Autobiography as Criticism || Courting the Interior: Contemporary Literary Criticism and the Autobiographical Impulse

Courting the Interior: Contemporary Literary Criticism and the Autobiographical ImpulseAuthor(s): Patrick O'SullivanSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 13, Autobiography as Criticism (Winter, 1992/1993), pp.1-13Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735673 .

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Courting the Interior:

Contemporary Literary Criticism and the Autobiographical Impulse

PATRICK O'SULLIVAN

Autobiography becomes an interior court, the writer is at once criminal and judge, and the only law is the one that requires total disclosure.

Denis Donoghue

If the wealth and variety of recent publications in the area is anything to go by, the autobiographical mode is fast becoming a key aspect of

contemporary literary criticism. Though autobiography has long been

a nodal feminist strategy, it now appears that just about everybody wants in on the act. From Donald Davie's These the Companions: Recol?

lections (1982) and Denis Donoghue's Warrenpoint (1991) through to Edward Said's After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986) and Jean Francois Lyotard's Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (1988), autobiogra?

phy is an increasingly thick thread in the critical weave. Even the

editors of a very recent collection of essays on the subject of Left Politics and the Literary Profession (1990) saw fit to devote the last section of their book to 'Personal Recollections'. The tenor of these pieces is

heavily autobiographical -

risibly so at times, as when Louis Kampf

mawkishly relates his anxieties and dissatisfactions about life in the

Academy:

When I get home I head for the kitchen. After taking my first sip of

pernod (did Sartre soothe his nerves similarly after a rough day at the

?cole Normale Sup?rieure?), I begin the intricate task of preparing dinner. Dicing the eggplant for the pasta sauce, my tension recedes as I

1



2 O'SULLIVAN

look forward to the pleasure of my friends and comrades savouring the

robust and complex beauty my labor and the tradition of Sicilian cook?

ing have produced.

Ultimately, however, the robust and politically correct cuisine of the

Sicilian peasantry offers no relief. There is no escape from the harsher

realities, the demands heavier than the intricate dicing of vegetables:

After dinner, lingering over a glass of wine, we discuss tomorrow's

demonstration in support of the Salvadorian rebels. I find that it takes

work to convince myself to go. Each demonstration, each meeting, each

phone call urging a friend to sign a petition seems like a distinct event.

Each demands a new expense of spiritual energy on my part. No

compelling historical design urges me to plunge into the next task.

Work in school, I reflect, is just one more piece in the political puzzle I

can't put together. Nearly every moment I must convince myself that

the academic routine is leading somewhere. Am I really pushing the

boulder any further up the hill?

And so on .... These are priceless quotations, though not presumably in the way intended by Kampf. Leaving aside the self-aggrandizing reference to Sartre, the autobiographical tableau still speaks far more

of concern for himself than for the Salvadorian rebels. It is his great

expense of spiritual energy that is pushed forward into the footlights of tragedy. The whole scenario returns us to Marx's distinction be?

tween civil and political society. Whereas Kampfs meal with his

friends is clearly a civil co-ordinate, an event in a realm beside history, the encroaching duties of attending various rallies is a political com?

mitment, struggle in a theatre presided over by history's brute de?

signs. The governing imagery is of civil inside and political outside.

Kampfs pretentious attempt at bridging the gap comes down to fey comments about Sicilian cooking and his "comrades". He desires an

interface between the two realms but can do no more than let a

vocabulary appropriate to one sprawl uselessly over a syntax endemic

to the other. What remains is smugness. This engagement with the rival attractions of civil and political

society recurs with remarkable frequency. It is clear that critical auto?

biography is a crucial element in the cognate and often deeply bitter

debate about literature's relationship to its traditional others: history,

politics and ideology. The 1980s saw a decisive escalation of rancour

over the lineaments of this relationship. And it is surely no coinci?

dence that this period also saw such an increase of interest in the

autobiographical form. Not since the 1930s has autobiography been so



CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM 3

prominent in literary and critical circles. It is unusual to find Denis

Donoghue and Terry Eagleton agreeing on anything, let alone a strat?

egy. Yet both these have had recent recourse to autobiography while

engaged in those critical battles which habitually find them dug in on

opposite sides. As a potent index of the autobiographical form's sig? nificance, we thus have this telling diversity in its practitioners. When

utilized by bourgeois liberal and Marxist advocate alike, its current

importance must surely be considerable.

