Auto-hagiography
“But eternity which arches over and high above the temporal, tranquil as the starry vault, and God in heaven who in the bliss of that sublime tranquillity holds in survey, without the least sense of dizziness at such a height, these countless multitudes of men and knows each single individual by name – He, the great Examiner, says that only one attains the goal. That means, every one can and every one should be this one – but only one attains the goal.”
–Søren Kierkegaard (1859)
I.
Image – Self-portrait. Botwnnog, Wales, 2013. Photo: Gavin Keeney.
Perhaps two of the most famous examples of auto-hagiography in the Arts and Letters are Augustine’s Confessions (397-400 A.D.) and Rousseau’s Confessions (1782 A.D.). Yet, there are many, many others. The art of auto-hagiography is often disguised as a novel or other semi-fictional work. It might be a film, or it might be a painting. Jean-Luc Godard’s Self-portrait in December (1994) is an excellent example, in terms of film. In the case of painting, it might also be a self-portrait (e.g., Courbet, Van Gogh). The irony is that it almost always hides in plain sight. What is hiding is “self-consciousness,” and its travails. The reasons for hiding it have to do with the so-called “embarrassment of riches,” or what the author or artist has endured but cannot quite reveal. The literary measures undertaken to hide it in plain sight are often a cover story for the fear of being misunderstood – for the appearance of self-aggrandizement. Self-aggrandizement is not the same thing as auto-hagiography. Perhaps Augustine and Rousseau did not hide behind fiction because their confessions were already semi-fictionalized. Rousseau famously created two narrative lines in his Confessions – one in the main body of the text, and another in the notes (footnotes). The art of footnotes and/or endnotes (for authors) is often the art of “prevarication” – i.e., not so much as outright lying but, instead, as quibbling with the nominal self (author arguing with author, in Fichtean “I and I” style). Both Augustine and Rousseau were, however, engaged in an artform that crosses back and forth between literary memoirs (and other autobiographical or biographical works) and fiction proper. What is at play, in all cases, is the story of the life-work, whether told by the author or by another author. The life-work is the cumulative effect and affect of apparent singular works – the episodic becoming the singular. For such works (life-works) the author is also more or less erased. Arguably, this is the reason why authors indulge in auto-hagiography – i.e., to “save their souls.”
Perhaps it is best, anyway, for authors to tell their own stories versus have someone else misrepresent them, intentionally or otherwise. In the case of important (or self-important authors) this could also serve as preemptive strike against later misrepresentation – i.e., after one has become famous and/or died. Auto-hagiography is, then, a form of countering hagiography. Who would not prefer a life of the saint written by the saint versus some hagiographer appointed by the authorities to cook the books in advance of beatification? Certainly, Saint Francis of Assisi left just enough behind to counter some of the more absurd claims of the hagiographers that came after his death in 1226 A.D. This is also why Kazantzakis’ novel about Saint Francis is the best biography of Saint Francis.
There is a famous splitting in two undertaken by artists and authors that accompanies the emergence of the life-work. It takes different forms, but it is ultimately reducible to the fact that an artist or author quite often has to escape one persona to find his/her true persona. This often resembles betrayal, to some, of the artist’s or author’s “true self,” as defined by others. This splitting in two is usually catastrophic for the artist or author, insofar as it leads to a period of instability and/or the need to withdraw. The severity depends upon where in the trajectory of the life-work the artist or author may be. And it is the life-work that requires the splitting in two. One of the best examples is Ruskin and his so-called escape from English pietism. A more subtle form of this splitting can actually be found in specific works, “contained,” as it were, versus fully experienced and/or lived. Tennyson took this route. Others battle the daimon (muse) and produce extraordinary works (e.g., Kleist, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), which often go unread for 100 years or more, or unacknowledged for centuries (El Greco).
II.
Image – Self-portrait. Botwnnog, Wales, 2013. Photo: Gavin Keeney.
One of the most mysterious examples of this splitting in two is Dylan c.1964-65 and the song that sits astride a gap, so to speak, between his former self and the self to follow – i.e., “Visions Of Johanna” (1966). This song holds all the marks of – for some – a betrayal of his past as folk troubadour. The lyrics have been subjected to “the couch” by critics for decades but resist “historicization.” Sure, it is New York City in the early 1960s. And sure, there are also historical figures disguised in the manner of many of his songs of this period – e.g., “Desolation Row” (1965) – that critics have tried to identify. But it hardly matters. Dylan is shedding his skin, like a good snake, and nodding farewell to all that has passed and all that has timed out. The scene he describes is toxic. The people he describes are wannabes. He has decided to move on. It may be instructive that he also chose to move on after carefully constructing the persona of the folk troubadour (channeling Woody Guthrie and others, stealing from Rimbaud and such along the way to make it all that much more edgy). Tossing Joan Baez under the bus along the way, he also seemed to be heeding Phil Ochs’s advice regarding becoming a martyr. “Don’t do it.” Ochs would later attempt to escape his own folk-troubadour persona and end up self-martyred. His sacrifice is/was self-sacrifice. He remains a legend. Dylan’s subsequent work underwent a perpetual metamorphosis, as if he was unwilling to be any one thing any longer to any one person, including to himself. He would escape all definitions and create, in the process, one of the most powerful recent examples of a life-work imaginable.
