In 1918, the Massachusetts Historical Society published The Education of Henry Adams, a work devised in 1905, and privately printed in 1907 (as it was intended for a smaller audience), adding the subtitle ‘An Autobiography’ to the original title. Whether this act of publisher’s interruption decreases the intimacy of the original, implying in itself an end and a beginning, is left to literary historians to decide on. However, when read under the guise of being Henry Adams’s autobiographical text, the reader is faced with two important questions: first, whether The Education of Henry Adams is to be read and reviewed as the historical record of Henry Adams, and second, whether it is to be taken as a text that pursues one simple theme, that of the role education plays in a student’s life.

If we look at the author’s ‘Preface’ to the work, we fail to find in it the Henry Adams, the American patrician, the descendent of the Adams family line; instead, what we come across is a third-person narrative voice, speaking not of the man but of the ‘manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes.’ He then continues to add on this metaphor, informing us that the object of his study would not be the figure (Henry Adams, the historical self), but the garment (the educative experiences of one Henry Adams). If we decide to accept this treatment of a writing self, then we need to ascribe a sense of consciously chosen didacticism to Adams’s goal for his work. We can find support for such a claim in the work of Thomas R. Smith, titled ‘The Objectivity of The Education of Henry Adams’. Smith, in turn, looks to another critic (namely, Ross Lincoln Miller) while examining Adams’s intent along the lines of a thematic discourse. On page 152 of his study he states: ‘According to this reading of the Education, Adams sees his life as a long educative experience, and thus the writing of his book is an attempt to set down what he has learned, primarily for his own behalf.’ In that respect, ‘Adams’s didactic aim’ could be elucidated ‘as a displacement onto readers of his reason for writing so that it appears a reason for their reading the book.’ (152) Therefore, how do we as readers treat Adams’s choice for a third-person narration? Are we to see it as a mere strategic device, set to help Adams the author create the appropriate amount of objectivity and detachment, thus enabling the solidification of his personal experiences, portraying them ‘as a lack of significant education and a succession of failures and unsatisfying endeavors?’ (153, added question mark) Or are we to see it as a whim of a disappointed man, who introduces to us a passive and lifeless figure and the extent to which he, Henry Adams, suggests his own supposed sense of failure? Critics have argued that the failure to attain high political office provides the origin of Adams’s pervasive sense of dissatisfaction with his self, yet it remains a challenge to unearth any definition of success within the work, while neither his friends nor the reader could find it easy to promote his life as one lacking in achievement.

Nevertheless, if we decide to regard Adams’s work as an autobiographical text, the author’s choice for a third-voice narrative may not lead us any closer to closing the gap between the text’s didactic nature and life-writing vein. On that note, Thomas R. Smith looks at Jean Starobinski’s theoretical criticism as he uses the theorist’s notion of ‘solidification by objectivity’, in order to shed light on Adams’s intent to give forth his life suitable verification in the historical argument he tries to pose. Smith examines Starobinski’s principles behind this notion, applying them to The Education to withstand the text’s autobiographical nature. At first, Smith analyzes external information to ascertain that the hero and the author are indeed one and the same figure. He then proceeds to understand Adams’s choice for a third-person point of view narrative strategy as a cautious technique of self-effacement, thus allowing Adams to assume the desired role of the historian-educator. And last but not least, Smith emphasizes the importance of the objective third-person narration for the author’s intent to stress the importance of the undertaken narrative actions rather than the actuality of the narrative’s protagonist. According to Smith, these actions are not the historical events found in books of encyclopedic scope; quite the contrary they are ‘the effects of those external events on the protagonist.’ (157) Hence, Smith is content to summarize: ‘Adams’s attention is his own life seen as a history of possible education; his protagonist is the locus of the action and therefore does not receive the reflected “glitter of action” since he is the source and site of it.’ (157)

