[In the following essay, Folkenflik studies the treatment of alterity and the self in autobiographical narratives from St. Augustine to Jean-Paul Sartre, with primary reference to several Victorian autobiographers.]

My title may seem to be an abstract version of Rimbaud's “Je est un autre,” and this is certainly a line to which I will return, but what I have in mind, at least initially, is the moment in autobiography in which the subject perceives himself, or less frequently herself, as another self, a frequent though not inevitable feature of the genre.¹ I will start with Augustine, not simply because he stands at the beginning of the most influential tradition in autobiography, but because he presents the process in a clear-cut and characteristic form. In book 8, chapter 7 of the Confessions he says:

This was what Ponticianus told us. But while he was speaking, O Lord, you were turning me around to look at myself. For I had placed myself behind my own back, refusing to see myself. You were setting me before my own eyes so that I could see how sordid I was, how deformed and squalid, how tainted with ulcers and sores. I saw it all and stood aghast, but there was no place where I could escape from myself. If I tried to turn my eyes away they fell on Ponticianus, still telling his tale, and in this way you brought me face to face with myself once more, forcing me upon my own sight so that I should see my wickedness and loathe it. I had known it all along, but I had always pretended that it was something different. I had turned a blind eye and forgotten it.²

Augustine's translators typically have some trouble with this passage because of the physical impossibility—it is literally preposterous—of Augustine's original locution “behind my own back.” This placement of the self makes of the true self an other, for though we are not normally present to our selves, yet we can in some sense see ourselves by means of a mirror. What we get is an image of our exterior self (it is not quite accurate, for right and left are reversed) that enables self-contemplation. Some of the images of bodily displacement that follow in this passage suggest a vision in a mirror—“you brought me face to face with myself once more.” And in a few paragraphs he says “the time had now come when I stood naked before my own eyes, while my consciousness upbraided me.” Jacques Lacan has claimed that in the infant there is a “mirror stage” in which the infant gains a sense of self by seeing itself in a mirror. Perhaps there is a similar state in those autobiographers who undergo a conversion experience that is registered in their autobiographies and provides the point of departure from which the autobiography is written.

In any case, there are a number of things of importance to be noted here. First, concern with the self comes about through self-hatred rather than self-love. This will be typical of the religious conversion autobiography. In the English and American traditions it is especially characteristic of Puritan autobiographies of the seventeenth century. The form that the opposition between the two selves takes is accompanied by imagery of sickness versus health (here the “ulcers and sores”), darkness (often blindness) versus light, bondage versus freedom, sleeping versus waking, birth versus death. This imagery runs throughout the book, and it is easy to see how Manichaeism, with its emphasis on good and evil as equally powerful oppositions, appealed to Augustine in his earlier days. Just after the quoted passage he registers in a famous sentence the pulls he felt in adolescence: “I had prayed to you for chastity and said ‘Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.’” This is, to use in another context the term that Sacvan Bercovitch has revived from Puritan usage, an “automachia,” a battle of the self against the self.³

But we have not yet considered the nature of the “mirror” in which Augustine sees himself. It is a narrative told by Ponticianus. On a chance visit to Augustine, Ponticianus notices a book on his game table. It turns out to be Paul's epistles, and this leads him to relate the biography of St. Anthony of Egypt and then collective biographies of monks in the desert, followed by an account of the monastery at Milan led by Ambrose. All this is new and astonishing to Augustine, but it leads to the story of how Ponticianus strolled with a friend while another pair of friends went off to a house and found a book containing a biography of Anthony. It converted the one who read it on the spot. He, “labouring under the pain of the new life that was taking birth in him,” conveyed to his friend his decision “to serve God,” and his friend decided to follow his example. When they returned to the other pair, “Ponticianus said that he and the other man did not change their old ways, but they were moved to tears for their own state of life” (p. 168).

The shifts here are complex, more complex than I wish to work out in detail in this essay, but some aspects should be noted. The finding of a book bearing Christian witness leads to biographies of saintly men and then to a story of how a saintly biography converted one man who conveyed his conversion experience to another who was in turn converted by his argument. And though the other pair (the balance is neat) is not converted by the story, they are moved by the disparity between it and their own lives.

This is the narrative that serves Augustine as a mirror of his own life. And yet it is both mirror and anti-mirror. It shows him, in the converts, a model that he admires but has not followed, and it shows him a parallel to his own action in that of Ponticianus and his friend. The image is a self that he has not seen, but it is a hateful self, not what he has characterized a little earlier as his “true self” (p. 164), a self that his faulty will has kept from coming into being. His emphasis, however, is on the difference between himself and the converts: “I hated myself in comparison with them.” We should be reminded, then, that although this book is a confession directed to God, both in the sense of a confession of sins and a praise of God (confessio laudis) conveyed in the first paragraph of the book, it is also intended for a less exalted audience: “I need not tell all this to you, my God, but in your presence I tell it to my own kind, to those other men, however few, who may perhaps pick up this book” (p. 45). Hence, the chance reading of this private confession made public may itself act like the life of Anthony upon the friends of Ponticianus, like the story told by Ponticianus upon Augustine himself. And Augustine's Confessions will be that other that will show the true self to the unconverted Christian. (This is his primary audience, though his career, which moves through the errors of Pagan philosophy and Manichaeism, provides a wide net in which other sorts of believers may be caught, only to find their way.) Augustine shows us how the narrative of another about narratives of others yet becomes his narrative, his testament, as the praise of God found in the Old and New Testaments becomes the very words he speaks. So his book provides a model that may become part of our narratives if it converts us in turn; he is that other in whom we may recognize our selves.

The retrospective consciousness converts the early events of his life to a series of continuously ironic activities, as for example in his reading of Virgil: “I was obliged to memorize the wanderings of a hero named Aeneas, while in the meantime I failed to remember my own erratic ways. I learned to lament the death of Dido, who killed herself for love, while all the time, in the midst of these things, I was dying of love for you, my God and my Life, and I shed no tears for my own plight” (p. 33). Here the chiasmus and antitheses oppose two ways of being that were not present at the time and can only be seen together through the narrative that makes of the early self a false self and of the later a true.

