Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Anaïs Nin (review)

THE COMPAnATIST translated Nietzsche is left writing in English only, seems a bit unfair. And the assertion that 'TAe Birth ofTragedy is Nietzsche's most important book" (56) left me bouche bée. If it had been my book (should reviewers be allowed to say this— without being suspected ofenvy?), I would have scratched Nietzsche's name from the subtitle, and published the third chapter, which is quite interesting as a study of Mallarmé and Nietzsche coming to terms with Wagner, as a separate article. With chapters four ("The Orphic Moment of Stéphane Mallarmé") and five ("Tombs, Fans, Cosmologies: A View from the Prison House"), Robert McGahey really shows his capabilities. Whether in analyzing the Orphic resonance of images ofthe lute (as in "Une dentelle s'abolit"), the tomb, or the grotto, or in demonstrating how "with respect to the narrative cycle ofOrpheus, . . . Mallarmé's Orphic moment occurs when the scattered limbs first begin to stir back into life" and that "the oscillatory or vibratory reflex is the key to Mallarmé's Orphic moment" (79), McGahey fulfills the promise of his book's title, leaving the reader not so much directly cognizant as peripherally aware of the shamanistic shadows that he has gathered around the master. For McGahey has found a language that suits the topic; he indeed "writes as an Orphic Musician," as Thomas Moore claims in his foreword , and his results are correspondingly suggestive rather than conclusive. And this Orphic style is fine for a study of Mallarmé, whose poetry perpetuates visions seen out ofthe corner ofthe mind's eye. As McGahey writes in one ofhis fascinating footnotes (The Orphic Moment is definitely a book whose footnotes should not be neglected), Mallarmé "never (after the poems ofhis youth) invokes the other world in anything like the plenitude that Plato grants the world of Forms; it is rather the horizon or limit ofthis one. But that horizon always sparkles with the bewitching possibility of something more and other than ordinary reality has to offer" (170, n. 59). Steven F. Walker Rutgers University SUZANNE NALBANTIAN. Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Anal's Nin. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. xi + 223 pp. Nineteenth and twentieth-century scholar Suzanne Nalbantian's major thesis in this book is that authors in the twentieth century treat autobiographical elements significantly differently from the way such materials have been incorporated in the past. Her work attempts to fathom this aesthetic process and offers insightful readings offour ofthe modem era's best prose writers. Nalbantian starts from the premise that world views, personal or societal, dictate or influence aesthetic treatment. Her first chapter, and by far one ofthe most enjoyable in the book, is "Historical Paradigms." Here she considers autobiographical material as wide-ranging as that ofJonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, WoIe Soyinka and Jean-Paul Sartre. Essentially, the fundamental change she sees in the twentieth century is the atemporalizing and increasing subjectification of human experience. Vol·. 20 (1996): 207 BOOK NOTES The next chapter, "Theories ofAutobiography," analyzes the criticism on the subject, which has proliferated greatly since 1970. The theories sound or attempt to sound decidedly different from one another, but invariably return to the fundamental fact that artists create from their own experience; though, again, Nalbantian emphasizes the differences she sees in the twentieth century. Drawing on works in the nineteenth century, she maintains that authors used to write from newspaper accounts and historical events while contemporary authors create repeatedly from their own life experiences, which they attempt to disguise or conceal through their craft. It is this process which fascinates her, and which she explores in Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Nin. She claims that "literary critics . . . have not come to terms with the autobiographical novel with its own autonomous structures and concerns" (41). She further maintains that "[m]uch ofthe attack on autobiography has really been an attack on individualism and aesthetics—attempts to undermine the individualistic , independent style as the referential factor" (41). Nalbantian offers her own "Theory ofAesthetic Autobiography" in the third chapter. Her concern throughout is aesthetic rather than psychological or sociological ; and in this chapter, and the four...