/publication/60

161-163

Jeffery H. Reiman argues that privacy is 'a precondition of personhood,' 'a social ritual by means of which an individual's moral title to his existence is conferred' (310). Moreover, theorists of privacy seem to agree that space or social distance is a precondition of privacy. If we accept this hypotheses, ethical problems will arise in life writing when space is transgressed, when privacy is abridged, with the result that the integrity of the person is breached or violated. I investigate this link between privacy and personhood first in the philosophical and juridical literature and then in various kinds of life writing. \r\n\r\nThe American press seized upon the death of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1994 to mourn the passing of an ideal of privacy that this beloved public figure had, paradoxically, come to represent. No one needs reminding that we live in an age of intrusiveness, where each innovation in communications technology seems to create some new threat to the possibility of being left alone: we read daily about eavesdropping on the eaveless virtual space of cellular phones, about call screening, caller identification, and scrambling devices. It is surely a sign on the times that access is newly empowered as a transitive verb. The hunger of the public for the private lives of the rich and famous has spawned a breed of professional privacy-busters - gossip columnists and paparazzi - and Onassis became the chosen prey of self-styled paparazzo Ronald E. Galella. Photographer Galella's single-minded pursuit of Onassis resulted in more than a decade of litigation, culminating in a Federal Superior Court judgement in 1982 that upheld Onassis's 'constitutional right of privacy' (Galella 1106)... \r\n\r\n The legal history of the right to privacy invoked in this case dates from the publication in 1890 of a celebrated article by Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis titled, precisely, 'The Right to Privacy.' The article was occasioned by Warren's exasperation with intrusive coverage of his family's social life by the popular press of the period; revolutions in printing technology and photography exposed anyone deemed to be a celebrity - the Warrens were socially prominent Bostonians - to the gaze of a mass-circulation audience. Brandeis and Warren argued for 'a general right to privacy for thoughts, emotions and sensations...whether expressed in writing, or in conduct, in conversation, in attitudes, or in facial expression' (82), a right so comprehensive and fundamental, in fact, that we might call it the right to personhood. Their own formulation, however, as we shall see, has proved peculiarly memorable, 'the right to an inviolate personality' (85). \r\n\r\nThe subsequent legal history of privacy is rich and complex, turning especially on challenges to Brandeis and Warren's positing of a single, all-embracing right. William Prosser, for example, reviewing seventy years of cases in 1960, found that 'the law of privacy comprises four distinct kinds of invasion of four different interests of the plaintiff.' I quote his description of these four torts to suggest something of the complex of issues with which the right to privacy has been associated in the law: \r\n\r\n1. Intrusion upon the plaintiff's seclusion or solitude, or into his private affairs. \r\n2. Public disclosure of embarrassing private facts about the plaintiff. \r\n3. Publicity which places the plaintiff in a false light in the public eye. \r\n4. Appropriation, for the defendant's advantage, of the plaintiff's name or likeness. (107) \r\n\r\nCountering the apparent reductiveness of Prosser's four-part analysis, however, is Edward J. Bloustein's 'Privacy as an Aspect of Human Dignity: An Answer to Dean Prosser' (1964), a defense of the distinctiveness of the right to privacy claimed by Brandeis and Warren. Bloustein discerns in all of the manifold transgressions against the right to privacy 'an interference with individuality, an interference with the right of the individual to do what he will.' His portrait of the person deprived of privacy, moreover, is chilling: 'Such a being, although sentient, is fungible; he is not an individual' (188). \r\n\r\n*Galella*: Galella v. Onassis. 533 F.Supp.1076 (1982)

159

Because our own lives never stand free of the lives of others, we are faced with our responsibility to those others whenever we write about ourselves. There is no escaping this responsibility.

157

In 'The Shameless World of Phil, Sally and Oprah,' Vicki Abt and Mel Seesholtz argue that 'television is rewriting our cultural scripts' (172), undermining the traditional foundations of moral behavior in both the 'guests' and the viewing audience. 'The talk show ideology' trains those who confess to see themselves as ''victims' rather than possibly...irresponsible, weak people,' with the result that 'traditional boundaries between very private matters and public discussions are continuously breached' (178). For Abt and Seesholtz, the talk show confessional is socially, because morally, dangerous: 'The split between the televised action and the concomitant social effects in real life situations must be eroding our collective ability to make causal connections between actions and consequences' (187-188).

