Images of Self
Images of Self:
Biography and Autobiography in a Relative World
“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago–centuries, ages, eons, ago!–for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, for they are so frankly and hysterically insane–like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every single one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell–mouths mercy and invented hell–mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!…”You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks–in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.
“It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream–a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought–a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”
He vanished, and left me appalled, for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.
—The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain
The twentieth century brought with it several realizations that were to forever alter man’s relationship to his world. Perhaps the most fundamental paradigmatic shift that can be noted is relativism. In a puff of logic, the world disappeared, God was dead, and all forms of authority seemed specious. The reactions of literature to this development were varied, and as a result the concept of “self” has undergone a drastic re-examination. Some psychologists have gone so far as to ascribe the rise in depression, schizophrenia, and paranoia to the modernist mindset.
The self that existed prior to the relativistic revolution was one that existed in a world of absolutes. Although circumstances varied, there were always absolutes that colored thinking. God was one such absolute. What could be seen was another. The current scientific paradox that any object is mostly empty space would have seemed laughable to anyone inhabiting the world as it was before the paradigmatic shift. This shift took place largely because of science, however, as first the supernatural was debunked, then the act of objective observation assumed primacy. It did not take long for the realization that there was no such thing as true objectivity to sink in. The result was a relativistic world. Every statement of fact suddenly became a personal opinion. Authority ceased to exist, as did fact.
It took many years for all this to penetrate the cultural consciousness. We are perhaps only now seeing the final results, with deconstructionism and language poetry. In terms of immediate impact on literature, however, its results may be seen as far back as the late nineteenth century.
The first concern for writers, particularly of fiction, was the impact that relativism and unknowability of fact had upon the self. Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and many other writers worked with the idea that characters are unknowable. Books like Jacob’s Room and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas play with the established notions of self and work towards a realization that other people are essentially unknowable. However, they also propose an alternate notion of knowability: that of “negative space,” whereby a form is understood and its nature grasped by observing the perturbations around it. The term is from the world of pictorial art, which provides many useful insights when discussing the problem of mimesis.
Virginia Woolf was fascinated by the problem of subjectivity. In Jacob’s Room she tackles it head on. Jacob’s Room,Êa modernist version of the fictional biography or even of the elegy, is notable for its commitment to the idea that nothing and no one can be truly known. Thus the book focuses not on Jacob Flanders’ life but on his room and on the swirl of events around him.
To fulfill the expectations of a traditional biography, Woolf would have had to engage in mimesis to at least the extent sufficient to portray Jacob himself to us clearly. Instead, she undermines the assumptions with which we come to the book by titling it not Jacob, but rather his room. To openly attempt to engage in a representation of Jacob’s inner life would have been futile, according to Woolf’s precepts.
In fact, the title itself is misleading, for Jacob’s room itself can hardly be said to be the focus of the book, despite the expectation that it must be important. It turns out to be precisely as important or unimportant as anything else in the book. It cannot be said to serve the antiquated function of symbol. Symbols, as signifiers of meaning, were also undone to a large extent by relativism.
However, Jacob’s every action pervades the book, because any form into which reality is forced must be colored by the lens through which we see it. The room is one such lens, as are the company Jacob keeps, the conversations he holds, the mere fact of his name, and his eventual death.
Jacob’s Room is built around the fictional life of one Jacob Flanders, a name which immediately tipped off the reader of 1922 that this was a young man who died on the battlefield of Flanders in World War I. Woolf’s technique is to avoid entering the young man’s mind whenever possible. But his last name has already provided us with a decided perspective upon him. Tragedies tend to assume a disproportionate magnitude when presented in a person’s life, and Jacob is no exception. We cannot help but read the novel expecting pathos.
Similarly, Jacob is presented to us as a composite of other people’s views of him. Only rarely is he described directly, and when he is, it is as more of an inanimate object than as a person:
The light drenched Jacob from head to toe. You could see the pattern on his trousers; the old thorns on his stick; his shoe laces; bare hands; and face.It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from a livid whetstone, which was his spine; as if the switchback railway, having swooped to the depths, fell, fell, fell. This was in his face.
