Autobiography and the Problem of Finish (original) (raw)

What do Wordsworth's Prelude, published posthumously in 1850, Mill's Auto biography, written and then revised in three portions, and Whitman's Leaves of Grass, published in at least six editions over thirty-seven years, have in common? 1 The fi rst answer is that they are nineteenth-century experiments in autobiography in different modes; the second, which I pursue in conjunction with the fi rst, is that they are marked by genetic complexity. Despite living in a period indebted to Romantic ideas about compositional spontaneity and organic form, these writers had immense diffi culty writing autobiographically, and produced their work only after false starts, multiple layers of revision, temporal breaks, and a general struggle with ending. Philippe Lejeune's recent turn to genetic criticism and study of "autogenesis" has pointed to the possibility that there are "generic specifi cities" that govern the process of composition; in particular, he makes the compelling suggestion that autobiography has "a different relationship to its avanttextes than do texts of fi ction, poetry or thought" (214). This is an intriguing claim but not yet a fully worked out one given that most of his own detailed case studies concern diaries rather than retrospective autobiography. 2 In this article, I argue that different kinds of self-writing have different geneses, and that understanding how an autobiography comes to be can tell us about the kind of work that it is. If the linear form of the diary, which extends paratactically forwards, produces anxiety about writing the fi nal entry, autobiography produces a different, although no less sinister, problem with endings. Because the genre aims to present a coherent and totalizing record of past time-as Wordsworth puts it in The Prelude, "I would enshrine the spirit of the past / For future restoration" (XII: 341-42)-it also presents its practitioners with the fear of incompletion, error, and fragmentariness. The particular way in which writers rework, revise, or restart their life writings is also historically