Determining Ones Fate :: Autobiographies Writing Literature Papers

Determining One's Fate In his preface to Portrait of a Lady (New York Edition) James commends Turgenev's method of first inventing a character which subsequently offered that character's fate (4). It can be said that James applied this procedure to his own autobiography. Having completed every novel he would ever write, he was, theoretically at least, in full possession of his character as a great novelist and therefore able to impose the pattern of this fate on his personal history as a small boy. As he reviewed his past writing A Small Boy and Others, James consciously "read into it" certain recurring motifs, aided by the power of retrospect to see what was formerly not observable, if even extant at all. Although James's definite interest in writing does not emerge until much later, in the second volume of his autobiography The Middle Years, James as a small boy is presented as a writer, albeit yet unformed, a writer in the embryonic stage. It is only because the mature autobiographer is provided with hindsight that he is able to cast the small boy in this light, the small boy whose existence while limited to a meaningless present was not, apparently, directed. James contrives to demonstrate that his early life was not spent idly, however much it might have seemed so to the "others." He offers an apology for the fact that at the time of his boyhood his fate was not at all obvious and he had nothing "to show" but appeared like "some commercial traveler who has lost the key to his packed case of samples and can but pass for a fool while other exhibitions go forward." James's family and friends, it seems, observed him from perspective of readers of a novel whose point of view is limited first or third person and whose solution is kept till the end. The autobiographer's conceit is to indicate the clues which might have revealed his character even then if only one had been an imaginative enough "reader" to see these clues, clues such as his preference for observation and his interest in art. James supports the conceit that he was always a writer by sometimes referring to "Fate" which seems, at first, to be at odds with James's acknowledgement that during the process of writing it was his hindsight that imposed the pattern. In any autobiography there is tension involved in the desire to depict life in all it realistic messiness while giving that representation artistic shape.