I could take each of these master narratives and focus or skew my autobiography as Jean Piaget did his series of autobiographies. In his study of Jean Piaget's self accounts, Vonïche deals with the particularly interesting case of Piaget’s multiple autobiographical identities. Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist, wrote several autobiographies aimed at different audiences, thus presenting himself in different ways and on different scenes. In all of his autobiographies, Piaget is both the same and different. The facts are the same. The anecdotes are similar. But the outcome is entirely different. People use their autobiographies as a form of self-presentation that varies according to the target audience. They organize and re-organize the plots of their lives. According to the target audience, Piaget can be a post-Bergsonian metaphysician, a scientific psychologist, or a disillusioned philosopher turned scientist. And so is this target-oriented approach to autobiography an approach I could use as well and perhaps at a future time I may do so. For now these 2500 pages in four volumes will have to suffice.
I have tried to avoid the telling of such a series of incidents, like vignettes, that concentrate upon episodes and especially those which identify specific life activities and practices. A real danger in this critical incident approach is that, if uncritically used, critical incidents and their respective literary accounts have a great and compelling explanatory power. This explanatory power exerts a conservative force on the overall narrative which cannot be underestimated.” I like to think I have used critical incidents critically, conscious of their explanatory power and their affect on the overall narrative.
I like to think I have done what Goodson advises autobiographers to do; namely,“to move from life stories to life histories, from narratives to genealogies of context, towards a modality that embraces stories of action within theories of context.” “In so doing,” Goodson suggests, “stories can be ‘located’, seen as the social constructions they are, fully impregnated by their location within power structures and social milieux.”
As the distinguished historian E.H. Carr put it: “facts of the past exist independently of the mind of the historian, but historical facts are only those data selected from the past that a historian finds relevant to his or her argument. The historian can never know the past “as it really was,” but only how it might have been, since our information about the past is partial and inevitably mediated.” It seems to me this is true, a fortiori, of the autobiographer. Neither I nor the historian enjoys the scientist’s luxury of being able to conduct and replicate experiments about the past, my past, under controlled conditions. I can test one theory about my life against another theory, as can the historian about some aspect of history. This allows me, as autobiographer, and historians, to develop theories that are more viable. But we can never establish the truthfulness, the validity, of that theory. History and autobiography are both attempts to explain our experience of the present by constructing a viable account of the past, such that if it had taken place then the present we live in would be the case. History is not only an attempt to account for the way things were, but also to account for the way things are. George Landow writes: “at that point in human history when choices become so abundant, autobiography, the justification of one's choices, becomes increasingly important as a literary mode.” There is certainly much of this justification of my choices here.
The distinction between the practice of artists and writers and the theory of critics can be circumnavigated by collapsing both figures into that of the intellectual, a figure that incorporates both theory and practice. For me, this intellectual work—in my case this autobiography--is based on, finds its raison d’etre in, a vision of social agency rather than a theory of generic form or of creative process. If the term intellectual is a little too pretentious I am happy to use the term thinker. After living in Australia for 35 years I am not happy with the term 'intellectual'. As broadcaster Robert Dessaix discovered when he conducted interviews for a book and radio program on the topic, Australian intellectuals are wary of being called intellectuals. Unlike their French counterparts, "Any Australian whose name was included in a Dictionary of Australian Intellectuals would very likely sue for libel."
Whatever the terminology, my focus is a mixture of author-as-creative-individual, writer-as-literary-intellectual and historian-as-autobiographer. For an artist-writer to be an intellectual it is less important to have a theory of writing than to possess a vision of how their literary work might operate in society and to assume responsibility for it. For me this vision is expressed in a number of ways one of which is what might be called a new "sociological poetics" that "connects literary work to the outside world.” This vision is also expressed as an individual, personal, rendition of a Baha’i
interpretaiton of history and society.
In general terms what I do in this memoir is described succinctly by Jerome Bruner, who has written extensively on life-writing. “We constantly construct and reconstruct a self,” writes Bruner, “to meet the needs of the situations we encounter, and we do so with the guidance of our memories of the past and our hopes and fears of the future.”
There are some occasions in autobiography when writers abandon any claim or pretense to literal truth and an accurate account of their experience. They strip off the content of their consciousness’s excessive valorization and the specificity of their life and--perhaps again excessively--dismiss their life’s “very littleness.” Whatever facts occupy their conscious awareness they deem but accidental happenings. They discard their autobiographical self as an ultimately trivial and illusory phenomenon and create a novel self. This novel self is constructed out of memory and desire. This attempt, this somewhat novelistic approach to autobiography, continues to punctuate the narrative and becomes a new actuality to the autobiography. This is far from my aim and is not a part of my philosophical approach in any way, but I think it is difficult for autobiographers generally and me in particular to entirely dismiss this autobiographical orientation. Memory is cultural and personal, muscular and cerebral--simultaneously--and its products, contents, can be dealt with in so many ways.
Through a close reading of Wordsworth’s first autobiographical sketches made in his late twenties and dating from October 1798 through April 1799, one can demonstrate how Wordsworth creatively remembered his childhood. The context of this memory was in terms of the development of the powers of his imagination. In this six month period we find Wordsworth's earliest autobiographical attempt to trace the ontogeny of his imagination back to the dream state, to play, and to perceptual and conceptual blending. I did not engage in such a serious tracing of my childhood until my early sixties. But I profited from one of the first attempts at poetic autobiography in Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
I could add the results of cognitive neuroscience, drawing on memory research, sleep research, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, to add an evolutionary history of fictional cognition to my own autobiography as Wordsworth did to the origin and development of his work. An accurate, honest and successful unfolding of the imagination, one could argue, is only possible when accompanied by adequate monitoring systems. An author must possess the capacity to distinguish between what originates in his perception and what is the response of his memory. The resulting tapestry must be sufficiently complex to permit the formulation of a hypothesis about the self which may not be scientifically tested but at least possess some sweet reasonableness.
In a commentary on this first period of composition Wordsworth wrote that his autobiographical self-as-being arose as a virus within his source monitoring system itself. This investigation by Wordsworth of his early years is a complex one and I don’t want to go into any more detail here. I find the same is true of the origins of my own imaginative function: its unfolding is complex. And the monitoring systems that existed at the time of its earliest unfolding are difficult to trace. I hope that readers find here at least some of that sweet reasonableness.
When I say that my life has been full of joy and sorrow I do not see this as an apparent contradiction but simply as a reality of all our lives. If I analyse my life I can divide it into joyous parts and sorrowful parts. This I have done by discussing these aspects, but I have not precisely quantified these two emotions. My life has been joyous in some respects and sorrowful in others. The whole of life, when analysed in respect to these emotions, could be seen as contradictory and paradoxical. The nature of the reality of our lives is to deal with these endless polarities. Like an oyster we must do what we can to heal the ugly wounds of life by turning them into beautiful pearls. Much has been written about these polarities of life and I do not want to add to the philosophical library here.
Biologists estimate that there are about 5 to 100 million species of organisms living on Earth today. Evidence from morphological, biochemical, and gene sequence data suggests that all organisms on Earth are genetically related, and the genealogical relationships of living things can be represented by a vast evolutionary tree, the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life then represents the phylogeny of organisms, that is, the history of organismal lineages as they change through time. It implies that different species arise from previous forms via descent, and that all organisms, from the smallest microbe to the largest plants and vertebrates, are connected by the passage of genes along the branches of the phylogenic tree that links all of Life. In the broadest of senses, then, my autobiography would be one encompassing all of life. I must, of necessity here, limit my analysis and discussion.
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Submission Name: Memoir: Part 2