The mysteries of the life-work cross historical categories and boundaries. Often enough they open up entirely new, unforeseen horizons (new time-lines and, if so fated, new time-senses). That was and is the origin of the so-called avant-gardes of the past. The term avant-garde, having its own troubled history, only seems to pertain, at least in art-historical terms, to the modernist era, dating perhaps to the late 1800s. Prior to that, all “avant-gardes” were hidden in the slow-moving “gestalt” of what came to be known as eras or epochs. The Renaissance represents one such shift, when something or other was reborn, though by most all accounts “what” was reborn has never been properly accounted for. Thus, Pico della Mirandola’s objections to clueless word-smiths, and/or Jacob Burckhardt’s great summary, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), with its focus on statism and all of the baggage that comes with statism. Was it really “antiquity” that was reborn? Was the influx of previously lost texts (e.g., hermetic texts) the reason for the Renaissance? Or was it more about the socio-political context and the emergence of Capitalism that sent the Late Middle Ages “packing” – e.g., Michael Baxandall’s “dancing merchant savants,” plus Burckhardt’s inescapable statism?
To get a peek behind the curtain of cooked histories, it is necessary to enter the semi-charmed waters of historiography (the history of the writing of history), via such figures as Hayden White, or by another progenitor of this classic détournement of official history. If official (Big History) is almost always a case of cooking the books, and it must be admitted that much of the “cooking” is done by consummate “chefs,” it is not necessarily always a case of malfeasance. History also proceeds by a collectively produced form of hagiography. It might also be said that, at times, it writes itself. Perhaps it actually uses authors to perform its very own version of auto-hagiography? Hegel certainly seemed to think so, and he called this spectral author “Spirit” in his The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Actually, he called it Geist, which can be translated as mind or spirit. Cue the term zeitgeist and you get the picture. Phänomenologie des Geistes (the original German edition) curiously sent Hegel’s “stock” into the stratosphere. The fact that Hegel ends up back in statism is, however, telltale. He effectively “went over” to the Prussian State, for privileges, cashing in his symbolic capital, not unlike Goethe did. For a semi-tragic account of this period, see Giorgio Agamben’s Hölderlin’s Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806-1843 (2023). It would seem that any attempt to objectify history becomes a game of brinkmanship. The same holds true for artists and authors attempting to divine the secrets of their own works. Works eventually, if permitted, speak for themselves.
How life-works negotiate this socio-political or socio-cultural landscape (e.g., both the raw and the cooked variety) has also never been fully accounted for, except for, perhaps, in auto-hagiographic writings. Such writings reveal the inner workings of the work of art, a non-historical surplus, ironically through an episodic versus epochal manner. Each life-work reverts to an episode, the artist or author reduced to ashes over time. States produce pantheons (real and irreal, material and immaterial) to inter these ashes. This “interment” coincides with the canon produced by authorities to lionize artists and authors. This “gift” of immortality is matched/granted by mortality. This gift of immortality rests upon the unspoken – the immemorial. The immemorial (the forgotten) is actually the true “gift” … It is the wellspring that artists and authors draw from – using a type of mnemonics that resembles the memory theater of Giordano Bruno, plus a range of unaccounted-for “guests.” (Yeats’s The Vision was written under just such a spell, including quite a few unaccounted-for guests conjured up by his clairvoyant wife.) Strangely, all true life-works return to that wellspring, such that other artists and authors may draw upon them. In copyright law, that wellspring is known as prior art. It is the presence of prior art in all works (but most especially in life-works) that makes ownership of works the equivalent of theft. It is the presence of life-works in all other life-works that makes intellectual property rights one of the most absurd inventions of Capital ever to be visited upon subjects (artists and authors). Curiously, the invention of intellectual property rights dates to the Renaissance, when Capital arrived to overwrite any previous justifications for cultural production. Without exaggeration it may be said that it is Capital that needs saints today to continue to justify its commodification of life-works.
OUTTAKES
The following three reviews situate the arguments of this brief essay in the context of three artists: Michelangelo; Dylan; and Marina Abramović.