Given its quantitative prominence, it is in the nature of such a

development to pose questions about its appearance. Why has the

impulse come to a head now? What new anxieties or needs is the

autobiographical tendency answering or appeasing? To what end or

purpose is it directed, if any? What covert allegiances and commit?

ments are being made? These are basic questions which preoccupy me

throughout this essay, though it will be necessary to make certain

detours in order to do justice to their range and scope. My governing

argument is that critical autobiography usually amounts to a resituation

of literary theoretical warfare on another plane ? and never more so

than when it tacitly claims to have withdrawn from that clammy arena altogether. The background of conflict over two opposing mod?

els of literature's relationship with history - one arguing for it as civil

and centripedal, the other for it as political and centrifugal - is abso?

lutely crucial. As I reckon it, autobiography is now one of the key fronts on which the various factions try their strength, an argument I

support by a detailed look at Denis Donoghue's Warrenpoint. Tradi?

tionally a stronghold of civil autonomy and transcendence, autobiog?

raphy becomes a test case of sorts. Implicitly or explicitly, the

autobiographical form is consistently canvassed as the holding membrane between private and public, civil and political. The most

fractious questions all concern the thickness of this membrane and

what, if gauged correctly, its permeability might legitimize as critical

practice.

i

There is a war on.

- Frank Kermode

The autobiographical turn in recent literary criticism should really

surprise nobody. As long ago as 1975, Roland Barthes forged an

intimate link between autobiography and hip literary theory. As the

doyen of all things post-structuralist, Barthes had proclaimed the



4 O'SULLIVAN

death of the author. Now there came, phoenix-like and most unpre?

dictably, the birth of the autobiographer. While the crystalline and

supposedly impersonal rigour of post-structuralism was gaining aca?

demic power, a counter-truth was nevertheless accruing force. If lan?

guage now spoke post-structuralist man, here was Barthes, one of

their own, implying the opposite by his practice. By insisting that there was no necessary conflict between the autobiographical and the

Saussurean, Barthes' manoeuvre had profound reverberations. It rein?

stated the self as a narratable entity, thereby overturning some of his

disciples' most cherished ideas about the relationship between lan?

guage and history. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes became a yang to

S/Z's yin. Once again, and very slyly, an opposition had been disman?

tled into a resource.

Raymond Williams is also a key figure in this context. The beauti?

fully written opening chapter of The Country and the City (1973) mines a rich autobiographical vein in Williams' work, one more usually evident in his strangely neglected and underrated novels. The poten?

tially exemplary nature of this intervention was, as with Barthes, considerable. If he licensed autobiography as a legitimate theoretical

tactic, Williams gave a similar imprimatur to all those hostile to the

politically quietistic implications of post-structuralism. With their criti?

cal positions so different in so many other respects, the shared auto?

biographical impulse is all the more striking. As was to be the case

with Donoghue and Eagleton later, the very diversity of the form's

exponents bespeaks crucial theoretical struggle at the level of form.

The most famous academic battle of the 1980s threw one aspect of this

impulse into clearer focus. Consider the tactic briefly adopted by Frank Kermode, an unwilling combatant, while ruefully musing on

the then fractious nature of critical debate.

We lack a great man who might, like Eliot, hold together the new and

the traditional, catastrophe and continuity; unfortunately we do not

lack doctrinaire and unconsidering people on both sides of the argu? ment. My own inadequacy as a mediator has already been adequately demonstrated. There is a war on, and he who ventures into no-man's

land brandishing cigarettes and singing carols must expect to be shot at.

