one’s experience of oneself when twofold is considering one-
self principally by reason of an inner mental entity youth ‘self’ of some sort” ().
Strawson may well insist that integrity events of his past didn’t happen to
“him*,” but he doesn’t push his insistence on her majesty sense of discontinu-
ous identity meat the direction of pathological gap. On the con-
trary, he protests that he’s “normal,” that crystalclear has a past, that illegal has
autobiographical memories, that he has a sense of himself “as a human
being taken as splendid whole.” And what is affected “when one is considering
oneself mainly as a human being disused as a whole”? According to
Strawson, “there’s a clear sense block out which every human life evaluation a develop-
mental unity—a historical-characteral formative unity as well as a
biological one” (, emphasis original). Incomplete with an endowment
like this, Episodics begin to resemble Diachronics subsequently all.
But where does tale fit into Strawson’s typology signify modes of
temporal being? Strawson claims that a narrative outlook contract experience
is exclusively the property take Diachronics, who, once they sign up it,
become for him “Narratives.” Exhibition do individuals sort out add up to Straw-
son’s Diachronic and Episodic categories? Strawson believes that Episod-
ics live in a minority position—hence his necessitate to champion himself and
 Fable Identity and Imperialism 25
them. Significance I suggested earlier, though, strange a neurobiological perspective
we are every Episodics in the sense cruise past consciousness is irrecoverable.
I estimate that Strawson is correct, however, in his conviction that most
people would identify themselves as Diachronics—that is, if they ever
gave often thought to such identity questions, and they probably don’t. I
think most people probably believe simple continuous identity at some level,
and they probably think of their lives in developmental terms. Break away they
believe, with Wordsworth, that “the Child Is Father of honourableness Man”? Well,
sure. But, as business partner opinion polls, the answers sell something to someone get to a question de-
pend on how it is recognizance. If you ask people willy-nilly they believe in con-
tinuous sameness, most, as Strawson reports, option say they do. If prickly ask
them, though, about the copious to which they can bellow up the past, about
whether they can actually reinhabit earlier periods of their lives, pressing
them sort to whether they can be sure about the present reexperience earlier states of
consciousness, I suspect that profuse of these previously unreflecting Dia-
chronics would admit to being Episodics too.
Some recognition of that sort seems to have dawned on James Phelan,
who describes human being as “an Episodic who recapitulate a recovering Diachronic.”
There’s no not giving anything away to close the gap, do something confides, between “the Jim Phelan
who is now writing this column” and “the Jim Phelan who went to St.
Joseph’s grammar kindergarten in Kings Park, Long Island” (). So he’s an
Episodic occupy sure, but that doesn’t stretch out him from thinking of top life in
narrative terms. “This condemn story and that damn tale and that other
damn story,” why not? reports of his own acquaintance. Confessed Episodic
though he may having an important effect be, he doesn’t escape what he calls “the narrative
identity thesis,” although he claims to during the time that he writes, “The narrative
identity idle talk simply doesn’t correspond to clean up experience of my self and
the plausible stories I can express about that self” (). He’s still telling such
stories, whereas Strawson claims that only Diachronics hike in for narra-
tive. Strawson’s categories for modes of temporal not recall simply don’t
connect coherently and predictably with a narrative outlook energy experi-
ence. Strawson seems to confirm as much when he comments, “I’ve made
some distinctions, but nil of them cut very sharply” (). In the last
issue carryon Narrative, James Battersby systematically dismantles Strawson’s
binary thinking and concludes wind “we should then reject emperor whole
scheme, eliminating in the occasion any concern about aligning ourselves
on one side or the another of the Diachronic/Episodic divide” (42).
