Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will. By Richard Freadman. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. xiv, 394pp.

Reviewed by Shlomit C. Schuster

If entitling this review is correct then "Autobiography as the Expres-
sion of Will and Reflexivity" seems to be appropriate. Will and reflexivity are the two pivotal issues in Richard Freadman's new book, Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will. In order to understand autobiography it is considered essential to discern how the autobiographer renders the functioning of the will. How the will features in self-narratives seems often to have been overlooked so far. Freadman explains this neglect by delineating late modern culture as "deeply conflicted, confused, and even incurious about the will" (1).

Freadman is a professor of English but his interest in philosophy has already led him to produce and co-edit several works that show a profound affinity with philosophy and its history.[1] Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will presents further evidence of such philosophical inclination. Freadman "considers autobiography and the philosophy of the will as paired discourses, with the philosophy of the will as, so to speak, the subordinate partner of the pair" (7). And, the majority of authors that Freadman discusses are philosophers. A glossary of terms at the back of the book keeps less philosophically oriented readers on track by explaining possibly unfamiliar philosophical terminology.

Freadman's book is a very readable interdisciplinary study that is truly impressive in its scholarly extent: it includes a theory of autobiography, a history of conceptions of the will, and in-depth readings of the autobiographies of Louis Althusser, B. F. Skinner, Roland Barthes, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, and Diana Trilling. The conceptions of will covered in this book range from Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers, to late modernist such as Paul Ricoeur and Wittgenstein.

On the theoretical plane we are introduced to a new term and notion in narratology, namely, "reflective autobiography": "Autobiography in which there is a significant and sophisticated component of reflection on the meaning and larger implications of the life being written, and of life in general; and in which there is a significant sense of reflective, critical distance between the attitudes and assumptions of the autobiographer, and the attitudes and assumptions that were/are prevalent in her or his cultural-ideological milieu" (32728). With the exception of Hemingway all the authors analyzed in Threads of Life:

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

Autobiography and the Will are said to have written life stories marked by the autobiographers' "reflexive monitoring" of their conduct.

These authors are reflective actors, as it were, and their intelligent conduct is a reaction that changes the values of their social worlds. Consciously or subconsciously their autobiographies display the function of will in their lives. Moreover, "the sense of self and the sense of will are intricately entwined" (27). The will is essential in the creation of that which is metaphorically called a "thread" (sometimes also a "weaving") of life. Freadman traces the notion of life-threads back to Homer's Iliad, where the gods are said to spin the threads of human life according to their own desire or will.

In later ages divine and human destiny are often found in collision with each other, but the metaphors of the thread and of life-weaving are steadfast. Simone de Beauvior, in her life-writings, uses images of threads and spinning; these emerge as "a form of heuristic philosophical notation for issues of will and necessity" (16).

Freadman's interpretation of these metaphors seems different from the interpretation of scholars such as James Olney (Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing) and Richard Wollheim (The Thread of Life). Freadman accentuates the metaphors' "mobility"; they are found in various cultural frameworks and flourish in variant manners. What I found most attractive in this description is that the will fashions threads and weavings in mysterious, wondrous manners. However, active introspection may bring each individual to perceive for him or herself the nature of the personal thread through narrating the subject's journey in time.

A considerable number of pages are assigned to analyzing the conceptual climate of late-modernity, i.e. the era in which Althusser, Skinner, Barthes, Hemingway, de Beauvoir, Koestler, Spender, and Trilling wrote. One may wonder to what extent the Zeitgeist of this era indeed influenced peoples' theory and practice in relation to will. Are all late-modern accounts on the will marked by ambivalence and contradiction (in some cases even the absence of will), as seems true for the authors discussed in this book? But Freadman is careful and avoids sweeping statements, his observations presenting only a tendency that has its exceptions.

Chapters three to eight divide into theoretical and autobiographical sections. Freadman first demonstrates the different autobiographers' conceptions of the will and then shows how the will is portrayed by them in their self-narratives. Althusser, Skinner, and Barthes are discussed together in chapter three because their theoretical position denies freedom of will. However, in the light of these authors' lives as described in their autobiographies, Freadman does not find these theories sustained.

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Take for example the case of Althusser. His Structuralist Marxism conceives people's willpower as captivated, trapped within a system that necessarily causes them to be inauthentic. Additionally, Althusserian theory isolates experience, subjectivity, will, and action.

Althusser's two autobiographies, The Facts and The Future Lasts a Long Time, are considered in some aspects reminiscent of Rousseau's Confessions and The Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Comparable to Rousseau, Althusser wants (wills) "to intervene personally and publicly to offer my own testimony" (88). Although the lives of these two authors appear to be quite different, they both seem in their feelings to be victims of negative public opinion and gossip.