155-156

[Margo] Jefferson believes that the 'problem' of memoir is 'figuring out how to examine and dramatize ourselves without forgetting to pay the same attention to the larger historical and spiritual forces that have made us.' This, she argues, The Kiss does not do. Harrison's book, she concludes, is of a piece with the publicity surrounding it: 'In the end, you have to treat 'The Kiss' as if it were performance art, with the book, the reviews, the interviews, the editorials and the readers' responses all spread across some vast media gallery.

141

I am less interested, finally, in demonstrating that there is a link between narrative disorders and identity disorders than I am in pointing out that both clinicians (psychologists and neurologists) and conventionally socialized laymen make this link. What I find striking in both Sack's and Schacter's cases on the one hand and in Thernstrom's account of her friend's response to her own 'case' on the other is the steady monitoring of narrative practices by these observers for familiar signs of healthy identity. Well before Melanie's attempted suicide, for example, her down-to-earth, sarcastic friend Bob condemns her morbid tendency to 'see things Match Girl' (202): 'I think, actually, the metaphor sucks,' he tells her bluntly (272). And her boyfriend Adam, increasingly disturbed, joins Bob in attacking her Match-Girl self-characterization as 'the doomed kind': 'But this isn't a story...And you aren't a kind...You are you,' he protests (278). Identity narratives generate identity judgments; the way we practice identity narrative makes a difference: is the display of affect appropriate, is it lacking? Either way, as we make such evaluations (and I grant that we often make them in what we consider another's best interests), we enter an ethical realm that deserves further investigation. After Foucault, we hardly need to be reminded of the potentially disciplinary dimension of this regulation of identity, especially when it is a question of labeling the individual as healthy or normal. \r\n\r\nMelanie Thernstrom. The Dead Girl: A True Story. 1990. New York: Pocket Books, 1991.

140

In speaking of amnesia and autism as pathologies, I want to get at the psychological rather than the neurological dimension of these phenomena, the strange absence or loss of affect in such individuals that in case after case makes so deep an impression on the clinicians who study them. This sense of something missing, an inner chill or deadness, seems to be associated with a 'dysnarrativia' that bespeaks a damaged identity. Who can say for sure, however, that the identities in question are truly damaged? It is the fact that those who observe such individuals should think so that interests me, suggesting that we live in a culture in which narrative functions as the signature of the real, of the normal. (I should add that, given the opportunity for first-hand observation, I suspect that I would agree that identity has been damanged in these cases.) In a remarkable essay that I keep going back to, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,' Hayden White makes this point in connection with history, whereas I want to apply it here in connection with identity. Social accountability requires identity narrative; in The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston gives a nice rendering of a child's perception of this requirement: 'I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn't explain themselves' (216).

137

From time to time, in a spirit of formal innovation, critics have south to free autobiography from its perennial allegiance to biography's concern with narrative chronology, as though narrative's primacy in self-accounting were merely a matter of literary convention. As I have shown in this chapter, however, narrative's role in self-representation extends well beyond the literary; it is not merely one form among many in which to express identity, but rather an integral part of a primary mode of identity experience, that of the extended self, the self in time. If my reading of narrative's place in life writing is correct, to move beyond narrative would involve not merely a shift in literary form but a more fundamental change in the culturally sanctioned narrative practices that function as the medium in which the extended self and autobiographical memory emerge.

132

Meaning for Melanie is narrative meaning: you know what will happen, she tells herself, 'because you know the genre.' 'In books,' she continues, 'events are meaningfully ordered, and people are suited to their fates' (112)\n\nMelanie Thernstrom. The Dead Girl: A True Story. 1990. New York: Pocket Books, 1991.

129-130

Certainly a continuing refrain in the clinical accounts of amnesiacs and autistics is the clinician's distress over the subject's apparent loss of affect, confirming that one of the important adaptive functions of narrative identity and the exchange of identity narratives is the enhancement of bonding and social solidarity. Sacks's remark testifies to the working of social accountability: to achieve a socially recognized identity, individuals need to display 'that range of emotions and states of mind that defines a 'self' for the rest of us.

127

It may well be the case that the narrative model of identity that forms the bedrock of interpersonal relations in human communities is more like a piece of necessary cultural equipment than an ultimate psychological reality, something we need in order to get on with the business of living as we have been socialized to understand it. That is, there might be a sense in which the subjectivity of the ordinary individual, stripped of the cultural overlay of linguistic and narrative socialization, might not be so different from that of the autistic, but such a possibility is difficult to imagine precisely because it lies beyond the ground of our linguistically, narratively constituted knowing.

