118
PARTISAN REVIEW
search for authenticity motivating most autobiographies. Here is some–
one who was always an aspiring student and became a successful
scholar-teacher. Yet Tompkins's book, unsparing in its depiction of her
schooling, is marked by an equally unsparing self-portrait.
The "I" that reveals itself is neither apologetic nor vaunting. Nor
does it have quick remedies for personal loneliness or the incapacity of
our schools to draw students towards a vital sense of kinship, coopera–
tion, and community. Instead it returns continually
to
a dissatisfaction
with the very self that describes a delayed awakening.
It
achieves,
though at the cost of being relentlessly unfunny, the accumulative force
of a
Bildungsrol1lall.
Tompkins's awakening was prompted by a duo of repeated dreams
exposing her fear of authority and investing it with two separate mean–
ings. There is the fear of personal failure, related
to
the power a teacher
has over you, and which was instilled frolll the very beginning of the
author's life in school. But later there is also the fear of becoming an
authority figure yourself-a fraudulent one. TOlllpkins writes that the
dream of being exposed as a fraud is experienced in one form or another
by thousands of teachers at the beginning of each school year.
Once upon a time awakenings of this kind were followed by revival–
ist movements. But in this book the spirituality is ecumenical and
dressed down. It is not unthinkable, then, that the autobiographical
wave we are experiencing is a contemporary version of a perennial anx–
iety whose classic examples are Augustine and Rousseau.
I draw two lessons from the above. Autobiography, at its best, is nei–
ther ego-trip nor history-fiction but rather, as in Tompkins, a c1ear–
sighted analysis together with a refusal
to
impose pedagogical or social
solutions that could provoke further tyranny and iatrogenic suffering.
Whether the hypocrisy of half-baked ideologies is punctured by the
earnest realism of memoir-writer and novelist, or-since "the worst
returns
to
laughter"-by picaresque forms of hilarity, is less important
than that the relation between description and prescription become as
complex as in a work of art. Let there be a greening of the pedagogical
element, so that,
to
quote Wallace Stevens's "Phosphor Reading by his
own Light": "The green falls on you as you look ... / That elemental
parent, the green night, / Teaching a fusky alphabet."
The drive, moreover,
to
be totally embodied and yet transparent, a
drive fostered by today's biographical and self-biographical culture,
by a II those ca nd id constructions or reconstructions, ca n not expu nge
a lingering fear of personal inauthenticity. This fear need not be as
explicit as the torments of self-examination undergone in the spiritual
