The practical concern in the thirteenth century with the identity of two charters and the spiritual concern with the individuality of each person reflect the new ability to distinguish what is in the book and what is on the page. The word individual itself comes from Antiquity. In Porphyry's Commentaries on Aristotelian categories, the word carries the meaning of "unambiguousness";it has a deictic or demonstrative character. It means an ultimately indivisible(a-tomos)something, the subject of which something is predicated—for example,*Socrates, to whom we can point as the"bearded, garrulous, son of so-and-so."In this sense, in-dividuum (Cicero's translation of a-tomos) was carried over the bridge of Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae into the Middle Ages. Abelard used the word in the same deictic sense. Albert the Great took the "individual"beyond Classical Antiquity when he grasped the difference between the individuum vaguum and the individuum certum, the frog whose croaking woke him up last night, as opposed to this particular croaker that I catch and am able to skewer.
THE SELF is as much an alphabetic construct as word and memory, thought and history, lie and narration. Narration and the self in the twentieth century have become as inseparable as the epos and its singer in oral times: The writer spins the story as part of his self. The twentieth-century citizen sees himself through the eyes of various sciences as a layer cake of texts. From the eighteenth century on, the state has become a corporation of selves that letters examine.
No language can get by without a first person singular, which in some languages is demonstrative—for example, the Hebrew ani that acts like a finger turned backwards—and in other languages sets the speaker off from the rest. But, unlike the"I,"most epochs got along without a self. There was no self in epic times. According to Bruno Snell, there was not even a body: heroes refer to their arm or their "thymos,"but do not contextualize these into the kind of body we now have. In oral cultures, one may retain an imge of what has been—yesterday, at the time of the full moon, or last spring, but the person then or now exists only in the doing or the telling, as the suffix comes to life only when it modifies a verb. Like a candle, the "I"lights up only in the activity and is extinguished at other times. But not dead. With the retelling of the story, the candle comes to glow again. No pilot light gives continuity to the first person singular between one story and the next. The"I"can exist only in the act of speaking out loud—or to oneself.
The idea of a self that continues to glimmer in thought or memory, occasionally retrieved and examined in the light of day, cannot exist without the text. Where there is no alphabet, there can neither be a memory conceived as a storehouse nor the"I"as its appointed watchman. With the alphabet both text and self became possible, but only slowly, and they became the social construct on which we found all our perceptions as literate people.
Writing the history of the self is as difficult as writing the history of the text. The self is a cloth we have been weaving over centuries in Confessions, journals, diaries, memories, and in its most literate incarnation, the autobiography, to tailor the dress in which we see our first person singular. Beowulf dates from the life of Bede (671--735), the time that the Christian alphabet came to England; its hero, Beowulf, has nothing of what we moderns call"self."But by the fourteenth century it is clear that to the two books delineated by someone like St. Bonaventure—the Book of Creationand the Scriptures—has been added a third: the Book of the Self*. Hugh of St. Cher refers to the Book of the Heart*, which, at the end of time, Hugh declares, Christ will open to reveal all "things secret."Alanus de Insulis calls man's conscience a book hiding things of the soul. These secrets too will be revealed on the Day of Judgement. And in the next several centuries, the self becomes an established literary phenomenon that can be read in popular accounts such as Benvenuto Cellini's supposed autobiography, Rousseau's Confessions, and the interminable memoirs of Casanova. At virtually the same moment that James Boswell is lionizing his friend Samuel Johnson, through the biography, Benjamin Franklin is doing the same thing for himself, in his autobiography—though he uses the old term, memoir. It is also in America that the newly constituted self quietly reaches its crisis, with Henry Adams.
We cannot conceive facing each other except as selves. The image of the self that we have inherited seems to us fundamental for western culture. But we notice that some of our students are bred on electronic text composers."Text"means something entirely different for them than it does for us. And thus we sense its extreme fragility at this moment. We fear that the image of the self made in the image of the text could fade from society, together with the self-destruction of the text. Retracing the sociogenesis of our perception, we want to point to its historical nature.
