True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern. Ed. G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. x, 169pp.

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

True Relations consists of ten articles emerging from a conference
on autobiography at Hofstra University. While many of these articles could have benefitted from more extensive developmentthey average about ten pages of textthe collection does address just about every issue contemporary critics of autobiography are engaging: race/class/gender identity, representation, generic boundaries, marginalized voices, the canon. At the center of the collection, spatially and theoretically, is an essay by Paul John Eakin that argues that the self is constructed not as an independent unit but rather through relations with others. Many of the other essays in the collection refer to Eakin's work (as might be expected given his current influence); within various contexts, they all address the autobiographical self as a relational entity.

In his introduction, Joseph Fichtelberg clearly and efficiently situates the genre of autobiography and criticism of it within the postmodern moment. While "Kant has given way to Foucault" within the realm of interpretation, "discussion of autobiography has been both symptom and subject of the postmodern attempt to define its own authority" (1). The postmodern dilemma, then, has been to define the subject such that it can function within and beyond systemic domination. Fichtelberg points to this dilemma itself as evidence for "the profound need of postmodern thought to reclaim human agency" (3). Enter autobiography, the genre that is arguably most invested in individual agency: "It is the claim that my past matters, my history has meaning, that still distinguishes autobiography as a mode of truth. To be sure, that claim always exists within the dialectical movement that marks any autobiographical statement as the product of dismemberment and re-membering. But the continued relevance of the claim makes autobiography a paradigmatic postmodern genre" (34).

Paul John Eakin's central essay, "Relational Selves, Relational Lives: The Story of the Story," evaluates this "paradigmatic postmodern genre" by arguing that "I," the pronoun most crucial to autobiography, is in some senses plural. To open this essay, Eakin traces its autobiographical origins, the story of this story, his reading of the story of Christopher McCandless, a young man apparently too enamored with rugged individualism who starved to death in a remote area of Alaska. Eakin proceeds to critique contemporary critics' general failure to examine

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

"models of identity" (65). While Eakin exempts feminist critics from this failure, he persuasively argues that the gendered polarization of autobiographical narratives performs a disservice to both female and male authored texts; the characteristics linked to either gender, including individualism and relationality, admit so many exceptions as to be inaccurate. When critics redefine the construction of the self as relational, as Eakin suggests they inevitably will, autobiography, including its canon and history, will be redefined.

To illustrate his argument, Eakin focuses on four texts: In My Mother's House by Kim Chernin, Brothers and Keepers by John Edgar Wideman, My Place by Sally Morgan, and Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman. Each of these texts is to some degree collaborative, a fact that Eakin exploits to suggest that all narrative is relational and that narrative as a mode creates as much as reflects reality. While this argument is not new, Eakin states that it has been insufficiently addressed by critics of autobiography and that more attention to it would prove fruitful.

To the extent that Eakin is correct (as well as for other reasons), all of the articles in this collection contribute to the study of autobiography. In "Photography and Ventriloquy in Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude," Timothy Dow Adams examines Auster's book as a means of exploring the function of photography within autobiographical texts. Both photography and autobiography are often understood as quintessentially representative, a characterization that is obviously problematic and that Adams teases out in the remainder of his essay. Through this analysis, he is able to conclude that, yes, autobiography does depend on reference.

In "Art/i/fact: Reading Culture and Subjectivity through Sexual Abuse Survivor Narratives," Marie Lovrod argues that "The production of a record of the event [the abuse] situates its reader as a medium through which culture is forced to confront its own complicity" (23). Readers, in other words, participate in the construction of this relational self. Lovrod briefly examines the writing of two more-or-less canonical authors, Virginia Woolf and Maya Angelou, and then examines three less-well-known texts, Betsy Petersen's Dancing with Daddy, Angela Hryniuk's walking inside circles, and Elly Dancia's Don't: A Woman's Word, in greater depth. Occasionally relying on the language of testimonial, Lovrod concludes that survivor narratives serve as restitution within cultures that insistently deny the presence of abuse. Richard K. Sanderson, in his "Relational Deaths: Narratives of Suicide and Survivorship," examines a similarly painful genre. In this article, his purpose is "to survey this significant but neglected body of writing and to indicate the principal defining features of these narratives" (34). Although Sanderson does succeed at this stated task, I found this article

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a bit too utilitarian and his method perhaps a bit datedin enumerating the characteristics of a given genre, one inevitably limits its boundaries, a strategy that has proved particularly ineffective and frustrating within autobiography studies. This article would have been more engaging had Sanderson been willing to grapple more ambitiously with some of the implicit theoretical issues surrounding these texts.

