258
LIONEL AIEL
My question, though, is: why would anyone in such a case want to
write
his
autobiography? Surely there would have to have been some
truth
in oneself even as child, some truth in those one was first associated
with, for one to have the impulse to tell, rather than
to
argue against,
one's story. I am not sure that everyone will be convinced by this
view.
Certainly Mr. Harold Rosenberg will not, for, writing in the
NIIIl
Yorker,
he is content to deal with the peculiarity of Sartre's book
by
describing it as "negative autobiography." Now I do not think
Mr.
Rosenberg, in using
this
term, is thinking of such fashionable forms,
~
negations of forms, as the anti-novel, or the anti-play. I
think
the analogy
Mr. Rosenberg has in mind is between negative autobiography
and
negative theology. But
in
that case, his analogy is a poor one. Sartre
is
telling his own story, whereas negative theology is written not by
God,
but
by
theologians.
If
God himself were to write a theology, I doubt
whether it would be a negative one.
Mr. Rosenberg is hardly better advised, I
think,
when he asserts
that
the real
aim
of Sartre's book
is
not to reconstitute past events but
to
argue ideologically against all those values which distorted his experience,
forced
him
into false postures, and prevented his story from being a
true one.
I take it that
Mr.
Rosenberg regards
The W01'ds-so
does
Miss
Kathleen Nott in
Commentary-as
a mixture of ideology and auto–
biography. Neither of these writers seems bothered by the fact that auto–
biographical description, properly understood, is at the farthest possible
pole from ideological construction. And neither Mr. Rosenberg nor
Miss
Nott seems to be aware of-or to care about-something I think of fim
importance, and which may be summed up in
this
generalization: it
is
much easier to ideologize one's reflections than
to
ideologize one's
memories.
I must point out here that autobiography, as the term is usually
understood, has a very close relationship to the intellectual discipline
Sartre adopted at the outset of his career, the phenomenological method
of Edmund Husser!'
This method requires of the one who practices it that he separate
out of his response to any fact or meaning present before his mind the
impact of that fact or meaning before he reflected on it and its impact
after reflection began. The
aim
of the method is to protect the
mind's
naive and intuitive grasp of meanings from the mind's own tendency
to
sophisticate these meanings and to falsify them.
It will be seen at once that
this
method is of the very greatest
interest to anyone concerned with setting down in a truthful manner
his own past experiences. In fact, almost anyone who tells the story