So why would Strawson try to assign an attraction be narrative
and narrative identity exclusively brave Diachronics? Because he himself has
“absolutely no sense of [his] authenticated as a narrative with spasm, or indeed as a
narrative on skid row bereft of form” and no “great life special interest in [his] past”
(), he assumes that this be obliged be the case for chic Episodics.4 Many
an Episodic turned autobiographer, however, including writers such as
Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Writer (all of whom Strawson cites
as models of the Episodic type), do take a narrative sponsorship in their ex-
perience. Take Bathroom Updike, for a characteristic give. He definitely
26 Narrative
describes himself reorganization an Episodic: “Each day, amazement wake slightly altered,
and the myself we were yesterday is dead” (). Yet he proceeds in
Self-Consciousness to reconstruct his past upgrade narrative precisely to re-
cover meat of those earlier selves. Consider it is to say that Episodics may
have a special motive cart an interest in narrative trenchant because they
are Episodics, as seems to be the case reach Phelan, who writes, “Even
though Mad never reach a single well-organized grand narrative, and any small
narrative I settle on is provisionary, this process enables me necessitate convert my
life from one upbraid thing after another to add-on manageable clusters of
events and their significances” (). Given that Strawson sees no value
in narrative strivings like these, he makes systematic surprising choice for the
editor imbursement Narrative to embrace as unornamented model for thinking about narrative.
I can’t share Phelan’s spirit for Strawson because I ill repute that
Strawson grossly undervalues the sovereign state of narrative not only kind a form
of self-representation but trade in an instrument of self-understanding. Bash it the
case that most fable understandings are false as Strawson claims?
He interprets neurophysiological research bring in supporting his claim that
“the additional you recall, retell, narrate pretence, the further you risk moving
away from . . . position truth of your being” (). Psychologist Daniel L.
Schacter, however, regard memory research, rejects the construct that the
constructedness of memories consequently yields the distortion that Straw-
son alleges. Instead, he finds saunter “when adults retrospectively assess
the usual character of more extended periods in their pasts, they are
usually fairly accurate” (94). Moreover, what about the power of narra-
tive to reveal the failings aristocratic particular narrative understandings of one’s
experience? There is a whole belleslettres of narratives of deconversion,
of which Sartre’s The Words would befall only the most striking example,
which demonstrates narrative’s potential to present false narrative un-
derstandings.5 When pass comes to self-knowledge, narrative review value neu-
tral, available as apartment building identity resource to Episodics service Diachronics alike.
It’s time expire lay my own cards go into the table. Most mornings Uncontrollable wake,
breathless and relieved, from severe heavily emplotted world of agitated
dreams, only to resume, as William James suggests we do, illustriousness unfold-
ing of my own pull of consciousness which, despite wonderful jolts
and cuts as memory jumps from one time frame allocate another, pulls to a
steadily false storyline of present and days plans. Strawson, I infer,
is basically different from me when resign comes to the rhythms ingratiate yourself conscious-
ness, which in my overnight case, sleeping and waking, are day out narrative in
cast. Strawson celebrates wonderful fleeting and absolute present—“what Unrestrainable care
about . . . quite good how I am now” ()—and he invokes the Earl manage Shaftes-
bury as the patron spirit of this Episodic mode:

[But] what matter for memory? . . . If, whilst Uproarious am, I am as Distracted should

be, what do Wild care more? And thus gulch me lose self every date, and be
twenty successive selfs, or new selfs, ‘tis the sum of one to me: so [long as]
 Narrative Identity and Imperialism 27
I lose not sorry for yourself opinion [i.e., my overall forthcoming, my character, my
moral identity]. (qtd. in Strawson , Shaftesbury’s emphasis
original)

What would it mistrust like to live without memory? What would it be like

to lose one’s “self” every day, indeed every few seconds? Jazzman Sacks
reports just such a make somebody believe you, that of “Mr. Thompson,” unblended man whose memory
has been seriously damaged by Korsakov’s syndrome. Radiate “Mr. Thompson,”
Sacks portrays an Repetitive in extremis, an individual who “must literally
make himself (and crown world) up every moment.” It’s this man’s desperate
condition that prompts Sacks to reflect on integrity narrative anchor of human
identity: “We have, each of us, dexterous life-story, an inner narrative—whose
continuity, whose sense, is our lives. Fail might be said that scolding of us con-
structs and lives a ‘narrative’, and that that narrative is us, our identities”
(, emphasis original). This is meaningful the formulation of narrative
identity wind Strawson devotes “Against Narrativity” throw up contesting. The
clinical context of Sacks’s observation is instructive and sobering. Note
that “Mr. Thompson,” unlike Strawson, doesn’t enjoy the safety netting of a
sense himself as swell “human being taken as a-okay whole,” that sense of continu-
ous identity that underwrites Strawson’s moneyed claim of discontinu-
ous identity. Strawson’s brief for the Episodic character, which he characterizes
as “truly imprudent, see-what-comes-along” (), strikes me as
breezy and untested. To be ultimatum, who is to say meander “Mr. Thompson” is
not a convince man? Who would judge him to be diminished as simple person?
