Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity in Seventeenth Century France

Modern Language Review, The, July, 2003 by Nicholas Hammond

Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity in Seventeenth-Century France. By NICHOLAS D. PAIGE. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2001. ix 297 pp. 38.50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-8122-3577-0

Starting from the premiss that 'autobiography, in its manifestly problematic promise to make identity readable, is part of the contradictions of modernity' (p. 10), this book explores the emergence of autobiography as mediation between interior and exterior worlds in various seventeenth-century religious texts. Nicholas Paige has produced an engaging study of how writers (many of whom are not well known) grappled with metaphors and practices relating to interiority before autobiography became a recognized genre. The book is divided into two parts, each comprising two chapters. The first chapter of part I, entitled 'Reading In', deals with the way in which two key texts--Montaigne's Essais and Augustine's Confessions--were read in the seventeenth century. Paige is ingenious in showing how the deliberate enhancement of metaphors of interiority by seventeenth-century readers, editors, and translators led to their modern misinterpretation as autobiography. It does seem perverse, however, that he does not consider (other than very fleetingly) perhaps the most prominent reader of both texts, Pascal: the 'Entretien avec M. de Sacy' is essential here. Chapter 2 is devoted to autobiographical and biographical writing produced largely by women associated with mysticism. Paige is particularly illuminating in his analysis of the typographical methods used by biographers. Part II, 'Frictions', is concerned more with autobiographical writers who operated on the fringes of the Catholic Church. In chapter 3 Paige explores texts written by Jean de Labadie, Antoinette Bourignon, and Jeanne Guyon. Such early forms of autobiography function, Paige argues, 'positively, as tales of their own creation, and, negatively, as critiques of the world that has made them necessary' (p. 178). The final chapter (following Michel de Certeau's work on the same subject) deals with Jean-Joseph Surin's Science experimentale, an extraordinary text which charts Surin's breakdown following his role as chief exorcist in the famous case of the possession of nuns at Loudun. Although much of the book is concerned with the notion of 'experience', Paige chooses to define his terminology only in this chapter. Overall, however, this book is full of detailed and revealing insights into the writing of pre-modern subjectivity. It is a pity that, despite evidence of the wealth of secondary reading in the endnotes, no general bibliography is provided.

NICHOLAS HAMMOND GONVILLE AND CAIUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE