Writing about oneself, like thinking about oneself, can be a humbling thing — it can also be an exercise in narcissism. We might as well try to choose which it will be before we write.
And the choice to turn something autobiographical into something interesting, something more than navel-gazing, is to find how our lives point to the lessons learned, to the wisdom gained. That way those lessons can come into contact with lessons learned from other lives, and then, at least, you have grounds for interesting arguments.
And so, we have stumbled upon the first lesson of writing autobiography: your life only matters for what it means, what it symbolizes, what it represents, and like all symbols, it must point to a reference beyond itself.
A life lived for itself, like an autobiography written for its own sake, gives you a laundry list of happenstance and disconnected fragments — Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” After all, a lack of significance makes us all into idiots. But the writer who can rescue out of this idiot’s catalogue some connection to a greater whole, some reason or purpose behind the mania — such a writer will have rescued life itself.
And, in the end, all biographies do this. All biographies resurrect some music, some pattern out of the cacophony. To list everything that ever happened in one’s life would take longer than living it, and so, since a biography is necessarily selective, we know that some criteria of selection must lurk under the surface of every autobiographical attempt: some set of values which can reveal more about our author than the content which he writes. For it is precisely the author’s values that have survived the sound and the fury — the rest of the story, the part that didn’t make the cut, is presumably still being told that by that same telltale idiot.
But we know of another kind of writer, one who has his values so doggedly in his mind that he warps everything, all the marvellous strangeness and surprises of life, into his familiar axioms. Such a writer would seem to have little reason to write at all, since he could not possibly have any questions about his life which he has not decisively settled, and if he does write, it is to convince others that he has settled them well.
Such a writer strikes us as more of a narcissist than the naïve, self-cataloguing archivist who loses himself in the minutia of daily existence. If the first writer is a diligent machine relaying all the facts but without structure, the second writer is equally a diligent machine for reproducing structure without the facts. The first writer might seem, after all, like an interesting fellow by comparison to the veritably demonic single-mindedness of the second.
The first writer has his eyes open, at least, open to the world and its ineradicable uniqueness, even if his mind is so open, as Chesterton would say, that his brain is liable to fall out. But the second writer, the moralist, truly sees only himself — the world is nothing but an extension of his inner empire.
Such attachment to one’s value system betrays something more sinister than commitment to a cause: it reveals that a man’s main concern is not positive but eliminative, to negate the world in all its strangeness. His cause is not to strive towards the greatest good he can conceive — a quest which always brings surprises — but to shut out anything unexpected and challenging that might displace him from his comfortable place at the center of his own universe.
And so, we have discovered the real narcissist: not the one who catalogues the minute details of his life, but one who eradicates all detail altogether. Because the details, by definition, could not belong to him; in their particularity they escape any ownership. Details stand out in defiance to the narcissist.
Now let us turn to the synthetic alternative, a third writer we have not yet considered: one who embraces both the world of facts, like our first writer, and the world of values, like our second. Yes, such a writer must have something to say — a message. On the other hand, he must with equal readiness admit his powerlessness in the face of a universe of things so wild and untamed he could never have enough words to do justice to it all. Nor would he want to; for such a writer must necessarily have a life to write about, and therefore a life that is not all writing. Something about his life escapes the describable and reproduceable.
In his book Sun and Steel, Mishima — the Japanese writer, fascist, and the last person, to my knowledge, to commit hara-kiri — shares the following insight about the art of writing:
“I felt I should take the offensive in fields outside art; in art, I should defend my citadel. It was necessary to be a sturdy defender within art, and a good fighter outside it.”
Mishima, who started out as a scholarly, effeminate poet and later became a sword-fighter, bodybuilder, and militant revolutionary, argued that the solution to the writer’s problem — that is, the divide between the real and the ideal — lies in the pursuit of physical culture and in the acceptance of death through daily suffering, discipline, and daring acts of danger.
When he implemented this change in his being, Mishima explains, his writing became as lean, muscular, and stylish as his body. And this death-defying style, this reckoning with his body and his limits, turned his writing into a search for a ‘particular truth’ rather than an ‘all-inclusive truth’ as he explains in his characteristic, esoteric way.
And so, there is a strange tension that typifies good writing: it must be a search for truth but also an acceptance of limitation, the limitations of form, of the page, and the limitations of the body — and these limitations must be realized as part of that truth, not as obstacles to it. The alternative to such a painful convergence (between formal limits on the one hand and the infinite objective truth on the other) is a form of writing which is a denial of the body, a denial of life and of death, a writing which strives to break free of the bodily world and into an eternal realm of ideational purity — in other words, such writing is an escape from life rather than an engagement with it.
Our synthetic writer, then, travels a narrow road of continual disjunctions; he must inhabit a painful middle way. Along this way, the writer does due diligence both to the world in itself and to his own hallucinatory hopes and beliefs. It is such a disjunctive existence that keeps him traveling that road, nomadically, in search of a center.
And so, because my audience have their own lives to live, I will summarize in simpler words.
It is not enough to write about the facts of existence when writing autobiography: the things that happen, the tumble of events. Nor is it enough to write about what matters to you: because when this goal is pursued to its limit, it isn’t clear whether writing itself would survive the elimination process. What matters most to us, to our current self, is not so different from what matters to an animal — and writing is far down on our list of immediate animal needs. The simple confirmation of our values and beliefs could not be the sole motive to write.
Rather, the synthetic alternative between those two extremes is that we write about the strange collisions (and sometimes collusions) that take place between our values — our wants and needs — and the facts of life and the world around us. We write about how these two worlds butt heads, how they run into each other in unexpected moments, and how, in the rarest and most precious times of our lives, these opposites seem to warm up to each other, to resolve their differences and shake hands.
And so, along this adventurous middle way, life finds meaning; meaning finds life.
(Next to Read: “1992–1997”)