In three thousand lines, Beowulf describes the wondrous adventures of Beowulf, whose patronymic translates as Bee-Wolf, or simply Bear. Like a bear, Beowulf swims vigorously, runs swiftly, and fights fiercely. He possesses the strength of thirty men in his right hand. A mighty animal is his model; though he is quasi-human, the hero is not inarticulate. Indeed, he is adept at reconstructing his genealogical roots: he does so in over fifty lines of well-shaped verse. With deftness he tells the story of his prodigious three-day swimming contest with Breca. The same story about the contest with Breca is told by Unferth completely differently. What to us looks like a contradiction in the two stories never becomes a"problem"for Beowulf and is never"resolved."Unferth's diverging story merely shows Beowulf in another light. Beowulf knows no hesitation, he cannot lie, but neither can he take inventory of his life. He seems incapable of remembering. He suffers no pangs of conscience, no regrets. Larger than life, he is also far removed from it.
However, during the last hours of Beowulf on the third and final day of his struggle with the dragon, a kink occurs in the story; for eight and one-half lines there is talk of a kind of shame or guilt or causality—what we would not know how to call anything but "conscience."Less than one hundred lines from the end of the poem a young warrior, named Wiglaf, the sole survivor of an ancient tribe called the Waegmundings, sounds this new and discordant note. He chides his comrades for not aiding their king, who has kept them secure for so many years, in his own time of need in this fatal fight with the dragon.
The death of Beowulf signals more than the simple end of a ruler; it marks the passing away of the heroic way of life and the spirit of comitatus(community) that holds that life together. Young Wiglaf represents the new order in the poem. Perhaps Wiglaf is a Christian interpolation by some monastic scribe, but nonetheless his voice is a new one in English. He wants those cowardly old men to feel bad, and he wants them to carry that feeling around with them. So he scolds:
Wergendra tō lȳt
þrong ymbe þēoden, þā hyne sīo þrāg becwōm.
Nū sceal sinc-þego ond swyrd-gifu, eall ēð el-wyn ēowrum cynne,
lufen ālicgean; lond-rihtes mōt
þǣre mǣg-burge monna ǣghwylc
īdel hweorfan, syððan ǣðelingas feorran gefricgean flēam ēowerne,
dōm-lēasan dǣd. Dēað bið sēlla eorla gehwylcum þonne edwīt-līf.
(Too few defenders pressed round the king when his worst time came.
Now all treasure, giving and receiving, all home-joys, ownership, comfort,
shall cease for your kin; deprived of their rights each man of your families will have to be exiled,
once nobles afar hear of your flight, a deed of no glory. Death is better
for any warrior than a shameful life!)
Embarrassed and ashamed—and still too frightened to fight—they do the only thing left to them: skulk off to the woods.
But Wiglaf will not allow the Waegmundings to forget their betrayal. He wants those warriors to be stuck with their guilt or their shame—or both. Wiglaf implies that each of those men possesses something like a self whose voice is his conscience. He sends a messenger to court to foretell the horror of the feuds that will be caused by their cowardly inaction. For the first and only time in the entire poem, past action is presented as the cause of future grief. Wiglaf interprets the history of feuding tribes as the result of the guilt of forebears.
Beowulf is then set on a barge, along with all his treasures. Set afire, the barge drifts off to some unknown destination. Women bewail a past epoch and keen over the king. The future looms in grim detail. Wiglaf has erased the present. Warriors are helpless to undo the past while they prepare for what is to come. For the present they can only lament and hide.
James Cox, a literary critic concerned with autobiography, argues convincingly that autobiography is not only an American invention, but one that flourishes, as nowhere else, in America. Franklin, the Ur-American portrait of success—founder of a university, a hospital, a library, a philosophical society, the postal system; inventor of the stove, the smokeless street lamp, bifocals, electrical conduction, and the glass harmonica, among other things— "at the age of sixty-five embarked upon what one wants to call his great invention—the invention of himself, not as a fiction, but as a fact and in history."Thus, in Franklin we are not reading some fictional character like Lancelot, or some product of romantic longing like Casanova, but a fictional fact.