The most temporally sweeping article in this collection is George Newtown's "From St. Augustine to Paul Monette: Sex and Salvation in the Age of aids." While he acknowledges that aids narratives may owe more to Rousseau than to Augustine (a patrilineal discussion many have raised but few have resolved). Newtown relies on Augustine's autobiographical pattern, from sex to salvation, in order to invert itearly aids narratives at least often seek the "preconverted" state wherein aids was unknown. Yet Newtown concludes that Monette "has not really strayed far" from Augustine's themes: sex and salvation remain linked (59). One can manipulate established autobiographical patterns, but one can't escape them.

In "Autobiography in the Contact Zone: Cross-Cultural Identity in Jane Tapsubei Creider's Two Lives," Joseph Hogan and Rebecca Hogan demonstrate that texts written from the frontier, borderland, or contact zone must often negotiate not only differing cultural practices but often contradictory assumptions regarding the nature of identity. They rely on the figure of the trickster to illustrate how Creider can be both of and in two divergent cultures. As an autoethnographer, Creider not only translates Kenyan cultural practices but also destabilizes and hence metaphorically translates North American cultural practices for a North American audience.

Larry Sisson in "The Art and Illusion of Spiritual Autobiography" argues that, for a variety of cultural reasons, spiritual (and particularly Christian) autobiography has been unduly neglected by contemporary critics. While spiritual autobiography might not be as derided within the academy as Sisson asserts, he makes an intriguing claimthat since conversion narratives are overtly hermeneutic, they are perhaps most representative of autobiography in general: "More illuminating than illusory, spiritual autobiography illustrates what life-writing is made of: indebtedness to (and departures from) earlier narratives and invested interpretations with an eye to the future" (106).

Katharina Gerstenberger's "Multiple Crossings: Cross-Dressing, Cross-Gender Identification, and the Passion of Collecting in Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's Autobiography I Am My Own Woman: A Life" not only analyzes Mahlsdorf's destabilization of gender as an identifying category, but also interprets Mahlsdorf's obsession with collecting furniture as an autobiographical practice. Gerstenberger argues that

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

Mahlsdorf is simultaneously subversive and conservative, that Charlotte Mahlsdorf is and is not simultaneously Lothar Berfelde, that she/he refuses to confirm that photographs of the autobiographer identify her/him. Through her decision to address "social, psychological, sexual, and historical network[s]," Gerstenberger effectively complicates our understanding of relationality (122).

In "Crazed New World: Reflections on Godfrey Moloi's My Life: Volume One," Judith Lütge Coullie performs a Foucauldian reading of this text written by a black South African prior to the end of apartheid. Moloi situates himself as a hero, not overtly in the struggle against oppression, however, but rather through American popular culture. That is, Moloi presents himself as the self-made individual whose quest through a series of dangerous episodes is to some degree comic. As Coullie concludes, the "truly hegemonic discourse" is not obvious political and cultural oppression but the multi-nationally effective American entertainment.

Like many edited collections, True Relations concludes with a gesture outward. While Timothy Dow Adams's opening essay examines photographs within otherwise literary texts, Gerald Silk's "All by Myself: Piero Manzoni's Autobiographical Use of His Body, Its Parts, and Its Products" analyzes visual art as a text in itself. Manzoni's art is intentionally transgressive and is sometimes art because he declares it to be so; Manzoni's signature on a given object testifies to its status as art. While the question Manzoni raises about the nature of culture, art, and the self may be more interesting than the art he produces, this essay turns True Relations back on itself: because Manzoni's art is so solipsistic, the relational nature of this text resides in the critic's response.

State University of New York, College of Technology, Delhi