Prophetic Self and the Problem of Voice

Prophetic Self andthe Problem of Voice G.ThomasCouser.American Autobiog:aph)!: ThePropheticMode. Amherst: The U01vers1ty ofMassachusetts Press, 1979.222 pp. S.C.Neuman.Gertrude Stein: Autobiography andtheProblem of Narration. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1979.74 pp. Elizabeth Waterston Autobiography has traditionally been considered a sub-area of history. Memoirs,though taken with a grain of salt, have enriched a diet of documents andstatistics. Recently, however, psychological critics, offering to decode autobiographies(as in Jeffrey Mehlman's structuralist study of Proust, Leiris, Sartreand Levi~Strauss),have led to a revaluation of the genre. Distortions of thepast now appear as the special interest-indeed the glory-of the form, ratherthan as its weakness. Of the two books under review here, one studies thetechniques of exploring and exploiting distortion developed by Gertrude Stein,while the other examines American motivation for a special kind of distortion,in specimens of autobiography chosen from three hundreq years ofexperimentation in the mode. · Studentsof biography have begun to speak of "ethnobiography" (particularly if they have been influenced by Levi-Strauss). Thomas Causer's work encouragesus to think of "ethno-autobiographyt for he claims that there is anAmerican mode-not just a subgenre-of memoir. From the Puritan belief intheredemptive power of individual effort, he says, grew a way of narrating true experience; from the American assumption that the nation would actualize a state of grace grew the determination to use one's own life story asexhortation to the community to work toward an ideal nation. The result is''prophetic autobiography." Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 2, Fall 1982 194 Elizabeth Waterston Couser calls writers like Edwards, Thoreau and Stein "prophets," not inthe sense that they foretell the future, but in the Old Testament sense of holding a supramundane view, feeling a compulsion to recount personal experience as significant, and imagining an audience of people who may be wandering in a wilderness but who are nevertheless chosen for a special destiny. Selftranscendence is the mark of achievement of a prophetic voice; in America the national cult of individualism makes such an achievement paradoxical a~ well as difficult. The origin of the prophetic stance is traced in the personal narratives of three patriarchs of the Puritan period. Thomas Shephard focuses on the communal experience of emigration as well as on the private process of conversion as double proof of divine guidance, of the individual and of the new nation. Increase Mather's jeremiad dramatizes the break in the double covenant. Jonathan Edwards gracefully reports the revival of a personal sense of misison, but retreats from national history into a vision of a community of saints. · But Couser, interested in form as well as content, finds more interest in his next pair of autobiographers. John Woolman, in his Quaker affirmation of the "language of the pure Spirit," his primitive asceticism, his practical group~oriented mission, adds qualities of style and voice to American experience . Plain style becomes a very complicated device in Franklin (whose debt to Quakerism is interestingly traced). Franklin's deism "liberated the autobiographer from the providential framework." His story, offered as a model to a rising people, "prophesies the Revolution, just as Edwards' narrative prophesied the millennium.'' The national importance of the genre becomes clearer when we look at the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, the slave who casts his story of escape to freedom in the now-conventional form, equating liberation with conversion. The slave must fight his own "sin of submission" and defy the owner, who is held in a "hell" of power and cruelty. Douglass' great contemporary, Thoreau, lacked that traditional belief in a conversion crisis. Every moment for him can be a moment of transfiguration. Given this transcendental break from the conventional narrative shape of autobiography, Thoreau nevertheless works in the conviction that moral progress, personal and national, are conflated. He enacts his life with prophetic intent, Couser says, parodying all previous moments in American history within his own life, and then tracing in Walden his own version of migration, westward movement, declaration of independence , Great Awakening and abolition of slavery. Thoreau thus forces the facts of his life into a mythic dimension, then recounts his own story in the...