Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. By Susanna Egan. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999. x, 275 pp.

Reviewed by Tom Smith

Using contemporary theories and her formidable powers of naming
and description, in this book Susanna Egan sets forth several new categories for understanding autobiographies and autobiography as a whole. She wants it to include as many different kinds of self-referential writing as it can, invoking Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes" as an appropriate presiding spirit for the genre. On encountering this allusion, some impish reader is bound to add the run up to that line, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself." Which would be very much in keeping with Egan's resistance to a narrow ideal of generic consistency as well as her principled inclusiveness in this book. The last forty years of scholarship have shown that autobiography is both a genre and a mode of writing, oriented toward the truth as well as necessarily fictional, and capable of absorbing as well as subverting any stable set of categories applied to it. In accounting for many ways that contemporary texts encode self-reference, Egan works with these contradictions rather than trying to resolve them. She pushes the envelope of autobiography understood as a single genre, while also creating a richer understanding of it as a mode of representation. With a generously pluralist impulse, Egan would leave older generic definitions intact, acknowledging their usefulness for explaining the works on which they are based, but she shows that they are of little use in understanding the recent autobiographical texts she is interested in.

Those works appear in several mediaprint, film, the comic strip, and the theater. What links them for Egan is "mirror talk," her inclusive and flexible category embracing dialogue between two characters, dialogue between the text and the reader, and internal dialogue within a character or narrator. Following de Man's notion that autobiography is a figure of reading since readers are caught in a specular relationship with a text, Egan's readings suggest the converse, that wherever textual mirroring exists, there may be self-presence and thus autobiography. Mirror talk is Egan's generic ground for autobiography. From this stance, features of autobiography as understood in the mainline tradition of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centurieslinear narrative, the predominant use of the first person, and even retrospectionappear as aspects only of that older construal of the genre, not as universal, permanent determinants of a genre conceived ideally as beyond the means of its construction.

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But I am being more categorical here than Egan is. She does not want to lock in any one definition of autobiography for at least two reasons: first, doing so violates her sense of its protean instability, and second, she would not want to exclude works of any kind that are well illuminated when seen as autobiographical. This openness to the possibilities of autobiographical reference means that her nets are cast extremely widely. At several points when reading this book, I thought that "self-referential" rather than "autobiographical" would more accurately describe some of the textual effects she notes. Egan might respect that impulse, but I think would suggest in response that doing so would unfairly require autobiography to include Olney's "bios" or perhaps narrativefor her a restrictive move since it would rule out of autobiography texts in which space is an organizing principle.

Egan prefers to consider autobiography as a group of genres rather than as one central genre with several subgenres. She is interested in what she calls "genres of crisis," made up of autobiographical texts recounting traumas of many kinds. In such works, the crisis is often ongoing, identity is not fixed but in process, the self projected is multiple and constructed by others' voices as well as the author's own, the reader is engaged directly, and the elaboration of emotional or experiential space rather than narrative often provides forward movement to the text. In these genres, narrative may be present, but it is not usually continuous, nor does it create its effects by echoing culturally validated patterns like conversion or the return of the prodigal (a topic on which Egan wrote the book Patterns of Experience in Autobiography [also U of North Carolina P, 1984]). Occasionally, Egan calls the texts she treats "dialogic autobiography" as if creating a subgenre. But given her anti-hierarchical approach to genre, it is safe to say she is not. Rather, she is open to many possible ways to understand that term, including using it to characterize all autobiography. "Dialogic autobiography" is another name besides "mirror talk" for the plural, weaving, interactive voices and structures Egan hearsand also seesin her texts. In showing how those texts speak, they speak for her as reader and interpreter, thus illustrating one manifestation of mirror talk, that it catches up its listeners, readers, and viewers in its reflexivity and thus virtually constitutes them for the duration.

Conceptually supple and subtle, Egan's readings are not restricted by the necessity of always demonstrating her theses. Her descriptions of texts, however, make implicit arguments of their own, so that her reader is not argued into submission, but encouraged to view the text under discussion in ways that confirm Egan's larger points. The rich detail and nuance of those descriptions carry the burden of her argument. She listens to and looks at her texts very carefully, "without pushing for resolution," as she says. Befitting her chief metaphor of

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"talk," Egan wants to see her chosen texts as open-ended conversations, rather than pawns in a strictly marshaled argument. She lets her works be themselves as much as possible because, as she writes, "The dance of dialogic discourses proves most illuminating when accepted quite simply as process" (28).