125-126

...there is no question that the self of the amnesiac is radically altered by the loss of explicit memory. Sacks registers the jolt such cases give to the sense of identity that we usually take for granted when, contemplating the ravages of Korsakov's syndrome on 'Mr. Thompson's' personality, he asks, 'has he been pithed, scooped-out, de-souled, by disease?' (Man 113). Would we be prepared, though, to follow Sacks in question whether 'There is a person remaining' (115) in 'Mr. Thompson'? That we do instinctively ask such a question reveals the importance we attach to our identity conventions and narrative practices. How often have we said, or heard it said, for example, after visiting a friend or relative slipping into senility, 'She was not herself today' - an arresting thing to say, on the face of it, yet we know what we mean when we say it.\r\n\r\n\r\n*Man*: Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Harper, 1985

123

I have been arguing that narrative plays a central, structuring role in the formation and maintenance of our sense of identity. Most of us, however, never give much thought to the place of self-narration in our lives; we run, as it were, on automatic narrative pilot. Only when the capacity to construct narrative is impaired (as in cases involving brain damage) or never acquired in the first place (as in severe cases of child abuse) are we apt to recognize that identity itself has been damaged as well. I want now to test this proposition, suggesting that narrative disorders and identity disorders go hand in hand.

114

What, it is fair to ask at this point, does 'memory talk' look like? Here is an example of an exchange between a twenty-four-month-old boy and his mother, which Nelson quotes to illustrate the dominant role of the parent in the memory work involved:\r\n\r\n>C: Mommy, the Chrysler building\r\nM: The Chrysler building?\r\nC: The Chrysler building?\r\nM: Yeah, who works in the Chrysler building?\r\nC: Daddy\r\nM: Do you ever go there?\r\nC: Yes, I see the Chrysler building, picture of the Chrysler building\r\nM: I don't know if we have a picture of the Chrysler building. Do we?\r\nC: We went to..my Daddy went to work\r\nM: Remember when we went to visit Daddy? Went in the elevator, way way up in the building so we could look down from the big window?\r\nC: big window\r\nM mmhm... (Language 166)\r\n\r\nFrom such fragmentary beginnings as these, where the parent is doing most of the work, the balance of power will gradually shift until the child, having acquired the habit of reviewing autobiographical memories and mastered the narrative skills to organize them, can perform a self-narration of her own, such as this one by Emily in monologue at thirty-three months:\r\n\r\n>We bought a baby.\r\n[False starts: cause, the, well because, when she, well]\r\nwe thought it was for Christmas,\r\n*but when* we went to the store we didn't have our jacket on,\r\n*but* I saw some dolly,\r\n*and* I yelled at my mother and said\r\nI want one of those dolly.\r\n*So after* we were finished with the store,\r\nwe went over to the dolly and she bought me one,\r\n*So* I have one. (Language 204)\r\n\r\nStudy of this material, Nelson concludes, reveals children in the process of learning 'to talk about - and to remember - their experience in specific ways': 'They learn, that is, to 'narrativize' their experience' (Language 170). \r\n\r\nIn this formative phase of 'memory talk,' where parents are teaching the child how to work with autobiographical memories, parental styles of engagement can exert an enormous influence, transmitting both models of self and story.\r\n\r\n*Language*: Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind

111

The child's 'memory talk' training, I might add, confirms John Shotter's concept of 'social accountability' presented in Chapter 2: the child learns that she is expected to be able to display to others autobiographical memories arranged in narrative form.

108-109

Since it has been established that very young children do in fact have episodic memories¹ , it becomes reasonable to ask why they don't retain them. Rejecting any Freudian notion of repression, Nelson embraces instead an evolutionary perspective which prompts her to focus on the function of event-memories: 'As an adaptive system, the general function of memory is to predict and prepare for future encounters, actions, and experiences. That is, memory as such has no value in and of itself, but takes on value only as it contributes to the individual's ability to behave adaptively' ² . In early childhood, accordingly, memory work is dedicated to the generation of general event-memories or scripts that help to organize the child's knowledge of daily routines - bathing, eating, going to bed, and so forth. In this early developmental context, Nelson reasons, memory for novel experience (the one-time event that at a later stage will be valued and stored as autobiographical memory) 'does not have the same functional value, unless it is repeated' ³ , and so, if it is not incorporated into a general event-memory, it is not retained.\r\n\r\n\r\n¹ Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind, pg 162\r\n² Katherine Nelson, 'The Ontogeny of Memory for Real Events.' In Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, pg 265\r\n³ Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind, pg 158

107

...students of memory today hold that past experience is necessarily - both psychologically and neurologically - constructed anew in each memory event or act of recall.