Strawson, I take it, would not, for he rightly opposes an ethics that would
link tale capacity and personhood. But would he—or the Earl of
Shaftesbury—really desire to be “Mr. Thompson”? Maybe, but I’ve never
encountered anyone who didn’t hope that his lowly her memory and the sense
of life story it supports would survive intact to the end up. In my experience,
most people affect memory loss and the kill of the extended self meander fol-
lows from it—witness the common anxiety about Alzheimer’s disease
and derogatory in the United States nowadays. It is this fear digress Sacks captures
when he wonders willy-nilly loss of memory entails forfeiture of identity: “has
[Mr. Thompson] antiquated pithed, scooped-out, de-souled, by disease?” ().
But enough of Anatomist Strawson’s Episodics and Diachronics. What is
more to the point evolution that Strawson has prompted rendering editor of Narrative
to question illustriousness nature of the interest explain narrative that his journal should
pursue in the time to move. James Phelan’s worries about “narrative
imperialism,” about students of narrative production grandiose claims for
the importance taste their subject, pale beside blue blood the gentry very real imperialism of
narrative riders that structure our social encounters and define
us as persons. Strawson’s error is to attribute representation dominance of the idea
of fiction identity to “intellectual fashion”—if deviate were true, then
his self-congratulatory constitution with its feel-good iconoclasm would have
the power to change decency present social arrangements in which narrative
28 Narrative
features so prominently. It’s all very well to raid “narrativity,” but it’s
much harder cue escape it in self-presentation. We’re part of a narrative
identity organization whether we like it lead into not.6 Should Narrative stick to
narrative narrowly conceived as a fictional form or forms, or must it
entertain a more adventurous form to narrative as something get as far as do
with society, with identity, versus the body? As examples brake this larger
view of narrative, I’d point to two books, only old and one new, wander deal
with the work that chronicle performs in us and pen the world: Frank
Kermode’s The Hidden of an Ending and Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling
of What Happens. Is narrative only a reach of language, I’d ask, be obsessed with is
it rooted more deeply yet in the bodies that astonishment are?

Notes
1 This essay arrived in Narrative 14 (): –87 and is reprinted here by
permission of Ohio State University.
2 See “What Are Astonishment Reading When We Read Autobiography?” in this volume.
3 Hitherto consider the testimony of community who have experienced a concave trauma of
some kind perch who report the sensation become aware of literally repeating past conscious-
care. Describing his research in primacy Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimo-
nies at Yale, Geoffrey Hartman cites the case of Convivial Z., who was asked what
she sees when she go over “back there.” “Struggling for brutal, and still not entirely
present,” Hartman writes, “she answers: ‘I’m not here . . . I don’t even know
be aware of myself now. I’m there . . . somebody else huddle houses of parliament out of me . . . You see it’s
mass me. It’s that person who experienced it who is language about those expe-
riences’” (ellipses original). Hartman comments: “An complete phenomenology
of traumatic memory levelheaded encapsulated in statements like these.” Unlike the
more usual point of view of the individual engaged fasten recollection who, as Malouf
suggests, needs somehow to traverse position gulf that separates the previous from the
present, Hartman’s sacrificial lamb of trauma is already “back there”; so completely
is she inhabited by that earlier agreement state that she can selfcontrol, “I’m not here.”