At the beginning of book 8 Augustine says that although he was sure of God's eternal life, “I had only seen it like a confused reflection in a mirror,” an allusion to the passage from St. Paul that we know better as “through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13: 12). Of course the whole of the book is composed of Biblical quotation and allusion—it is almost a cento—with the greatest number coming from the Psalms, which provide a model of a continuous, intimate song of praise to God and a proto-autobiography of sorts, and, though far fewer, from St. Paul's epistles, which themselves provide a model of conversion in an autobiographical context. And we should remember that the conversion only comes about when Augustine hears a child's singsong voice saying “Tolle, lege; Tolle, lege” (Take up and read; take up and read). Though he had been contemptuous of the use of random Virgilian passages as guides, he finds that the words of Romans 13: 13-14 with its injunction to “put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ” are meant for him.

The very language Augustine uses, then, is the language of the true self, the convert to God's ways, whose every word is intended to fall within his mode, just as Augustine pays tribute to God's continuous presence in his life from the first, even though he was unaware of it. Augustine's work is in the tradition of the imitatio Christi, but it in turn provides an exemplary life for contemplation, and the mirror is central image both within the book and for the book itself. The “mirror” as a literary form would last until the Renaissance and provide images of both exemplary and negatively exemplary behavior. The Mirror for Magistrates, to take a well-known example, provides a series of tragic falls of princes and great men.

A later churchman uses the image of the mirror directly to account for a stage in his shift from Anglicanism to Catholicism. John Henry Newman in the embattled Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) speaks of his reading the History of the Monophysites: “My stronghold was antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found as it seemed to me, Christiandom of sixteenth and nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite.”⁴ Here we have again not a literal mirror, but a book, and one that reflects not just individuals but whole epochs. What is characteristic of the metaphor is that Newman's perception of self is in advance of his rational recognition. He does not go to the mirror to see what he looks like; he sees in the mirror of the book a face that is his, but it is a fifth-century Christian of a forgotten sect peering out at him. In this strange and moving defense of Newman's religious change, he must see that the other is himself before he can apprehend his true self.

It is not surprising to find that a few pages after this account of a mirror that is a book Newman speaks of the power of words by reference not only to Augustine's words in his attack on the Donatists but also to a key passage in the Confessions: “For a mere sentence, the words of St. Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. To take a familiar instance, they were like the ‘Turn again Whittington’ of the chime, or, to take a more serious one, they were like the ‘Tolle, lege—Tolle, lege’ of the child, which converted St. Augustine himself” (pp. 98-99). Newman shifts from the story of Dick Whittington's decisive reversal, which leads to his becoming Lord Mayor of London, to the more meaningful instance of Augustine's hearing the child's command to “Take up and read, Take up and read,” which leads him to turn to a Biblical passage that seems providentially guided. The whole of Augustine's Confessions would seem to provide just such a reading experience for Newman.

There is an extraordinary—I am tempted to call it unique—autobiographical document written by Newman that is sometimes given the title (not his) “An Autobiography in Miniature”:

John Newman wrote this just before he was going up to Greek on Tuesday, June 10th, 1812, when it only wanted 3 days to his going home, thinking of the time (at home) when looking at this he shall recollect when he did it.

At school now back again.

And now at Alton where he never expected to be, being lately come for the Vacation from Oxford where he dared not hope to be—how quick time passes and how ignorant are we of futurity. April 8th 1819 Thursday.

And now at Oxford but with far different feelings—let the date speak—Friday February 16th 1821—

And now in my rooms at Oriel College, a Tutor, a Parish Priest and Fellow, having suffered much, slowly advancing to what is good and holy, and led on by God's hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me. Even so, O Lord. September 7, 1829. Monday morning [frac14] past 10.

And now a Catholic at Maryvale and expecting soon to set out for Rome. May 29, 1846.

And now a Priest and Father of the Oratory. having just received the degree of Doctor from the Holy Father. September 23, 1850.

And now a Cardinal. March 2, 1884.⁵

We might be inclined to call this the work of a lazy diarist, but it is different and more. What makes it remarkable is the spread in the writing, conducted at intervals over a period of nearly 72 years, and only conveyed to us as what it is through the suppressed present tense and the anaphoric “and now.” If the locution were “and then,” and the tense, like that of the first entry, past, we would have a typically autobiographical form (provided also that it adhered to first-person narration). But as either autobiography or biography it would be unexceptional: after childhood a mere dating of high points or stages. Even less exceptional: the dates, as Jonathan Loesberg notes, may be exhorted to speak, but they do not, for they are frequently at some remove from the event to which they may point when the event is significant.

The use of “and now” insists upon the identity of the changing being whose voice comes to us in different registers at each point and whose shifts must be composed of “far different feelings” even when he does not say so. The locution begins in earnest when he picks up the single word from the second entry (“And at school now back again”) and uses it with a sense of the irony of the situation (“And now at Alton where he never expected to be”). The generalization established here operates as a figured bass for the entries of the next 65 years: “how quick time passes and how ignorant we are of futurity.” With each succeeding entry he knows the difference between what he was and what he is (the “far different feelings” he has), but he does not know what the future holds. Throughout the whole document there is a sense of expectation, whether that of going home or being “where he never expected to be,” which gives way to “slowly advancing … led on by God's hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me.” This in turn is succeeded by his “expecting soon to set out for Rome” and the final reticence and mystery of “And now a Cardinal.” Home turns out to be Rome in a way he never could have guessed. In this serial autobiography, the suggestion is that the self may be “other” at every given moment. What looks like a conundrum for the philosophers of personal identity is presented as the mystery of God's leading the blind self into an unknowable future.

