Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative

John Eakin has long been our leading interpreter of autobiography, and not just (along with James Olney) the doyen of the field, but one of the scholars most generous toward and influential on a generation of life-writing critics. Eakin’s career has recast the discipline, starting with his earlier books stressing first the fictional aspects of autobiography and next its referential aspects*a sequence of studies capturing the dialogical nature of the genre employed by both life-writers and astute readers like himself. Then, starting in the late 1990s, in a deliberate turn away from an exclusive concern with close literary analysis and aesthetics, he began to read canonical and non-canonical texts as products of motives quite different from the traditional ones of psychological necessity and urgency, namely of impulses both ethical and moral as well as neurological and somatic. Of course he famously emphasized relationality as essential to the form and equally if not more significant than individuality or individuation. Eakin’s latest study once again resists being another book merely about books. It continues his account of research in the arena of neurophysiology, especially the relation of brain activity to what we call ‘self’; his ongoing interest in the reasons why we tell our life stories*the function and purpose of self-narration; and his analysis of the conventions*social as well as somatic*that shape those stories and constrain narrative desire into what he calls our ‘identity protocols’. In Living Autobiographically Eakin stakes out five main positions for discussion, and delineates them with his usual verve and rigor. As always in his writing what might look like rhetorical simplicity turns out to be a clarity all too unusual in such critical discourse. His first point is that we are who we say we are. Though this position does not seem to account for self-deception, Eakin is really claiming that our identity does not precede our story of ourselves, nor is it merely contained by that story; rather, we inevitably make narratives of ourselves from an early age and live out one or more versions of who we tell ourselves (and others) we are. In effect, we are our story. ‘Narrative . . . is a constituent part of self,’ and from an early stage of our lives we continue to narrate ourselves, whether in speech or in writing. Life Writing VOLUME 8 NUMBER 1 (MARCH 2011)