In the Confessions, Augustine realizes that hubris must inevitably end in failure; he must, therefore, eschew the things of this world. But autobiography is born out of hubris, it requires that the self be woven into the very design of material society. In Franklin's case, his autobiography grows out of the hubris of America's emerging power—its myths and ideals—a power that actually thrives on mistakes. One merely seizes upon them, as Franklin makes clear, and turns them into substantial financial success. Autobiography amplifies that power: Since a person is literally creating a new being, he can smooth out the rough transitions in his life, clean up the mistakes, to produce a polished and attractive literary self. The writer presents his life as he thinks it should have been. Thus, every autobiography is in some ways a declaration of independence, as the writer bids farewell to his baggy historical self, embracing a new, tidy, authorized, and public one. It marks an act of willful liberation. No wonder, then, the number of powerful American black autobiographies, such as the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the story of George Washington Carver, and the Confessions of Nat Turner. How fitting that Franklin, so concerned with autobiography, should have been one of the framers of the Declaration of Independence. He was also President of the Executive Council of Pennsylvania, as well as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. And in his Autobiography Franklin continually measures himself against that singularly American founding document, the constitution. Constitution is a word that had been in use for only a hundred or a hundred and fifty years by 1771, the year Franklin began writing his memoirs, to mean the composition of some body or some thing; and Franklin borrows the idea to help enact the "constitution of his own self."This self should not be seen as a mere literary fabrication, Franklin implies, but in some substantive way "constituted"out of the homely virtues of honesty, sobriety, moderation, frugality, and perseverance. A self so constituted knows no limits to its accomplishments: Like everyone else, Franklin pursued life, liberty, and happiness and he shows that hard work pays off in enormous success.
Franklin's Autobiography charts his climb from raggedy beginnings, in the guise of the frugal and industrious Poor Richard (Saunders), through an encyclopedic and disparate series of selves, to the birth of that star, the Great Doctor Franklin. While the Autobiography breaks off its narration in 1757, the moment that Franklin's career really takes off, John Adams points out that when Franklin began writing the Autobiography he was already an international celebrity: "There was scarcely a citizen who was not familiar with his name and who did not consider him a friend to human kind."Poor Richard, it turns out, is rich in wisdom, which he expresses in pithy sayings and maxims. Franklin sprinkles them throughout the Autobiography: A penny saved is a tuppence clear; God helps those who help themselves; A word to the wise is enough. Collected and sold in little pamphlets, Richard's advice became a commodity easily dispensed and digested, a constant reminder of the importance of practical application. Those apothegms helped to mask the real-life Franklin, a sometimes untidy, spendthrift man, at loose ends with his own finances. But more than that, Richard Saunders sired Ben Franklin, a brand-new self—we still refer to Franklin stoves, Franklin glasses, Franklin lightning rods. (Franklin patented none of his inventions, saying that "as we enjoy great advantage from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours."Curiously enough, American patent law derives from a provision in the Constitution empowering Congress "to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing... to inventors the exclusive right to their... discoveries.") A public self like Franklin's is essential for the full-time pursuit of success. The question may be: How long can the pursuit be sustained?
The answer is delivered in the next century, with The Education of Henry Adams, considered by most historians to be the first autobiography, one in which we can actually experience a self crystallizing around the act of writing. We see the struggles and the mistakes; we are present at the moment of crisis. Franklin writes from a position of solid success; he's already made it, and from this position of assuredness glances over his shoulder to document its history. Adams writes out of failure. The Education of Henry Adams involves a dialogue between the failed Adams, who hopes to learn from his mistakes, and some other Adams. To make this clear, Adams adopts a curious literary stance: The Education is the life of Henry Adams told by Henry Adams, but narrated in the third person. We are thus made to experience two Adamses: the previous one—actually Adams as a young man—and the new Adams—the writer as an older man. Not only are there two Adamses, however, but more curiously, the young Adams, the literary creation being remembered, or recollected, takes on its own life and begins to educate the new Adams.
Here is a truly extraordinary development: The literary creation of the self has assumed enough life of its own to instruct and educate its creator. This third-person golem must be disposed of, dealt with, or, ideally, incorporated back into the first person. The young Adams in fact controls the situation so strongly that he turns the old Adams, the writer, into a ghostly fictional character. Adams must figure out how to take back his life. So these two selves travel the entire meandering path of the book as master/pupil; they stand together at the moment of crisis in Paris on April 15, 1900, at the largest exhibition ever held in Europe, the Great Exposition.
Ben Franklin ransacked his soul to uncover there the multifarious parts of his soul—artist, printer, inventor, educator, designer, statesman, scientist, and so on. Some powerful invisible force drove Franklin toward success. At the Great Exposition, Adams saw that force updated and made concrete in one grand contraption: the forty-foot-high dynamos displayed in the Gallery of Machines.