100-101

...narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self - the self of autobiographical discourse - does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative. I have always been convinced that narrative occupies a central and determining place in the autobiographical enterprise, but I now make a much bolder claim for its function in self-representation. ...I asked whether the self could be said to be narratively structured. I concluded that self and story were 'complementary, mutually constituting aspects of a single process of identity formation' (Touching 198). \r\n\r\n...\r\n\r\nNarrative and identity are preformed simultaneously...in a single act of self-narration; the self in question is a self defined by and transacted in narrative process. What is arresting about this radical equation between narrative and identity is the notion that narrative here is not merely about the self but rather in some profound way a constituent part of self - of the self, I should be careful to specify, that is expressed in self-narrations, for narrative is not (and cannot be) coextensive with all of selfhood, given the multiple registers of selfhood, about which I will say more in a moment. It follows that the writing of autobiography is properly understood as an integral part of a lifelong process of identity formation in which acts of self-narration play a major part.

98

...autobiographers are primed to recognize the constructed nature of the past, yet they need at the same time to believe that in writing about the past they are performing an act of recovery: narrative teleology models the trajectory of continuous identity, reporting the supreme fiction of memory as fact. 'You' and 'I' and 'she' and 'he' and 'we' - the dialogic play of pronouns in these texts tracks the unfolding of relational identity in many registers, in discourse with others and within ourselves. The lesson these identity narratives are teaching, again and again, is that the self is dynamic, changing and plural.

94-95

...Patterns of Childhood is indeed [Christa] Wolf's self-narration, an *intra*relational life which works steadily, as we shall see, to reforge the link between selves past and present. Wolf recognizes continuous identity not only as a fiction of memory but also as an existential fact, necessary for our psychological survival amid the flux of experience. \r\n\r\nLooking back some twenty-five years after the end of World War II, the German novelist seeks to understand her own participation in the pernicious ideology of the Third Reich: as a teenager, she had been an ardent member of a Hitler youth group. But how, the narrator asks, can she connect with an earlier self she has repudiated and repressed? How to begin when at least three distinct stories claim her attention? In this intricately layered narrative, Wolf tracks all three chronologies of her inquiry into the past simultaneously: Nelly's childhood in the 1930's through World War II up to 1946, the narrator's trip to Poland to revisit Nelly's childhood home in July 1971, and the narrator's writing of Nelly's story from November 1972 to 1975. What, Wolf would have us ask, can possibly bind these periods of personal history together? Memory? Narrative? Identity? The use of the first person? 'We would suffer continuous estrangement from ourselves,' she observes, 'if it weren't for our memory of the things we have done, of the things that have happened to us. If it weren't for the memory of ourselves' (4). \r\n\r\nDoes memory indeed provide a basis for continuous identity, uniting us to our acts, our experiences, our earlier selves?

93

John Updike has identified autobiographical writing as a way of coping with the otherwise 'unbearable' knowledge 'that we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves' (226). In this sense, the selves we have been may seem to us as discrete and separate as the other persons with whom we live our relational lives. This experiential truth points to the fact that our sense of continuous identity is a fiction, the primary fiction of all self-narration.

89

[Mary Gordon] was the daughter of a doting father who treated her to lavish displays of affection. So central is the father's love to he child's sense of her own identity that his early death when she is seven creates a profound sense of lack, of want, that Gordon in her forties - successful novelist, happily married, with a child of her own - is still trying to fill. [Paul] Auster could be speaking for Gordon when he observes, wisely, 'You do not stop hungering for your father's love, even after you are grown up' (19)^1. Now, in midlife, however, when Gordon sets out to recover her father and his story, she discovers that she wasn't the central figure in his life. Archival research in Washington, in Providence, and in Lorain, Ohio, turns in a painful process of disconfirmation in which everything she thought she knew about her father turns out to have been a lie: reinventing himself (like Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby), David Gordon had edited his siblings, his working-class childhood, and an earlier marriage out of his story, passing himself off as a Harvard graduate, who had converted later on to Catholicism. The records disclose an unattractive stranger, a disreputable man-on-the-make, an Eastern European Jew who wrote for pornographic magazines in which he indulged in anti-Semetic jokes. Struggling to reconcile the idealized image of childhood memory with the stubborn truth of the biographical record, Gordon even attempts briefly to assume her father's identity in order to understand it, conjuring up the immigrant Jewish child's oppressive sense of being burdened with the 'wrong' identity to succeed in the American culture of his day. \r\n \r\nThe turning point in her quest comes when she concludes that 'David Gordon is a man I cannot know.' Refusing to be merely an episode in his story, she appropriates him for her own: 'The man I know is a man I gave birth to. His name is not David. ...It is My Father' (194).² Her act of possession is as total as she can make it. Not only does she 'give birth to' her father in this narrative, but she literally revises his death as well: in the final section of The Shadow Man Gordon has her father's body exhumed from its place in her mother's family's plot and reburied in Calvary, a cemetery of her own choosing. This is certainly extravagant stuff, as Gordon is certainly aware. ...Gordon and Auster conclude that the story of the proximate other is ultimately unknowable. For Gordon, moreover, it proves to be a story she would prefer not to know, for it can't be integrated into her own identity narrative.\r\n \r\n \r\n¹ /publication/70 \r\n² /publication/71