Whether we know what was in his mind is another question.
(Jacob’s Room, p.94)
Despite the erasure that the self of Jacob has undergone, despite the lack of knowledge of his mind, it is clear that his presence or absence is the defining quality of the text. It would not exist save for his presence, and everything in it is there because of him. He is the motive for the book, and he colors everything that is presented.
The issue that arises is that of “negative space.” Jacob has no self; rather, he is defined by the perturbations of English society around him. His death in the trenches of World War I, a manifestly impersonal one, cannot be presented to us, because in and of itself it is unlikely to have been observed. It is more descriptive to present the brief scene at the end, when Betty Flanders and Bonamy examine his room. In the study of pictorial art, a common exercise is to draw a form by washing ink around the outline of a shape, drawing it by omission. This is Virginia Woolf’s technique. Only rarely do we actually get to see Jacob himself.
Woolf cannot entirely manage to stay out of Jacob’s mind. We often get brief moments of Jacob’s actual thoughts, but they are never revealing of motivation, aspiration, or desires. They are, rather, mostly observational, or descriptive. Take the following instance:
Jacob took her word for it that she was chaste. She prattled, sitting by the fireside, of famous painters. The tomb of her father was mentioned. Wild and frail and beautiful she looked, and thus the women of the Greeks were, Jacob thought; and this was life; and himself a man and Florinda chaste.(Jacob’s Room, p. 78)
As a rule, Woolf denies mimesis as it applies to Jacob’s mind, but she enthusiastically engages in description of everything else. Woolf, like other fiction writers, is not willing to reduce the whole world to absolute relativism: it would destroy fiction itself. However, like D. H. Lawrence, she is willing to make uncertainty a part of those descriptions, as when she inserts a clear authorial voice commenting on the proceedings:
Let us consider letters–how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark–for to see one’s own envelope on another’s table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table.(p.92)
Not only are the words of uncertainty present, such as “perhaps,” but Woolf’s observation is clearly Woolf’s–not Jacob’s. Although the device of authorial intrusion, particularly when making a social observation such as this one, is a common one in the eighteenth century and earlier, it was never used in quite this way. Woolf is making the supposed biography into a discourse.
Whether we gain or not by this habit of profuse communication is not for us to say…For example, take this scene.
(p. 125)
Though the opinion is unpopular it seems likely enough that bare places, fields too think with stones to be ploughed, tossing sea-meadows half-way between England and America, suit us better than cities.
(p.144)
Not only do her comments in and of themselves insert a note of uncertainty–the classic example for this novel is the “rose or rams’-head” question–but by their simple presence they introduce a relativistic, subjective nature into the relationship of the author/narrator and the reader. Once we know that the narrator is not merely reciting facts, but is also coloring them overtly with opinion, even unsure at times of the truth of what he or she says, the semblance of authority that had existed is destroyed.
Given this impossibility of authority, the natural question to ask is what effect it has on an individual self? Being the only person in the world can easily lead to solipsistic depression and suicide, or just as easily to megalomania and perhaps fascism. The concept of selfhood underwent a radical change, and Woolf’s approach to presenting another person as a series of perturbations in a social context–as negative space–must necessarily be applied to one’s own self as well.
Woolf here is showing us a young man caught up in the machinery of war, analogous to the machineries of a mechanistic world, and even portraying him as less than human throughout the novel; yet he emerges at the end, as E. M. Forster put it in the jacket copy, as a “solid figure of a young man.” Despite all the ideas of relativism and subjectivity clearly brought to bear on the story of Jacob Flanders, he not only comes out as a person despite all the depersonalizing, but as unique, a man beyond all the chattering figures that surround him. Has Woolf found a new approach to defining the self?
Gertrude Stein attempts something similar in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Purporting to be the autobiography of Alice Toklas, it nonetheless reveals at the end that the author of the text is Gertrude Stein. In doing just that much, Stein is telling us a great deal about her concept of self, or of the individual, and of authorship.
