Never before has autobiography drawn so much scholarly attention purporting to theorize its place in narrative as a genre or subgenre of its own. What the novel has long secured as the domain for theorization that cuts across cultural studies, literary criticism, and poetics, has partially shifted attention to self-narratives. The reasons behind this shift are many, especially when predicated on a broader spectrum of socio-political consciousness that has generated a turn to self-narratives as significant components of history. On the other hand, this active climate of theorization has rarely touched on autobiography outside the European cultural center. Although the Arab region, with its eastern and western flanks, has been a field for research, Arabic literature and literary autobiography in particular have remained outside this focus. Exceptions have often involved scholars specializing in Arabic culture. The neglect of Arabic and non-western autobiography stems from a number of postulates that often center on Eurocentric presumptions regarding a ‘Western’ origination of genres, modernity, and/or self-consciousness. In fusing a rising awareness of subjectivity in tandem with economic and social change with a ‘Western’ cultural specific, Eurocentric scholars are betraying the prioritization of an outdated branch of philology. Such opinions are often argued at the expense of the dynamics of transformation associated with the accumulation of capital, colonial expansion, and the industrial revolution. This argument in favor of a Western-oriented form, as aptly noted in Interpreting the Self, cannot be seen apart from the anxieties of European scholarship since the interwar years and thereafter. Presented in Eurocentric literary criticism “as a cultural product unique to modern western civilization,” autobiography is central to this idea, but conversely, no less pivotal to rising trends in postcolonial studies that have already begun to question and discredit such a premise. Scholars known for sustained engagement with autobiography, such as James Olney, focus on an English-speaking ‘western’ writing that excludes even Australia, India, and Canada.
However, in such studies there is an effort to explain the rise of autobiography. Karl Weintraub associates it with self-consciousness, “It may have such varied functions as self-explication, self-discovery, self-formation, self-presentation, and self-justification.” In relation to self-consciousness, he explains: “all these are centered upon an aware self, aware of its relation to its circumstances.”
This association is potentially significant if it can be reformulated in the light of what sociologists or anthropologists such as Pierre Bourdieu have argued with regard to disposition and habitus, leading the discussion away from Eurocentricism and situating it properly in theory. The origination of this association has already been made popular in Neo-Hegelian theory and with Marx’s notion of struggle “against the gods of heaven and of earth who do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity.” The implications of self-consciousness arise however whenever it is linked to a ‘modern’ European specific, something that in turn leads arguments into erroneous cultural-geographical claims of a Eurocentric specificity.Olney is on solid grounds, however, whenever he links this specific in the circumstantial and temporal, a point which I’ll address further in due time. He argues:
I am convinced that it was something more deeply embedded in the times and in the contemporary psyche, something more pervasive in the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere that caused and continues to cause a great number of investigators, thinkers, and critics to turn their attention to the subject of autobiography.
Even so, while this sounds logical, no substantial theorization is offered to explain this “turn,” or to place “value” on self and circumstance, and its problematic within an epistemological construction, other than the common and obsolete presumption of post-renaissance modernity and the alleged birth of individual consciousness as a western specific. As shown in Dwight F. Reynolds’ edited volume, an underlying fallacy was rampant among European scholars like Georges Gusdorf, Roy Pascal--with his “essentially European” genre, and Georges May’s belief in autobiography as a European invention “linked inextricably with Christianity,” something that also gets Europeanized outside its space and culture of origination. In his “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” Georges Gusdorf --who receives much acclaim in studies of autobiography, advocates this canonization of a Eurocentric autobiography as follows:
it would seem that autobiography is not to be found outside of our cultural area; one would say that it expresses a concern peculiar to Western man, a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of the universe and that he has communicated to men of other cultures; but those men will thereby have been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a mentality that was not their own.
Gusdorf suffers no qualms and has no scruples with respect to his ignorance of other cultures. He is pleased with this kind of reading. Even the colonized national elite are deprived of selfhood, for whatever they have is bestowed on them by “whites… from beyond the seas.” Eurocentric theorists of autobiography forget that Othering through geographical and cultural demarcation often tilts against itself, in that the birthplace of St. Augustine, a cornerstone for this theorization, in the year 354 AD was the municipium of Thagaste when it was part of the Roman Empire province of Numidia. Thagaste is now Souk Ahras, Algeria. In a pertinent remark on “the historical consciousness on which Western man has prided himself since the beginning of the nineteenth century,” Hayden White writes: “it is possible to view historical consciousness as a specifically Western prejudice by which the presumed superiority of modern, industrial society can be retroactively substantiated.”