86

...the most common form of the relational life, the self's story viewed through the lens of its relations with some key other person, sometimes a sibling, friend or lover, but most often a parent - we might call such an individual the proximate other to signify the intimate tie to the relational autobiographer.

85

...the key environment in the individual's formation is the family, which serves as the community's primary conduit for the transmission of its cultural values.

75

[Henry Louis Gates, Jr.]'s sensitive - and also startlingly funny - account of the permutations of racial identity, of 'being colored' (xiv), demonstrates how 'we'-experience shapes the trajectory of 'I'-narrative, not only his own but the one he projects for his children: 'In your lifetimes, I suspect, you will go from being African Americans, to 'people of color,' to being, once again, 'colored people.' ...But I have to confess that I like 'colored' best, maybe because when I hear the word, I hear it in my mother's voice and the sepia tones of my childhood.

67

...developmentally speaking, the rise of the self that is the subject of autobiographical discourse dates from the child's initiation into a lifelong practice of self-narration.

66

Although Keller had previous mastered a small vocabulary of finger-words spelled into her hand by her teacher, Anne Sullivan, it was only when Sullivan placed one of her hands under the spout and spelled into the other the word water that Keller achieved simultaneously a sense of language and self. It was truly a kind of intellectual and spiritual baptism: 'I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul' (Story 23). I summarized the upshot of the well-house episode schematically as follows: 'the self ('my soul') emerges in the presence of language ('w-a-t-e-r') and the other ('Teacher')' (Fictions, 212)^1.\r\n\r\n¹ /publication/69

63

The premise of Shotter's concept of social accountability is that 'one ontologically learns how to be this or that kind of person' in conversation with others (138). Identity formation, then is socially and (more specifically) discursively transacted: thus 'the capacity to be addressed as a 'you' by others is a preliminary to the ultimate capacity of being able to say 'I' of oneself' (143). \r\n... \r\nIf Shotter's theory of social accountability is correct, and I think it is, the longevity of the myth of autonomy is hardly surprising: in this view, we are conditioned precisely not to recognize the relational dimension of selfhood; possessive individualism, functioning as the dominant social 'text' to which we are held 'accountable,' masks the contribution of the 'practical social processes going on 'between' people' (137) toward making us what we are: 'we fail to register the fact of our involvement with others' (142).

62

The psychologist John Shotter has worked out a much more searching answer to the enduring vitality of the myth of autonomy. In order to correct psychology's - and his own - one-sided preoccupation with inner states, Shotter proposes 'to repudiate the traditional 'Cartesian' starting-point for psychological research located in the 'I' of the individual, ...and to replace it by taking as basic not the inner subjectivity of the individual, but the practical social processes going on 'between' people' (137). \r\n \r\n'In my earlier views,' Shotter writes, 'I was clearly still in the thrall of classic 'text' of identity, possessive individualism' (147). Possessive individualism is C. B. Macpherson's term for the proto-capitalist model of identity proposed by Hobbes and Locke, which posits the individual as 'essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them' (quoted in Shotter 136). Stepping back, Shotter asks why he - why we all - continue to account 'for our experience of ourselves...in such an individualistic way [as Macpherson describes]: as if we all existed from birth as separate, isolated individuals already containing 'minds' or 'mentalities' wholly within ourselves, set over against a material world itself devoid of any mental processes' (136). We talk in this way, he answers, because we are disciplined to do so by 'social accountability': 'what we talk of as our experience of our reality is constituted for us very largely by the already established ways in which we must talk in our attempts to account for ourselves - and for it - to the others around us...And only certain ways of talking are deemed legitimate.' So pervasive is this discursive discipline that not only our talking but 'our understanding, and apparently our experience of ourselves, will be constrained also' (141).

