Remembering James Olney (1933–2015)

James olney and the study of autobiography - john eakin

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,

Luxe, calme et volupté.

—Charles Baudelaire

James Olney’s death last winter set me to thinking about the past—thirty, thirty-five, forty years ago—back to a time before the creation of all the resources for the study of autobiography that we take for granted today. James did a lot to provide them, and I want to honor his memory by recalling here not only what he did for our field but also what he did for me personally, setting me on a path of study that I have followed for nearly forty years. I want, too, to suggest what autobiography did for him.

James Olney in his Southern Review office, a copy of Memory & Narrative on the table (photo courtesy of Laura O’Connor).

Beginnings

In the 1980s James sponsored two key initiatives that helped to coalesce the stirrings of interest in autobiography into something like a coherent field: in 1980 he published the first edited collection in the US of essays devoted to autobiography, and in 1985 he convened in Baton Rouge what I believe to be the first international conference on autobiography. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical brought together sixteen essays, mostly by Americans and mostly from the late 1970s, on an admirably broad range of topics and employing an instructively various array of approaches. James dedicated his part in the volume to his “mentor and friend” Georges Gusdorf, whose landmark essay from 1956, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” he translated and placed prominently at the beginning of the collection. Moreover, in the introduction, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” James located the start of autobiography studies in our time squarely with Gusdorf: “In the beginning, then, was Georges Gusdorf” (8). Gusdorf’s key insight, later confirmed by the work of Elizabeth Bruss and Karl J. Weintraub, was that autobiography was a culture-specific phenomenon. “The concern,” Gusdorf wrote, “which seems so natural to us, to turn back on one’s own past, to recollect one’s life in order to narrate it, is not at all universal.” In fact, the “conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life” that motivates autobiographical recall “is the late product of a specific civilization”; it is “a concern peculiar to Western man” (“Conditions” 29).

James identified three reasons for autobiography’s belated arrival as a legitimate object of literary study: its apparently other-than-narrowly-literary nature, its necessary incompleteness as a work of art, and its self-reflexive, self-critical tendencies that made additional criticism seem superfluous. I believe that James pointed to the motive for his own work when he observed, sizing up the critical landscape, that the quickening of interest in autobiography was driven above all by a “fascination with the self and its profound, its endless mysteries” (“Autobiography” 23). Turning to his own beginnings, James recalled that when he began writing Metaphors of Self in the 1960s, it never occurred to him to consult autobiography criticism because he didn’t think that what he was doing was studying autobiography; instead, he thought of it as “a humanistic study of the ways of men and the forms taken by human consciousness” (10). In fact, located as he was then in West Africa, there simply weren’t any available books on autobiography to consult.

There were four keynote speakers at James’s “International Symposium on Autobiography and Autobiography Studies” in March of 1985, each associated with a primary subject area: James M. Cox (heading the session on The Interpretation of Autobiography), Henry Louis Gates (Ethnic and Minority Autobiography), Georges Gusdorf (Autobiography as Cultural Expression), and Germaine Brée (Women’s Autobiography). James was prescient in featuring women’s, ethnic, and minority autobiography, for work on women’s autobiographies and slave narratives represents the signal achievement of autobiography studies in the US in the 1980s. The keynote speakers made for an impressive line-up, and I think the conference was...