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Reviews Carl Dawson, Prophets of Past Time: Seven British Autobiographers, 1880-1914. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. 257 pp. $29.50. It is difficult to know what to say about a book containing such egregiously written sentences as (for example) these: In any case, Freud's exploratory writing, his sense of Heimlichkeit in all facets of the human psyche, parallels Proust or Yeats or Virginia Woolf, whose works depend on similar preoccupations. To say that their written lives are only texts is perhaps to be right in a technical sense, but it probably denies every fundamental reason for the reading of autobiographical works . . . autobiographies remain human documents however slippery their medium. Because of the radical exploration of self in modern autobiography and in autobiographical novels such as Proust's, the ideas of self or identity of 'author' have succumbed to another kind of doubting, as Michel Foucault makes clear. And then there are all the spelling errors: Paul De Man (twice), Ford's Edward Ashburnam, Butler's narrator Overtone, dessicated for desiccated, and so on. One feels that this book would have benefited from a good (or even a bad) editor. This is not trivial quibbling; the poor quality of the writing is prophylactic, preventing the reader from being certain whether Prophets of Past Time has anything valuable to say about autobiography as a genre. And there are other radical problems. The omission of a chapter on Proust is fatal, since he is referred to constantly (Dawson does not seem to know that while the young Proust idolized Ruskin, the mature Proust denounced him). There are essays on W. H. White, George Tyrrell, Samuel Butler, Edmund Gosse, George Moore, Ford Madox Ford, and W. B. Yeats. Ultimately, this book fails because it is unable to say authoritatively what autobiography is, or what it may be. Take the essay on Butler. Dawson starts promisingly, REVIEWS 329 pointing out that for the author of The Way of All Flesh "the remembering self is really a composite of selves, of ancestors and parents who may be unrecognizable to the remembering individual but who empower him or her to live and act. Present consciousness ," Dawson says, "is to Butler a grudged necessity, a fly in the ointment of unconscious workings, as well as an inescapable given for the writer of fictional autobiography ." But having said this, Dawson finds himself stumped. Why, he asks, do autobiographers so often leave their work incomplete (Butler never quite finished revising—and revising— The Way of All Flesh)} He does not see that the answer lies in his own account of "the remembering self; there is only so much one can or will remember, and then again only so much one can or will tell. Next comes a clumsy attempt to place Butler in the modernist tradition. "In giving privileged status to certain moments, an author is not describing the formation of self so much as the escape or liberation from it. And this is what makes Butler and Tyrrell, Gosse and Yeats, Moore and Ford, modern." It is also, of course, what makes Donne and Defoe and Wordsworth "modern." And there are factual errors. Butler was not, as Dawson says he was, less able than Hardy "to live by his social or literary ideals"; perhaps no author lived less by his or anyone else's social or literary ideals than Thomas Hardy (his letters are terrifying; Dawson should read them). Virginia Woolf did not, as Dawson says she did, have The Way of All Flesh in mind when she remarked that human nature "changed" around December 1910: she was thinking about the first British exhibition of Post-Impressionist painting at the Grafton Gallery. Nor does Dawson see, apparently, that Samuel Butler, and not G. E. Moore, was the true, the real, in fact the only unanimous hero of young Bloomsbury; they all worshipped Butler, and at least some of their anti-Victorianism grew out of his. And if we did not have enough confusion already, Foucault is dragged in by Dawson to cast doubt on, of course, the authenticity of authorship itself. This is wholly gratuitous; but then so is Dawson's windy argument...

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