Confessing our selves
Jones, Robert
17 May 1985: 305 THE MANY CLOAKS OF DISCLOSURE Confessing our selves ROBERT JONES IN his admirable new book, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago,...
...To utter "/ am" is the creative act...
...Language replaces the self as the subject of discourse...
...One speaks to regain a lost connection and strives to turn the ear of culture into an authenticating presence...
...So we forget how strongly the urge to redeem the present, how strongly the belief in the restorative power of art, were to the nineteenth century...
...The past still counts for something...
...For modernism the individual life is part of the jabbering masses...
...To become conscious is to unmask the fiction of the "I," and recognize the subject to which we always address ourselves in speaking: the omnipotence of language...
...Clearly undaunted by his confessors' reluctance to hear him, Peter returned to writing...
...Self-expression, the impulse toward autobiography, does not give voice to the desire to be, but is the medium by which we absolve the self of personality and its monopoly of meaning...
...this is how it was become statements that stamp one's life indelibly onto history...
...Rousseau may not be the first, but he is certainly the best, example of the transformation in our idea of what it means to tell the truth...
...After his death at eighteen, in his room was found a chest overflowing with ROBERT JONES worksfor a major publisher in New York City...
...But as the psyche has replaced the spirit as the perceived core of human personality, confession has been transfigured like a mutated gene...
...In confession, one speaks oneself out of conventional existence and into another world...
...Barthes's axiom is that we can only deliver ourselves from slavishness to the past by the act of writing...
...Hence, Theophile Gautier's proclamation of decadence as "the confession of dying passion entering depravity...
...Think what elegies Proust might have written for the missing streetcar — or those Tennessee Williams wrote...
...But it is never the personal self for its own sake, but always the'ideal self expressed through language...
...That most pleasurable of post-modernist writers, Roland Barthes, led us before his death to the image of a self rescued from the discords of history and the ego by the serene emptiness of language...
...To speak what is in one's heart simply acknowledges what is already known to God...
...In his Confessions, he recognizes that one can justify any behavior or validate any emotion if it comes under the cloak of disclosure...
...In its emphasis on the revelation of sin and the unburdening of desire, hagiography prefigures the contemporary obsession with autobiography and biography...
...And the act of writing itself assumes the mystical significance of the oracle speaking to reveal the truth of inner consciousness, which is the truth of the world...
...Language bereft of desire becomes "words, dry and riderless," flung to their own signification...
...Confessing becomes self-mythologizing, the act of creating a persona which can become part of the historical memory...
...of art, remembrance...
...One can respect the beauty of mat intention while recognizing its futility...
...In the vague complacency of our age, it is nearly impossible to speak the language of disintegration and decay without engaging a cliche...
...we have had to adapt ourselves differently to experience...
...This is how I felt...
...If Augustine speaks to relinquish himself of the past, Rousseau writes to claim the past as his own...
...To see confession in this light reveals the inadequacies of psychoanlytic understandings of penitence as masochistic products of a servile will...
...All efforts to speak involve the creation of a self...
...Utterance becomes literally destructive of the ego...
...their poems become hymns sung into the darkness...
...This illusion of self-preservation vanishes with Woolf s The Waves...
...Perception breaks off from desire and drags the self after it in the ' 'rushing stream of broken dreams...
...It may be that the genesis of human experience is to express the flight from ourselves and that this desire finds its beginning eternally in the word...
...With history as arbiter and judge, in Rousseau we see the conviction that truth can be manufactured through the art of retelling so that the personal version becomes the final chapter...
...17 May 1985: 307...
...Plath's poetry leaves us with the image of a black hole echoing with the*tatic of a once human voice...
...Peter's slips of paper, Henry Suso's Life of the Servant, Teresa of Avila's mystical writings, do not give voice to a self as we have come to define it, but to a soul aspiring to nonbeing...
...Think of the distances separating Augustine's Confessions from Rousseau's...
...Richard Kieckhefer tells us that Peter of Luxembourg would stay at his desk throughout the night jotting lists of his sins on scraps of paper and collect them in a pocket book so they could be near him always...
...In his autobiography, Roland Barthes By Roland Barthes (Hill & Wang, $7.25 paper, 188 pp...
...Romanticism is the last refuge of hopefulness, of the belief that there is redemptive power in the invocation of individual desires onto the world...
