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422 JANET WARNER Catherine, Blake's widow. It includes this sentence, a little sidelight on Blake's marriage: 'The artists ofthe 14thand 15th centuries have done much, but they had friends, pupils, and every assistance; but this man had to struggle with poverty in a Commercial Country, and has produced these mountains of labour with the assistance only of a fascinated and devoted wife, who as a beautiful damsel, loved, as a woman, cherished, as a wife, obeyed, - as a willing slave incessantly laboured, and as an aged nurse, attended, and alleviated his last sickness; and now, as bereaved, deplores but patiently acquiesces.' This book is the same height and width as Blake Records but only a quarter as thick, so one can carry it around and dip into it at leisure. There are many fascinating appendices, including one on rediscovered references in John Linnell's journal and account books, and another reproducing the list of books known to have been in Blake's library. The Changing Nature of the Self PHYLLIS GROSSKURTH Robert Elbaz. The Changing Nature of the Self: A Critical Study of the Autobiographical Discourse Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm. 189. £27.50 Itwas DrJohnson's opinion that the only person who could tell the truth about his life was the subject himself. Dr Johnson held the classical view that men were more or less the same in all ages, and if they differed it was only in the degree to which they adhered to or transgressed the eternal verities. Since Freud, biographers have gained the edge over autobiographers in that they have arrogated to themselves the role of psychoanalysts, dissectors of compulsions and obsessions of which the subject himselfwas totally unaware. In their view, autobiography is now regarded as an interesting new form of fiction. Robert Elbaz addresses himselfto many of the issues arising from this new view of autobiography in his The Changing Nature ofthe Self, with its subtitle, 'A Critical Study of the Autobiographical Discourse.' The self, he argues, far from being a consistent entity, is historically and culturally determined. Moreover, autobiography can only be a fiction, since the life, when committed to paper, lacks finality and completion. The very attempt to impose a linear narrative on the fluidity of existence necessitates a distortion of truth. 'Like fiction,' he writes, 'autobiography can only be a beginning, a ceaseless beginning, because that is all there is; because consciousness in its temporal division, in its process of contradiction and negation, allows for beginnings only for what cannot be completed.' Autobiography can only represent ceaseless beginnings, with unknown contingencies. Within this theoretical concept, Elbaz discusses the self-examination of three figures - 5t Augustine, Rousseau, and Andre Malraux - with varying degrees of success. WALKER PERCY'S ART AND VISION 423 5t Augustine, by implication, is treated as a modern in his conception of space and time. He offers the linear progression of a life only in the loosest sense. Augustine's world view is cyclical in that wherever one starts one can only come back to the beginning. Hence, it is irrelevant that he does not refer to his birth until chapter 6. His very being is expressed in terms of the spatiality of God: 'Therefore my God, Iwould not be, I would in no wise be, unless Iwere in you.... You fill all things and you fill them with your entire self.' Whatever happens to him has been preordained, so that Augustine, the paradigm of sinful man, has been placed upon this earth to pray and hope for his salvation. Rousseau is also aware of sin, but for him sin is not an Augustinian inheritance but an injustice perpetrated on him by others. He becomes what society make~ him. The whole purpose of his Confessions is to recapture the lost innocence still buried deep within him. The title of Malraux's Antimemoires reflects his sophisticated scepticism about the possibility of ever recording truth. Time is compressed and expanded, and real and fictional characters coexist in a network artificially ordered by Malraux's consciousness. For Rousseau, his unity means his uniqueness; for Malraux it resides in his relationships within the world so that every relationship expands into a variety...

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