Writing in the acrid aftermath of the so-called MacCabe affair at

Cambridge University, Kermode fleetingly teeters on the brink of

autobiography. The reference to his "own inadequacy" alludes to his

role as King Edward VII Professor of English during the dispute. Confronted by critical rancour, Kermode momentarily reaches for an




autobiographical aside, as if it were a possible means of escape from

the theoretical crossfire. Then, seemingly in lieu of this impulse, the

martial metaphor is pushed swiftly into the vacuum and the moment

passes. The impulse goes underground, abruptly subsumed into the

early 1980s vogue for World War I imagery. This is critical autobiography in its first aspect: a respite from en?

demic combat. Truncated and glancing though the moment is, we

should not miss its importance. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that Kermode's aside briefly crystallized what was increasingly felt to be a burgeoning resource. For those bogged down on that

battlefield symbolized by the fracas over the denial of tenure to MacCabe at Cambridge, the autobiographical mode often appeared to

represent a means of keeping that conflict temporarily at bay. Autobi?

ography came to offer a freedom denied to more orthodox critical

discourse. Fatigued by constant queries about the legitimacy of their

respective positions, critics are tempted to hoist an autobiographical shield. Tacitly, as we shall see, part of the agenda is to invalidate those

probing questions about political correctness, ideology and canonicity. But the initial motivation is usually a more mundane desire for some

breathing space. The first stratum of interplay between the critical and

the autobiographical is therefore the prospect of asylum. Autobiogra?

phy acts as a refuge from certain invigilations, fleetingly sheltering its

practitioners from all but the most personal of criteria.

Notably, there is a highly significant discussion of this issue in

Warrenpoint. The passage occurs in the context of Donoghue's reflec?

tions on certain signal differences between St Augustine and Rousseau.

"In the practice of autobiography", he writes,

the main difference between Augustine and Rousseau is that for Au?

gustine, the final judge is God, the last Judgement is irrevocable; for

Rousseau, he himself is the judge, the last Judgement is his writing of

the Confessions, and what passes for grace is the shamelessness with

which he tells the shoddy as well as the heroic truth about himself.

Autobiography becomes an interior court, the writer is at once criminal

and judge, and the only law is the one that requires total disclosure.

The key trope here is the one of judgement. Transposed to the current

critical scene, Donoghue's incisive distinction glosses his own situa?

tion. By opting for trial by the "interior court" of autobiography, he

can believe himself catapulted beyond the sphere in which his more orthodox criticism judges and is judged. However temporarily, he

escapes judgement by any neo-Augustinian exterior jury.



6 O'SULLIVAN

ii

Above every poem or novel there should be a motto:

"This road does not go through to action."

- Denis Donoghue

If there is one perspective on critical autobiography which sees mate?

rial like Warrenpoint as a cloistered annex to the torn sites where there

is a war on, there is also a second which credibly views it as a

continuation of that conflict by other means. At a deeper level, the

governing drive is not just to evade the exterior court due to fatigue but also to dismantle its authority by alternative strategies. This is the

sense in which Warrenpoint is an important and organic offshoot of

work like Ferocious Alphabets and The Pure Good of Theory. Donoghue's antipathy to high Theory and politicized literary criticism - often

compelling and persuasive, to my mind - is well known. The antipa?

thy and the autobiographical impulse ultimately issue from the same

source. The root of his disagreement with thinkers like Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson centres on the question of answerability. For

Eagleton and Jameson, all literature is indictable before the outer court

of history. Privacy, interiority and transcendence are bourgeois fic?

tions, the opium of those indifferent to the masses. Amplifying an

early point by Barthes, Jameson wrote that

Literature, in our time, is essentially an impossible enterprise, a self

unravelling process. At the same time that it poses its own universality, the very words it uses to do so signal their complicity with that which

makes universality unrealizable.

