Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life Writing by James Olney (review)

ity, and links diese narrative elements to frequently erotic images ofthe Dance of Death. In Hamlet the ghost returns from death to seduce, as it were, his son into avenging him, albeit at the risk ofdamnation. Abusing his patriarchal authority and Hamlet's filial love, this ghostly father turns his son into a grim reaper whose harvest includes most ofthe characters in the play. Triumphantly, the author asks, "Whatever made us think of marriage as closure, or associate the parental relationship with the promise ofsecurity?" (173). If Belsey seems eager to deny the contentment that people have long sought and often found in the family, the same could be said for Shakespeare. Contentment is not the meat that playwrights feed upon. Even critics seek more compelling subject matter. Besides, at a time when politicians inundate us with sentimental platitudes in lieu ofa helping hand, debunking serves as a valuable corrective . Most valuable is Belsey's conscientious documentation ofthe provenance of "family values" in early modern England. * James Olney. Memory andNarrative: The Weave ofLife Writing. Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 1998. 430p. Holu G. Levitsky Loyola Marymount University James Olney's latest book is a collection ofessays which offer an account of the development oflife-writing since Augustine's Confessions. Originating from a 1981 paper, "Autobiographyand the Narrative Imperative from St. Augustine to Samuel Beckett," this book succeeds as a lively and penetrating continuation of Olney's earlier work on autobiography. Noting similarities between Augustine's Confessions and Beckett's Company, he looks at such issues as narrative theory and the relationship ofthe act ofrecollecting to the act ofnarrating. Armed with the keen and active intelligence of a very thoughtful reader, he attempts to untangle the mutual relationship ofmemory and narrative as a means toward defining autobiography as a literary mode for the late twentieth century. Although the organization ofthe book at first appears confusing— structured as Prelude, First and Second Interludes, and Postlude — the book breaks itself down into two distinct parts. Chapters I and II and the two interludes provide the background discussions of Augustine, Rousseau (and Vico) which then grounds the second half of the book: Chapters III, IV, and V and the Postlude, which examine the problem ofmemory and narrative in a number oftwentiethcentury contexts. There is a kind of inevitability in the choice ofexamining Augustine , Rousseau, and Beckett — for Olney, each of these figures represents a FALL 2000 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW + IOS major moment in the history of life-writing, and each could not have written without the others; however, there is an equal arbitrariness in the inclusion of certain modern figures. Presenting such writers as Kafka, Gertrude Stein, and Richard Wright as autobiographical might seem problematic to readers still unwilling to blur the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. Still, as the metaphor of"weaving" in the title suggests, and as teachers ofthe form know from experience, life-writing is the subject's best "attempt" to work his or her life into an elaborate, important, and connected whole. Olney's project is to derive theory from the great texts oflife-writing (avoiding the common temptation to force contemporary theories of memory back to historical accounts). In the "Prelude" and first chapter, "Memory and the Narrative Imperative," Olney establishes the foundation for his position by introducing the three great principals of life-writing: St. Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Samuel Beckett. Together they establish a tradition against whom other figures over the centuries have had to converse/contend. By turning first to Augustine who initiated the tradition, second to Rousseau, who, Olney argues, "is the true center ofit all" (xii), and finally to Beckett as the culmination, our position in the twentieth century seems inevitable. In other words, our obsession with life-writing now speaks to the essential paradox ofa modern drive to search for our "true" selves even while agonizingover the impossibility ofsuccessful completion ofsuch a task. The literary form of life-writing began with the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, who would understand the word "autobiography" to be from the Greek, "lifetime," or "the course ofa life" (410), with time as a crucial element. It assumed for him an historical dimension using memory as the...