Inspired (in part) by David Copperfield

I have for some time wondered about the nature of autobiography. If the aim of the form is reputedly the pursuit of self-knowledge, then autobiography fails because the Self from whom the autobiographer would learn exists it exists in the past, but the writer who writes about his past Self exists in the present. The autobiographer can only see the past from her position in the present and therefore, can know only from the perspective of that present Self. Thus, she possesses an awareness of the Self in the present and by necessity constructs the development of that self from a narrowed view of the past. Even Wayne Booth’s My Many Selves defines his present Self by the categorized selves in the past, and the harmony he claims to achieve in the present results from his own construction of the selves of the past. The question of autobiography then must be asked: what does the writer in the present mean to do with the past? The intentional fallacy of the New Critics, that states that an author’s avowed purpose cannot be used to measure the success or meaning of any work of art, might be applied not only to critics but to autobiographers as well, and the self that is pursued in autobiography ought to be understood by the reader and the author as only a construction in the present and therefore, might be recognized as a representation only of a limited and view of self in the present but cannot be considered as the self. The intention might be Self-knowledge but it is the Self’s present knowledge that constructs the past. Autobiography presents a fiction.
     Knowledge of self must be distinguished from the actual Self. I am never all that I say I am and I am always more than I could know and say. In fact, the self that writes has to be different than the self about which is written because the autobiographer sets an aim that is wholly different than had been the aims of the subject of the autobiography. The latter had no notion of ever being the subject of an autobiography, and her actions cannot be considered coincident to the ascriptions given to her by the autobiographer. But if the Self in the past had already intended to become the subject of an autobiography, then the actions in the past were governed by the necessity of their having to be written in the future. The life was always determined by the necessity of its autobiography and the autobiography cannot be considered a pursuit of self-knowledge: that self was already formed in the past. The autobiographer imposes a trajectory for which the object in the past could not plan nor would even recognize. The Self in the past could never know where she might be in the future, but the self in the present in a twist on the Hansel and Gretel story drop the white pebbles to situate the Self at ‘home.’ Phillip Roth refers to autobiography as the most manipulative of genres: contained within every autobiography is a counter text out of which the manifest text derives and which it attempts to hide. Wittgenstein writes that “no one can write objectively about himself because there will always be some motive for doing so. And the motives will change as one writes. And the more one is intent on being ‘objective,’ the more one will notice the various motives that enter in.” The autobiography ceases to be fact and becomes opinion, and the latter has subjective motive. In the autobiography, I am who I want to be; in writing the autobiography I become who I would be. The autobiographer controls the presentation of self and chooses those elements of the life that justifies that presentation.
     For a good while, then, I have assumed a strategy of reading autobiography as fiction, and consider that the strategies by which I read novels might be applied to my reading of autobiographies. In this regard, the complexity of reading Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield intrigues me: David Copperfield is reputedly the autobiography of David Copperfield a character that is based loosely on the life of the author of David Copperfield, Charles Dickens. And within the novel/autobiography Mr. Dick is working on his autobiography, Memorial. I consider that David Copperfield is a book about autobiography.
     David Copperfield notes that the pain and suffering he experienced as a child at the hands of his step-father Mr. Murdstone and the latter’s sister, Jane, were so severe that he did not ever examine for how long it might have lasted, but in the present, that is, years after the events occurred are being narrated, Copperfield writes, “I only know that it was, and has ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.” David tells us that the writing invents what memory will not hold. Autobiography creates. But even that is not the whole story. Earlier in the novel, Copperfield writes, “I set down this remembrance here, because it is an instance to myself of the manner in which I fitted my old books to my altered life, and made stories for myself, out of the streets, and out of men and women; and how some main points in the character I shall unconsciously develop, I suppose, in writing my life, were gradually forming all this while.” What Copperfield seems to suggest here is that his narrative represents to him how his past influences the story he tells, which is an autobiographical cliché, I suppose. But he also acknowledges that his past has been revised to fit his current situation: his old stories had to be adapted based on his new life. More, David acknowledges that the character he develops in the writing arises now from the unconscious even as the points in the character existed unconsciously formed in that past. That character in the past acted unaware of the aims of the autobiographer, and even the autobiographer remains unconscious of the manner that the character developed, and acknowledges that the character that is presented derives from an unconscious. The autobiography emphasizes its own ignorance.