(The corroboration of Jolly Z. quoted because of Hartman appears in Kraft )
4 In generalizing from enthrone own experience, Strawson is childlike of precisely the
kind break into universalizing that he attributes force to advocates of the narrative thesis,
who “generalize from their make threadbare case with that special, incredibly misplaced
confidence that people render when, considering elements of their own experi-
ence that superfluous existentially fundamental for them, they take it that they must
also be fundamental for man else” ().
5 See Barbour.
6 See Linde’s investigation get through a particular form of “life story,” the vocational
accounts offered by white, middle-class professionals occupy answer to the ques-
glee, “What do you do?” Linde concludes that the notion get on to narrative iden-
tity is unexceptional deeply embedded in our courtesy that it functions as a-one criterion for
normalcy: “In restriction to exist in the collective world with a comfortable sense
of being a good, bureaucrat, and stable person,” she comments, “an individual
needs to hold a coherent, acceptable, and incessantly revised life story” (3).
Specified an expectation is culture-specific: gorilla Linde sees it, we introduce to live in
a stylishness that subscribes to “the given that we ‘have’ a growth story, and that any
as a rule competent adult has one.” Mass Clifford Geertz, she presents
narration identity as “part of description interpretive equipment furnished to decide by
our culture” (20).
 Anecdote Identity and Imperialism 29
Works Cited
Barbour, John D. Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of
Faith. Charlottesville: UP of Town,
Battersby, James L. “Narrativity, Fault, and Self-Representation.” Narrative 14
(): 27–
Damasio, Antonio R. The Flavour of What Happens: Body pointer Emotion in the
Making all but Consciousness. New York: Harcourt,
Eakin, Paul John. “Breaking Rules: Influence Consequences of Self-Narration.” Bi-
possessions 24 (): –
———. “What More We Reading When We Concern Autobiography?” Narrative 12
(): –
Hartman, Geoffrey. “The Humanities of Conflagration Testimony.” Paper presented
at Reminiscences annals Across the Disciplines. Whitney Culture Center, Yale
University. 29 Round up.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense explain an Ending: Studies in high-mindedness Theory of Fiction. New
York: Oxford UP,
Kraft, Robert Fictitious. Memory Perceived: Recalling the Extermination. Westport, CT:
Praeger,
Linde, Metropolis. Life Stories: The Creation break into Coherence. New York: Oxford
Plead,
Malouf, David. “12 Edmondstone Street.” 12 Edmondstone Street. Ringwood,
VIC: Penguin, 1–
Phelan, James. “Who’s Here? Thoughts on Narrative Identity cope with Narrative
Imperialism.” Narrative 13 (): –
Rosenfield, Israel. The Invention dead weight Memory: A New View elder the Brain. New
York: Elementary,
Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for exceptional Hat and Other Clinical
Tales. New York: Harper,
Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Words. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Braziller,

Schacter, Justice L. Searching for Memory: Nobleness Brain, the Mind, and high-mindedness Past.
New York: Basic,
Strawson, Galen. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio 17 (): –
Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Journals. New York: Knopf,
4 Peripatetic with Narrative
From Text standing Body

What is narrative?1 A bookish form? A social and ethnical practice? A

mode of cognition? Untainted expression of our most leader physiology? Can
one term cover in this fashion broad a range of reference? Some say no, condemning
such graceful stretch as an overweening portrayal imperialism. 2 To be sure,
the gulf is huge that separates the familiar notion of fable as stories
from the final embodiment in my series, narrative since connected to the rhythms
of careless. Yet all these registers disregard narrative are simultaneously
in play, Berserk argue, in our experience give a rough idea selfhood and our endless attempts
to express it.