Once again we have an unknowable. The authorship, and hence the authority, of the text, must remain in doubt. We cannot fully trust anything said, for we know that the title of the work is based upon a falsehood. Although the style of the work does not lend itself to the kind of uncertainties that Woolf embeds in her descriptions, Stein is accomplishing the same thing by a slightly different method.
Similarly, the minds of characters are never entered. Although the material in the book is primarily nonfictional, in an autobiography one expects to have personal reactions to the events that are depicted. With the knowledge that the narrator is not the author, providing inner thoughts becomes ludicrous. They must be fictitious, or at least second-hand. Once again the unknowability of a character has become the focus: it is as if Jacob’s Room were narrated by Jacob Flanders himself.
Yet Stein does indeed provide thought and opinions, putting them in the mouth of Alice Toklas. “I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius… the three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead,” the narrator tells us. (Autobiography, p. 5) The self-reference on the author’s part merely reinforces the disappearance of the self of Alice Toklas. By putting such an observation in her narrator’s mouth, in the mouth of the person who so obviously is not Alice B. Toklas, Stein accomplishes a complete erasure of Toklas.
While this predates the deconstructionist practice of putting words and concepts sous rature, it has elements in common with it. Stein would not agree with the eventual removal of all signifiers that deconstructionism leads to, for she is too preoccupied with the lovely play of meaning between words; but she is more than willing to acknowledge the impossibility of mimesis and frankly engage in a recursive exercise. Where we expect to read Alice Toklas’ point of view, we get instead Stein, always behind the curtain, admitting that she is incapable of giving us Alice, and offering Stein’s rendition of Alice instead.
So what has happened to the concept of self? Can any one person have a validity of their own? Stein as depicted within the text is all the less valid for being twice removed from the author. She becomes a caricature: self-image defined by what you imagine others think of you. Once again, negative space. The Autobiography is full of depictions of the perturbations around Toklas and Stein:
Guillaume Apollonaire solemnly approached myself and my friend and asked us to sing some of the native songs of the red indians. We did not either of us feel up to that to the great regret of Guillaume and all the company.(p.107)
This passage is particularly illustrative because it shows the consequences of the destroyed image of self. The only thought and emotion of the narrator’s that is given is a reaction to a general social situation. That is, the situation of Toklas is defined by the situation around her. She is passive, as was Jacob, as indeed Toklas is throughout the book. In addition, her identity is defined by her nationality, and by a misconceived notion of it at that, so that the French expect her to know Native American songs simply because she is from America. Toklas is being defined by what is around her.
What are the implications of Stein’s unwillingness to submit to the erasure she makes Toklas undergo? Stein could just have easily changed the title to reflect her authorship; but then the idea of self-defined-as-negative space would have been lost. Stein would have been free to present her notoriously opinionated voice directly–and therefore misrepresent herself. Rather than misrepresent, she writes an autobiography in which there is no protagonist, in which the narrator is no the author, and in which the self of the subject is perceived and understood primarily by its absence.
These two instances of biography and autobiography resonate further than the world of literature. I posed several rhetorical questions earlier: in attempting to answer them we must look to the texts and see if they manage to resolve the dilemma of the biography in the relativistic world.
