The Paratexts of Newman's Apologia

Newman's apologia pro vita sua is, primarily, an apologia, an apology or self-defense speech. This apparently trivial classification requires explanation today partially because scholars have tended to obscure it in one of three ways. Either they ignore it in favor of mining the Apologia for its biographical or theological information;¹ they downplay it by emphasizing instead what features the work has in common with other genres;² or they even implicitly deny it by reclassifying the Apologia as another kind of literature entirely.³ The first of these problems is not so much a problem as a natural byproduct of constructing a biography or theological study of Newman. Any biographer must select and interpret the traditionally autobiographical elements of the text, and any theologian must select and interpret Newman's summaries of his own doctrinal reasonings. However, the other two mischaracterizations of the Apologia's genre can present more serious obstacles to a reader's enjoyment of the work insofar as they tend to directly mismanage genre expectations. Reading the Apologia as if it were, primarily, a spiritual autobiography, or Moby-Dick as if it were a novel, or Paradise Lost as if it were anything but epic poetry, is bound to be a frustrating experience to some extent. And yet, such mischaracterizations of the Apologia are standard fare in the literature. Ever since the Apologia first began to receive systematic treatment as a literary masterpiece in 1945,⁴ a variety of ingenious, non-apologetic readings of the text, its structure, and its genre have been proposed: it is a four-act drama about a soldier serving in the Church Militant;⁵ it is a classical tragedy complete with "the reversal-discovery-suffering sequence" of Aristotle's Poetics;⁶ it is an intimate "account of religious experience" and "confession of error" whose "closest model is perhaps Augustine's Confessions";⁷ it is "an artistic autobiography" focusing on "the story of a soul";⁸ it is the epic story of "the perils of a spiritual Ulysses pursuing a kindly light to an ultimate haven";⁹ it invites comparison with the novel because its substantial length allows it to "create and populate a universe of its own, one that maintains internal consistency in obedience to its own rules of decorum";¹⁰ it is a story that "develops mainly around its family imagery," with the patristic authors as fathers, the church as mother, and the Oratorians as brothers;¹¹ it is "a Catholic autobiography in the English tradition," fusing aspects of Thomas Scott's Force of Truth in chapters one and two with aspects of Augustine's Confessions in chapters four and five, joined by a "generic crisis" in chapter three;¹² it is "a compelling achievement in spiritual autobiography," remembered not for its "excursion into apologetics" in chapter five but rather for "its power as personal statement";¹³ it is an epic, "Dantesque divine journey, with Newman as pilgrim and his conscience, reason, and duty as guide."¹⁴ There are genuine elements of insight in most, if not all of these interpretations. But to do the Apologia justice I must align myself with the far less numerous camp of scholars who have interpreted and emphasized its nature as an apology in the Classical sense, that is, as a statement of self-defense in response to a public accusation of wrongdoing.¹⁵

Both the subject and the methodology of this article are, in large part, additions to Newman studies. I take as my subject the four opening paratexts: the title, subtitle, epigraph, and above all, the preface. Despite their richness and artistry, even the scattershot attention paid to them so far has been negligible. The case is similar for my methodology: namely, a systematic literary and narratological analysis of these paratexts, in their order of appearance. Close literary readings even of the main text are quite rare in Newman scholarship, and the systematic application of a range of concepts from narratology (such as focalization, the implied author, analepsis, narrativity, the masterplot, and the notion of the paratext itself)¹⁶ to...