Introduction
Obsession, Narcissism, Repression: A Literary Genealogy of Rousseau's Confessions
"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies--captivating books... If only a man know how to choose among what he calls his experiences, that which is truly his experiences, and how to record them truthfully." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I first read Howard Stern's Private Parts, I was struck by the many parallels between his work and the work of other autobiographers, writer who have attained significant places in literary history. While the status of Stern's book, by no means a 'literary' work, could not be more unlike the status of Rousseau's Confessions, a work that is considered to be among the major texts in the genre of autobiography, nevertheless, I feel it is quite appropriate to examine Stern's autobiography in relation to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as there are important insights to be gained through a comparison of the two works. In addition, Private Parts entered the literary world as an anomaly and, as an extremely successful anomaly, it faced the same kinds of discriminatory practices as the writings of Henry Miller.
The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have helped to create the view that the craft of writing presents an obstacle to the acquisition of virtue. This notion is only part of a widespread cultural viewpoint that sees all artistry as being potentially more damaging to one's mooral character, much more so than other, more mundane professions, such as that of carpenter or soldier. Indeed, the Confessions so firmly established as a lascivious and immoral person that, even a hundred years after his death, the mere mention of Rousseau's name could send members of the female sex into a state of delirium which, in the words of a member of the Academie Francaise, bordered on epilepsy: "Their eyes burn with rage, they go pale and start frothing at the mouth from which there rushes a torrent of curses..." In the period immediately following his death, Rousseau came to be seen as a figure whose fame was derived from his morally outrageous life: David Hume, whom Rousseau lived with during the period he spent in England, later described Rousseau as a "monster who regarded himself as the only important being in the universe; Horace Walpole, who served as the first prime minister of England, dismissed Rousseau pithily, pronouncing him to be a charlatan; Voltaire needed a whole string of abusive phrases to sum up his feelings. He called Rousseau everything from "a malicious rascal" to "a little man bursting with conceit" to "a monster of vanity and baseness."
The second author I will be looking at in this project is Henry Miller, who is, in Erica Jong's opinion, the most frequently misinterpreted writer in the history of American literature, as he is seen from either one of two extreme viewpoints: depending on the perspective from which one views his writing, Miller is either "a pornographer or a guru, a sexual enslaver or a sexual liberator, a prophet or a pervert." His works, including Tropic of Capricorn (1938), on which I shall be focusing, as well as his most famous book, Tropic of Cancer (1934), were banned in the United States due to their 'obscene' contents. These works eventually became renowned for their inflammatory subject matter: Norman Mailer has written that, in the freshman class of Harvard in 1939, Miller was celebrated as a great dirty writer whose books, while unpublishable in America, could be obtained in France; he was seen as a writer who was different from everybody else alive.
The third and final figure I will be writing about is none other than Howard Stern. Who is Howard Stern? In case any of my readers are unfamiliar with this name I will provide a short summary of who he is, and why he is important for my purposes. After a number of years building a New York audience, morning talk-show radio host Howard Stern has established a daily listener-base that has propelled him into the eyes of the nation. Originally transmitting exclusively in New York City, he later went on to conquer radio markets in Washington and Philadelphia. Stern, who now broadcasts nationally, has developed a radio following that now extends across the country: he can be heard in Los Angeles, Cleveland, and other cities throughout the nation. As his radio show came to national attention, Stern began to receive a good deal of coverage in the press; recent articles have appeared, not only in the New York newspapers and magazines, but in national monthlies such as Time. Many of the recent articles about Stern focus on the rising predominance of authoritarian figures in popular culture; the Time magazine article focuses on Stern along with Rush Limbaugh, another immensely popular personality who taps into Stern's style of acerbic radio. Indeed, there appears to be something of a historical movement in our mode of confessional discourse.
In 1993 Stern published his autobiography, Private Parts, a book which, like the work of Rousseau and Miller before him, has been derided as containing nothing more than obscene, trivial nonsense. As it will be seen in this paper, this has been a recurrent objection which has plagued literary texts throughout history, so much so that it has become a type of literary tradition; this tradition stretches back to include a great many writers who are now accepted, such as the canonical figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the less-than-canonical Henry Miller. In pointing out how the works of these three authors share a set of structural themes, I intend to demonstrate that the high-culture/low-culture opposition is not the strict either/or barrier one might be led to believe it is. As I conceive it, my argument bears some similarities to a Foucauldian enterprise in that I will be taking cultural achievements from different ages and, through a process of literary genealogy, revealing their hidden complimentarity. Perhaps Foucault would commend me for proposing this endeavor, an endeavor about which some of my readers may be mildly apprehensive: to draw a comparison between the work of Rousseau, who is so deeply engrained in our cultural memory, with the writings of Henry Miller and Howard Stern.