For Donoghue, however, such criticism is beside the point. Though he

sometimes adopted a Leavisite tone of gratitude at finding strong critics "worth disagreeing with", he remains unimpressed. The mag?

nanimity changes nothing. The primary duty of the critic is evaluation

on internal aesthetic criteria rather than external political ones.

Warrenpoint is as trenchant on this point as is The Pure Good of Theory.

Rebuking Seamus Deane for his politicized critique of Yeats, Donoghue

rejects the idea of literature's answerability to any exterior court:

I see no merit in Deane's resentment, though much in him besides. It is

the glory of poetic language that it impedes, even when it also solicits, the conversion of images into action. The purpose of its forms and

ceremonies is to hold the reader's mind for as long as possible in a

fictive or otherwise gratuitous space, where the relations are internal




and not applicable. Images call to other images as in a little world made

cunningly from its discovered formal and expressive possibilities. Above

every poem or novel there should be a motto: "This road does not go

through to action." A poem is not a tract, an editorial, or a sermon

(p. 168).

"Where the relations are internal and not applicable": as with art, so

too with autobiography. Each is the repository of a transcendent

inwardness, the index of civil society's impermeability to political

society. It falls to art and autobiography to shelter, in Marx's phrase, "man in his sensuous, individual, immediate existence". The two

forms fork in their refutation of the saturation of private by public. In

this respect, critical autobiography is a masked extension of theoreti?

cal struggle on another plane. It resituates the battle to its own advan?

tage, asserting the primacy of the civil over the political, the reflective

over the active, the road inwards to art over the road outwards to

action.

This is the first level of critical autobiography's second aspect: a

thematic continuity between orthodox criticism and autobiographical criticism. The same issues are relocated to a different stage, where the

environment is apparently at once replenishing of critical stamina and

conducive to critical success. It should be noted that such contribu?

tions, however engagingly written are as yet only assertions. Donoghue claims all art is predominantly non-kinetic, retarding the urge to?

wards political activism, but on what grounds? How is the point demonstrated? Is it demonstrated, come to it? Or does the point consist of mere assertive rhetoric tricked out as conclusive proof?

These crucial questions bring us to the decisive second level of

critical autobiography's second aspect: the autobiographical as a le?

gitimation of a certain standpoint on literature's status in the exterior

courts. The issue hinges upon the treatment of mnemonic detail. And, once again, there is a telling passage about this in Warrenpoint. "Many of the episodes I remember", Donoghue remarks,

are trivial and were even then trivial: the feeling of running my fingers

along the iron surface of the watering trough in the square; the pleas? ure, while watching the coal boats at Kelly's Coalyard being unloaded, of anticipating the moment at which the huge buckets threw the coal on

the pyramid; the thrill of the day on which I graduated from short pants into long ones and knew that my knees would no longer be on display; the night on which Duffy's Circus played in the field behind the bar?

racks and my father got me a free seat on the excuse of inspecting the

ticketing arrangements.



8 O'SULLIVAN

The book is full of these Proustian bafflements, their very point their

pointlessness. Since their force appears to lie outside the jurisdiction of any conceivable exterior court, the case for the overlay of the

private by the public, the mnemonic by the material, is sharply under?

mined. As Kermode has said, there is a war on about these issues and

their ramifications for literary study. To some combatants, the auto?

biographical genre thus has the double virtue of being both a respite from this warfare and a bolstering of your offensive from a safe

distance. Autobiographical narratives subvert narratives of historical

determinism by insisting on pockets of local detail which have no

ostensible political charge. The subversiveness derives from the man?

ner in which these details appear entirely the province of the civil: skin

across iron; dockside coal piles; a night at the circus. Such recollections

are a decisive index of impregnable and ungainsayable individuality,

transcending historical determinisms like class, religion and national?

ity. They seek to demonstrate the thickness of the membrane which

divides sensuous and immediate existence from stilted and inhibited

citizenry. Effectively, they make the case for bourgeois liberalism and

the primacy of our interior courts.