Albert E. Stone agrees with this exfoliation of Adams’s work, depicting The Education to be several things at once, that is ‘Adams’s comprehensive theme and all-embracing metaphor.’ For Stone, The Education is to be viewed as a genuine autobiographical text, whose metaphors embrace the didactic goals of the author, presented through the experiences of his younger persona, which, in turn, do not diminish the autobiographical nature of the text itself, since ‘the work compresses historical, literary, psychological, and metaphysical dimensions of experience as recovered and imaginatively recreated by a final self.’ (43) Thus, Stone finds justification for this assertion in Adams’s incorporation of the Carlylean image of the tailor, the manikin, and the suit for clothes. Then again my own dilemma regarding the nature of this narrative is not with the validity of the narrative voice; I am more than willing to believe in the authority of Adams’s narrating voice. What I am still puzzled by is the overwhelming didactic nature of this autobiographical text, so pervasive that it threatens to swallow up both the protagonist and the author. The idea of education seen through his own, personal experiences, now given the status of historically creditable events, seems to override the self-invention narrative process of Adams’s life story. In 1919, T. S. Eliot wrote a review of The Education, where he stipulated: ‘It is doubtful whether the book ought to be called an autobiography, for there is too little of the author in it; or whether it may be called Memoirs – for there is too much of the author in it; or a treatise on historical method, which in parts it is.’ For that reason, if the larger lesson here be one of welcoming change, not one of personal failure (meaning, man seeking to recapture a sense of instinctive unity within the realm of art), then the whole story may be viewed as an experiment in didactic art, where education transforms from an end to a means to an end. But, then again, to achieve this, the author feels the needs to focus his attention on a central human figure, Henry Adams the person, allowing it to grow from childhood into manhood, trying, for the reader’s benefit, to experience an extensive variety of educational acts.

Hagel’s photograph captures the serenity of a wounded environment, possibly that of a German town living out the aftermath of the Second World War. Taken from an elevated vantage point, which allows for a three fold partition within the recorded ambiance, Hagel’s camera eye records the journey of a schoolboy down familiar town steps. The vertically elongated frame enables the separation and at the same time the merging of these three distinct strata in the boy’s environment: that of the town’s roof-top panorama, almost ‘blinded’ by the morning light, then the space-in-between, populated by the carnage of some of the town’s houses, and finally, the cobblestone steps that enable the boy’s dissent, enclosed by overgrown and unattended to shrubbery.

On the one hand, the towering vantage point of the photograph’s image suggests an unfolding of a narrative that supplants rather than accentuates the narrative of depicted life. The schoolboy’s journey is only one ‘story’ within the multifarious tales that the image records. However, the way his story is being told – for instance, Hagel chooses to photograph the boy with his back turned to the camera, thus focusing on boy’s presence (movement) in time rather than his subjectivity (facial features) – connotes an intrusion in the static reality of the represented everydayness. The boy’s captured movement from a high point, with his one foot raised in front of the other as he is about to continue walking down the cobbled steps, interrupts, almost negates, the lifeless surroundings of town’s livelihood. Without trying to over-play the connotative card when reading photo-texts, we could say that Hagel’s recorded image unfurls a journey not too dissimilar to that of Dante Alighieri’s poet’s dissent into the underworld. Instead of a companion, a human guide, Hagel’s schoolboy can only rely on what is physically present on his footpath: the devastating yet compliant physicality of his immediate surroundings, framed by an intrudingly elevated vantage point.

On the other hand, the very nature of Hagel’s frame, its elongated verticality that enables a horizontal dissemination of the recorded imagery, questions the possibility of separating the narrative of the picture from the narrative of the life it records. The many visually recorded stories within the interweaving narrative threads – namely, the break of day in a quiet town recovering from the night’s destructive forces, the sunlit roof-top of the remaining church tower, the schoolboy’s solitary walk through a bereft ancient foot-path, the healing power of education that awaits him – do not dismiss the reality which they were set out to capture. Quite the contrary, the texture of these images within the greater picture that Hagel recorded so aptly reinforces the minutiae of life’s physicality; even though Hagel filters his ‘subjects’ through an elevated almost deictic vantage point, forcing them to fit his horizontally structured sense of suspended presence, the narrative they combine heightens the narrative of the life they portray. In a sense, due to the particular choice of framing and the camera’s focus, Hagel image of a boy’s school-bound journey through rummaged grounds induces a silent interchange between life lived and life represented. Consequently, the two narratives – the story behind the photographic image and the story of the photographic image – complement each other by forging a syntax of intimation, as the private moment of a boy’s journey connects with the public immediacies of a town’s life, evoking the ever-present past through little, singular instances.

