5 - Worstward ho: some recent theories

Summary

The theory of autobiography has become very well trodden terrain. So much so, in fact, that there are now not only many theories of autobiography, but there is also a growing number of theories of those theories, and of surveys (such as this) of autobiographical theory. This is no doubt ironic, since it demonstrates a capacity for the theory of the theory to generate itself apparently infinitely by taking itself as its subject or object – as if it, too, were a kind of autobiography:

Unable to give up wishing, theories of autobiography themselves tend to persist or endure as self-productive fictions about – but never quite transparently evidenced ‘in’ – the kinds of narrative we conventionally recognise as ‘autobiography’.

Those are the words of Louis Renza. What is worse, according to E. S. Burt, is that these interloping theoretical autobiographies may end up sounding like the real thing:

That writing about autobiography should always seem to require having recourse to the same vocabulary of praise and blame as the one that autobiographical writing uses to talk about the self is significant, all the more so because it makes the critic's job of writing about autobiography dangerously like writing autobiography.

Louis Renza and E. S. Burt both bring out the slight distaste or embarrassment at this contamination of the theory by its object, a contamination exacerbated in the case of theories of autobiography which is all about such immeasurable self-involvement, and in doing so draw us back again to the anxieties over method analysed above in relation to Hegel's protocol for philosophical enquiry.