The Romantic Subject in Autobiography: Rousseau and Goethe. By Eugene L. Stelzig. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000. xii, 279pp.

Reviewed by Tom Smith

Living in a largely Eurocentric society as we do, we cannot ignore
Rousseau and Goethe if we want to understand the ways we have come to think about autobiographies, not to mention our own lives. Millions of people of both sexes have lived and are living lives that those two late eighteenth-century men first mapped out, in part. They helped to make us people who believe we are born innocent and good but have been socialized to become otherwise--and people who believe that a perhaps unknowable combining of innate tendencies with outward circumstances have shaped our selves into their present configurations. Long before developmental psychology was dreamt of, Rousseau and Goethe laid the foundations for it in their autobiographies and other writings.

This ambitious book casts its nets much wider than the title suggests, doing several things at once. First, it contributes to literary and intellectual history by arguing for the centrality of Rousseau, Goethe, and Wordsworth in creating Romantic autobiography, defined by Stelzig as a kind of life writing that includes fiction. He puts Chateaubriand's Memoir from Beyond the Tomb, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Dickens's David Copperfield and Great Expectations, George Sand's History of My Life, and Stendhal's Life of Henry Brulard and The Red and the Black in the category and might have included many other nineteenth-century autobiographies and autobiographical fictions as well. He defines Romantic autobiography as "a type of confessional narrative of the self in the later eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries that, as a retrospective account and interpretation of how the writer's identity and personality were formed, artfully merges reality and imagination, the historiographic and the poetic poles of narrative--or what Goethe calls the 'poetry' and the `truth' of a life" (8). For Stelzig, it is the fictional (or "poetic") admixture to historical narrative that makes the autobiographical works of Rousseau, Goethe, and Wordsworth new and different from eighteenth-century memoirs. His introductory chapter weaves an intellectual history of the self (following Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self as well as literary historians) with descriptions of features of Romantic autobiography as Stelzig defines it. As he does at several points throughout the book, in the introduction he situates Rousseau's and Goethe's self-written lives in regard to current ideas of autobiography, those writers'

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ideas of it, and in relation to their other literary works, philosophical positions, and aspirations for their autobiographical writing.

Second, Stelzig's book makes a real contribution to autobiography studies by bringing theoretical sophistication to bear not only on his two main authors, but also on his overall literary historical project. Aware of the slipperiness of genre distinctions in connection with autobiography, mindful of the feminist critique of the unitary self modeled largely by male autobiographers from Augustine on, and willing to reread two pillars of the canon in light of that critique, Stelzig brings us a Rousseau and Goethe somewhat freed from their permanent job of holding up Western cultural traditions. Following Paul John Eakin's extension of relational autobiography from women to men, Stelzig reconsiders Rousseau's and Goethe's self-representations in light of the other characters in their narratives, imagining those others fully as human beings, especially when the autobiographers do not. Such recontextualizing of their autobiographical narratives allows us to see Rousseau and Goethe as something other than the marble monuments of Western subjectivity. Through Stelzig's eyes, we can see them as hugely talented, egocentric tellers of their life stories whose play with their unreliable memories brought fiction into autobiography in ways that would be imitated by many others after them. Stelzig rehumanizes them. Given his inclusion of Wordsworth with Goethe and Rousseau as the inventors of Romantic autobiography, some readers will feel the lack of an extended treatment of Wordsworth's The Prelude. Although he has already written a book on Wordsworth, All Shades of Consciousness: Wordsworth's Poetry and the Self in Time (Mouton, 1975), we can hope that Stelzig will go on to place Wordsworth's epic poem in the history of autobiography as he has done with Rousseau and Goethe, so that M. H. Abrams' placement of it in the history of epic poetry does not become its final home in literary history. After reading Stelzig on Goethe and Rousseau, I can think of no one else better suited to the task.