Egan sees spatial forms, coincident events, weavings of voices, internal and external dialogues, interactivity, and crossing of genre boundaries as features of contemporary autobiographies, especially valuing texts in which those qualities work together well. Though she rarely reveals her preferences among the texts she treats, in a few instances she invokes the general aesthetic principle of matching manner to matter (which some might call formalist). For example, she feels that the use of linear narrative in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces and Audre Lorde's Zami blunts their ability to discriminate finely in expressing their diasporic experiences, which Egan says have to do with "transformations and plurality of self," qualities she feels are not aptly conveyed by the straightforward march of continuous narrative and its concomitant assumption of singular identity. In not so much an aesthetic as an analytical/political discrimination, Egan sees Richard Rodriguez's rejection of his Hispanic origins and acceptance of an adult Anglo identity in Hunger of Memory as a monologic refusal of the dialogism she feels appropriate for all diasporic autobiography. Egan regrets the shutting down of imaginative possibilities that linear narrative and monologism represent for her. But far more frequently registered in the book than such judgments are Egan's profound respect and care for all her texts, including those she raises doubts about. She refuses to reduce her texts' complexity or to cut them to fit the demands of her argument. As a commentator, she is absolutely open to the interpretive possibilities of her texts, more disappointed than critical when they seem not to want to share her pleasure in openness and their own possibilities. If her texts were her students, they would love her for the freedom she offers them to be themselves.

Egan's descriptions can be wonderfully metaphoric and poetic, often creating her discursive points as they register textual qualities. For example, describing Primo Levi's way of telling stories, Egan riffs on an anecdote he tells of carrying a beam together with a clumsy fellow-death-camp prisoner who lets it drop on Levi's foot: "Levi's methods of narration balance, like the beam he carries, between possibilities that he does not resolve: on the one hand the literalnon-men ("tired beasts"), train, beam, footand on the other the sources of animationwords, desire, story, and recognition. Maintaining that balance, not allowing it to fall, distinguishes between one-sided, singular meaning and the continuous effort of multiple possibility" (177). Here Egan uses a detail from Levi's textbalancing a carried beamto generate a state

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ment of the qualities she detects and values in contemporary autobiographies"balance" and "the continuous effort of multiple personality." The many passages like this in the book show how she can ground her analytical terms and values in the primary texts and at the same time make those texts illustrate ideas derived from theory and others' criticism. The sense of easily negotiating internal and external demands, or the comfortable looseness within strict bounds evoked in Robert Frost's "The Silken Tent," characterizes many passages of Mirror Talk. To take up her metaphor of balance, the book presents many performances of remarkably sustained equilibrium.

Nothing I've said thus far suggests the wide variety of works Egan deals with and the range of her discussions. Under the general rubric of modernism, she treats Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, the Canadian writer and visual artist Mary Meigs's Lily Briscoe a Self Portrait, and Breyten Breytenbach's South African prison memoir Mouroir: Mirrornotes of a Novel. Egan breaks the impasse Elizabeth Bruss and Catherine Portugues set up regarding the impossibility of filmed autobiography by detailing the complex creation of subjectivities in the movies of Britisher Michael Apted, Americans Jim Lane and Tom Joslin, and Canadians Cynthia Scott, Janis Lundman, and Adrienne Mitchell. Egan's prismatic lens of multiply-constructed, shifting subjectivities may sometimes seem better suited to collaborative media like film and theater than to print, which (to stretch her understanding of autobiography perhaps farther than she herself would) only with difficulty shakes off its inherited ability to stoke the illusions of individual control and mastery. (Egan encourages me to speculate that new ways of reading and writing on the computer screen are now weakening those illusions for everyone.) In discussing Jessica, a play by Canadian Metís writer Maria Campbell, and a book about mounting a production of the play, The Book of Jessica, written along with Campbell by the Anglo actor who played Campbell on stage, Linda Griffiths, Egan shows the many ways in which Campbell's autobiographical image on stage and in the text is created out of the blending of voices and crossings of cultures and genres.

