Nobody’s Perfect: Autobiography and the Ethos of Democracy

Nobody’s Perfect: Autobiography and the Ethos of Democracy Thomas L. Dumm (bio) If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious. He must not be afraid to invent. Above all he must invent himself. Like Rousseau, who wrote (at the beginning of his novelistic Confessions) that “I am not made like anyone I have ever been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence,” he must sustain, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the illusion of his preternatural extraordinariness. —Janet Malcolm1 Introduction: Writing and Reading Often, when an intellectual memoir appears—perhaps especially one that has originated from within the academic world—it is presented to its public as a sort of completion of one’s life work, a personal summum bonum, a writing that serves somehow to justify the author’s devotion to creating a body of work over their lifetime. Told from the perspective of someone who is reaching toward a conclusion, perhaps even from a point where they may assume—hopefully not hubristically—to have achieved some sort of wisdom, the memoir appears as a sort of capstone; given the genre, it is not unlike a final paper handed in at the completion of a course. Maybe one vaguely senses mortality knocking; maybe one feels as though they have peaked in their intellectual powers, and before decline sets in too far wants to get some coherent self-understanding out of what the unreliable memory of the past presents to oneself of oneself. Sometimes a vague or specific urgency, a worry about the possibility of diminishing self-perception, sometimes an incomplete life or a life interrupted, or even a life drawing to an end, impels them forward, forward before time runs out. Who is the audience for such markings? Janet Malcolm assumes that it is any and all readers who, within the limits of reasonability—with no patience for “memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious”—presume to learn something second-hand from lessons learned by another over their lifetime. The academic intellectual memoirist usually [End Page 758] comes well equipped for such a task. After a lifetime of teaching, they remain a pedagogue to the end. And after a lifetime of writing, they have an archive they can lean on, as well as continued contact with colleagues, former students, and others that may help them as they piece together elements of the past. I have already made note, but it bears repeating: an important reason for undertaking such an exercise is not only to explain oneself to others, but to explain oneself to oneself. This quest for self-understanding need not be an exercise in individual celebration or self-congratulation—in fact it should not be—but it can be something better; a reflection on the contingencies of the particular life one has lived and its connections, both strong and attenuated, to the more general life of the mind one has participated in. At its best it is honest—and an element of that honesty is the memoirist’s capacity to work with the realization of their own inevitable self-deceptions, the fictional elements, as Malcolm suggests, that will infiltrate remembrance and its recording. These fictions are inevitable because they are a result of the essential unknowability of one’s self. An acknowledgment of this self-unknowability—that is, how one goes about being honest to oneself and others about one’s inevitably fictive self—reflects not only a deeper reality of the writer’s being, but of the larger culture within the writer lives. Judith Butler notes that there a political valence to the problem of self-understanding that comes from this cultural embeddedness. Her concern regarding what we might call the vicissitudes of honesty in giving an account of oneself is political because specific cultures are always subject to change. She observes that a collective ethos, when it comes into question as a result of larger cultural shifts and transformations, can resist those changes, refusing to recede into the past: “. . . and violence is the way it imposes itself upon the present...