"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies--captivating books... If only a man know how to choose among what he calls his experiences, that which is truly his experiences, and how to record them truthfully." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I first read Howard Stern's Private Parts, I was struck by the many parallels between his work and the work of other autobiographers, writer who have attained significant places in literary history. While the status of Stern's book, by no means a 'literary' work, could not be more unlike the status of Rousseau's Confessions, a work that is considered to be among the major texts in the genre of autobiography, nevertheless, I feel it is quite appropriate to examine Stern's autobiography in relation to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as there are important insights to be gained through a comparison of the two works. In addition, Private Parts entered the literary world as an anomaly and, as an extremely successful anomaly, it faced the same kinds of discriminatory practices as the writings of Henry Miller.
The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have helped to create the view that the craft of writing presents an obstacle to the acquisition of virtue. This notion is only part of a widespread cultural viewpoint that sees all artistry as being potentially more damaging to one's mooral character, much more so than other, more mundane professions, such as that of carpenter or soldier. Indeed, the Confessions so firmly established as a lascivious and immoral person that, even a hundred years after his death, the mere mention of Rousseau's name could send members of the female sex into a state of delirium which, in the words of a member of the Academie Francaise, bordered on epilepsy: "Their eyes burn with rage, they go pale and start frothing at the mouth from which there rushes a torrent of curses..." In the period immediately following his death, Rousseau came to be seen as a figure whose fame was derived from his morally outrageous life: David Hume, whom Rousseau lived with during the period he spent in England, later described Rousseau as a "monster who regarded himself as the only important being in the universe; Horace Walpole, who served as the first prime minister of England, dismissed Rousseau pithily, pronouncing him to be a charlatan; Voltaire needed a whole string of abusive phrases to sum up his feelings. He called Rousseau everything from "a malicious rascal" to "a little man bursting with conceit" to "a monster of vanity and baseness."
The second author I will be looking at in this project is Henry Miller, who is, in Erica Jong's opinion, the most frequently misinterpreted writer in the history of American literature, as he is seen from either one of two extreme viewpoints: depending on the perspective from which one views his writing, Miller is either "a pornographer or a guru, a sexual enslaver or a sexual liberator, a prophet or a pervert." His works, including Tropic of Capricorn (1938), on which I shall be focusing, as well as his most famous book, Tropic of Cancer (1934), were banned in the United States due to their 'obscene' contents. These works eventually became renowned for their inflammatory subject matter: Norman Mailer has written that, in the freshman class of Harvard in 1939, Miller was celebrated as a great dirty writer whose books, while unpublishable in America, could be obtained in France; he was seen as a writer who was different from everybody else alive.
The third and final figure I will be writing about is none other than Howard Stern. Who is Howard Stern? In case any of my readers are unfamiliar with this name I will provide a short summary of who he is, and why he is important for my purposes. After a number of years building a New York audience, morning talk-show radio host Howard Stern has established a daily listener-base that has propelled him into the eyes of the nation. Originally transmitting exclusively in New York City, he later went on to conquer radio markets in Washington and Philadelphia. Stern, who now broadcasts nationally, has developed a radio following that now extends across the country: he can be heard in Los Angeles, Cleveland, and other cities throughout the nation. As his radio show came to national attention, Stern began to receive a good deal of coverage in the press; recent articles have appeared, not only in the New York newspapers and magazines, but in national monthlies such as Time. Many of the recent articles about Stern focus on the rising predominance of authoritarian figures in popular culture; the Time magazine article focuses on Stern along with Rush Limbaugh, another immensely popular personality who taps into Stern's style of acerbic radio. Indeed, there appears to be something of a historical movement in our mode of confessional discourse.
In 1993 Stern published his autobiography, Private Parts, a book which, like the work of Rousseau and Miller before him, has been derided as containing nothing more than obscene, trivial nonsense. As it will be seen in this paper, this has been a recurrent objection which has plagued literary texts throughout history, so much so that it has become a type of literary tradition; this tradition stretches back to include a great many writers who are now accepted, such as the canonical figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the less-than-canonical Henry Miller. In pointing out how the works of these three authors share a set of structural themes, I intend to demonstrate that the high-culture/low-culture opposition is not the strict either/or barrier one might be led to believe it is. As I conceive it, my argument bears some similarities to a Foucauldian enterprise in that I will be taking cultural achievements from different ages and, through a process of literary genealogy, revealing their hidden complimentarity. Perhaps Foucault would commend me for proposing this endeavor, an endeavor about which some of my readers may be mildly apprehensive: to draw a comparison between the work of Rousseau, who is so deeply engrained in our cultural memory, with the writings of Henry Miller and Howard Stern.
posted by Andrew B. Noselli at 11:16 AM
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