The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good (review)

The paradigm shift signaled by the subtitle of this cogently argued and lucidly written book was adumbrated, as David Parker acknowledges, by the ground-breaking collection edited by John Eakin (The Ethics of Life Writing, 2004), to which Parker contributed an essay on Edmund Gosse, also incorporated into The Self in Moral Space. The revisionary claims involved in this shift are formulated with persuasive clarity in a series of illuminating readings of a wide spectrum of life writing from across the globe. The stakes involved in Parker's arresting claims are summarized in the conclusion ("Articulating the Good"): "There is a clear epistemic gain in moving beyond the deeply incoherent neo-Nietzschean theoretical paradigms that underpin much of the identity politics still current in life writing studies. What is needed is a new reconstructive paradigm to bring to focus the suppressed structures of value that constitute the ethical lives that we moderns cannot avoid living.… This new paradigm would make it clear that such central terms in life narrative as self and identity cannot be fully understood outside of moral space" (175–76).

After the near-hegemony of poststructural theorizing in the last part of the twentieth century, Parker's eloquent focus on "what it is important, admirable, or valuable to be" (176) is a breath of fresh air indeed. Parker also brings an undisguised though nuanced neo-Arnoldian moral earnestness to bear, one grounded in Western philosophy and going back all the way to Plato and Aristotle. In fact, the new "paradigm" Parker is advocating "would point to a quite new and fruitful meeting place between life writing studies and moral philosophy" (176). While acknowledging the work of John Barbour and Richard Freadman, autobiography critics who have articulated "a view of ethics that gives constitutive centrality to moral deliberation and choice" (3), Parker seeks to revisit the "ancient connection between ethics and literature" (2) by taking "the question as it was posed by the Greeks: How should a human being live?" and reformulating it as a question he takes to be "at the heart of all written lives, What is it good to be?" (2). His ethicist approach is indebted to a number of thinkers and critics, but by far his greatest debt is to Charles Taylor, the chief interlocutor for Parker's philosophical take on life writing. Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989) is frequently invoked, and his "clarity, humanity, and wisdom" are acknowledged as "constant reference points" (vii). Another important interlocutor is John Stuart Mill, whose account of his personal crisis demonstrates that "life narrative … can … inspire change, empower the self to pursue new, life-enhancing ways to be" (9–10).

The first and most important chapter ("Life Narrative and the Languages of the Good") spells out "strongly valued goods" and "strong evaluation" as "key Taylorian terms" (15), to being "oriented in what [Taylor] calls 'moral space'" (16), and his "'best account' (BA) principle," which turns on "thick anthropocentric languages of moral and spiritual discernment" (18, 19). These phrases will recur as a lexicon for the new approach to life writing that Parker opposes to "the thin languages of post-Saussurian theory" (19). One of the central assumptions in the succeeding chapters is that the impoverished languages of postmodern theory are inadequate to either writing or understanding life narratives and the full and complex range of moral goods on which they turn. To demonstrate that Taylor's framework "is not specific to Western culture" (19), Parker strategically opens his textual analysis with several pages devoted to the "Self Account" of Wang Shi-min (1592–1680) as an instance of "strongly valued goods" presented in a Confucian language of moral discernment in which the author locates himself in moral space by way of "strong value terms such as 'honor' and 'propriety'" (23).

The analyses of Roland Barthes's and Nietzsche's autobiographies in the opening chapter constitute the discursive center of Parker's study. He follows up on the...