Interpreting the Self: Two Hundred Years of American Autobiography (review)

Twenty-five or thirty years ago almost no one was writing about autobiography as a literary mode; today no subject receives more intense, sustained, various, and loving scrutiny. Whether they concern themselves with language and style; gender, ethnicity, and nationality; the psychology and philosophy of self-interpretation and self-presentation; or any other of the seemingly endless possible approaches to the subject, many literary critics have adopted autobiography as their genre of choice; in fact, in very recent productions some seem to confuse writing about autobiography with writing autobiography.

With Interpreting the Self: Two Hundred Years of American Autobiography Diane Bjorklund introduces herself into this crowded scene, not as a literary critic but as a sociologist—which makes all the difference. Not for her an analysis of style and language that might distinguish among writers and demonstrate that one is more valuable than another. As a social scientist she has 110 items of data, 110 autobiographies (otherwise termed “Primary Sources”) published between 1800 and 1980, all potentially of equal value to the scientist who would discover from study of them how Americans conceived of “the self” in 1820, 1890, or 1970. Early on Bjorklund admits that to “focus on general patterns . . . we must gloss over [the] diversity and complexity to be found among individual autobiographers” (14). Thus, it is nothing to her purpose to observe that Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory might hold an interest of an altogether different kind from that of Lawrence P. Berra’s Yogi: The Autobiography of a Professional Baseball Player.

One might wonder how Bjorklund chose her 110 volumes from the 11,385 American autobiographies listed in the bibliographies of Louis Kaplan and Mary Louise Briscoe, how she lit on Lawrence P. Berra’s Yogi rather than Mickey Mantle’s My Greatest Summer, on Nabokov’s Speak, Memory rather than Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or her Everybody’s Autobiography (is immigrant autobiography more pertinent than emigrant?); one would continue to wonder after reading the appendix titled “Method.” Hers, Bjorklund explains, is “a judgment sample,” which a “typical social research text” (Therese L. Baker’s Doing Social Research) describes as “a nonprobability sample that ‘considers the most common characteristics of the type it is desired to sample, tries to figure out where such individuals can be found, and then tries to study them” (168). But still, why these 110? And why do some (the “railroad signalman” James Fagan and the “itinerant Methodist preacher” Peter Cartwright, for example) receive the favor of extended quotation while others (Inagaki Sugimoto and Lorene Cary) are allotted part of a sentence each? Why do many “primary sources” receive no mention in the text at all?

I’m afraid that Interpreting the Self, written in a bland, colorless, and humorless prose, will have little to say to students of literature—which is to say the readership of American Literature—or to those many who today fancy that autobiography, in its fullest and finest form, is best thought of as a literary mode.