Newman uses third person at times in this passage, and such usage is characteristic of a small but significant portion of writers of autobiography in the Western tradition, with a greater percentage before the early modern period. In the Chinese tradition third-person autobiography has been the norm, a fact that leads a recent investigator of this neglected field to call them “self-written biographies.”⁶ In a sense this convention reminds us of how unusual a genre autobiography is, for it is dependent not on the subject but on the identity of subject and writer. It would be easy for the writer of a third-person autobiography to pass off his work as a biography, though in most cases there are internal signs that the work could not have been written by a biographer (or perhaps only by a bad biographer, one given to mind reading or unwilling to make available the basis for his inferences about the feelings and thoughts of his subject). Third-person autobiographies have been written by such important autobiographers as Vico (see John Sturrock above), Mme d'Aubigné, and Henry Adams, and this convention, which has different meanings at different times, is worth closer examination, for it would seem to insist upon the self as an other.⁷

Before doing so, however, I would like to glance at a still rarer convention, the use of the second person to refer to the self. Julia Watson (above) finds it occasionally in the work of Christa Wolf, but perhaps the strangest of formal breaks representing the self as other appears as the dedication, “The Author to Herself,” of the Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755), an autobiography discussed above by Linda Peterson. Charke's second-person address is preceded, as far as I know, only by Smollett's dedication to himself of the novel Ferdinand Count Fathom and Fielding's mock dedication of Shamela, “The Editor to Himself,” an attack on Charke's father Colley Cibber among others. I know of no earlier autobiographies so dedicated. Charke plays against the form by criticizing rather than flattering her dedicatee through a mock encomium: “That thoughtless Ease (so peculiar to yourself) with which you have run thro' so many strange and unaccountable Vicissitudes of Fortune, is an undeniable Proof of the native indolent Sweetness of your Temper.” She wants to call herself “Friend; a Name, I own, I never as yet have known you by.” In what seems a characteristic move by this cross-dressing actress of the eighteenth century, the dedication dramatizes the difference between her former behavior and what she hopes to become, her self-division and her awareness of her “Oddity,” something she represents while reprehending it.⁸

Early third-person autobiographers, like Vico, could be said to attempt impersonality, if not entirely objectivity, but the appearance of the convention in more modern writers is apt to be complex. In perhaps the greatest of them, Henry Adams, this seeing of the self as other is part of a strategy operating at various levels and highly thematized in his work. He did not want The Education of Henry Adams to be taken as an autobiography at all. It was to be seen rather as a plotted point to be lined up with Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, a geometric basis for his “scientific” history. The book was originally privately published and sent to a number of friends, who were to regard it “in the nature of proof-sheets” and to return it (which most, of course, did not).⁹ He characterized it as an “experiment” (p. 513), a “last Will and Testament” (p. 508). It is also “a mere shield of protection in the grave,” and he advises the recipient of the letter in which he says this, Henry James, “to take your own life in the same way, in order to prevent biographers from taking it in theirs” (pp. 512-13). Adams metaphorically recommends autobiography as suicide, a way to avoid being murdered by biographers. Despite his claim at times that it is not an autobiography, he asks William James in a letter if he has ever read “the Confessions of St. Augustine, or of Cardinal de Retz, or of Rousseau, or of Benvenuto Cellini, or even of my dear Gibbon?” in order to insist upon Augustine as the only one with “an idea of literary form” (p. 511), and to establish that his own book is “rotten”—though in another letter naming Augustine as his “literary model” he indicates that like himself, Augustine was a failure as an artist.

All of this has its bearing on the third-person form. If the impetus for his third-person form comes from his quest for historic detachment from the self to give it historic meaning, this is neither the sole function nor the significance of his strategy. It is as though, unlike those egotists of autobiography, Adams cannot say “I.” He seems to suffer from low self-esteem, as a popular psychologist might put it. And certainly the self-characterizations of Adams throughout the book denigrate and diminish him. He is “The American insect” (p. 143), “a little dog” (p. 146). In comparison to others he has no importance. When he accompanies his father, the ambassador to England, as private secretary, he is a “cabin-boy” (p. 112). He summarizes his activity at the embassy by claiming that “he never gave his father the smallest help, unless it were as a footman, a clerk, or a companion for the younger children” (p. 117). To the poet Swinburne, “he could be no more than a worm.” In the social world of England he is a shapeless “cub” (p. 122), for in society he was “a young man without any position at all” (p. 145). He remains “a mere student” (p. 153), and “a clerk at five dollars a week would have done the work [at the embassy] as well or better” (p. 171). He even loses what identity he has (typically, at the hands of a servant):

No one knew him—not even the lackeys. The last Saturday evening he ever attended [one of Palmerston's parties], he gave his name as usual at the foot of the staircase, and was rather disturbed to hear it shouted up as “Mr. Handrew Hadams!” He tried to correct it, and the footman shouted more loudly: “Mr. Hanthony Hadams!” With some temper he repeated the correction, and was finally announced as “Mr. Halaxander Hadams,” and under this name he made his bow for the last time to Lord Palmerston who certainly knew no better.

(p. 134)

He has a powerful awareness of his own small stature that takes on metaphoric force. In the text he says that “Adams had tried his own little hands” on the problem of Grant's administration (and failed), but in the preface he presents himself in an image adapted (along with much else) from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus as a “mannikin,” obviously a dummy upon which clothing is draped, but a “little man” as well (pp. 280, xxx). And later in the book he devises an epitaph for himself that begins “Hic jacet / Homunculus Scriptor,” portraying himself as a virtual embryo (with perhaps a glance at Sterne's Tristram Shandy).