...In the autobiographies of the secular world, confession no longer manifests the boundless desire for salvation, but becomes the declaration of a self onto the world...
...Confession reveals the infinite mystery of personality rendered in memory...
...addresses a void in which memory is submerged by the present...
...Bernard's final question, "how, then, to describe the world seen without a self...
...All night Peter banged on their door in a frenzy of penitence, so that finally they locked him out...
...But Peter of Luxembourg's compulsion to document his blotted soul aims at the dissolution of normal self-centered consciousness, not at self-expression...
...The question remains, of course, as to whether this enthronement of language is not itself an "illusion," an inversion of the identical, human instinct for God...
...express regrets for a lost youth by pretending to regret a streetcar...
...What unites A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and Nabokov's Speak, Memory (Putnam/Perigee, $7.95 paper, 316 pp...
...This double urgency of the backward glance perpetually unmasking the future is always present in Augustine's writing...
...To come to consciousness is to realize the irrelevance of the self in history: "common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness...
...The artist becomes our most dramatic fiction...
...The poetry's terror is its voicelessness: the only power left the self is to create metaphors of silence that give a name to an encroaching absence...
...Eventually his spiritual advisors forbade him to write at all and appointed two priests to hear his sins at intervals during the day...
...What strikes one most about Augustine is his guilelessness...
...This movement toward language for its own sake can be seen as a resting place from the anxiety of nihilism...
...A romanticism of the nerves replaces the romanticism of the imagination...
...Speak, memory: it is only in recourse to remembrance that we recover our banishment from the past...
...This is the last, possible moment of transcendence...
...the more Peter confessed, the more he found to confess...
...He seeks to empty his body of the world for the glory of the divine...
...We are made by writing...
...Existence is treacherous, the heart is always anxious, because what is revealed to the self in confession is only a fragment known fully to God...
...In book 10 of The Confessions, he writes of the self revealed through memory.'' This memory of mine is a great force, a vertiginous mystery, my God, a hidden depth of infinite complexity: and this is my soul, and this is what I am...
...The poet speaking his or her life into the world affects no change...
...The origin of most autobiography is reminiscence...
...poet deconstructs through language...
...But it is never simply personal loss and never the banality of the individual as a microcosm of the whole...
...The author is the subject only insofar as he reveals the catastrophic experience of loss...
...Peter of Luxembourg and Augustine have no illusions about the limitations of human knowledge...
...I am the eye of the universe...
...The urgency to confront the world publicly is as much a characteristic of the fourteenth century as of the twentieth...
...Confession inexorably links the human soul to God...
...And as we leave Rousseau and enter the Romantic age, the cult of personality governs life and becomes the organizing principle of a diminishing world...
...No progress in pleasure, nothing but mutations...
...The self remains the subject because only in the self do we experience the jolt of memory...
...If the world has become a void, then the poet seizes the void as her own...
...IN the literature of the post-modern age, Bernard finds his descendant in the heroic anti-self of Sylvia Plath...
...He began to forsake sleep entirely in favor of these written confessions...
...The self implodes: its energy finds no outlet in the world, so it turns upon itself...
...As romanticism dies in the language of the great modernists, it is the memory of suffering by which we subvert the historical present...
...Augustine is never his own subject...
...One cannot find refuge in one's heart or conceal oneself in history because deceit will always be known...
...In the worlds between their Confessions, we see the awesome significance of a civilization in which myths of human progress, rather than religious myths, reign supreme...
...Fevers and hallucinations usurp the purity of sensation...
...The transitional work for our age is neither Finnegans Wake nor A la Recherche du Temps Perdu because they continue to reclaim the self's integrity through the memory of the return...
...The event of guilt and its power over conscience is the mystery central to human consciousness...
...Deception is of the self, never of God...
...And that even in the unmasking of fictions, we create them...
...This is to say that the art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it...
...As the impulse of romanticism dies out, one has the image of a body flinging itself against a wall...
...And in the act of remembrance, in turn, we glimpse whatever we can know of God in this life...
...If art exists as the redemptive force in experience, as it does in Romantic poetry, then the artist becomes quasi-saint, and it is to the life of the artist the culture turns to find examples of the life fully lived...
...Reverie no longer reveals the vast, transformative event of remembrance, but comes as an interruption: for a "moment" in Woolf...
...There is more than the distinctiveness of two intelligences, one humbled and anxious before God, the other wreaking vengeance on his persecutors...