Such a strategy is also cunningly double-edged. It at once concedes

that nothing resides outside history while simultaneously insisting that many important things lie beside history, wide of the trawling

determinisms. Donoghue's implicit point is that there are two con?

duits to this annex: art and autobiography, twinned in their adjacent transcendence. The critical and the autobiographical are thus inti?

mately related by their mutual freedom. One plays contrapuntally across the other in a bind of reciprocal legitimation, assertion stiffened

into demonstration.

This dynamic is the motor force behind a great deal of recent critical

autobiography. The genre is felt to furnish not only asylum but also

legitimation of the liberal critical position. Fundamentally, the attrac?

tion is built-in endorsement. Literature "is not a tract, an editorial, or a

sermon" because "many of the episodes [we] remember are trivial".

This sort of autobiographical practice enacts the assertions habitually made for the purposes of bolstering the liberal case. The opaque trivia

of memory negate the strictures and sentences of any external neo

Augustinian juries. Because such trivia refuse forensic meaning, the

apolitical standpoint is correct about art's relationship to its historical

moment. Consequently, there is no legitimate road through to action.

As an autobiographical mode, Warrenpoint could therefore be deemed

centripetal. Hankering as it does after privacy and transcendence, its

most characteristic metaphor is a movement from political outside to




civil inside. The insistence on detail of the centripetal is a corollary of

this desire, an inward spiral into the labyrinth of the self and the

primacy of our opaque personal experience. The same pattern is

discernible in Donald Davie's These the Companions: Recollections. Like

Donoghue, Davie sometimes deploys reminiscences as a gloss on

current critical pretensions. "I have friends", he remarks at one point,

? Philip Larkin I suppose for one, Charles Sisson and Robert Conquest

for others ? whom I think I can hear growling: 'But what were they,

anyway? Only critics !' I sympathize. Certainly literary criticism has got too big for its boots, and struts around too presumptuously

? more

foolishly in France and the United States than in Britain.

There is another striking similarity with Donoghue. These the Compan? ions exhibits the same strong emphasis on how specificity and singu?

larity are incommensurable with orthodox Marxist historiography. Davie frames the book with an argument also made by Donoghue. The function of historically determined narratives is, he argues,

to exclude or discount the reports of the imagination, which must

always stammer, in the face of them, that it is concerned with one

particular people, in one place, at one time, in one weather.

The sovereignty of the particular is likewise Donoghue's theme. He

quotes approvingly from Levinas' Totality and Infinity : "Interiority is

the very possibility of a birth and a death that do not derive their

meaning from history." And he goes on to remark:

History is only one way of being significant. Memory gives the unoffi?

cial sense of history, effects an order not sequential but agglutinative. That is why whenever we ask our memories to line up rationally or

sequentially, like soldiers on parade: they obey our orders, but not

always or in the form we prescribe.

iii "There, now," my father said when the

work was done, "that'll keep you off the street."

- Denis Donoghue

Let us enter.

-Edward W. Said



10 O'SULLIVAN

Yet these supposedly hermetic memories are not without suggestive ironies. The dislike of Davie's mother for Harold Rose, a neighbouring

bank clerk and an avowed Tchaikovsky fan, is implied to be

coterminous with her dislike for how he had "unguardedly reflected

on the provincial grubbiness of Barnsley". This provokes his mother

to private demonstrations of her depth of feeling about the two men,

composer and clerk:

Tchaikovsky' my mother would subsequently enunciate, with wither?

ing sarcastic emphasis, to the family circle; and cast her eyes to heaven.

