Autobiography as Performative Utterance

Michael BRub

American Quarterly, Volume 52, Number 2, June 2000, pp. 339-343 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2000.0012

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/2436

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 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCE 339

Autobiography as Performative Utterance

MICHAEL BRUB
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

My participation in this forum is oddlybut pleasantly

overdetermined. I presume that I might be considered a plausible
contributor to a discussion of autobiography and disability if we
employ a capacious definition of autobiography and biography as life
writing, whereunder it could be said that I have contributed to the
genre of life writing about disability by writing about my second child,
Jamie, who is now eight years old and was born with Down syndrome.
The fact that my book on Jamie, Life As We Know It, is not an
autobiography is important to my understanding of the issues relevant
to this discussion, so although I hope to speak directly to some of those
issues, I necessarily come at them somewhat aslant. But, as it happens,
this is not my only angle of approach here. The other reason I might be
a plausible discussant is probably opaque to everyone in the profession
save for Tom Couser, whose second book, Altered Egos: Authority in
American Autobiography I reviewed for the Journal of English and
Germanic Philology (JEGP) some years ago.1 My reading Cousers
book was, at the time, a happy accident: not long after I arrived at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall of 1989, I was
invited to review something for the University of Illinoiss only
humanities journal, JEGP. But because no one at JEGP knew exactly
what kind of book I was supposed to be competent to review (and, as a
terrified first-year assistant professor, neither did I), they chose a book
almost at random. And so Altered Egos became, for no good reason, the
first book I reviewed in my life, and I am not sure that anyone other
than Tom Couser and JEGPs editors ever read that review. I am sure

Michael Brub is professor of English and director of the Illinois Program for research
in the Humanities at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

American Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2 (June 2000) 2000 American Studies Association

339
340 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

that when I reviewed the book, I did not know that Couser would go on
to make a substantial contribution to an emergent field called disabil-
ity studies, just as I had no idea that I would wind up working in the
field myself.
This point of dual intersection is more than simple coincidence. For
I learned from reading Altered Egos that the genre of autobiography,
long understood by scholars from Georges Gusdorf to James Olney to
be a vehicle for (relatively) unmediated self-expression, can be fruit-
fully approached from its most problematic and marginal instances
not only slave narratives, formerly excluded from autobiography proper
for rather spurious theoretical reasons, but even co-authored and/or
edited texts as corrupt as John Neihardts Black Elk Speaks. Altered
Egos, representing what I could call the poststructuralist turn in studies
of life writing, thus seeks toilluminate the genre precisely by bringing
to light the featuresthat are normally considered to threaten or violate
the boundaries of the genre. To this end, Couser writes that far from
being an anomaly . . . Black Elk Speaks may represent the general
condition of autobiography, which alwaysseeksb ut always failsto
recapture aboriginal experience, and whose ontological status is
perhaps less important than the question of how it was produced or
constructed.2 This is a broadly deconstructive move, designed both to
draw out instructive infelicities in American autobiography andto
reconstitute such infelicities as the very condition of possibility for
autobiography as traditionally understood. And, I believe, it has been
largely successful, both on its own terms and for how it has opened the
door, so to speak, to quite broad theoretical questions about the social
and historical conditions of composition, production, dissemination,
and reception of all forms of life writing, particularly including those
forms under discussion at present.
Then again, there are poststructuralisms and then there are
poststructuralisms. It is one thing to inquireafter the manner of the
Foucault of What is an Author?into the conditions of production of
autobiography and life writing; it is quite another thing to suggest (as
Couser does not but as one Foucauldian strand of poststructuralism
might) that the subject produced in life writing is merely an
ideological effect, a sleight of hand done with mirrors of production.3
Indeed, one of the signal advantages of reading slave narratives (for
instance) as legitimate autobiographies is that they help us to
understand what kinds of authority are constructed by autobiography
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCE 341