Rousseau's infamous decision to send his children (whether or not these were his natural children remains a question for some) to an orphanage was a deliberate act based on Platonic reflection, while Althusser murdering his wife is ascribed to an unconscious act. Quoting Freadman: it was "brute externality. Madness here functions as a cause--a form of event causation. It is madness that `makes' him kill her" (89).

Althusser's psychopathology is subsequently confirmed by his own denial of having written a diary, memoirs, or an autobiography, while he admits to writing "the `genealogy' of the emotional traumas of my psyche," which he considered to have shaped his life (90). Appropriately Freadman observes that The Future Lasts a Long Time is a constitutively Freudian narrative with murder by unconscious causation as climax. As a whole, Althusser's theoretical reflections seem only by incident echoed in his self narrative, while his childhood Catholicism is considered more prominent and manifest than his Marxism.

Skinner and other behaviorists consider people conditioned by their history; a view that leaves little place for a life directed through choices made by a free will. Accordingly, Skinner's autobiography is that of a "nonperson"; the self is "decentered and lacking the characteristics of a persisting entity" (101). Another peculiarity is that there are limitations to reflexivity in Skinner's life story. Skinner is only "in some respects a reflective autobiographer, but where it matters most, reflection is often suppressed" (104). Although one may interpret this (a la Freud) as repression, Freadman considers an alternative explanation too. Skinner confessed that through writing his autobiography he possibly committed "intellectual suicide." Accordingly, Freadman assumes Skinner to be conscious of contradicting his own theory and of writing against himself. Skinner displays an awareness that his self-narration could not "proceed without a powerful `mentalistic' dimension," i.e. an act of determination, of willpower (103).

One may wonder how to conceive of autobiography at all if one would strictly apply Barthes' notion that "the art of living has no his-

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

tory" (110). Yet an open-ended dialectical movement between "doxa" and "paradox" allows for Barthian self-disclosure. The will in the doxic narrative holds an illusionary function, the will is merely that which creates the self, as--in Barthes' words--"my own symbol, I am the story which happens to me" (113). Yet, Freadman finds evidence of some agency in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes as well, namely through Barthes' emphases on writing "through the [homosexual] body" that "suggest something that is both transgressive and willful" (115).

Freadman succeeds in showing that the autobiographies of Althusser, Skinner, and Barthes are characterized by the will-canceling-itself, although that capacity of will-lessness seems to contradict the sum total of each life story. The autobiographies of Hemingway, de Beauvoir, Koestler, Spender, and Diana Trilling are as profoundly scrutinized as are those of Althusser, Skinner, and Barthes. These are shown to have different problematic relations to the theoretical conceptions of willpower and its practice as described in the life narrative. These later chapters I find less exotic and exciting than the earlier ones. In particular I love chapter three; the critical exposure in it of willed will-lessness I find a greater achievement than the illuminations that follow: Hemingway's passive will, Beauvoir's constrained voluntarism, Koestler's mystically mentored will, Spender's educated will, and Diana Trilling's will as rooted in affective and rational deliberation. Though these later chapters are as worthy of a detailed discussion as the beginning ones, to expound on each of these diverse and complex self-narrations in a becoming manner would go beyond the scope of my review.

Freadman's descriptions of volition, as related to theoretical reflections and life experiences, makes one not only raise questions about how these matters relate in one's own life, but makes one wonder at the will as "one of those deeply puzzling issues that pervade our often puzzling experience as human beings" (287). Threads of Life is not only intellectually interesting and fulfilling, it is as well a stimulant inducing new self-reflection and human knowledge. I find this a remarkable book; in particular it is significant for its account of human volition in the form of individual testimonies. It is an excellent work that should be taken note of in the fields of life-writing, literary criticism, philosophy, and psychology as well.

Jerusalem, Israel.

Notes

1. See Freadman and Lloyd; Freadman, Adams, and Parker; Freadman, "Philosophy" and "Genius."

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Works Cited

• Freadman, Richard. "Genius and the Dutiful Life: Ray Monk's Wittgenstein and the Biography of the Philosopher as Sub-Genre." Biography 25.2 (2002) 301-42.
• _____. "Philosophy and Life Writing." Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. 2 vols. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 2: 707-10.
• Freadman, Richard, Jane Adamson, and David Parker, eds. Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
• Freadman, Richard, and Lloyd Reinhardt, eds. On Literary Theory and Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Encounter. New York: St. Martin's, 1991.
• Olney, James. Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.
• Wollheim, Richard. The Thread of Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.