53-54

Like Benjamin, Steedman conceives of identity as relational, and the autobiography she writes is also relational, for she believes that her mother's self and story provide the key to her own. 'Children are always episodes in someone else's narrative,' she affirms, 'not their own people, but rather brought into being for particular purposes' (122).¹ In this way the familiar and perfunctory beginning of so many autobiographies - 'I was born...' - acquires a new and signal importance, for Steedman argues that her dawning recognition of the circumstances of her conception - her realization that she was neither a wanted nor a legitimate child - determined the very structure of her personality. \r\n\r\n¹ /publication/67

52

According to Benjamin, 'most theories of [infant] development have emphasized the goal of autonomy more than relatedness to others.' They accept Margaret Mahler's 'unilinear trajectory that leads from oneness [with the mother] to separateness,' 'leaving unexplored the territory in which subjects meet' (25). As a corrective to Mahler's model, Benjamin stresses accordingly the 'intersubjective dimension' (49) of individuation and its central paradox: 'at the very moment of realizing our own independence, we are dependent upon another to recognize it' (33). Thus, because the assertion of autonomy is dependent on this dynamic of recognition, identity is necessarily relational.

47

The contemporary debate about the nature of the self portrayed in autobiography was launched forty years ago in a remarkably influential essay written by the French critic Georges Gusdorf, 'Conditions and Limits of Autobiography' (1956). The model Gusdorf posited for the identity that autobiographies presuppose - let us call it the Gusdorf model - was emphatically individualistic, featuring a 'separate and unique selfhood' (Friedman 34). In a similar vein, writing in the 1970's, Phillippe Lejeune (L'Autobiographie) and Karl J. Weintraub traced the rise of modern autobiography to Rousseau and Enlightenment individualism. Then, in 1980, Mary Mason became the first of a long line of feminist critics to repudiate the universalizing claims of this model and question its place in the history of the genre. The model might suitably describe the experience of Augustine and Rousseau, she conceded, but it did not fit the contours of women's lives. Correcting this gender bias, she proposed an alternative model for women: 'identity through relation to the chosen other' (210). \r\n \r\n A few years later, Domna Stanton asked, 'Is the [female] subject different?' and by implication, 'Is women's autobiography different from men's?' Answering yes to these questions, subsequent scholars - and I am thinking especially of Susan Stanford Friedman, Bella Brodzki, and Celeste Schenck - have returned most often to Mason's notion of relational identity as the distinguishing mark of women's lives. Thus, in her essay 'Individuation and Autobiography,' and indictment of 'the conflation of autobiography with male life-writing' and 'the conflation of male experience with critical ideologies' (60), Joy Hooton observes, 'The presentation of the self as related rather than single and isolate is...the most distinctive and consistent difference between male and female life-writing' (70). Following Friedman, Hooton cites research in developmental psychology and sociology, by Carol Gilligan and especially Nancy Chodorow, to support this view that individuation is decisively inflected by gender. The female subject, then, is different, and so is her life story. \r\n \r\n... \r\n \r\nThe understandable pressure to settle on reliable criteria for identifying difference in autobiography, together with the rarity of comparative analysis, has promoted the myth of autonomy that governs our vision of male lives. I hasten to add that men are hardly the victims alone of critical misdescription; like women, men also are constructed by patriarchal ideology. Consolidating the gains of feminist scholarship, and emulating what Sidonie Smith and others have achieved for women's autobiography , we need to liberate men's autobiography from the inadequate model that has guided our reading to date. As Chris McCandless's story demonstrates, the Gusdorf model is potentially a killer. \r\n \r\nWhy, it is fair to ask, didn't critics pick up on the implications for male identity of Mary Mason's early critique of the Gusdorf model? Part of the answer, I believe, is that Mason, Friedman, and other feminist critics helped to keep the old Gusdorf model in place - paradoxically - by attacking it: it didn't apply to women, they argued, but it did to men, leaving men stuck with a model of identity that seems in retrospect rather like a two-dimensional caricature: so-called traditional autobiography became the province of the Marlboro Man.