Egan's chapter on diaspora autobiographies evinces perhaps the best fit of all her genres between the experiences of her autobiographers and the terms with which she discusses them. In Egan's hands, Days and Nights in Calcutta, co-written by Canadian Anglo Clark Blaise and Canadian Bengali Bharati Mukherjee, shows the interinvolvement of categories by which subjectivity is constructed, as does her treatment of Trinh T. Minh-ha's Surname Viet Given Name Nam, whose very title embodies identity combinatorics. Egan's analytical model works well to tease out the narrative complexities of Kingston's The Woman

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Warrior and Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, in which she finds "mapping" the constituents of subjectivity a major strategy of self-representation.

To her consideration of the ways Primo Levi creates autobiographical subjectivity in many of his works, Egan adds focused attention to his use of language's multivalences in resisting Nazism's singleminded assault on the idea of humanity. Her pages on Levi are the longest sustained treatment of any author in the book and well display the resourcefulness of her ways of explaining autobiographicality: they are as useful in revealing cultural and general human issues as "technical" issues of literary interest.

In a chapter devoted to narratives of death and dying, Egan makes explicit her rejection of any sort of organizational structure for autobiography on the basis of the kind of experiences narrated or the nature of the autobiographer. Fiercely anti-essentialist, she insists that autobiographical narratives of "single-experience"citing those of women and gays as well as those that narrate dyingare "centrally, quintessentially autobiographical" (200). Radically democratic, she refuses to bracket off into any subordinated category any group of autobiographies, irrespective of the medium in which autobiography appears. For example, she submits two Doonesbury sequences on AIDS to close literary and visual analysis, displaying what may be called, without exaggeration or prejudice, an exacting formalist regard for the expressiveness of the comic strip's representational and formal details. Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals provides Egan with an opportunity to demonstrate how a variety of literary forms creates the multiplicity of roles and selves she sees as creating autobiographical subjectivity. Sandra Butler and Barbara Rosenblum's Cancer in Two Voices is especially well suited to Egan's analytical terms since it is co-written, is assembled from many sources, and thematizes issues of mirroring identity between the two writers, including a blurring of bodily distinctions between them. Briefly treating an interview with the dying Dennis Potter (of The Singing Detective) called Seeing the Blossom, Egan finds in Potter's talk about his current playwriting projects, both of which involve dying playwrights, an apt final example of the kinds of layered, multiple self-representations she sees at work in all the contemporary autobiographies she discusses. Potter's texts display, if not an infinite regress of reflected self-representations, a mirroring at least two or three times over.

Egan reserves the book's boldest statements of its governing ideas for its concluding section, "Coda." There she says more directly what she implies throughout the book, that mirror talk "constitute[s] . . . presence" (225). Also, to the familiar identification of our moment of

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historical time as one of an "absence of master narratives" Egan adds the idea that the writers she works with have "[l]ived experience that lacks a master narrative," experience she describes as "precarious at best, impervious to examination, analysis, or understanding . . . at worst, invalidincredible, invisible, unreal" (226). She cites this sense of living in crisis, without external props, as a cause of her autobiographers' textual affiliations with nonliterary forms of self-expression, seeking in them forms of self-patterning other than the linear, individualized, and developmental ones offered by autobiography as traditionally conceived. Finally, Egan identifies political aspects of autobiographies and the cultural politics of her own project in acknowledging, respectively, "the desire for change beyond any individual life in question" and a seeking of "communal meaning." Because they point toward interiority as well as gesture beyond themselves toward others, autobiography and autobiography studies are "central to the cultures we inherit and create" (229). A more ringing affirmation of the importance of the subject matter and the intellectual work represented in this journal could not be wished for.

Mirror Talk amply demonstrates the truth of its final claims. Its generously large scope and the fine detail of its individual readings should provoke correspondingly deep and close responses. As well as projecting and, yes, reflecting the current moment in autobiography studies, Egan's book points a way forward. Hold this book up to your own nature as a reader of autobiographies. See yourself and much more in its pages. Then, as Egan knows you will, try to look beyond it. You will be challenged.

Penn State Abington