The image(s) that I have been associating with Benjamin Franklin’s name before reading his memoirs (the “original title” of his present-day renamed autobiography) is/are related to the memories of my childhood. It is mostly due to the Disney produced cartoon of the brave mouse that truly discovered the ins-and-outs of the infamous kite experiment. Now, having consumed Franklin’s work, I am de-constructing those images, or at least trying to do so. The reason for this effort lies in the nature of the text itself, and it is also interwoven in the arguments presented by William H. Shurr, in his article on Franklin’s autobiography, bearing the provocative title “’Now, Gods, Stand Up for Bastards’: Reinterpreting Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography” and Jennifer Jordan Baker’s views, given as such in her article “Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and the Credibility of Personality”.
So my question of the day is: Is Franklin’s autobiography a “simple” individual story of the archetypal self-made man, or is it a greater, grander script along the line of a cultural narrative?
Re-reading Shurr’s provocatively titled, and provocatively drawn article, I am compelled to look at Franklin’s story unfolding through the prism of an individual account of a duplicitous personality. Shurr is mainly concerned with the singularity of Part 1, the only part of the entire four, which bears a “distinct addressee”. As a critic of Franklin’s work, one seemingly pursuing an objectified approach to/from Franklin’s text, Shurr struggles with the “(im)personality” of Franklin’s tone throughout this part of the memoirs. The fact that this part was written, as he puts it, by a Franklin of 65, addressing himself and his claims to a William Franklin of 41, the Royal Governor of New Jersey, a far more prominent figure than his father, sets it apart from the rest of the autobiography that may clearly fall into the realm of a cultural narrative. As a writer, Shurr, posses many hypotheses, both regarding the father-son relationship at the time the “personal letter” was conceived and the stature of Franklin in the then British-governed American colonies.
(I do admire Shurr’s agenda to “decanonize” Franklin by employing every known means of verifiable argumentation, especially the episode with the now demystified kite experiment, and William’s life under the colonists’ imprisonment, when the “reverend father” does nothing to come to the aid of his child, disregarding the individual politics of the two men.)
I am tempted to follow his argumentation and look at the letter as an “insurance policy”. But, further on in the text, Shurr, himself, claims that the tone of Franklin the narrator changes towards the end of Part 1, as if suggesting that he no longer needs to “claim the issued insurance policy”. Nonetheless, whether I as a reader buy into Shurr’s outstanding attempt to decanonize Franklin’s revered public persona, I agree with the statement that The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, as a whole, “suffers” from serious questions of genre.
Looking at Baker’s article, the same serious questions of genre re-address themselves, but from a different standpoint. Her article does not question the problematic of Part 1, or Part 2, 3, 4, for that matter; instead, she looks at the end product from an economist’s point of view. She sees the autobiography as a “financial instrument – a national letter of credit endorsed by Franklin himself – that attests to the economic promise of America.” (1) She pursues this claim as she is unfolding her thesis statement, which presupposes that Franklin’s Autobiography “is representative not as a generic tale of an ordinary American experience but rather as a story of exemplary success that uses Franklin’s experience to advocate, like a celebrity endorsement, the possibilities of American life” (1, 2) She believes that Franklin saw himself as one nation’s financial spokesperson as a result of his experience with the print media, and his subsequent belief in its generic power to influence the public credibility of an individual as well as the monetary value of a country. Baker is ready to “forgive” Franklin for his exaggerated accounts of the Denham and the Mickle incidents, something that Shurr holds tightly on and is unforgiving of, since she is interested in Franklin the entrepreneur, not Franklin the son, brother, father, family man, truth layer. On the last page of her article Baker stresses: “If Franklin’s relish for credit schemes inevitably raises doubts about the veracity of the Autobiography, it simultaneously encourages a faith in the speculative life that has been promised.” And as an economist and an American reader Baker is interested in the promise.
I come full circle and yet am not certain about the nature of this text. I do understand that an individual story often provides a solid basis for a promising cultural narrative, but I am not quite certain if this is one such case. I somehow see both a link and an abyss between these two entities in Franklin’s work, mostly due to the author’s tone, the framework of the piece, and the audience it is intended for. If I am to follow Albert E. Stone’s view on these notions, given in his essay “Individual Stories and Cultural Narratives: Autobiography in Modern America”, the narrating self is allowed to reinvent the historical actor. However, as a reader and perhaps a future scholar I am not certain that the reinvention and its voice speak for a whole culture.
Subscribe