46

Models of identity are centrally implicated in the way we live and write about our lives. As Paul Smith puts it, 'None of us lives without reference to an imaginative singularity which we call our self' (6).¹ ... In forming our sustaining sense of self, we draw on models of identity provided by the cultures we inhabit. Some of these models are life enhancing, some not. \r\n\r\n¹ /publication/66

40-41

Initially, Murphy's identity troubles, like Sack's, are caused by a loss of proprioception; in losing full use of his legs, he writes, 'I had also lost a part of my self. It was not just that people acted differently toward me, which they did, but rather that I felt differently toward myself' (85). But people did act differently toward Murphy once he became confined to a wheelchair, and in the remarkable middle section of the book, 'Body, Self, and Society,' the anthropologist delineates the 'liminal,' devalued status of the disabled in contemporary American culture. Like Grealy, he joins the company of 'damaged' selves for whom there is no conceptual place in the culture of the normal. Citing the anthropologists Mary Douglas, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Victor Turner, who have developed theories about the 'deviant' individual, Murphy argues that the disabled, who 'gross out ordinary folks' (132), are compromised in their status not only as gendered individuals but even as human beings. They belong to the category of the category-less.

64

If Shotter argues that the individual's sense of self is generated in conversation with others, several theorists in Burkitt's survey - including George Herbert Mead and Rom Harre - propose that our subjectivity is itself structured as a conversation. Harre writes: 'The fundamental human reality is a conversation, effectively without beginning or end, to which, from time to time, individuals make contributions. All that is personal in our mental and emotional lives is individually appropriated from the conversation going on around us and perhaps idiosyncratically transformed.

39

The autobiography of [Lucy] Grealy's face comes to an end when she finally abandons the old body plot that structures the narrative, 'the framework of when my face gets fixed, then I'll start living (221): 'As a child I had expected my liberation to come from getting a new face to put on, but now I saw it came from shedding something, shedding my image.' Grealy recognizes that she had allowed herself to be more deeply scarred by culturally imposed shame than she ever had been by the original cancer. Surgery can never make her look like herself, while society urges that 'we can most be ourselves by acting and looking like someone else, only to leave our original faces behind to turn into ghosts' (222).

32

Ecological experience, like the body image, belongs to the unreflexive realm of primary consciousness and is, accordingly, normally inaccessible to conscious examination and representation. [John M] Hull's blindness, however, like Sack's injury, seems to have created for him a window through which he was privileged to observe how his sense of self was shaped by the usually invisible sensory reception of data from the world. In both cases, a sensory deficit is experienced as a deficit of identity. Because Hull became blind only in midlife, in his forties, after a lifelong struggle with failing vision, his new condition sensitized him to probe the unexamined assumptions that the sighted take for granted in their conception of identity. \r\n\r\n*note*: would increased sensory experience lead to an increase of sense of identity?

30

Sacks even speculates that the body image 'may be the first mental construct and self-construct there is, the one that acts as a model for all others' (192).^1\r\n\r\n¹ /publication/64

29

The body image - here specifically proprioception - emerges as the lifeline of identity, and Sacks invokes a metaphor of property and possession to conceptualize it: \r\n\r\n>One may be said to 'own' or 'possess' one's body - at least its limbs and movable parts - by virtue of a constant flow of incoming information, arising ceaselessly, throughout life, from the muscles, joints and tendons. One has oneself, one is oneself, because the body knows itself, confirms itself, at all times, by this sixth sense [proprioception].¹ \r\n\r\nAre bodies and selves something we 'have' or something we 'are'? Interestingly, Sacks use the two formulations interchangeably to express his sense that bodies and selves are intertwined and inseparable. Identity turns on the question of the organism acknowledging or 'owning' what is proper to it; it is this sense of ownership that Sacks invokes when he speaks of the body 'knowing' itself. This bodily knowledge is the basis of selfhood in organisms endowed with consciousness.\r\n\r\n\r\n¹ /publication/64

24

In contrast to the unmediated, direct perception of the ecological and interpersonal selves, the reflexiveness that distinguishes Neisser's extended, private, and conceptual selves is much like the 'consciousness of consciousness' that distinguishes Edelman's higher consciousness from primary consciousness. Following the acquisition of language and the entry into symbol-making activity that accompanies it, the child now engages in the 'self-representations' that these modes of selfhood predicate. Development of these selves is normally shaped and fostered in a concerted way at home and school by the adults of the child's immediate culture. These are the selves familiar to traditional autobiographers, who relate the story of the extended and private selves by drawing on their culture's store of conceptual selves.