Painfully shy and self-conscious, Adams is further reduced by the tireless narrative voice that describes him and refuses to comfort him or make compact with him. Its mordant irony does not allow Adams to find a place in the present or a retrospective purchase on his being through telling his own tale. He even breaks with autobiographical decorum by insisting that “to the end of his life he labored over the lessons then taught.” This is what no autobiographer can say, and what no honest biographer can say of a living man. This sentence is the work of a disembodied voice from beyond the grave, one who has successfully “taken” his own life in writing his autobiography. He knows that the book will only be “published” after his death, despite the printed copies he has sent out while alive.

This is the self as other with a vengeance. It is as though Adams, through the strategy of historical detachment, is able to disown his self, to make believe he is not he. In a strange and usually unremarked scene, the only one that may remind us that Adams and Lewis Carroll were contemporaries, he comments on the barrenness of his “diplomatic education”: “Still another nightmare he suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somerset, a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and forced him to perform a Highland fling before the assembled nobility and gentry, with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador for a partner. This might seem humorous to some, but to him the world turned to ashes” (p. 118). Here nations are united in a dance, but everything is out of synchronization in this grotesque wonderland version. The English Duchess holds Spanish castanets and the young American is forced into a Scottish dance (a highland fling no less) with a Turk. He calls it a “nightmare” and certainly the idea of being not just commanded but “forced” to dance a dance one does not know before a society filled with authority figures, nobility, gentry, and ambassadors must be that for the shy young man. Even the ironic and generally detached narrator seems momentarily to sympathize with him.

Joyce's description of his own fictional James Duffy in “A Painful Case” could be designed for Adams: “He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.” And the sentence before this one seems to also make its comment on Adams: “He lived at a little distance from his own body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances.” I cannot say that Adams did this in fact, but his style in the Education certainly does. Something more than an inferiority complex is at stake, though Adams was painfully aware of being a very short man. He was also aware of coming short of expectations, for his grandfather and great-grandfather had been presidents of the United States. The very first paragraphs of the book dramatize that heritage, typically as a disabling fact. He is born “under the shadow of Boston State House” and christened “by his uncle, the minister of the First Church in the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.” This provides the basis for a characteristically strange analogy: “Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple and circumcized in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century” (p. 3). This is the initial self-denigration, for Adams was a visceral anti-Semite, and the bitter humor here comes at the expense both of himself and Jews. Much later in a chapter called “The Press” he again energetically compares himself negatively to a Jew in the ugliest passage in the book: “Not a Polish Jew from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him and an education that had cost a civil war” (p. 238). He achieves something of the intensity he claims he lacks in the envious contempt he displays toward this anti-self (what Erik Erikson would call a “negative identity fragment”) with whom he has in some ways metaphorically identified himself at the outset of the book. This is not just a matter of “period” anti-Semitism. One can see here the scapegoating that comes from a genuine feeling of inferiority that is there despite all the irony.

Autobiography as the story of failure or tragedy is relatively unusual. Most autobiographies are success stories, even if not crassly so, despite the fact that the older autobiographers are of necessity nearing death (and as W. B. Carnochan indicates speaking of Hume, we can even read the autobiography of a man who knows that he will be dead shortly after he finishes writing).¹⁰ But Adams is possibly unique in his continued insistence upon his own failure. One of the later chapters in the book is called “Failure,” and the title might have been used for the whole. This insistence, of course, cuts two ways, and the irony operates both for and against him. Another sort of autobiographer might take the facts of Henry Adams's life, his ancestry, education, and achievements as the material for a fulsomely self-congratulatory and complacent book. As R. P. Blackmur puts it, he should be regarded “as a representative example of education: but education pushed to the point of failure as contrasted with ordinary education which stops at the formula of success.”¹¹ Hence we also see what the self-denigration and diminishment tend to underplay, the heroic standard by which all of Adams's thoughts and actions are judged, and one could put the emphasis, as Adams's best biographer, Ernest Samuels does, on the egoism of the man, though it would have to be far different from the egoism of Rousseau.

One very special form of the self as other is dependent on the lie. The telling of a lie as a way of presenting the self to others as different from what one consciously knows oneself to be differentiates one from others and at the same time makes of one's self a private thing (one's “own” self) that cannot be known by another. The lie seems particularly important in autobiographies devoted in whole or in part to childhood. Edmund Gosse's Father and Son provides a good sense of the process involved, even though an actual lie as such is not told at this point in the narrative. His father, an authoritative figure and member of an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren, one day says something factual that is mistaken. Since the six-year-old boy has “confused him in some sense with God; at all events I believed that my Father knew everything and saw everything,” this otherwise insignificant event changes reality for him entirely:

The shock to me was as that of a thunderbolt, for what my Father had said ‘was not true.’ … Nothing could possibly have been more trifling to my parents, but to me it meant an epoch. Here was the appalling discovery, never suspected before, that my Father was not as God, and did not know everything. The shock was not caused by any suspicion that he was not telling the truth, as it appeared to him, but by the awful proof that he was not, as I supposed, omniscient.¹²

This is, of course, not a lie but an error, yet it is the first step toward conscious lying on the part of the boy. The next comes soon after and involves the boy's keeping quiet as his Father speculates that some plumbers have put a hole in a waterpipe that the boy himself had pierced: “No suspicion fell on me; no question was asked of me. I sat there, turned to stone within, but outwardly sympathetic and with unchecked appetite” (p. 34). In essence here there are two selves, an inner real self and the outer one playing a role. But this in turn leads to a corresponding sense of another inner self that seems more important even than the discovery of his Father's fallibility:

But of all the thoughts which rushed upon my savage and undeveloped little brain at this crisis, the most curious was that I had found a companion and a confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and it belonged to me and to somebody who lived in the same body with me. There were two of us, and we could talk with one another.

(p. 35, and compare p. 158)

And he will lie, will keep his inner realities known only to himself as he becomes a hypocritical “infant Samuel,” the cynosure of a sect that he leaves long after losing his faith.