...he writes of himself only insofar as his life exemplifies and articulates the human spirit striving for grace...
...The operatic intensity of the lives of Byron and Keats, the artistic suicide of Rimbaud, retain their power because they proclaim the self as the supreme fiction...
...slips of paper, each one detailing a litany of his sins...
...If ' 7 am" was once the transformative, creative expression that brought the world into harmony with inner consciousness, the emptied self now addresses the void and says, "/ am not...
...We have, in a sense, come full circle...
...Most readers want to find the consolation of the personal in Plath's poetry, but her impulse is to rid consciousness of personality...
...For what is the title of Sartre's autobiography but The Words, and what is its most powerful image but that of the man transfixed before the mirror as he watches himself in the act of speech...
...The Confessions has the clarity of truth because it never occurs to Augustine that his past is not already known to God...
...And even as fin de siecle disenchantment passed to twentieth-century bewilderment, the most influential writers clung to a lingering romantic hope for the possibilities inherent in self-expression...
...as a "shock" in Walter Benjamin...
...Virginia Woolf wrote of Proust that he brought "the light of an immensely civilized and saturated intelligence to bear upon chaos.'' This is the territory of art at its most self-conscious, not autobiography...
...In this view, it is this moment of constitution, infinitely retrieved in memory, that is salvific in the fullest sense...
...If one looks to the past for the model of modern autobiographies, or even for models of the writing of history, one looks to Rousseau...
...This declaration of non-being is the final, authenticating act of will...
...Other pleasures come, which replace nothing...
...In The Waves, Woolf remains linked to past tradition only by the regret in Bernard's voice of despair, by his memory of all that it is no longer possible to regain...
...17 May 1985: 305 THE MANY CLOAKS OF DISCLOSURE Confessing our selves ROBERT JONES IN his admirable new book, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago, $24.95, 238 pp...
...For a moment we think his contemplation of the now vanished car will reveal something about the present...
...as the modern classics of their genre is the transformation of the present through memory...
...Rousseau wins against his persecutors not because what he says is true, but because his version is the one that prevails...
...What, then, am I, my God...
...In Rousseau's Confessions, personality becomes triumphant...
...In the waning violence of individuality, all that remains is the artist's neurotic arrogance: the desire to collapse the world into the emptiness that is the self, and by its annihilation, lay claim to it...
...he returns to the memory of a streetcar in Biarritz...
...The self is drowned in the attempt to name itself against the current...
...The transformative power of the imagination, the voices of desire spoken through memory, take the poet beyond personality to an ideal self, one that is at once timeless, yet apprehended in time...
...If hagiography is the history of self-education, autobiography is the narrative of self-glory...
...Truth as Augustine understood it is neither possible nor relevant...
...The entire process of evolution is subsumed into the artist's personality, so that it is impossible to distinguish the life from the work, or the self from the world...
...Art for art's sake, feeling for feeling's sake, are an admission of failure...
...Confession is no longer a preparatory move in an ongoing dialogue with God, but an end-unto-itself...
...But today, Barthes tells us, we cannot "apply a mythic embellishment to the past, or...
...In giving voice to the incompleteness of the human soul, they find its power...
...But even this impulse towards retrieval is ultimately lost...
...Nabokov's autobiography opens with the haunting image of the family photograph predating his birth in which his absence is its strongest aspect...
...AFTER Rousseau, narratives of personal history mingle with the territory of art...
...One need not be a believer to understand the radicalness of a soul revealing itself to a god trusted to be the order of truth in the universe...
...Through the act of allegedly laying bare his conscience and by a selective, calculated memory, Rousseau creates himself for posterity...
...But the unfolding of his soul induced an outpouring of recrimination and sin...
...Confession, the utterance of the "I," sheds experience like dead cells...
...Both seek redemption through speaking, but for Augustine, as Peter Brown tell us, "con-fessio" simultaneously means to accuse oneself of the past and to praise God as one's future...
...If the individual has been forsaken by society and reduced to a voyeur of its own existence, then there is still a belief in art's redemptive power for the isolated self...
...in an "epiphany" in Joyce...
...Can it be a coincidence that the great, modernist writers left no autobiogCommonweal: 306 raphies...
...Proust recreates the past under the guise of fiction, Nabokov under the guise of fact, but these are only labels in an act of writing that has identical significance...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 10