In the Preface to her second memoir, titled Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, bell hooks tells her audience point blank that she is not interested in linear narrative journeys, especially when it relates to the presentation of her narratively recovered ‘self’. Life according to hooks does not follow a linear pattern; what we experience in our lives is not a finite passage from point A to point B. Therefore, she chooses to shift her life-writing story between two narrating voices, one rendered in the first person, and the other a more detached third person-observant voice. The two narrating voices unearth hooks’ life-story through a fragmented, disjointed narrative, recollecting events and remembrances of people and places without essentializing the need to compartmentize their precise spatial and temporal occurrence.

Ever the skillful storyteller, hooks does not conceal from her audience the reasons for her narrative strategy; quite the contrary, she confronts her fragmented ‘selves’ on the page by revealing to us the mechanism behind their generative power. The detached third person-observant voice complements and at the same time negates the first person narrator by coercing it to dig deeper into memory, to recover the self through writing about conflicting and painful past recollections. Reflexive, hooks’ third-person narrating voice meanders through difficult patches of saturated past pain (for example, the story of her father’s violence over her mother’s body and spirit, which leaves young Gloria devastated, and yet the experience strengthens her determination never to allow such violation over her ‘self’ in the future), allowing for the pain to emerge, to become palpable through the act of recovery in writing. On the other hand, this same voice of reasoning reflection complicates the act of healing since what surfaces on the written page is not a clear-cut example of the narrating self’s coming to terms with its past, but rather an additional blurring and hurtful re-casting of the same painful past. Consequently, what we encounter while reading through hooks’ memoir is a conscious attempt to unmask the past experience, to recognize how painful it was to live through it by re-living its memory in the present moment of writing, i.e., to go through the act of healing by acknowledging the immanent acts of painful remembrance.

No matter how honest hooks seems to come across in the Preface to the memoir, admitting full-heartedly to her narrative choices and intentions for this life-story, once we read through the book, reading with and against the narrating voices, we might come out feeling ‘conned’, ‘played’, ‘messed with’. Why such a feeling after all hooks has told us about her writing technique? If we do agree that hooks has consciously tricked us into believing her that this and nothing else constitutes her life-story, does this narrative ‘thick and treat’ invalidate her act of self-recovery as an act of healing and pain? Perhaps this feeling of being fooled is fueled by the fact that ‘hooks’ is a pen name, a conceptual identity used in public and for the public, whereas the original ‘Gloria Watkins’ remains silenced behind this cultured mask.

But then again, wouldn’t such reasoning be just another example of misreading hooks’ work, obliterating her narrative attempt to recover the private self in the public’s eye?

When I read Wounds of Passion (and I use ‘read’ in a present continuous tense form, as a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘done’, since I understand hooks’ work, theoretical and autobiographic, as one of constant unfolding), I see the distinction between Gloria Watkins and bell hooks breaking down, as the latter speaks for the former, bringing her innermost thoughts, fears, hopes and struggles to the culture’s forefront. Gloria Watkins is submerged into bell hooks but that does not make her a silent witness/accomplice to hooks’ retelling of her story; she is the key vocal component to the act of self-recovery. By recalling her life as Gloria Watkins, hooks can continue to live and discuss her life as bell hooks, now no longer an empty political concept. In other words, the temporally and spatially detached hooks, nowadays a notable academic and cultural theorist, channels the painful upbringing, schooling, and love seeking of the unknown and dismissed graduate student-poetess Gloria Watkins, thus allowing her former self to heal and to live out the pain.

On that note, is the third-person-observant narrating voice then ‘the voice’ of bell hooks, whereas the first person narrator ‘the voice’ of Gloria Watkins?