The lie plays a special role in differentiating the self from others. Here the need to lie is part of the need to be oneself, despite the powerful personal and ideological demands made upon the self by the authoritative Father. To see that the Father is not congruent with the self and does not have the omniscience of God is crucial. The failure of the self to obtain such knowledge may lead to a very different kind of perception of the self as other, that obtained not through lies but through sickness. Schizophrenia has come to be perceived by some analysts as a means for the protection of the real self from others through the projection of a false self that keeps the other from penetrating to the self.¹³ Returning to Gosse, we would not have a hard time proving that this narrative, which he insists upon calling a “document,” is a fiction itself.

The network of themes surrounding the lie found in Gosse also appears in somewhat different form in Rousseau's Confessions. He has experienced that key event of early life, the “first injustice”:

There ended the serenity of my childish life. From that moment I never again enjoyed pure happiness, and even to-day I am conscious that memory of childhood's delights stops short at that point. We stayed some months longer at Bossey. We lived as we are told the first man lived in the earthly paradise, but we no longer enjoyed it; in appearance our situation was unchanged, but in reality it was an entirely different kind of existence. No longer were we young people bound by ties of respect, intimacy, and confidence to our guardians; we no longer looked on them as gods who read our hearts; we were less ashamed of wrongdoing, and more afraid of being caught; we began to be secretive, to rebel, and to lie.¹⁴

In Rousseau the distinction is between an external world that remains paradisiacal and the paradise lost within. Thus the false accusation of a stolen comb (which has a later counterpart in the ribbon he does steal) leads to the parent figures becoming gods no longer because the nature of their godhood was their ability to read the hearts of Rousseau and his cousin. If in Gosse a lie leads to this state, in Rousseau the state leads to a guilty selfhood, one that expresses itself through secrets and lies. And the theme of the damaging relation of self to others is writ large in his work, to which we will now turn.

Rousseau is, as he himself insisted, a special case. Although we could follow our theme in that splitting of the self that is Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques, the Confessions supplies some very interesting variations. One of the more obvious causes of the self's being perceived as other is a split between what a man appears to be and what he knows himself to be. Rousseau's whole autobiographical project can be seen as an attempt to present the real Rousseau to an audience that knows him only as writer and rebel and at the same time to define and apprehend the self that is conscious of worth even when its actions are not worthy. Rousseau presents himself as a man of the esprit d'escalier, and perhaps we should look on his autobiography as the articulation of the tongue-tied man's real life. Is the self the body, the mind, a continuum of the two, or something else? Obviously Rousseau thinks himself something other than what his awkward body does or what he says to others.

Frequently Rousseau's position in life is at variance with his real worth. Even others recognize from time to time that, as he says, “I was not in my true place” (p. 85). At times he even gets some help: “In my succession of desires and fancies I had always struck too high or too low, always played either Achilles or Thersites; now hero, now scoundrel. M. Gaime took pains to put me in my place, to make me see myself as I was, neither sparing me nor discouraging me” (p. 92). This man, upon whom Rousseau drew for the Vicaire Savoyard, taught Rousseau an unforgettable lesson, “that if every man could read the hearts of others there would be more men anxious to descend than to rise in life” (p. 93). And Rousseau elsewhere in the book claims as much for his own case. Soon after this the Count de la Roque tries to find Rousseau a suitable place. Though Rousseau initially seems to be a lackey, there is a difference: he is welcomed ceremoniously, eats at the steward's table, and wears no livery (p. 94). And when the Abbé de Gouvon comes on the scene, Rousseau quickly finds that “by one of those strange tricks that were to recur so often in the course of my life, I was at the same time above and below my station. I was a pupil and a valet in the same house, and, although a servant, had a tutor so highly born that he should have taught none but the children of princes” (p. 98).

These are rightly Confessions, for if his secular version of what Augustine had called his work is basically self-justifying (in the eyes of man and God), it is at the same time shot through with a pervasive sense of guilt, a guilt that takes its point of departure from the death of his mother in giving him birth and can only have been enhanced by his Calvinist heritage, a religious tradition that by yoking guilt and autobiography has given us some of the strongest autobiographical writings, those of Pepys, Boswell, and Bunyan, as well as Rousseau (and perhaps even Adams):

So much am I a slave to fears and shames that I long to vanish from mortal sight. If action is necessary I do not know what to do; if I must speak I do not know what to say; if anyone looks at me I drop my eyes. When roused by passion, I can sometimes find the right words to say, but in ordinary conversation I can find none, none at all. I find conversation unbearable owing to the very fact that I am obliged to speak.

(p. 44)

This is the man whose voice we hear speaking to us, usually without shame. In part it is his very distance from us, the fact that he does not have to see us or know that we are apprehending his story that allows him to tell us what he obviously could not say in his own person. But we should also be aware that what he regards as his real self can only be known through such writings, and the Confessions is filled with accounts of his being taken for an idiot because he is unable to express himself in the way that he wants. His most shameful incident, the story of his accusing a young servant girl of stealing a ribbon that he had stolen himself, is given as an example of an unpremeditated action that comes about through his inability to express himself: “I grew confused, stammered, and finally said with a blush that it was Marion who had given it to me” (p. 86). Rousseau had never been able to tell anyone, even Mme de Warens, of this shameful incident, which continues to haunt him, and indeed “I can affirm that the desire to some extent to rid myself of it has greatly contributed to my resolution of writing these Confessions” (p. 88). Ridding himself of guilt and saying the things he could not say thus become two sides of the same coin.

We might also remember Rousseau's activities as an exhibitionist in this connection (pp. 90-91), for he is surely trying to make contact socially in a direct way and to present himself (at least one version of himself) as he really is. And when he says “Since I have undertaken to reveal myself absolutely to the public, nothing about me must remain hidden or obscure” (p. 65), we may see in retrospect his Confessions as the literary equivalent of his exhibitionism. This is also apparent in his claim at the beginning of the book: “I have bared my secret soul” (p. 17). The key term in the original is dévoilé, unveiled. I do not, of course, intend to belittle him by this observation.