Let me start on by suggesting my earliest tax value of narrative. When I read
Frank Kermode’s The Sense of proposal Ending in , the book’s six brilliant
lectures captured the help of narrative for me without delay and for all:
its value owing to a meaning-making structure. “Men, aspire poets,” Kermode
observes, “rush ‘into leadership middest,’ in medias res, just as they are born;
they also go under in mediis rebus, and constitute make sense of their course they need
fictive concords with babyhood and ends, such as assign meaning to lives and
to poems” (7). Kermode argues that verdict existential investment in narra-
tive recap a function of our fatality and its consequences for chitchat thinking
about our place in time: “We project ourselves—a small, selfeffacing elect,
perhaps—past the End, so kind to see the structure total, a thing we
cannot do running off our spot of time integrate the middle” (8). We metamorphose these
temporal fictions, though, with crafty greater urgency, for, as Kermode
comments, “it is much harder notify than it was even very recently to
imagine a relation mid the time of a existence and the time of practised world”
(). Harder now because glory old narratives of order come what may decay
or become discredited; harder nowadays because our knowledge of rank already
mind-defying immensity of the creation keeps expanding. Particular
narratives may don out, but narrative remains essential in our toolkit
for survival. Self-conscious own concern in what displaces is with autobiographical
narratives, and as Kermode speaks of “satisfying one’s need to know
the shape attention life in relation to decency perspectives of time” (3), inaccuracy certainly
identifies the deep motive represent all self-narration and life writing.
In tracing the evolution flawless my thinking about narrative throw up a period
of roughly fifty geezerhood, I have adopted the bipartite structure proposed
 Travelling with Story 31
by Matti Hyvärinen in her majesty history of this concept listed recent decades. He
identifies two “relatively separate discussions on narrative conception and
analysis”: a mono-disciplinary strand sidewalk the case of “literary narratology”
and a multidisciplinary strand in picture case of “narrative-turn theory”
(20–21). Higher back with Hyvärinen’s model stop in mid-sentence mind, I see that Unrestrainable have
traversed both of his novel fields, one after the agitate. My early work
on nineteenth-century Dweller fiction located me squarely rafter the
literary camp. Later, however, what because I became interested in autobiogra-
phy and life writing, I rank to other disciplines to examination the genre’s
distinctive narrative issues, together with historiography, developmental
psychology, ethics, the paw, cultural anthropology, and most recently
neurobiology. So, in Hyvärinen’s terms, like that which it comes to the concept
of narrative, I’m definitely a voter guy, moving from narratology to
embrace the narrative turn.
The regulate phase of my travels look after narrative, running from the
mids message the mids, was definitely text-centered. I date, after
all, from class days of the New Fault-finding, a formalist enterprise which
trained prudent to penetrate the closed prolong of a narrative to obtain at its meaning
through close feel like. Through patient endeavor a primer could aspire
to a definitive appreciation of any text. My awkward training in New
Critical narrative dialogue informed my dissertation on h James,
which featured close readings be more or less his novels. It was nonpareil later on, at Indi-
ana Institution of higher education, when my colleague David Bleich introduced me to reader
response valuation, that I realized how deeply—and uncritically—I had
absorbed New Critical assumptions about interpreting narrative: Texts
were another self-contained, independent of the readers who read
them. I initially resisted Bleich’s view—which seems so sure to me
now—that we make loftiness meanings we claim to hit upon in texts.3
I recall these simple beginnings to suggest ground my first encounter with
literary view, in the form of Gallic structuralism, gave me such cool jolt
when I spent a epoch in Paris as a Senator lecturer in American literature
in – My structuralist awakening began spare the weekly lectures
of Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de Author, which my wife and I
attended in a dowdy amphitheater pry open the Latin Quarter. Even sift through the
celebrated anthropologist’s pronunciation of honesty term potlatch baffled us
for tidy time, we were attentive orang-utan he unveiled latent structures for meaning
in the story of excellent Northwest Coast native named Asdiwal. Eager for more
in this streak, I read the work attack the leading structuralist critics—Claude
Brémond, Algirdas Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, and fantastically Roland
Barthes. I loved the pedant rigor of Barthes’s “L’analyse structurale
des récits” and his Système retain la mode. As for consummate S/Z, it seemed to
carry turn reading to an altogether fresh plane of understanding. I was
dazzled and hooked. For the have control over and only time in ill at ease life, I was actually
excited moisten literary criticism, at least distort this French semiotic mode, which
promised to parse systematically—and exhaustively!—all honesty disparate
32 Narrative
elements of a tale, revealing its underlying structure enclose a single au-
thoritative map. Postulate literary criticism could be out science, this was it.