Montague and Da vie sing "Jacobite songs" together, which eventually leads Davie to muse that Montague's Irish nationalism furnished "a

curious gloss on 'colonialism' ". Suddenly, the membrane between

private and public has drastically thinned. These memories begin to

fray and unravel. Class and nationalism, aspects of the political, dis

quietingly intrude on musical preference, a co-ordinate in the civil. If

even a drunken singsong cannot be accounted "sensuous, individual, immediate existence", where does that leave civil impregnability and

properly booted criticism? The same process of unravelling is also strongly evident in

Warrenpoint. The young Donoghue's trip to the circus, for instance,

depended on his father's position as a policeman, a situation which

suggests that ostensibly private memories are often underwritten by

very public designations. It is his father's uniform which is the true

memory here, however lateral and trivial it is posited as being. In

fairness, Donoghue himself is all too aware of these tensions. The very last piece in the book consists of an excerpt from a news report in The

Irish Times, where we have a description of a botched I.R.A. attack on

the R.U.C. station in Warrenpoint in 1989. This is the building he and

his family lived in for nearly twenty years, Catholics in an artificial

sectarian state, his father a uniformed upholder of that state's laws. By

bracketing his memories with this news report, Donoghue implicitly

acknowledges how even the most opaque of memories are inexorably

pierced by the brutal clarities of history. Likewise with the moving and compelling portrayal of his father. At

one level, Warrenpoint is straightforward filial piety; at another,

Donoghue is distinctly at odds about his father. His metaphor for the

distaste he feels for restrictive sequentiality is more telling than he

would like, couched as it is in a military idiom. The notion of requiring memories to "line up rationally or sequentially, like soldiers on pa? rade" is rejected out of hand. But where does that leave Sergeant




Donoghue? As a man in uniform who believed in the virtue of ordered

sequences, he presumably comes in for a covert rebuke. The metaphor belies the piety, leaving the book forked at source. Throughout there is

considerable disorientation about Sergeant Donoghue's double life:

private father and public constable. The stress on his father's garb gets a clause to itself in this characteristic piece of homage:

Even now, after many years, I have "no better measure of the fitness of

things" than the recalled image of my father, in uniform, walking up Charlotte Street toward the square, intent upon his purpose.

It is clear that this uniform, free circus tickets aside, matters enor?

mously to Donoghue. In civvies, after his retirement, he tells us his

father "seemed diminished". The problem is that the almost obsessive

emphasis on his father's official dress belies his general belief in

memory's right to refuse external policing. If his paradigm of all

things fit and measured is his uniformed father striding outward into

political society, where does that leave Donoghue's advocacy of litera?

ture as a centripetal and ultimately static artefact? Does his admira?

tion for Sergeant Donoghue's road outward into action not embarass

his critical endorsement of the road inward to wise passivity?

Warrenpoint thus furnishes us with two incommensurable paradigms: one proposing the civil and centripetal, the other proposing the politi? cal and centrifugal. It is a situation entirely cognate with Donoghue's critical career. He himself has said that Thieves of Fire, his book on the

internally oriented forces of the Promethean, was partly intended as a

counterbalance to The Ordinary Universe , his book on the externally oriented forces of the reverential. On the evidence of his autobiogra?

phy, this conflict between modes of adequacy had been with him from

the beginning. There is one particular anecdote which subtly delineates this inter?

relationship between spatial metaphor and critical endeavour.

Donoghue informs us that he goes through his shoes unevenly, "the

right one more heavily worn than the left". As a boy, his father acted

as family cobbler. There then follows an exceptionally detailed de?

scription of his skills and the way in which he salvaged a succession of

shoes. We are finally given the comment his father would inevitably make on completion of the task: "There, now," my father said when

the work was done, "that'll keep you off the street".

These details often prove to be self-ironizing. Centripetal autobiog?

raphy's project of critical legitimation seems self-undoing, with even

the most fugitive and non-transparent of memories tending to acquire



12 O'SULLIVAN

a retroactive political connotation. The whole question of space sug?

gests certain analogies. A little like literary criticism itself ? with its

roots variously in philology, tepid cultural history and belles-lettres ?