I cannot say that I fully agree with such a narrowed reading of hooks’ memoir, mostly due to my understanding that both narrating voices reflect the writing choices of one bell hooks, a far too skillful crafts(wo)man to enunciate such a simplistic division of narrative roles. Let’s take into consideration hooks’ layout for her narrative: the fragmentation of the memoir’s narrating voices reaffirms the fragmentary outlook of the text on the page. It is as if hooks wants us to play the ‘who is who game’ and at the same time she is making us aware that such ‘playfulness’ on our part could sidetrack us from the ‘real deal’, that is, that all life and all recollection of life is fragmentary, multi-layered, multi-vocal, whether or not the source for the ‘speaking selves’ may be one and the same person. Only through the fragmented bits and pieces of memory can we grasp the magnitude of human existence, human interaction, human self-knowing. In that respect, hooks’ memoir Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life transpires an exultant life-writing attempt to get to know oneself, privately and publically, by not being afraid to ‘scratch the skin off old wounds’ and ‘make them anew’.

Personal Statement: Constructing a cultural identity is as easy as mastering the nuances of a foreign language while traveling to the country of its origin on an eight-hour flight. There are gifted individuals among us who may be able to carry out this task in less than eight hours. Fortunately or not, they are few in number. For most of us, nowadays, the process of constructing our cultural ‘selves’ is the journey of a lifetime, struggling to position/inscribe ourselves within a culture that is no longer (re)presented as monolithically uniform. I constantly do battles with my own cultural heritage (who was I before I became ‘I’) and my cultural repose (who am ‘I’ now that I contribute to the ‘living out’ of the cultural legacy), since for the most part these two notions seem to be at odds with each other. In other words, I was born into an ethnic group which, in turn, due to various social, political, religious circumstances managed to distinctly reshape and restructure its beliefs and customs, so that nowadays it strikes the outsider’s glare as non-existent in the first place. Therefore, when an individual such as myself decides to reaffirm his or her cultural identity against the background of strong ties to the indigenous culture which he or she was born into and the greater social milieu which he or she has assimilated to (as a result of education, religious conversion, power accessibility, etc.) the outcome may prove disheartening both to the individual and to his or her audience. Often these palimpsestic attempts at coming to terms with ‘the individual’ versus ‘the cultural’ self are carried out in the arena of autobiography, a genre whose flexibility offers the author/protagonist the ability to assert himself or herself in front of a larger audience as he or she sees fit. Whether the audience will fully comprehend the ‘portrayed self’ as the author/protagonist’s ‘true’ self does not necessarily constitute the principal claim behind an autobiographical work. When the personal becomes public through the act of writing it down, publishing it, or in the case of pre-literate autobiographies, when it becomes a part of the community’s oral narratives, an act of healing and/or an act of pain emerges.

Reading through bell hooks’ second memoir, I was constantly reminded of this actualization of the ‘self’ in autobiographical narratives, how it must ‘ache’ before/as it ‘heals’. I have always been interested in the relationship language and memory partake on in the making/unmaking of the narrative ‘selves’, especially if the ‘historical self’ had been denied existence, had been ‘shoved under the rug’ so to speak, and in that respect, it seems to me that hooks’ narrative technique asks of us as readers to persistently question the presence of a selfhood and its positionality inside an individual, within a community, amidst a social practice, or in a text. Hooks’ life-writing beckons us to examine whether language and memory, already dissolved by pain, can indeed ‘bear witness’ to the construction of a self.

One of the reasons why I have decided to journey with the ‘genders in America’ seminar this semester is tied in with my own quest for an understanding of this evocative process; namely, I would like to look closer at the link between language and memory, particularly when an individual’s pain cannot be clearly conveyed. In that regard, can pain be at least examined privately, in order to validate ‘the self’ to itself?

If pain is not publically utterable, can we comprehend the suffering it causes, can we contemplate it? I think hooks’ memoir allows for us to look at this question either way.