Conversion autobiographies usually contain, as in the case of Augustine, turning points in the life, those moments of conversion that divide the true and the false self. In Rousseau's case there were many, but they ironically function as moments that seal him off from the life he should have led. At the end of book one he recounts the incident of the gates closing the city of Geneva before he could get back inside as the decisive moment that causes him to leave his apprenticeship. But instead of celebrating this decision as the foundation of his freedom and fame, he bewails it as the start of his “fatal destiny” and depicts the happy obscure life he would have led as an engraver with busy daily activity and his imagination left free. Better a mute inglorious Rousseau than the persecuted Jean-Jacques he becomes (p. 51). This may be posturing of the sort that Roger Porter discusses above in the work of that inheritor of Rousseau's tradition, Benjamin Robert Haydon.

Another such incident, and certainly the most important, is Rousseau's reading, while walking along the road, of the essay prize proposed by the Dijon Academy on the subject, “Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to improve morals or to corrupt them.” “The moment I read this,” says Rousseau, “I beheld another universe and became another man” (p. 327). But if we are apt to take this as a secular version of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, we ought to recognize that the winning of that prize, which leads to Rousseau's fame, is another false turning point. Diderot encouraged him to try for the prize, “and from that moment I was lost. All the rest of my life and of my misfortunes followed inevitably as a result of that moment's madness” (p. 328). But, as we have already seen, Rousseau's actions on the moment-to-moment level are usually both mistaken and untrue to his real self. He is condemned to an unhappy actual life because the life he wants seems to exist only as afterthought. Although he does not take it as symbolic, even his vision seems to work this way: “My short sight is constantly deceiving me” (p. 45). And, as he says in recounting his original exile from Geneva, “Never mind how great the distance between my position and the nearest castle in Spain, I had no difficulty in taking up residence there” (p. 50). Perhaps in the long run the major theme of his life is the reality of his imagination and the unreality and pain of the life he leads.

A very different relation to the self is found in Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mots, which I think better translates as Words than as The Words. In this text Sartre's continual attempt to arrive at an authentic self is presented in two parts, “Reading” and “Writing.” It begins with Sartre's great-grandfather, not because Sartre wants to give an account of his ancestry, but because it enables him to show how the “family play-acting” forces roles upon others and ultimately upon him: he has a role in effect before he is even born. His mother is a good example of someone who has been educated to accept distortions of reality:

Anne Marie, the younger daughter [of Charles Schweitzer, Sartre's maternal grandfather], spent her childhood on a chair. She was taught to be bored, to sit up straight, to sew. She was gifted: the family thought it distinguished to leave her gifts undeveloped; she was radiant: they hid the fact from her. … Fifty years later, when turning the pages of a family album, Anne Marie realized that she had been beautiful.¹⁵

Just as Anne Marie, his own term for the woman who seems more his elder sister than his mother, suffered unknowingly from miseducation and the imposition of roles, Sartre himself has ideas imposed upon him by her and by others. Seemingly acting of his own accord, he actually is trapped by the form of her words: “She does not give me orders; she outlines in light words a future which she praises me for being so kind as to bring into being: ‘my little darling will be very nice, very reasonable. He'll sit still so I can put drops into his nose.’ I let myself be caught in the trap of these coddling prophecies” (p. 22). Rather than being ordered to do something, he is cooperating in bringing a preformed future into being. In doing so he is encouraged not to be responsible for his own acts but to perform an action that has already been given shape and presupposes what he will do.

His grandfather's form of the family play-acting takes other delusive and self-delusive shapes:

He was a man of the nineteenth century who took himself for Victor Hugo, as did so many others, including Victor Hugo himself. This handsome man with the flowing beard who was always waiting for the next opportunity to show off, as the alcoholic is always waiting for the next drink, was the victim of two recently discovered techniques: the art of photography and the art of being a grandfather. He had the good and bad fortune to be photogenic. The house was filled with photos of him. Since snapshots were not practiced, he had acquired a taste for poses and tableaux vivants. Everything was a pretext for him to suspend his gestures, to strike an attitude, to turn to stone. He doted upon those brief moments of eternity in which he became his own statue.

(p. 24)

The grandfather attempts to monumentalize his poses. He seems to live only to be caught eternally in a role that he dramatizes. Sartre's observation that the role he plays is that of Victor Hugo is given an added twist by the aside that Victor Hugo himself plays that role too. Hugo is also implicated in playing the role of the grandfather, an art ironically paralleled to the art of photography through an allusion to the title of Hugo's book, The Art of Being a Grandfather. In a sense he lives for others, for their gaze upon him in his chosen poses. In Sartre's narrative, culture becomes the mirror in which man looks at himself.

Sartre's dissatisfaction with biography stems in part from his recognition of the way an already known future operates in the form to let us at any given point take the main character in terms of what we know will come. In Sartre's terms, we cannot help seeing Robespierre at each point in the story of his life with his head under his arm. The main problem, as Sartre's Roquentin puts it in La Nausée, is that “a man … seeks to live his life as if he were telling its story.” Yet one contemporary line of thought would argue that the narrative encoding of “reality” is inescapable.

Sartre's atheism begins as a debate with “another me, my grim brother” (p. 100). Like Gosse, he keeps up the outer form while the inner self shifts: “I said my prayers every day, but I thought of God less and less often.” Here one might notice what is frequently apparent in autobiography: the self as other may come about through an opposition between exterior and interior, between outer expression or appearance and consciousness, between body and mind.