Third, Stelzig's book is a fine-grained comparative study of three books: Rousseau's The Confessions, his Dialogues, and Goethe's Poetry and Truth. He draws excellent distinctions and similarities between Rousseau and Goethe as autobiographers, marking lines between them that makes the distinctiveness of each all the more visible. For example, Stelzig writes: "whereas Rousseau's psychologizing, subjective, egotistical, and at times rhetorically defensive confessional autobiography polarizes or juxtaposes the self against the world, Goethe's historicizing, objectivizing, world-embracing, and largely non-confessional and nondefensive life narrative unfolds his development as a progressive imbrication in the world in all its historical richness and circumstantiality" (16). It takes such a complex sentence to flesh out the differ

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ences fully between the two writers within the categories Stelzig sets up. His sentences successfully hold many complex, intricate ideas in suspension as they work their way to their conclusions. Stelzig's comparatist task rarely leads him to adopt a numbing "this but that," back-and-forth style. Rather, he frequently uses comparisons between his two writers to introduce longer general discussions of one of them or extended passages of close reading. Especially for readers whose experience of the autobiographies may not be fresh, these analyses provide much orienting detail and context without becoming plot summary or flat description. Stelzig's analyses also engage other critics and commentators frequently and interestingly, so that the stakes of his close readings always remain in sight. For readers like me without German, Stelzig provides a real service by translating passages from many German literary critics on Goethe. We get a peek into what Germans have made of their Shakespeare. Stelzig's agreements with other critics are generously acknowledged, his differences with them forthrightly stated, and his own positions argued thoroughly and persuasively.

Stelzig extends the current trend in scholarship on Rousseau's The Confessions by seeing it as an intervention in the history of "human self-disclosure" with philosophical and political ramifications. Using a draft preface Rousseau chose ultimately not to include in the book, Stelzig makes the case that, despite his famously self-justificatory motive for writing autobiography, Rousseau was also motivated by an anthropological desire to reveal truthfully, for the first time, a human being from within. He emphasizes Rousseau's decision to take writing about oneself in the direction of complete and candid revelation as more than an egomaniac's attempt to correct the painful results of a persecution complex. Stelzig takes seriously Rousseau's philosophical intent to reveal the truth about one human being, the perpetually aggrieved writer's self-interest in doing so notwithstanding. He is very good on the challenges of self-examination and candor Rousseau throws out to his readers, even though he also recognizes that, as self-justifying rhetoric, Rousseau's book is "a public relations campaign" (37) calculated to win over posterity, if not his contemporary readers.

Stelzig's close reading of The Confessions focuses on Rousseau's presentation of his sexual history. Stelzig reads the autobiography in light of Rousseau's pedagogical novel Emile, illuminating both books. What emerges is that in his novel Rousseau corrects his own too early awakening to sex by dramatizing the benefits of an enforced abstinence until late adolescence. In the autobiography, Rousseau analyzes what he takes to be the negative consequences of his precocious sexuality. Rousseau's causal analysis of the adult effects of his childhood experiences leads Stelzig to call him an "early progenitor of psychoanalysis" (61), a tribute hard to argue with. As many others have done, Stelzig

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sees Rousseau's focus on childhood in Book 1 as largely inventing "the terms in which in which childhood and even the development of character were to be discussed for the next two centuries" (67). Regarding the overall plot of Rousseau's autobiography, Stelzig views it as a search for the loving family he did not have as a child, culminating in Rousseau's recognition that in his relationship with Madame de Warens he has already experienced all the mothering and family life he ever will and so must move forward into adulthood.

Speaking as an outsider in the world of scholarship on Rousseau or Goethe, my uninformed sense is that Stelzig offers more new interpretations of Goethe than of Rousseau, which may simply be a reflection of the amount of critical attention that has been paid to the two writers' autobiographies in French, German, and English. Stelzig claims that his three chapters on Goethe are now the most extended treatment of Poetry and Truth available, and they repay reading by anyone at all interested in autobiography, indifference or attraction to Goethe notwithstanding. These chapters meticulously work through Goethe's blending of fact and fiction, well supporting Stelzig's claim for self-conscious fictionalizing as a distinctive trait of Romantic autobiography. He follows Goethe in seeing all of his work as, in his famous phrase, "fragments of a great confession." Stelzig argues that all of Goethe's autobiographical writings represent a "totalizing if unrealized attempt to offer a narrative and chronological reprise of his entire life" and credits Goethe with "probably [coming] closer than any other autobiographer to that impossible objective" (131). If for no other reason than that, Goethe's achievement marks a shift in the understanding of autobiography's possibilities and purposes that prompted a surge in the number of fictional and nonfictional narratives of development in the nineteenth century that continues to the present.

