Apology to Apostrophe: Autobiography and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation in Spain

“Spain’s . . . ‘lack of autobiographers,’” writes James D. Fernández, “rather than indicating a shortcoming in the literature might—to some degree at least—reflect a problem among Hispanists: our willingness simply to pass along inherited prejudices, silences, and texts” (87). In Apology to Apostrophe, Fernández digs his heels in against the current and examines some inherited assumptions while bringing forward for analysis and discussion a number of little studied first-person Spanish writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning with Torres Villarroel’s Vida, he studies the rhetorical strategies of memoirs written under the sign of Spain’s transition to modernity, whether composed by political figures such as Manuel Godoy and General Espoz y Mina or by men of letters like Joseph Blanco White, Ramón Mesonero Romanos, José Zorrilla and Armando Palacio Valdés.

Fernández’s readings of specific texts center on the rhetorical movement summarized in his title, a vacillation between apology, a self-justification directed toward the historical and social world in which the autobiographer lives, and apostrophe, which addresses an absent and transcendental judge or perspective. Fernández finds these constitutive tropes in the autobiographical narratives that served as models for the genre—in Saint Augustine, Saint Teresa of Avila, and Rousseau—and devotes his introduction and a good part of the first chapter to a subtle and suggestive exploration of the concepts of self, writing, and community implied by the interplay of apology and apostrophe in these and other first-person life narratives. Paul de Man supplies the analytical model for the book’s deconstruction of textual claims (on the part of both autobiographers and critics) concerning the pure origins of the self or transcendental truth, but Fernández seeks explanatory paradigms in Michel Foucault’s work, especially in his insistence on the role of historical institutions and discourses in producing the subject. This line of approach leads to one of the book’s most provocative observations: that there is a strong anti-experiential tendency in a genre devoted to the recounting of the author’s experience (14). Augustine and Teresa, Fernández finds, move “upstream, against the currents of experience toward identity or truth,” a movement that corresponds to Cartesian epistemology, which arrives at the pure subject of knowledge by a process of subtraction (15). The paradox here is that historical circumstance (for example, the ecclesiastic institution that ordered Teresa to write her Life) motivates the autobiographical writing itself, shapes its communicative circuit, and provides its basic material. Thus, Fernández shows that the tension between the two rhetorical strategies, apology and apostrophe, runs right through the discursive space occupied by the autobiographical genre, a space in which the notion of a true self and a transcendent perspective struggle against the social and historical forces that constitute the discourse.

An analogous tension is perceptible in Fernández’s own critical strategies. While striving with notable success to elucidate trans-historical generic structures, he stresses the importance of understanding the specific cultural and historical conditions in which the Spanish autobiographical tradition was produced:

I believe it would be helpful to historicize not only the quality or character of life (Was there constant political unrest? Was a great deal at stake in the writing of an autobiography?) and the conventions of autobiographical discourse (Was “art” seen as antithetical to “truth”?), but also the conditions of the texts’ reception and transmission.

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Although Chapter 1 is primarily devoted to establishing the apology/apostrophe paradigm as an instrument of analysis applicable to all first-person life stories, it takes up the questions listed above in relation to the secular autobiographies that emerged in Spain as the ancien régime gave way to more modern formations. In the course of the book, a historical as well as a generic argument emerges. Fernández persuasively shows how the new reading public that appears as a principal interlocutor in Torres...