and how those forms of authority are acknowledged or denied by

autobiographys readers. For what was at stake in the production of
slave narrative? Nothing less than the very presumption that slaves
could not reason, could not write, could not narrate their life stories
without white mediation. Slave narrative thereby became, in the
antebellum United States, a performative utterance, announcing its
authors very capacity forand accomplishment ofthe fact of self-
authorship, on which could be based further claims for what are now
called human rights. I am not trying here to return us to the theoretical
paradigm in which autobiographers are understood to be unconstrained
and unmediated expressors-of-selves, since I cannot imagine that a
sensible person would claim that slave narratives were either uncon-
strained or unmediated. But I do mean to suggest, in Couserian fashion,
that the conditions under which certain authors claim the authority of
autobiography are sometimes exceptionally hostile to the claim, so
much so that the claim simply cannot be understood by the dominant
mode of reading unless the dominant understanding of authorship
undergoes radical revision. If defenders of slavery were to credit
Frederick Douglass as the author he claimed to be, much of the
ideological apparatus supporting slavery would have had to be dis-
mantled or reconfigured; likewise, many of Douglasss readers and
auditors came to the immediate conclusion that if slavery was impris-
oning eloquent, brilliant men like Douglass, it must be clearly and
manifestly indefensible.
What I am suggesting, then, is that a poststructuralist understanding
of autobiography and life writing might, paradoxically, lead us to invest
all the more authority in certain forms of self-authorship. Such is the
case when the writer of autobiography is a person with a cognitive or
developmental disability. For such writers, the act of self-authorship
performs the same performative function it did for Frederick Douglass
and Harriet Jacobs and Mary Prince and William Wells Brown: it
establishes the life writer as, at bare minimum, someone capable of
self-reflection and self-representation, someone capable of life writing.
And for populations considered constitutionally incapable of self-
reflection and self-representation, that bare minimum is actually the
crux of the matter, a meta-claim from which all other claims follow.
I do not want to mark a division here between life writers with
physical disabilities and life writers with cognitive disabilities, except
to admit that the former will almost assuredly outnumber the latter;
342 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

after all, many cognitive disabilities do in fact render people incapable

of self-representation in writing, or indeed self-representation in any
form. I merely want to remark on the conditions of production of life
writing for persons with cognitive disabilities and thereby to revisit the
question of self-representation so as to highlight the potential social
and political importance of this kind of life writing. For persons with
Down syndrome in particular, the genre has become in recent years a
means of demonstrating that the early-intervention politics of the past
three decades have substantially altered the life chances of an entire
population, such that a group of persons once thought to be incapable
of speech, let alone life writing, is nowor should now beunder-
stood as potentially capable of reflecting critically and articulately on
the very policies of inclusion that have shaped their lives. One brief
example will have to suffice. Jason Kingsleys and Mitchell Levitzs
Count Us In: Growing Up with Down Syndrome opens with a preface
written by their mothers, Emily Kingsley and Barbara Levitz, who
testify to the authenticity of the book, just as the authenticators of
slave narratives once did. No attempt has been made to correct their
sometimes idiosyncratic syntax or expression. The boys have a devel-
opmental disability, after all, and we have no desire to hide or
camouflage that fact.4 The testimonial then buttresses a series of
performative utterances that make up the collective performative
utterance that is the book; one such utterance in particular deserves
notice here. It is one of Jasons high-school essays. Written when he
was seventeen, the topic is his mothers obstetrician, who in 1974 had
advised the Kingsley family to institutionalize Jason because he would
never grow up to have a meaningful thought. Of this obstetrician
Jason writes:
He never imagined how I could write a book! I will send him a copy . . .
so hell know.
I will tell him that I play the violin, that I make relationships with other
people, I make oil paintings, I play the piano, I can sing, I am competing in
sports, in the drama group, that I have many friends and I have a full life.
So I want the obstetrician will never say that to any parent to have a baby
with a disability any more. If you send a baby with a disability to an
institution, the baby will miss all the opportunities to grow and to learn . . .
and also to receive a diploma. The baby will miss relationships and love and
independent living skills. . . .
I am glad that we didnt listen to the obstetrician. . . . He will never
discriminate with people with disabilities again.
And then he will be a better doctor.5
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCE 343

And in a passage like this, I think, the function of autobiography for

people with cognitive disabilities quite literally speaks for itself.

NOTES

1. JEGP 92 (spring 1993): 1413.

2. G. Thomas Couser, Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 254.
3. Michel Foucault, What is an Author?, trans. Josu V. Harari, in The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 10120. Foucault does not
specifically discuss autobiography, and, in fact, the infamous final sentence of the
essayAnd behind all these questions we would hear hardly anything but the stirring
of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking? (120)is
positively hostile to the spirit of my remarks here (as well as being a foolish conclusion
that is hostile to the spirit of most of Foucaults remarks in the rest of the essay). I am
thinking, instead, of the earlier passage in which Foucault sets out a challenge which
has since become the blueprint for much of American literary criticism in the 1980s
and 1990s:
It is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive value or formal
transformations, but according to the modes of their existence. The modes of
circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each
culture and are modified within each. The manner in which they are articulated
according to social relationships can be more readily understood, I believe, in the
activity of the author function and its modifications than in the themes or concepts that
discourses set in motion. (117)
Clearly, the imperative here is to understand how the attribution of the author function
determines the modes of existence of autobiography, not to dismiss the social
processes of attribution altogether.
4. Jason Kingsley and Mitchell Levitz, Count Us In: Growing Up with Down
Syndrome (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1994), 9.
5. Jason Kingsley and Mitchell Levitz, Count Us In, 28.