James O'Rourke. Sex, Lies, and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession.(Book review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 Boston University

James O'Rourke. Sex, Lies, and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Pp. 215.

The title of James O'Rourke's new book echoes that of the 1989 film "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," whose central character seeks the unvarnished truth through spontaneously filmed interviews but turns out to have his own flaws to hide. Like the medium of video, the genre of autobiography purports to be a form for truth-telling; but it, too, conceals and distorts as much as it reveals. This premise--that autobiographies lie, and that they sometimes lie about sex--is hardly a surprising one on which to base a scholarly study of the genre. What distinguishes O'Rourke's approach is its ethical turn--its thoughtful investigation of the relationship between the autobiographical self and others, and of the slippage between precept and behavior. In O'Rourke's premise, every, autobiography, whether historical or fictional, stages a conflict between its self-legitimating master narrative and an implicit "shadow narrative." The first says, in essence, "I am a good person"; the second is a suppressed story of harm and slights to others, of self-delusions that even critical retrospection fails to confront.

O'Rourke aptly begins with Rousseau, the author of the modern autobiography's locus classicus. The intractable fact at the heart of the Confessions is that its author fathered several children whom he abandoned to orphanages. This supremely self-justifying philosopher could rationalize other actions through recourse to sentiment or professions of shame or suffering, but as O'Rourke points out, he never found a suitable fiction to excuse his parental neglect. The raciness of O'Rourke's title should not obscure the fact that this book is as much about the procreative ramifications of sex as about sex itself--the ethics of having and raising children. Subsequent chapters address Wordsworth's fathering of an illegitimate child with Annette Vallon, Victor Frankenstein's creation of his monster, Rochester's abdicated duties to his wife Bertha and ward Adele, and Humbert Humbert's vexed guardianship of his stepdaughter, Lolita.

Rousseau's progeny are emblematic of the issue at the center of this study of narratives of the self: the problem of the other. In the Confessions, the other primarily takes the form of...

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