478
PARTISAN REVIEW
book useless at best, misleading at worst. Jeffrey Mehlman 's
A Struc–
tural Study of A utobiography
is directed toward dismantling the
"fantasy of an ideal unity"; and his attacks on American ego psychol–
ogy (as a psychology of individual "growth"), empiricist criticism (of
which Wellek and Warren are the composite incarnation), and bour–
geois capitalism, reveal the distance which separates him from Scholes.
For while Scholes agrees to dissolve the individual ego in the name of a
structuralist humanism, Mehlman would see the drive for unity in
such humanism as itself a symptom of a self-delusive individualism.
His dense but engaging book, in fact, centers on an analogous
problem: that autobiography emerges from a self-ceJ;lteredness (or
narcissism) and from a linguistic structure which are mutually incom–
patible. For Mehlman, the artist-as-narcissist continually re-enacts an
imaginary fusion with another, the mother or a surrogate for her,
which does not transcend but veils the presence of a suppressed
Oedipal triangle, and language itself reinstates the suppressed elements
even as it is being harnessed to eliminate them. Art thus becomes an
exercise in repression, and the aesthetic vocabulary of immediacy and
unification is merely a sugaring of this bitter knowledge.
Perhaps the most striking and convincing of Mehlman's insights
appears in his chapter on Proust: "what the author has served up in
Tante Leonie is a feminized parody of the narrator at the beginning of
the book." The artist is not a hero but a conflation of Marcel and his
mother, a hybrid directly related to Tante Leonie, the tyrannical
invalid whose unification with her surroundings is part and parcel of
her secret pleasure in the death of her husband. "With the suppression
of such threats to one's integrity, the circle of narcissistic gratification
can close and indeed consolidate its gains." And in chapters on Leiris,
Sartre, and Levi-Strauss, Mehlman pursues his recognition that the
denial of the Oedipal triangle is implicated in the artist's effort to
appropriate language as his alone. Yet language, for Mehlman, itself
overturns the autobiographer's attempt to consolidate his past times
and places, because language militates against all fusions (of time, of
place, between persons, and between words and things) by revealing
itself as a principle of difference.
In
fact, Mehlman 's use of Freud and
Lacan and his view of language converge in his suggestion that the
central problem of autobiography involves an inability to grasp
psychologically a basic fact about language, that articulation is only
possible because of difference. Autobiography, linguistically and
psychologically, becomes for him the inevitable return of a "mode of
absence" which the text attempts to eradicate. Moreover, autobiogra-