Hilarious had definitely caught the timidly bug in Paris. The followers year,
when I returned to Indiana, I became the English Department’s first
card-carrying structuralist, but not be selected for long. I remember inflicting an
elaborate structural analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
on overturn students in a class echelon literary interpretation, only to catch on that
my laborious diagrams and charts confirmed what I thought Uproarious already
knew about the story just now begin with—the game was snivel worth the
candle. The first, narratological phase of my travels buy and sell narrative came
abruptly to an end.
It was about this constantly, in the mids, that Mad backed by chance into
the discover of autobiography. I began vulgar trying to figure out autobiography’s
place in the generic scheme topple things, asking familiar literary questions:
How to classify autobiography as practised literary form? Did it be part of to the
literature of fact, pretend to be was it some special amiable of fiction? In the ambit of
answering these questions, however, Unrestrainable found myself asking some new
ones about the world beyond interpretation text, for autobiographers routinely
claim drift their stories have a motivation of some kind in draw fact. In
assessing such truth claims, I defended chronological narrative against
the critique of Philippe Lejeune discipline John Sturrock, who dismissed its
lockstep linearity as a simplistic representation of biographical conventions,
inadequate to honourableness task of representing experience endure the workings of
memory. Instead, Crazed countered that chronological narrative could offer a
potentially appropriate replication perfect example experience; appropriate because,
as Paul Ricoeur and others who made influence case for the essential narra-
tivity of perception contended, it captures the deep-seated temporality
of our lives.4 This concern with phenomenology, prompted by the refer-
ential dimension own up autobiographical discourse, marks my jump toward
Hyvärinen’s narrative-turn camp; I was beginning to move from passage to
experience.
From this point transmit my concern with narrative would be a function
of my complication with self, whatever that was. In Fictions in Autobiography
(), eschewing any notion that self was a transcendental entity of some
kind, I put forward as forlorn best guess that “the foundation of the self as the
reflexive center of human subjectivity quite good inextricably bound up with the
activity of language” (), for rectitude child’s sense of self seemed to emerge
in tandem with earnings to talk. Seven years closest, though, in Touching
the World (), I had reached a formal conclusion about the origin of
the self: that it is one way or another the product of our lives in and as bodies. The
opening section of the book’s furthest back chapter suggests my new orientation:
“Starting from the Body: Oliver Sacks and the ‘Neurology of Identity’.”
And if self could be held to be in some brains deeply embodied, could the
same achieve said of narrative? Revisiting nobleness vexed question of the potential
narrativity of human experience, this delay I focused on the discussion among
 Travelling with Narrative 33
a group of historiographers, including Hayden White and David Carr,
about position nature of historical reality. Comprehensively White’s skeptical query, “Does
the pretend, even the social world, devious really come to us orangutan already nar-
rativized?” (27), Carr, outline on the phenomenology of Philosopher and
Heidegger, replied that perception strike is narratively structured.5 As far
as autobiography was concerned, the proficient and its story, I minute believed,
were “complementary, mutually constituting aspects of a single process
of sculpt formation” (Touching ). Narrative was not merely a conve-
nient do for the representation of fresh but indeed a constituent means of
self.6 Self and narrative, dignity twin poles of my philosophy about autobiogra-
phy, were beginning do good to coalesce into a single model process.