Sartre recognizes his position in relation to La Nausée as a superior sort of conjuring trick:

At the age of thirty, I executed the masterstroke of writing in Nausea—quite sincerely believe me—about the bitter unjustified existence of my fellowmen and exonerating my own. I was Roquentin; I used him to show, without complacency, the texture of my life. At the same time, I was I, the elect, the chronicler of Hell, a glass and steel photomicroscope peering at my own protoplasmic juices. Later, I gaily demonstrated that man is impossible; I was impossible myself and differed from others only by the mandate to give expression to that impossibility, which was thereby transfigured and became my most personal possibility, the object of my mission, the springboard of my glory. I was a prisoner of that obvious contradiction, but I did not see it, I saw the world through it. Fake to the marrow of my bones and hoodwinked, I joyfully wrote about our unhappy state. Dogmatic though I was, I doubted everything except that I was the elect of doubt. I built with one hand what I destroyed with the other, and I regarded anxiety as the guarantee of my security; I was happy.

(pp. 251-52)

Without hypocrisy (he is demonstrating, among other things, the inadequacy of sincerity when one speaks of authenticity) Sartre is the happy registrar of man's unhappiness. As Roquentin and as himself he can have it both ways. He can be, in the scientific metaphor that merges with the religious metaphor running throughout the book, the objective observer of his own self-consciousness, the dogmatist whose right answers proclaim him of the elect while he damns the human race.

Sartre defines authenticity in his essay on Nathalie Sarraute as “the real connection with others, with oneself and with death.”¹⁶ His description there of her “protoplasmic vision of our interior universe” may remind us of his description here of viewing himself under the microscope. Sartre's irony at his own expense, conveyed by a series of nearly oxymoronic oppositions between his own state as writer and our human situation, certainly is his last word on self-deception in this book and he presents himself as “cured”: “I've lost my illusions” (p. 253). Yet the wisdom of the text suggests that the man who says this must be suffering from illusions, and we may well wonder what “Sartre” is thinking and feeling while the “I” of the narrative tells us what he has learned. Could it be that the second volume he never lived to write would have demystified the first? Sartre recognizes that “that old, crumbling structure, my imposture, is also my character: one gets rid of a neurosis, one doesn't get cured of one's self” (p. 254). The price of authenticity, Sartre seems to say, is eternal vigilance. Yet Sartre's autobiography suggests, as he himself does not, that the quest for authenticity is like the peeling of an onion, or perhaps that it can only be a quest, for each attempt to come into contact with the real self is only the shedding of another layer of falsehood. The value of Sartre's autobiography resides in the satirical demystifications of the self performed by the narrative “I” on all those earlier selves, but surely the logic of this work is that we must be led to a conclusion in which nothing is concluded. This is not Sartre's conclusion, which ends unsatisfactorily: “If I relegate impossible Salvation to the proproom what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any” (p. 255). Yet this position too is ripe for demystification, and some of Sartre's comments in interviews suggest that he recognized its inadequacy to sound the firm note of closure and finality of the text.¹⁷

Where can we go from here? Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes breaks the self into an alphabetical series of topics as likely to be in the present tense as the past and in the third person as the first. Despite the paradigmatic quality of the title, an autobiographical mirror image, Barthes claims to have written a text, not an autobiography: “Once I produce, once I write, it is the Text itself which (fortunately) dispossesses me of my narrative continuity” (p. [4]).¹⁸ This strategy—though Barthes abjures strategy because it implies structure—effects a radical break between subject and writing. His comment under “Lucidity” can be taken as a critique of autobiography from Augustine to Sartre: “This book is not a book of ‘confessions’; not that it is insincere, but because we have a different knowledge today than yesterday; such knowledge can be summarized as follows: What I write about myself is never the last word: the more ‘sincere’ I am, the more interpretable I am, under the eye of other examples than the old authors, who believed they were required to submit themselves to one law: authenticity” (p. 120). What we have in this case is the anatomy of autobiography and an unwillingness to let the self turn into a story, though as with those modern French novels scissored into separate pages and read in an arbitrary order, a story will assert itself even in the absence of plot through the interpretative acts of the reader. We have been too well prepared by fiction for Barthes' non-narrative. Indeed, he is aware that “All this must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel—or rather by several characters” (p. 119), an admonition, I would add, that need not preface a novel.

Sartre's anxieties about the correspondence of the represented self to the actual self cannot obtain here, for the “I” of the writing is textual and not to be judged in relation to a biographical Barthes whose characteristics nonetheless appear. Yet the anxieties remain in a thoroughly textualized form. The “risks” and “dangers” of which Barthes frequently speaks (compare these with Sartre's “traps”) are risks of going beyond the text or making a structure of the text. If “the subject speaks about himself” there is a risk of “psychologism.” Because the book is written in fragments, he risks “aphorism” (p. 152). This last is a particular danger for the editor of Rochefoucauld—as he notes later, “An aphoristic tone hangs about this book” (p. 179).

With ironic appropriateness this book appeared in the series “Par luimême.” Each volume consists of autobiographical statements by someone who has not necessarily written an autobiography, and the editor chooses and orders them. Barthes edited Michelet par lui-même for this series and could have stuck to the general form of the title, but he wished to overcome its reflexivity. He denies that Roland Barthes can be par lui-même. He includes photographs and an outline biography as in the Michelet, however, and he could as easily have billed this discourse as “images et textes présentés par Roland Barthes.” It is worth noticing that once a book par lui-même is actually composed by an editor it takes on the appearance of a collection of fragments. Barthes is aware that fragments can be organized (as they were in his unmentioned Michelet; or, I would argue, as they frequently are in Roland Barthes), but he is even more aware that “the fragment (haiku, maxim, pensée, journal entry) is finally a rhetorical genre” (p. 95), and hence cannot fully deconstruct the self. He might have added that the fragment as genre has an important Romantic history from the late eighteenth century (Sterne in prose and Macpherson in poetry). In the escape from the inadequacies of autobiography through alphabetized fragments and the shifting usage of first and third person, Barthes takes contemporary autobiography as anti-autobiography to its endpoint.

