Some Principles of Autobiography

CRITICS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY still preside over an unfederated domain, so each feels compelled to begin with a new definition of the genre. We have an ample number of precedents, ranging from hostility to encomia, most of them centering on the relative value of history and art, fiction and fact. Others, tracing the growth of autobiography since the Middle Ages, call it a history of the human mind, reflecting man's rise from dogma to greater individuality. But these views all pack the same evolutionary bias: that recent lives are necessarily more complex, and their stories more challenging; that the content of a life shapes the form of its story, and not the other way around. Of paramount importance to most critics is the autobiographer's ideology or profession, which supposedly influenced the events and values of his book. So the critics customarily divide authors into separate categories and-working like so many vocational counselorsgrade them according to religious denomination or social class. As a result, we learn that a faith produces a simple narrative, that a soldier writes as a soldier, a poet always as a poet.1 While this definition of autobiography may be useful for social historians, it is hardly a suitable basis for critical evaluation. Some readers have resisted the occupational mode of defining autobiography, preferring a broader and more inclusive scheme of classification. A partial disclaimer appears in Roy Pascal's influential book Design and Truth in Autobiography, which argues convincingly that autobiography is a unique literary form, offering its close readers a complex set of interpretive problems. But Pascal's sensitive analysis of the genre is marred by rather insistent value judgments. The true autobiography, in his opinion, tells us not merely of remembered deeds and thoughts, but