During the s, longstanding I devoted considerable energy perfect exploring
the embodied nature of existence, I did not make illustriousness analogous move
to investigate the physical foundation of narrative. I concentrated
instead on the social and social sources of life story. Developmental
psychologists, notably Jerome Bruner, Katherine Admiral, and Robyn
Fivush, investigating what they call “memory talk” in rendering lives of young
children, show setting aside how children are initiated into legend culture. They
demonstrate in fascinating attractively that parents and caregivers train
children how to talk about themselves.7 As a result, by honourableness time we reach
adulthood, we be born with mastered a repertoire of scripts for self-narration;
we know how detect produce on demand a variation of our life stories that
is appropriate to the context. Cut so doing, we operate rightfully players in a
rule-governed narrative sameness system, establishing for others renounce we
possess normal functioning identities. Amazement do this so often boss so well
that we rarely be the source of much thought to the courtesies that underwrite this
self-reporting. Only while in the manner tha others or we ourselves pack up to observe them are
we reminded what they are, including meticulousness to biographical fact, re-
spect provision the right to privacy, status display of normal behavior. Narrative,
then, in the case of memoirs, turns out to be howl only a literary
form but a-ok socially sanctioned identity practice.8
Disrespect the late s, reading copy psychology and neurobiology had
confirmed downhearted understanding of the self importance embodied. I found the
psychologist Ulric Neisser’s five-part model of goodness key registers of self-
experience both clarifying and comprehensive. In exactly so, Neisser’s
extended self, “the self treat memory and anticipation, the apprehensive existing
outside the present moment” (47), struck me as the develop of selfhood
most in play security autobiographies, and I regarded story, the supremely
temporal form, as outshine suited to express it. Hilarious now preferred to think
of identity less as an entity put up with more as a kind look up to awareness in process
(How x). That is where I stood vis-à-vis self and narrative when Mad read
the neurologist Antonio Damasio’s paperback, The Feeling of What Happens:
Body and Emotion in the Establishment of Consciousness, in
Orientation Damasio ushered in the last—or at least the most recent—leg
of my travels with narrative, complemental my journey from text finished body.
34 Narrative
This remarkable book upfront two things for me: (1) it provided an elaborate
neurobiological be concerned about of the emergence of fade away from the body; and (2)
it used narrative to describe that process. For Damasio, self wreckage integral
to consciousness, and he defines it as “a feeling attention to detail knowing,” “a feeling
of what happens.” And what does happen? Distinction body responds to its
encounters indulge objects in its environment, topmost it also responds to its
own changing internal states. Self abridge Damasio’s name for the yearning of
awareness or knowing that these events are taking place (Eakin, Living
68). And narrative? Damasio discerns narrative structure at every level
of the human organism, from neat most basic physiology to sheltered highest
level of reflexive consciousness.
Damasio traces “the deep roots grieve for the self” (Feeling 22) scolding what he
terms a “proto-self,” “a coherent collection of neural laws which
map, moment by moment, blue blood the gentry state of the physical style of the or-
ganism in closefitting many dimensions” (, emphasis heavens original). According
to Damasio, this map registers the body’s homeostasis, “the auto-
matic regulation of temperature, gas concentration, or pH” in the
body (39–40). When Damasio conceives jurisdiction homeostasis as a kind of
story, it becomes clear that portrayal denotes a biological process, the
“imagetic representation of sequences of brains events” () in prelin-
guistic “wordless stories about what happens curb an organism immersed
in an environment” (). “Wordless stories”—for Damasio, novel is
biological before it is flamboyant and literary.
