The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good, and: Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative, and: This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography (review)

The interest in studies of life-writing, that gained momentum in the last decades of the past century, is rooted mainly in the growth of both demand for and supply of memoirs and autobiographies in the literary marketplace. Yet it is also associated with the interdisciplinary turn in literary studies: discussions of life-writing must negotiate the relationship between intra- and extra-textual frames of reference, the world of the text and the world as we know it from other sources, in ways that are less often necessary with other kinds of writing. The three new books on autobiography discussed here engage in three kinds of such negotiation.

David Parker’s The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good examines autobiographical refractions of individual ethical orientation. It pits the value anti-realism (represented by, for instance, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science) against value realism represented by Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. Though opting for Taylor’s perspective on the ethical exploration of “what it is good to be,” the book does not cast Nietzsche as an antagonist. Against the background of Nietzsche’s familiar denial that the world has values beyond those anthropocentrically imposed on it, David Parker foregrounds Nietzsche’s less well remembered observation that we constantly attempt to protect ourselves from this realization by suppressing it. Nietzsche’s view of the choice of operative values as starting from individual activity best suited for a particular subject — “by doing we forego” (12–13) — is contrasted to Taylor’s view that the subject cannot help having recourse to strongly valued kinds of good which are no less real even if they do not fit in with the subject’s prejudices or assumptions. The “moral space” of the book’s title is the space of individual orientation between philosophical coordinates. The book’s achievement lies, among other things, in that such coordinates are not placed within digital binaries; nor is a middle way sought between them, nor are they represented as stable boundaries of gray areas. Rather, enlisting, towards the end of his book, Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good, Parker traces the individual trajectories of distinguished autobiographers in their search for reflective commitments to shaping the ethical stance of the self.

The subject of this philosophically rich, fair, and sophisticated study reflects the need of modern intellectuals to search for a series of redefinitions of “what it is good to be” in the course of their lifetime in a world that deprives them of the luxury of having such commitments established once and for all. Parker demonstrates the tension between the ethical preferentialism and the reference to an available, or even dominant, system of values — not so much in living one’s life as in writing one’s autobiography — by comparing a seventeenth-century Confucian autobiography, Wang Shih-min’s “Self-Account,” with Roland Barthes’s poetic self-reflection, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. By contrast to Wang Shih-min, who deploys his authobiographical themes among the ready-made cultural molds of an honorable life, Barthes rejects any kind of doxa external to his own integrity, yet, as Parker shows, even Barthes cannot avoid the lodestone of “strongly valued goods” that are not necessarily of his own fashioning.¹ The non-coincidence of agenda and performance in Barthes’s memoir may be regarded as aporetic, yet it may also be a trace of his “supersessive development” (35) — which reportedly included his late-life reconsideration of his “death-of-the- author” thesis, on recognizing it as a symptom of a dissociation between his intellectual constructs and his intuitive emotional life (see Eakin 1992: 17...