In ethical and personal terms, the erasure of self has disturbing implications. Regarding oneself as a sum of perceptions could quickly lead to regarding oneself as God (I create the world by perceiving it, therefore…) and certainly quite easily to regarding other people as merely bundles of sensory inputs–less than human. At the same time, realizing that one is no more than a “thought–a vagrant thought,” perhaps no more than the sum of other’s perceptions, could lead past humility and into suicidal depression. While neither of these possibilities is directly raised in Woolf’s and Stein’s books, it cannot be said that they were unaware of the permutations of their concepts. They both manage to create a firm image of the subject of their biographies, while never presenting them directly: using negative space. Bonamy can still cry out for Jacob at the end of Jacob’s Room:ÊJacob is above all a person, discrete no matter how discreet Woolf has been. Likewise, there are few passages where Stein’s prose is so vivid as in her descriptions of the ravages of war, rehumanizing the intellectual construct that relativism is:
We saw it all, we saw first the few wounded from the Invalides in their wheeling chairs wheeling themselves. It is an old french custom that a military procession should always be preceded by the veterans from the Invalides. They all marched past through the Arc de Triomphe. Gertrude Stein remembered that when as a child she used to swing on the chains that were around the Arc de Triomphe her governess had told her that no one must walk underneath since the german armies had marched under it after 1870. And now everybody except the germans were passing through.(Autobiography, p. 191)
This passage is powerful not only because it restores the human dimension to the book that could all too easily become a list of names and places, but also because it demonstrates to us that occasionally Stein cannot help but come out from the behind the curtain of artifice. The story about the Arc de Triomphe is most important to us as a sign that Stein is not willing to abandon all forms of straightforward emotional communication for the sake of the philosophical idea of relativism. She has grounded her book with the reader, established the connection–and in doing so, goes further towards defining a self than “negative space” can. The anecdote is like a single contour traced inside the outline described by the rest of the book. And we are more willing to grant it its status as truth because there is no artifice like “Gertrude Stein told me that...” Rather, it is simply, “Gertrude Stein remembered,” and the notion of relativity is abandoned. We sense an authority speaking.
Did Woolf and Stein manage to redefine the notion of self? Perhaps. Certainly, during the twentieth century image has become more important than ever, and their conceptions of biographical narrative are essentially external ones. But despite their methods, they each resorted to the more traditional device of entering the subject’s mind at least once in their books, so they did not really ever abandon the earlier absolute world. Perhaps as authors they were not willing to completely surrender authority.
Stein’s unwillingness to submit herself to the erasure that she submits Alice Toklas to indicates that despite the externalization that the concept of self underwent in her book and indeed in literature of the period, self is still intrinsically a concept of the Ego, the I. Stein does not want to annihilate herself in the Autobiography–and she knows that any erasure of Toklas will of course be fallacious, for Toklas has independent existence. Jacob does not have independent existence: he exists only as a fictional construct, and now forever as a, obscure and elusive one. Woolf did not erase herself either. Instead, she found that in order to effectively remove Jacob from the center of the narrative, she had to insert compensatory elements, like her own comments and views. She may be said to have substituted herself for Jacob in the book, giving the reader the same emotional grounding that Stein did, in order to prevent that novel from also possibly becoming a catalog of names and places.
The result is that despite the attempts by these two writers to work in the biographical mode withoutÊhaving a central knowable figure, they both had to resort to authorial authority in the end in order to pull it off. Although both books seem to embody the ideal state of relativism in that the central characters are never going to reveal their true selves to us (an impossible enterprise in the modern world), they both do so by substituting their own mental processes for those of their subject: not unlike the cuckoo taking over the field bird’s nest.
In and of itself, this is an affirmation of the self. They both set their own authorial selves as absolutes, from the reader’s perspective. And although one may argue whether or not they therefore fall into the abyss of self-involvement and solipsism, it remains undeniable that they have managed to, however imperfectly and subjectively, present to us not one but two figures each, in their biographies of erasure: the subject, defined by what is around him; and themselves, as authorial figures who can’t resist telling us about themselves and the way they think. Perhaps that is a prerequisite to being a writer: the delusion of godhood–and perhaps it isn’t altogether a bad thing to have.
Bibliography
Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf & Postmodernism: Literature in Quest & Question of Itself. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Fraser, G. S. The Modern Writer and His World. New York: Criterion Books, no year given in the edition.
Gutierrez, Donald. The Maze in the Mind and the World: Labyrinths in Modern Literature. Troy, New York: The Whitston Publishing Co., 1985.
Hafley, James. The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.
Latham, Jacqueline E. M., Editor. Critics on Virginia Woolf. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1970.
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf & The Problem of the Subject. Brighton, UK: The Harvester Press, 1987.
Naremore, James. The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.
Panshin, Alexei, and Cory Panshin. The World Beyond the Hill. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1989.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1922.
_____________. To The Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1927.