This brings us back to our starting point. Rimbaud's observation, “I is another,” registers through its fractured syntax the incompatibility of saying “I” and by that means asserting an identity of self and statement. Modern linguistics, which serves as the explicit or implicit model for so much of the most recent critical theory, has produced formulas that highlight such distinctions. Emile Benveniste, following Saussure, has made the analysis that enables a series of important observations. The “I” comes into existence only in relation to some “you.” That is, it is defined by its difference from some other. Furthermore, “I” according to Benveniste, is a shifter. As opposed to other pronouns, it is unable to refer of itself: “‘Ego’ is he who says ‘ego.’”¹⁹ Therefore, “it is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject,” and “the condition of man in language is unique.” The suggestion is strong that the self can only exist in language, that the self in autobiography is the only thing that we can call a self.

The idea of the self as other is a condition of the autobiographical narrative, for there is generally some distinction between the “I” who is talking and the figure in the past who is described (call them “narrator” and “protagonist,” for both comprise the “character”). An autobiography will often take shape as a way of dealing with the otherness of the figure in the past. This dédoublement in autobiography may or may not have its counterpart in the frequent occurrence of two selves within the lives of the subjects, though the pastness of a false self versus the presentness of a true self frequently provides the point of departure for the writing of autobiography. The sense that there are two selves, which may be negative or positive (Augustine as opposed to Gosse or Wordsworth), is both an assertion of difference and an assertion of identity. Gosse, we note, however, finds that his other self, a hidden consciousness, is that other with whom he communes, a friend of the friendless boy.

Perhaps instead of talking of those crucial moments I have been discussing as a “mirror stage” in the autobiographies, one can think of autobiography itself as a mirror stage in life, an extended moment that enables one to reflect on oneself by presenting an image of the self for contemplation. This does not happen in early childhood, but, if at all, in adulthood or old age. And the self is not that of the mirror or photograph. In Lacan's terms it is part of the symbolic, not the imaginary.²⁰ I say this because if the “I” relates to a “you,” it is not simply narcissistic, as in the infantile “mirror stage.” Autobiography promises intersubjectivity, not just intrasubjectivity. Because autobiography manipulates the prestige of the self in relation to the other, it enters the play of desire that constitutes the symbolic order. Here the self as a point of reference outside the text and the self as represented, constructed within the text, are in rightful tension.

Notes

1. An important line of feminist thought argues, as Mary G. Mason puts it, that “the self-discovery of female identity seems to acknowledge the real presence and recognition of another consciousness, and the disclosure of female self is linked to the identification of some ‘other,’ that is, of an ‘other’ who is not the self.” See “Autobiographies of Women Writers,” in James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 210. See also the theoretical work of Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). For the mirror image in particular, see Luce Irigary, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), and Jenijoy La Belle, Herself Beheld (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). I discuss the equivocal case of Charlotte Charke in this essay.

2. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 169. All subsequent references will appear in the text. The literature on Augustine is vast, but any list of citations probably should begin with Pierre Courcelle's Recherches sur les “Confessions” de S. Augustin (Paris: Boccard, 1950). I have found especially helpful Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), and Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).

3. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 19.

4. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. David J. DeLaura (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 96.

5. Idem, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Henry Tristram (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), p. 5. This text has, not surprisingly, received little attention. James Olney discusses it in another context in Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 28-29. For Jonathan Loesberg's account, see Fictions of Consciousness: Mill, Newman, and the Reading of Victorian Prose (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), pp. 89-91.

6. See Pei-Yu Wu, The Confucian's Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), especially pp. x-xi, 15-41. Avrom Fleishman warns that “autobiography's reputation as a peculiarly Western phenomenon” is overstated and subject to “refutation by example.” See Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 13n.

7. For an account of “Autobiography in the Third Person,” see Philippe Lejeune, New Literary History, 9 (1977): 27-50, now available in his collection On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 31-51.

8. I discussed this work in my paper “Generic Androgyny in the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke,” Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of San Diego, Feb. 1991.

9. The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 507. All subsequent references will appear in the text. Samuels's three-volume biography of Adams has been helpful: The Young Henry Adams; Henry Adams: The Middle Years; Henry Adams: The Major Phase (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948, 1958, 1964). For a good critical account see John Carlos Rowe, Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), chapter 4.

10. For Carnochan's account of Hume's very short autobiography, “My Own Life,” see Gibbon's Solitude: The Inward World of the Historian (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 129-30, 138-41.

11. R. P. Blackmur, “The Expense of Greatness: Three Emphases on Henry Adams,” in The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), p. 80.

12. Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 33. All subsequent references will appear in the text. Gosse is discussed in slightly different terms in Vivian and Robert Folkenflik, “Words and Language in Father and Son,” Biography, 2 (1979): 157-74.

13. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), especially chapter 6.

14. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), pp. 30-31. All subsequent references to this book will appear in the text. Paul de Man's deconstructive reading of the purloined ribbon passage in the Confessions speaks to a range of the topics under consideration here. See chapter 12 of Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979).

15. Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 14. All subsequent references to this book will appear in the text. Jeffrey Mehlman gives a somewhat Lacanian account in A Structural Study of Autobiography: Proust, Leiris, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), chapter 3 (“Sartre and His Other”), which also treats Saint Genet as autobiography. Paul John Eakin's account in Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), chapter 3 (“Jean-Paul Sartre: The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Book”), takes as its point of departure the parable of the missing train ticket, a highly self-conscious fiction.

16. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (New York: George Braziller, 1965), p. 199.

17. Philippe Lejeune prints the interview in L'autobiographie en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971), pp. 205-7.

18. Roland Barthers, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). All subsequent references will appear in the text. A good short account appears in Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).

19. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 225.

20. Some of the key works here are Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 1-7, and the essays now known in America as Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, ed. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). Although Lacan provides models, they must be used warily, for both the mirror and language, the specular and symbolic, remain other, though the identification with the other is crucial to the self. Lacan denies the ability of the self to speak itself in the first person, but it would seem that it can be read.