On Autobiography

One Way for French Theory to Come to America

Lejeune, Philippe and Eakin, Paul John. On Autobiography. Translated by Katerine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.


My continuing, slow efforts at the theory of biography and autobiography took me back to the first Lejeune volume in English, On Autobiography (I've already made one post on the famous essay 'Le Pacte Autobiographique'). I re-read Paul John Eakin's 'foreword' to the volume and for the first time started to get something out of it. A brief report on only the first section (from my notes):

Eakins unpacks the issues of narrative in Lejeune's work as one sign of the divisions between "two Lejeunes" -- two sides of his personality (p. xi-xiii). One Lejeune praises innovation above all things, and so he idealized "a story without narrative" as something really special, but the other Lejeune is a "connoisseur" making fine distinctions among very typically plotted autobiographies. Eakins continues directing us towards Lejeune's personality when he points out how Lejeune perhaps naively bracketed a firm concept of 'sincerity' in his work, but that it was this attention to the necessary modeling of the reader's response that makes Lejeune's theory more representative of the 'self' as we continue to consider it, despite the more contemporary theoretical notion that the 'self' is a fiction:

To read autobiography in the manner of Lejeune, one must be both sophisticated, alive to its imaginative art, and naive, believing in the sincerity of the author's intention to present the story of "a real person concerning his own existence" (p. xiii, quoting p. 4 of the translation)....The interest of Lejeune's position resides in his willingness to concede the fictive status of the self and then to proceed with its functioning as experiential fact (xv).