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Ángel Loureiro (2000) TheEthics of Autobiography.Replacing the Subject inModern SpainIsolina BallesterosPublished online: 04 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Isolina Ballesteros (2002) Ángel Loureiro (2000) The Ethics ofAutobiography. Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain, Journal of Spanish CulturalStudies, 3:2, 249-251, DOI: 10.1080/1463620022000014018

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Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2002

ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818 online/02/020249-03 Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/146362002200001401 8

Review textÁngel Loureiro (2000) The Ethics of Autobiography. Replacing the Subject in

Modern Spain (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press). 276 pp. ISBN 0-8265-1349-2 (hb) ISBN 0-8265-1350-6 (pb).

ISOLINA BALLESTEROS

This work presents the study of autobiography as a primordially ethical genre.Not merely preoccupied with the reproduction of an individual life,autobiography includes the discursive, rhetorical creation of a self willing toexplain itself before the other. To articulate the ethical dimension of theautobiographical subject, Loureiro draws primarily on Emmanuel Levinas’sformulation, which foregrounds or clarifies those previously offered by Foucault,Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan and Derrida: the other-directed ethical saying oftruth, and not epistemological truth itself, constitutes the authentic concern andvocation of autobiography. The autobiographical signature implies a responsefrom the other to whom the text is addressed and who does ‘not simply receive it[...] but has to consign it and thus take responsibility for it’ (2000: 24).

Given the authors’ experience as exiles, the texts chosen for this study – TheExamination of Blanco by White (1818-1819) and The Life of the Rev. JosephBlanco White (1845) by Joseph Blanco White (1775-1841), Memoria de lamelancolía (1970) by María Teresa León (1904-1988), Coto vedado (1985) andEn los reinos de Taifa (1986) by Juan Goytisolo (1931- ), and L’écriture ou lavie (1994) by Jorge Semprún (1923- ) – share a similar consideration of thedimensions of the ethics involved in self-knowledge.

In a preliminary chapter Loureiro thoroughly explores the theoretical andphilosophical dimensions of the ethics of autobiography. Then, he introduceseach of the four analytical chapters by offering very useful and extremely well-synthesized information on the historical and political circumstances thatdetermined the authors’ lives and writings. Following this, he analyses the self-cognitive strategies used by each writer. Finally, he examines the variedmanifestations of the ethical in each text. The election of the same structure inevery chapter, meticulously maintained throughout the book, facilitates theunderstanding of a well-established theory and clarifies the pertinence ofincluding these texts under the same rubric.

The originality of Loureiro’s reading of Blanco’s texts resides in hisemphasis on their religious and philosophical quality, derived from the model ofVictorian autobiography. During his self-imposed exile in England, where hedied in 1841, Blanco dedicated himself almost obsessively to combating religiousdogmatism, first in Catholicism and later in the Anglican Church. At the sametime, the story of Blanco’s life throughout his Catholic/Anglican/Unitarian yearsis inseparable from his body’s own narrative and its journey from being the seed

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250 Review

of uncontrollable erotic impulses to the seat of disease and suffering. Loureirocharacterizes Blanco’s self and body ‘as battlegrounds, constantly shifting andreshaping in response to feelings of disjunction or disadjustment’ (2000: 55). Hepoints out as well the confessional quality of Blanco’s texts which are allstructured as responses to, or dialogues with, another: his confession is addressedto real or imagined doubles and ultimately, like Augustine and Rousseau, to God.

María Teresa León’s autobiography seemed to call for a psychoanalyticalanalysis, which Loureiro does, but not without first contextualizing the historicalorigin of León’s melancholy: lost war, defeated ideals, exile, but also her‘lifelong obsession with severance, displacement, abandonment, and loss’ (2000:67). Loureiro finds an exception to the symptoms of her melancholy in the years1929-1939, and especially during the Civil War, a period which she characterizesas having ‘an almost feverish sense of purpose and of glorious plenitude’ (2000:69). León’s memory of these years constructs an impossible ethical dream offraternity that suppresses thorny political conflicts and contradictions. With awell-selected set of examples, Loureiro shows León’s simplification of ideology,first due to ‘the promise to center the war narrative on the anonymous people andthe small occurrences neglected by historiography’ (2000: 73), and second ‘inorder to ground her political vision in solidarity, fraternity, community andcommunion of affect’ (2000: 72). He also provides a relevant illustration of thedialogical dimension of Memoria, constructed as an interplay with the reader.

The analysis of Coto vedado and En los reinos de Taifa focuses onGoytisolo’s narrative process of the ‘(re)construction of his true identity at theexpense of his old, unsatisfying one [political, sexual, and literary]’ (2000: 101).Loureiro interprets an experience – at once cathartic and masochistic – includedin En los reinos de Taifa in the light of Deleuze’s theory on masochism as a riteof regeneration and rebirth. The symbolic elimination of the father throughmasochism frees Goytisolo to attempt a reconstruction of his identity, which hewill do in three complementary ways: ‘by substituting his paternal genealogywith a maternal/female one; by replacing/rewriting the national and literaryhistory of Spain; and by erecting a new superego, a new personal/literary lineagethat he embodies in writers such as Beckett, Lezama Lima or Cernuda, and aboveall, Blanco White and Genet’ (2000: 120).

Loureiro establishes very perceptively the connection between Goytisolo’srevision of Spain’s literary tradition and his post-national self-definition. He alsoanalyses in depth the role Jean Genet plays in Goytisolo’s autobiographicalnarrative, not only as a model but also as ultimate addressee. As was the casewith Blanco and León, Goytisolo conceives autobiography as a dialogue betweenthe two sides of the subject and between himself and the reader, and makes itexplicit by the use of the third and second persons. Loureiro finds the ethicalcomponent of Goytisolo’s texts in the performative self-exposure to the reader,which overshadows the mere cognitive dimension.

Semprún’s autobiography becomes the only possible way of ascribingmeaning to his traumatic experience in Buchenwald. As he does with theprevious autobiographies, Loureiro connects Semprún’s way of understanding

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the relationship between literature and life with that of three authors: AndréMalraux, Claude-Edmonde Magny, and Primo Levi. He brilliantly interpretsSemprún’s text as a response to and a dialogue with Levi’s texts on the Holocaustand thoroughly supports his interpretation by exploring Semprún’s recreation ofLevi’s recurrent nightmare: reality is a dream and the concentration camp is thetrue reality. Semprún’s ethical response to Levi’s negative position would be, in asimilar fashion to what León does with the Spanish Civil War, to insist onfraternity as the counterpart to the inevitability of Evil.

Loureiro concludes his study by summarizing with succinct precision thesimilarities among the four autobiographers. They all felt compelled to reassessthemselves through narratives of self-reparation, although in two different senses:‘reparation as restoration and renewal of a self’ that perceives life asinsufficiency (Blanco White and Goytisolo), and reparation of the self that haslived life as loss and fall (León, Semprún) (2000: 181). By interpreting theseauthors’ processes of reconstruction of the self, Loureiro has succeeded inrevealing the ethical component of their texts and its complex interrelation withdiscursive and political positions. Considering the scarcity of ‘ethical’autobiographies in Spain, his theoretical approach as well as his lucid and well-contextualized interpretations become essential tools for the study ofautobiography.

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