For Adams, the Virgin represented the great religious symbol of the twelfth century; for the twentieth century, that symbol was the dynamo. Both stand as "revelations of a mysterious energy like that of the Cross; they were what in terms of medieval science were called immediate modes of the divine substance,"symbols of a continuing divine force that has driven the history of man. Just like the Virgin, the dynamo was capable of attracting untold numbers of followers. Puzzling over the connection between these two disparate centuries, Adams begins to perceive the possibilities of Education anew; indeed, a hazardous one: "The knife-edge along which he must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attraction."The new Adams learns from the old Adams that the great invisible force of the twentieth century—producing electricity, X rays, and radium—has been around forever, just like the force of Christianity. At times, this force becomes visible. The Virgin represented a form of faith still felt at Lourdes, at the Louvre, and at Chartres. There, as he knew by the record of work he still could see, existed "the highest energy ever known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist."Through the dynamo, Adams reckons, the American mind would finally be able to grasp the immensity of a divine force. America tottered on the verge of momentous change, which Adams, in his excitement, can only equate with other revolutionary moments: "Copernicus and Galileo had broken many professional necks about 1600; Columbus had stood the world on its head towards 1500; but the nearest approach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up the Cross."In yet another reversal in The Education, Adams understands as he actually stands under this dynamo the great lesson of his Education: he is a failure. Not that Adams was not born of the proper Brahman, New England stock, not that he had failed to attend the correct schools, or that he had not created elegant and influential works of literature, like the wonderfully seductive Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, but that he had failed in the invisible world of the spirit.
Ironically, Adams had created his self with so much clarity and precision—the young Adams had been too much of a literary success—that his current state of failure becomes painfully clear to him. Adams has interpreted the self, analyzed it, and what he finds the literary self telling him is the opposite of what it seems to say. After more than fifty years of study, he was still an ignoramus. The modern way of describing this is to say that Adams psychoanalyzes his soul to determine what it feels or what it means. After all, the therapeutic experience is essentially a literary one: A person is expected to think, reconstruct, maneuver—narrate with shape and interest—his old self to a listening doctor/auditor. A rich imagination is as useful as a sharp memory. Only when this old self is fully understood, in all its complexities and contradictions, the theory goes, can the patient be deemed healthy.
Adams would have described Franklin's life as wrong-headed, for he desires an inner search, not an outward pursuit. Franklin fixed on success, from the Latin succedere—ascending, mounting. As a failure, Adams had plummeted—into himself. He realizes how he must climb back out, and he presents it in the most curious turn taken in The Education, He decides to trace the history of force and power from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century. In the midst of writing his autobiography he tells us that he must take up writing! Not only has self spawned self, but text has given rise to another, inner text. If the self is a reflexive phenomenon, and its history can be unraveled in writing, then why not a reflexive text as well. These intricacies—self doubling back on self, text on text, first person talking as third—make it appear as if the Book of Kellshad provided the pattern for Adams's autobiography. In Adams's words: "In such labyrinths, the staff is a force almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a sort of blind-man's dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen works for itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic materials over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too well; for often the pencil or the pen runs into side-paths and shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then it has to return on its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force. The result of a year's work depends more on what is struck out than on what is left in; on the sequence of the main lines of thought, than on their play or variety."A chief obstacle to writing a modern autobiography is its ending. How can it end, really, reach its final conclusion, until the writer is dead? Franklin's Autobiography breaks off in his fifty-first year; he dies before its completion. Adams solves the problem by killing off the young Adams, the instructor. Or, perhaps in a more accurate literary image, the two Adamses come together, both holding a single pen. So the end of The Education is in some sense the birth of the Old Adams, complete with a new self.
After incorporating the idea of force into his writing by developing what he calls the Dynamic Theory of HISTORY, he arrives at the last chapter, appropriately titled "Nunc Age," (Now Go). He is ready to reenter the world. But before he does, he pauses to realize that he had accomplished the goal he set for himself in the Preface (which Adams signs as Henry Cabot Lodge): to complete Augustine's Confessions. Self-satisfied, Adams no longer needs to talk to himself. He can finally confess, quoting Shakespeare but recalling Augustine, that "the rest is silence."