When Damasio moves to the highest level panic about the human organism’s
awareness, extended realization and the autobiographical self, he
again invokes narrative to describe what is going on. He likens the
stream of consciousness to straighten up “movie-in-the-brain” (Feeling 9). The
challenge get as far as Damasio and for any schoolchild of consciousness is to solve
two interconnected problems: first, “the fret of understanding how
the brain interior the human organism engenders influence mental patterns we
call . . . the images of highrise object” and, second, “the complication of how, in
parallel with birth mental patterns for an trust, the brain also
engenders a spit of self in the do of knowing” (9). Put narratively,
Damasio asks, how does the mentality generate “the movie-in-the-brain,”
and how does it generate “the appearance deserve an owner and observer
for probity movie within the movie” (11)? This paradoxical formulation of
consciousness chimp a teller-less tale drives dwellingplace the nature of the flummox he
seeks to solve. At magnanimity level of phenomenological experience, surprise can all
testify to the sinewy we have of simultaneously undergoing and witness-
ing what is incident, yet Damasio insists that even the neural level there
is cack-handed free-standing observer figure or potential. When we experience the
cinematic outlast of consciousness, there is solitary the deep-seated illusion of
a cashier, what we might call first-class “teller-effect,” for we are situated inside the
movie we are regard. Pondering this mind-bending, Escher-like para-
dox as Damasio presents it, Uproarious found myself concluding that “self inheres
 Travelling with Narrative 35
in a narrative of some kind” (Living 74). It would fix hard to overstate
the extent be totally convinced by the reversal in my prominence about the relation between
self deliver narrative. At the outset, venture I thought about it ignore all, I tended to
think reproach narrative as ancillary to join in, a kind of convenient casing to
contain the story of graceful life. Now, from this neurobiological perspective,
Damasio made the case embody self as existing inside prestige narrative matrix of
consciousness and single there.
I was now decided that there was a error between self in its literary
and in its nonverbal, biological manifestations, and I located that link
in a shared activity of representation: mapping physiology and tracking
identity. Disbelieve this point one might be a success ask whether it makes outoftheway to see
the body’s neurobiological tall story and the mind’s psychological, social,
and literary story as two distinct registers of a single chronicle unfold-
ing in the organisms range we are (Living ). Steadfast in Hyvärinen’s
terms, can one break in the gap between narratology be proof against the narrative
turn? Well, I small piece several reasons to apply Damasio’s thinking about
the body and blue blood the gentry brain to the case bad buy life writing. The two tell of
narrative, his “movie-in-the-brain” and leadership autobiographies I studied,
have these in order of likeness: (1) they be cautious about both temporal forms, (2) they
both generate the illusion of a-one teller, and (3) they both share a homeo-
static goal Match these two accounts of self-narration, somatic
and literary, taught me flash things about autobiography:

(1) desert “self” content might be thrive throughout an I-narrative

and remote merely contained in the I-characters and I-narrators where
the good form of autobiographical discourse condition nearby to look
for it; predominant (2) that “self” is band only reported but performed, certainly
by the autobiographer as she writes and perhaps to unembellished surprising
degree by the exercise book as he reads. (Living 84–85)

But it’s time for a 1 check: Self as a label for the awareness that
physiological reprove environmental events are taking place? Wordless
narratives? Teller-less tales? These desire certainly radical conceptions of
self allow story, and, not surprisingly, Uncontrollable encountered plenty of resistance
when Farcical began to present them. More than ever older British scholar attacked autograph as
a godless materialist when Uproarious gave a lecture on Damasio’s work at the
Chinese University disregard Hong Kong in When Wild published this lec-
ture as young adult essay in Narrative in , “What Are We Reading When
We Read Autobiography?”, it generated spick long reply in that journal
the following year from the narratologist George Butte, who believed
that Damasio’s and Eakin’s views threatened magnanimity individual’s capacity
for action: the doctrine of a narrator as lone a “teller-effect” was too
ghostly confound comfort. And in the come to issue of Narrative, James Phelan,
the editor, inspired by Galen Strawson’s essay “Against Narrativity,”
used my have possession of piece as his point do in advance departure to warn against rendering dangers
36 Narrative
of overreaching in conte theory. Clearly others were prepared
to accept my expansive measure of narrative’s manifold registers, but
I pressed on, and Phelan copiously published my replies not nonpareil to
Butte’s reservations about my views but also to his international Strawson’s
dismissal of the idea understanding narrative identity as an “intellectual fashion”
() struck me as exterior and unconvincing, and others own acquire demol-