22-23

In a remarkable paper titled 'Five Kinds of Self-knowledge' (1988), [Ulric] Neisser attempts to distinguish 'among several kinds of self-specifying information, each establishing a different aspect of the self.' Although he speaks of 'these aspects' as 'so distinct that they are essentially different selves' with different 'origins and developmental histories' (35), he argues that these selves 'are not generally experienced as separate and distinct' (36). Self or selves? Although Neisser occasionally speaks of the self, he seems ultimately less interested in affirming the self as a single, unified entity than he is in stressing the variety of self-knowledge, the 'self-specifying information' (35) that constitutes our experience. His fivefold modeling counters the tendency toward an oversimplifying reification that is one of the principal drawbacks of self as a term, a reification that obscures the multiple registers of self-experience he seeks to display. \r\nNeisser's selves include the following: \r\n\r\n1. The ecological self: 'the self as perceived with respect to the physical environment; I am the person here in this place, engaged in this particular activity' (36). Present in infancy. \r\n2. The interpersonal self: 'the self as engaged in immediate unreflective social interaction with another person' (41); 'I am the person who is engaged, here, in this particular human interchange' (36). Present in infancy. \r\n3. The extended self: the self of memory and anticipation, the self existing outside the present moment; 'I am the person who had certain specific experiences, who regularly engages in certain specific and familiar routines' (36). By the age of three, children are aware of themselves 'as existing outside the present moment, and hence of the extended self' (47). \r\n4. The private self: the self of 'conscious experiences that are not available to anyone else' (50); 'I am, in principle, the only person who can feel this unique and particular pain' (36). Although experts differ as to the emergence of this sense of privacy in developmental chronology, many studies show as 'aware of the privacy of mental life before the age of 5' (50). \r\n5. The conceptual self: the extremely diverse forms of self-information - social roles, personal traits, theories of body and mind, of subject and person - that posit the self as a category, either explicitly or implicitly. (Neisser's discrimination of five primary kinds of self-information, of course, is one such conceptual model.)\r\n

13

[Gerald] Edelman's approach to the brain and to the emergence of consciousness in [his books] is resolutely Darwinian - 'spirits and ghosts are out' (113). His Theory of Neural Group Selection (TNGS) or 'neural Darwinism' articulates his sense of the way in which the brains neural organization is constantly modified - both phylogenetically and ontogenetically - to adapt to the ever-changing demands of experience.

11

In 1905, two French neurologists, G. Deny and P. Camus, reported the strange case of 'Madame I,' a young woman who lost 'body awareness' and lost herself in the process: \r\n\r\n> I'm no longer aware of myself as I used to be. I can no longer feel my arms, my legs, my head, and my hair. I have to touch myself constantly in order to know how I am...I cannot find myself.¹ \r\n\r\nMadame I's pathetic touching of her limbs stages a startling inversion of Descarte's thought experiment: 'I feel by body,' she seems to say, 'therefore I am.' Her troubled condition reminds us that it is possession of a body image that anchors and sustains our sense of identity.\r\n\r\n¹ /publication/62\r\n\r\n \r\n

4

How much of what autobiographers say they experience is equivalent to what they really experience, and how much of it is merely what they know how to say? Is there, we should ask, a demonstrable difference between the psychological reality of selfhood and the linguistic articulation of that reality?

18

Neural Darwinism has the potential to transform not only traditional conceptions of self but of memory as well, as the work or Israel Rosenfield, formerly Edelman's colleague and collaborator, suggests. Rosenfield believes, first of all, that memories are perceptions newly occurring in the present rather than images fixed and stored in the past and somehow mysteriously recalled to present consciousness. As perceptions, memories share the constructed nature of all brain events that TNGS posits: 'Recollection is a kind of perception...and every context will alter the nature of what is recalled' (Invention 89, emphasis added). Rosenfield's second point about memory, a corollary of his view of memory as embedded in present consciousness, is that all memories are self-referential: 'Every recollection refers not only to the remembered event or person or object but to the person who is remembering' (Strange 42). The bond between self and memory can be traced back to Locke, but Rosenfield puts a new spin on this linkage by factoring in the body as a necessary third term in the equation.

20

...when we look at life history from the perspective of neural Darwinism, it is fair to say that we are all becoming different persons all the time, we are not what we were; self and memory are emergent, in process, constantly evolving, and both are grounded in the body and the body image. Responding to the flux of self-experience, we instinctively gravitate to identity-support-structures: the notion of identity as continuous over time and the use of autobiographical discourse to record its history.

21

In Narrative and the Self (1991) [Anthony Paul] Kerby stakes out a position on the self's ontology that is much like Edelman's no 'spirits' or 'ethereal beings.' Ruling out any notion of the self as some kind of transcendental (Cartesian or other) entity preexisting our lives as language speakers, Kerby defines the self as the product of 'signifying practices,' especially 'narrative constructions or stories' (1).