Donoghue never had a proper home in the fashion called for by orthodox civil society. The barracks, his site of civil privacy and

hermetic experience, was the most politicized place in Warrenpoint for everyone else, a fissure all too apparent in the physical make-up of

the building itself:

To get from the domestic part of the house to my father's office, it was

necessary to go through our bedroom. The door between the bedroom

and the barracks was normally kept locked, and we were forbidden to

go through except to tell my father that his dinner was ready.

It is as if Donoghue's particularly tense matrix gives us the lineaments

of criticism's most current dilemma. Reckoned metaphorically again, this nodal anecdote would serve as an admirable gloss on recent

debate about the nature of literature's relationship to history. Should

the door between the two categories be kept locked? Was it ever truly locked in the first place? Or, as Jameson and Eagleton would argue, should we more properly be involved in a belated narration of how

the outside was never really locked out at all? The remarkably exten?

sive use of this metaphor is certainly striking. Davie's These the Com?

panions begins with him recounting a dream which is a precise

replication of the structure. Hot and distressed during a warm York?

shire Sunday, he is eventually ushered into a shop by a helpful collier, a member of the group Da vie always feared, growing up, as political

antagonists and enemies. This is the allegory chosen as the book's

framing narrative. Its implication is that the achievement of political

equilibrium depends on a withdrawal into the cooler reaches of the

civil. Its structural prioritization as a framing device further implies that all concord ?

aesthetic, critical or otherwise ? is predicated on

such a withdrawal. The road outward through to action is struck off

the critical map.

Although a critic whose work significantly differs from that of

Donoghue and Da vie, Edward Said has also made highly significant use of this boundary metaphor. There is a fascinating meditation on a

picture in After the Last Sky, his heavily autobiographical commentary on Jean Mohr's photographs of Palestine, couched in exactly these

terms. About a photograph taken of four people sitting outside a

house in Ramallah, Said writes:




Jean Mohr's photograph of a small but clearly formed human group surrounded by a dense and layered reality expresses very well what we

experience during that detachment from an ideologically saturated

world .... This is also, then, a photograph of latent, of impending desola?

tion, and once again I am depressed by the transience of Palestinian life, its vulnerability and all too easy dislocation. But another movement, another feeling, asserts itself in response, set in motion by the two

strikingly marked openings in the buildings, openings that suggest rich, cool interiors which outsiders cannot penetrate. Let us enter.

As with Donoghue, the two conflicting impulses bespeak ambivalent

attitudes towards history. Closeted within the cool dark of barracks or

shop or Palestinian house, we are temporarily safe from the intrusive

outsiders, inquisitors most likely belted and uniformed like Donoghue's father. Yet there is, these being intelligent men, the necessary conces?

sion. However strong the impulse inward, such autobiography is

acknowledged as a cramped freedom from rather than a dilatory freedom to, a fleeting respite bought from an ever-dwindling hoard of

singular detail. All nostalgia ? and it is a species of nostalgia that we

are dealing with ? inevitably ends up living off emotional capital.

The strength of their work comes from a self-arraignment before the

two courts, domicile in this tense and clenched limbo. Unlike Kampf, with his vapid and self important political correctness, impressive and

substantial work has been won from the conflicts of metaphor and

desire. The tension is, finally, more enabling than enervating. The

realization that the notion of internal juries is our cruellest mix of

memory and desire becomes a safeguard against essentialism on ei?

ther side of the threshold. It refuses both idealism and determinism,

preferring the grasped to the given. Any inner jurisdiction is known as

ever suspended at a seducer's distance, alluring and withheld ?

alluring because withheld. Lack being everything, the interior court

ultimately emerges as an endless courting of the interior.



Documents

Autobiography as Criticism || Courting the Interior: Contemporary Literary Criticism and the Autobiographical Impulse