On the one hand, pain cannot make us ‘real’; if reality (empirically speaking) is a place reserved for memory, pain can, like the acknowledgement of a self’s existence, be revoked at any time. On the other hand, pain does make us fully human, at a large expense to our ‘humanity’. Does this then mean that being human is like being ghostly, spectral and substantial, fictional and real, occupying an ever shifting identity? In a sense, hooks’ text (and I would say that she shares this writing quality with Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston) constantly reevaluates our definition of humanity, of a self, of a voice, of a consciousness. It teaches us that a self remade in kindness is no more real than a self unmade in violence, as we seem to forget how easily a self is made and unmade, willingly or not. Hooks’ narrating voices teach us how to re-structure and re-examine the unspeakable human cost of American slavery, white patriarchal supremacy, everyday racism, sexism. Personally, hooks’ life-writing has enabled me to go back to African-American slave narratives written by female slaves, to re-read them now with a better understanding of their allusive silences, narrative ellipses and absences, which are revelatory of the complex and complicating nature of the double consciousness of the narrators’ selves. Hooks’ voices have taught me to begin to understand this without passing on my essentialist 21st century logic on everything I find cruel and repulsive within/without my cultural existence. They have taught me to read and to listen. And for that I thank them.

In the Afterword to the 2000 edition of his seminal literary product, Leo Marx starts to explain the genesis and the metamorphosis of his work by saying: ”The Machine in the Garden began as a doctoral dissertation I wrote in the 1949, some fifteen years before it became a book. It was an exploratory study of literary responses to the onset of industrialism in America.” The final product of his original thoughts, the book itself, is far more than a simple exploratory study. It is a carefully crafted vision of a literary scientist who dives into his nation’s most memorable dreams, exploiting their innate origins and various manifestations (mostly in the domain of the literary and the socio-political reveries), looking within and without the discreet and/or vibrant voices of their makers, thus developing his own ideas within the subject matter (technology and the pastoral ideal in America), that may help, in turn, explain why these two seemingly irreconcilable segments of the American experience happen or perhaps are “true”. Therefore, he deserves to be called a theorist, and his little study an exemplar in early American Studies theoretical scholarship. All the signs are there on the pages of this easily readable “cultural criticism”.

The structure of the study reads almost as a flawlessly designed plot figure of a typical story. (By using the adjective typical, I am referring to the notion of a “best representative”, i.e., a story that would best embody the six part structure of a story (exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), one that compilers of materials most suitable for high school teaching resources would choose.)The “mottos” to every part (chapter) come from literary/historical sources that might shed some light on the contents of the respective chapter, or provide a starting point within the textual discussion. And in the great tradition of the 1950s literary scholarship, the ideas expressed at the “onset”, those relating to the exhilarating difference between “sentimental” and “complex” pastoralism, come full circle, with the help of Nick Carraway’s (his narrating voice’s) observations about the “great green breast” of the New World shore, in the concluding chapter, the eloquently titled epilogue.

However, there is more than meets the eye in trying to read Marx’s attempt at non-fictional representation of ideas that have sprung partly due to the great fictional (narrative) traditions of the past (including the inevitable ancient past). All thorough out his in-depth analyses of the “pastoral ideal” and its emergence on the American scene(ry), or better, the emergence of the American scene(ry) on the “pastoral ideal”, the between-the-lines reader is able to sense a certain urge on the part of the “theorist” “to think” of a possible explanation for this American event. And it is right there, waiting for us in the embodying forth chapter of the book, appropriately titled “The Machine”. Beginning with the chapter’s motto (provided via D. H. Lawrence’s astute remarks on the American Man, in 'Studies in Classic American Literature'), we are given a panoramic view of the changing nature of American society and social thought due to the emergence of machine technology. While discussing the verbal practices of Tench Coxe, first to grasp the imminent importance of this “new technology”, Marx is setting the scene for his scholarly rational, i.e., why the image of the machine is so important. On page 190, an answer is given: political implications. The rest of the chapter sees this importance diffused through the comparative efforts of “confronting” the image of the machine with that of nature, history, mind and last but not least, America. He does go on to mention the role that Daniel Webster played within the “milieu” of the railroad scenario, but also leaves enough room for the “queer intellectuals” as represented by John Orvis, who did not really see “the railroad as the chosen vehicle for bringing America into its own as a pastoral utopia.” Thus, on this account, we may render Marx as a scholar who “theorizes” about society of the middle landscape, a child of the “ill-fated” marriage of nature and art. And once again, we would give the study a dutiful critical overview, which this time receives strong support by Marx’s choice to bring the “two kingdoms of force” together, juxtaposing their (dis)appearance in the works of those authors whose art he labels as “serious” (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Adams).