Stelzig includes a detailed and absorbing discussion of the influence of Rousseau's autobiography on Goethe's. He explains Goethe's relatively few and scattered remarks on Rousseau's Confessions by maintaining that since Goethe preferred to take a more objective view of his own life than Rousseau had done with his, the later autobiographer opted to be tactfully silent in print on the topic of Rousseau's autobiography. Stelzig reads Goethe's insistence on engagement with the outside world as the way to grow and develop as a rejection of Rousseau's tortured subjectivity and his own younger self. He makes a strong case from negative evidence. Given the great influence that Rousseau's social ideas had on the young Goethe and given the effects of his own fame, public position, and the passing years on him, it is understandable that the older Goethe might want simply to pass over Rousseau's sometimes embarrassing and annoying self-disclosures, instead, presenting his own autobiography as a silent criticism of

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Rousseau's and its corrective. Stelzig's excellent pages on Goethe's organicism and devotion to the world outside the self as the antidote to Rousseauean self-torturing subjectivity might only be improved, in my opinion, by mentioning the influence of Goethe's program of mental hygiene on Carlyle and Mill. Although survey course anthologies and critical discussions of those two writers ritually invoke the effect of Goethe's ideas on them, they rarely specify much beyond his ideal of "manysidedness." I would have appreciated at least a passing reference to the uses to which Carlyle and Mill put Goethe, both as an autobiographer and as a dispenser of wisdom.

As well as situating Rousseau and Goethe in intellectual and literary history, Stelzig also interrogates them in light of our time's questions about memory's inherent unreliability, the ability of language to communicate reliably, and the stability of the self. Without deconstructing Rousseau and Goethe or turning them into our contemporaries, Stelzig demonstrates that the stereotypical image of these classic writers as marmoreal "greats," safely enthroned in the pantheon of Western culture, is not the whole story. Noting Goethe's reliance on the written memories of others when writing his autobiography, Stelzig suggests that Poetry and Truth is a collaborative work. He also documents Goethe's doubts about the possibility of full self-knowledge in letters to friends, while acknowledging his "Olympian" pose of complete self-sufficiency expressed by his frequent use of the third person and the royal "we." Stelzig uses the fictional prefatory letter to Poetry and Truth--in which Goethe pretends to have written the book in response to a friend's request for a self-portrait to accompany his collected worksto explain how for Rousseau and Goethe, it is "the life narrative of [the] subject" that "complete[s] and contextualize[s]" their works (171). Making extensive use of the Rousseauean idea of the "supplement" throughout the book, Stelzig invokes it in this context to describe Goethe's sense of Poetry and Truth as the necessary addition that establishes and confirms his identity. He also maintains that both Goethe and Rousseau participated in and were instrumental in bringing about the "autobiographization of literature" around 1800. Extending the ideas of a German critic of Goethe, Stelzig characterizes literature before then as elaborating a topic—afterwards, as expressing a self or a life. One of the virtues of the book is that generalizations such as this, itself not a radical departure from established ways of thinking about the effects of Romanticism, are given new credibility and range of application by means of Stelzig's amply detailed readings and interpretations.

As a critic, Stelzig is somewhat Goethean in temperament. He calls Goethe "the author of the greatest modern autobiography" (169). He endorses "Goethe's secular theology of Bildung as the goal or chief good

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of our lives," terming it "an affirmation of the productive energies of the self and of its manifold potential of agency and activity in the world" (164). At several points throughout the book, he severely criticizes tabloid journalism and our celebrity-obsessed culture. In one instance he writes: "In a mass culture like ours, where the ideal of excellence seems to have degenerated, exactly as Tocqueville foresaw, into the consumer philosophy of less (quality) for more (quantity), and where fame and celebrity are often as short-lived as they are undeserved, Goethe's endorsement in the name of Bildung of talent, effort, and achievement no doubt has a shockingly elitist ring. But then perhaps we have forgotten that genuine cultural achievements are not possible without such a thirst and `struggle for excellence'" (164). What Goethe would have made the struggles portrayed on the TV shows "Survivor" and "I Want to Be a Millionaire" or what he would have thought of our Warholian fifteen minutes of fame as reward for merely existing can only be imagined. For his part, Stelzig remains committed to Bildung--as must, to some degree, any teacher or parent who thinks about the long-term effects of her or his efforts.

