I Know That I Know That I Know: Reflections on Paul John Eakin's "What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?".

Autobiography; Biographies; Narration; Literature; Cognitive science; Philosophy of mind

Paul John Eakin's recent article in the "Narrative" periodical in 2005, 'What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?,' illustrates, although sometimes inadvertently, the value of reflecting on literary narrative, in this instance autobiography, in light of research in the cognitive sciences. Eakin's particular context is Antonio Damasio's account in "The Feeling of What Happens" of 'extended consciousness' and the 'autobiographical self' as neurobiological phenomena. Eakin raises the provocative possibility that writing about ourselves, like talking about ourselves, 'may be grounded in the neurobiological rhythms of consciousness,' and suggests some outcomes of speculating on this linkage. The speculation is itself grounded in a speculation, since Damasio's description of more complex states of consciousness is, as he readily admits, hypothetical, although a hypothesis built on extensive clinical and research experience. Eakin's speculation is useful for narrative theory, even in its gaps, for the questions and implications that Eakin does not voice are as revealing, I think, as those he does. My resistance to Eakin's and Damasio's conclusions circles around two topics: one, 'the teller-effect' and its erasure of agency; two, the paradoxes of what I call 'the critic effect' and 'deep subjectivity.' The complications, at the least, that I would want to add to Eakin's speculation have large significance for the phenomenology of I-tale-telling.