Stelzig also understands modern autobiography--which he seems to think of as all autobiographical writing starting with Rousseau and Goethe--in a Goethean way, that is, as the narrative of a self ineluctably situated in history: "In foregrounding the subject-object, microcosm-macrocosm dimension as a dialectical one, Goethe's preface posits the historical dimension as the necessary horizon of modern autobiography. Only from its encompassing perspective can we begin to comprehend the meaning of an individual life" (171-72). Elsewhere, however, Stelzig is not so insistent on this Goethean historicized model of modern autobiography (which is also Diltheyan, Mischian, Gusdorfian, and Weintraubian). In fact, he ends the book by agreeing with the Romanticist Anne K. Mellor that the tight generic boundaries that such a model enforce need to be loosened "to include all writing that inscribes subjectivity" (250). What Stelzig seems to recognize is that the Goethean model defines and describes only one kind of autobiographical writing that, until the last few years, has been widely taken to be real autobiography, all the other forms somehow lacking in its gravitas. We are now emerging from ideas and conceptions of autobiography that go back over two hundred years to Stelzig's inaugurators of its Romantic style. Stelzig's book is an early sign of the improved sight we will have of those generic determinants as they retreat into the past, like the many autobiographies they finally depend on for authority and helped bring into being.

A few quibbles: though the book is well produced and is a pleasing physical object, Stelzig is not always well served in its copyediting and

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indexing. He quotes Alfieri, an autobiographer contemporary with Goethe, whose work has no entry under his own name in the Works Cited. In the text, the quotation is attributed to "Vincent," whose edition of Alfieri is also absent from the Works Cited. As a result, readers interested in Alfieri's autobiography get little help in locating it. More serious is an apparent contradiction between the text and a footnote. On page 139, Stelzig quotes Goethe's praise of Rousseau in a 1782 letter upon receiving "the fine Geneva edition" of Rousseau's works including the Confessions. In the text, Stelzig points out, I think correctly, that the quotation does not identify precisely which work of Rousseau Goethe refers to. In the note to the quotation, however, Stelzig states that Goethe is praising part 1 of the Confessions, published in 1782, since part 2 did not appear until 1789. Readers are left to wonder what Stelzig actually thinks. Is the precise object of Goethe's praise distinct or not, one wants to ask him. Better copyediting would have caught this minor glitch. Finally, the index is not always helpful. The names of authors of several secondary sources listed in the Works Cited, such as Brooke Hopkins, Thomas Kavanaugh, and Peggy Kamuf (to cover only letters "h" and "k"), do not appear in the index. Readers wanting to track down quotations or paraphrases from these critics and several others will have to comb the book page by page. If there is some indexing principle by which certain names of authors of secondary sources gain entrance into Stelzig's index and others are excluded, I have not yet figured it out.

These pesky issues aside, The Romantic Subject in Autobiography fills a great gap in autobiography studies. Histories of autobiography have explained to us why Rousseau and Goethe are central figures in the history of Western autobiography. Stelzig's comparative readings of their autobiographies help us see how Rousseau and Goethe invented something new in writing about one's entire life. Stelzig bridges divides between intellectual history and literary studies, and among historical criticism, American close reading, and post-structuralist theorizing. He provides a wide-ranging, solidly researched, interestingly detailed, and well-argued account of how Rousseau and Goethe first practiced a kind of autobiography that most people have taken to be the norm for 150 years. His prose accommodates a variety of readers, from those new to his writers to seasoned autobiography theorists and Rousseau and Goethe scholars. On top of all these virtues, he doesn't forget to entertain, at one point repeating a quip made by feminists at an NEH seminar on Goethe's Faust: "being Faust means never having to say you're sorry" (262).

Stelzig's book testifies to the variety and liveliness of autobiography studies today. The field is large enough to include work like Stelzig's

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that situates historically and analyzes closely works long thought to constitute part of something like a genre. At the same time, autobiography studies includes work that explains the autobiographicality of texts not conventionally autobiographical by taking issue with definitions and prescriptions derived from canonical texts in that quasi-genre. Everyone interested in the recent theory and practice of writing about autobiography, the history of autobiography, and Rousseau and Goethe as autobiographers will find much to learn from in Stelzig's book. Don't let the dead white European males in the title scare you off. They may be ghostly presences, but they live on in their own works and in countless other lives and books appearing since they too lived and wrote.

Penn State University-Abington