[from Biography, Fall 1980]

Rousseau: The Prophet of Sincerity

Jacques Derrida discovers in Rousseau's Confessions a restoration "by a certain absence and by a sort of calculated effacement, of presence disappointed of itself in speech." Derrida cites the following extraor­dinary statement from the Confessions: "I would love society like others, if I were not sure of showing myself not only at a disadvantage, but as completely different from what I am. The part that I have taken of writing and hiding myself is precisely the one that suits me. If I were present, one would never know what I was worth."¹ This pas­sage is characteristic of the Confessions in ways that do not interest Derrida: Rousseau assumes the value, unity, and efficacy of "the part that I have taken." It is paradoxical and remarkable that throughout Rousseau's unprecedented revelations of personal history we sense him "writing and [still] hiding himself," illustrating what Derrida elsewhere terms "the absence of the presence."

It is my contention that Rousseau, for all his other attributes, is an aesthetic failure as autobiographer. He lacks a coherent conception of the autobiographer's narrative role, rarely transcends confused ego­centricity, and never creates the prophetic authority he seeks and asserts. The Confessions remain a perpetually fascinating blend of rev­elation and evasion, aggrandizement and abasement, psychologically irresistible but formally chaotic. Rousseau is unable to resolve com­plex narrative problems of unity and reliability paramount to autobi­ography because he could not find any secular equivalent for Augus­tinian spiritual vision. As an autobiographer his original sin is not that he lacks faith but that he needs rhetorical control. Rousseau himself encourages a comparison with Augustine in his title and august in­vocation, which expressly claim the sanction of the Augustinian tradi­tion: "Let the last trump sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: 'Here is what I have done . . . I have dis­played myself as I was, as vile and despicable when my behavior was such, as good, generous, and noble when I was so. I have bared my secret Soul as Thou thyself bast seen it, Eternal Being . . .’ "²

Such self-consecration is both typical and misleading. It typifies Rousseau's confusion of autobiographical role, immediately blurring the distinction between confession and apology. But it is also a false start in that the Confessions have no serious theological purpose. As his casual conversions and various apostasies indicate, Rousseau's soul was relatively untroubled by spiritual travail. In fact, it was only after completing the whole manuscript that Rousseau added this opening flourish, probably to enhance his enterprise. The ensuing story em­ploys religious imagery frequently but only figuratively. Although Rousseau was worlds removed from the rigorous quests of Augustine, he finds spiritual verities appealing for their metaphoric power: to af­firm the literary form and value of his experience he intermittently imagines his story an Augustinian confession.

After recounting an unjust childhood punishment, for instance, he characterizes the abrupt termination of serenity as a fall from inno­cence: "We lived as we are told the first man lived in the earthly para­dise, but we no longer enjoyed it; in appearance our situation was un­changed, but in reality it was an entirely different kind of existence" (p. 30). A few pages later he again draws upon Edenic imagery, de­scribing an attempt to pilfer apples during his apprenticeship. Yet the ostensible comparison with the forbidden fruit of Eden and the stolen pears of Augustine is less telling than the distinction: Rousseau's secular revision virtually parodies the spiritual vision.

One memory of an apple-hunt that cost me dear still makes me shudder and laugh at the same time. These apples were at the bottom of a cup­board which was lit from the kitchen through a high lattice. One day when I was alone in the house I climbed on the kneading trough to peer into this garden of the Hesperides at those precious fruits I could not touch. Then I went to fetch the spit to see if it would reach; it was too short. So I lengthened it with one which was used for game—my master being very fond of hunting. I probed several times in vain, but at last I felt with delight that I was bringing up an apple. I raised it very gently, and was just on the point of grasping it. What was my grief to find that it was too big to pass the lattice! I resorted to the most ingenious devices to get it through. I had to find supports to keep the spit in position, a knife long enough to cut the apple in two, and a lath to hold it up. With time and perseverance I managed to divide it, and was in hopes of then bring­ing the pieces through one after the other. But the moment they were apart they both fell back into the cupboard. Kind reader, sympathize with me in my grief! (p. 42)

Rousseau introduces a potentially symbolic episode, clearly con­necting his transgression with the fall of man by describing the apples as "those precious fruits I could not touch." As his memory blossoms, however, he retreats from these metaphoric implications, and concen­trates on the intrinsic value of the experience; by recreating the scene in unusual detail, Rousseau approaches the fictive plenitude of novel­ists.³ He is most intent on demonstrating the enduring value of all the emotions emanating from the incident. The narrator's present re­sponses are as significant as the boy's feelings: the memory still makes him shudder and laugh. There is a bi-focal perspective in the scene. He narrates in the retrospective present to stress the suspense, and he demolishes the disparity between narrator and hero, insisting on the identity of past and present self. We are openly exhorted to adopt the boy's point-of-view—or is it the narrator's? "Kind reader, sympathize with me in my grief!" In the intensity of his re-creation, Rousseau for­sakes important possibilities of autobiographical perspective; vividly "present" in one sense, he is noticeably "absent" in another. Instead of a rigorous, precise evaluation, through which the narrator might command our assent, Rousseau requests sentimental sympathy.

Unlike the fall of man, or its Augustinian re-enactment in the theft of pears, Rousseau's pilfering does not occur under the eyes of God, and does not convey any Augustinian sense of divine "design for the salvation of the human race."⁴ On the contrary, capture and punish­ment convince Rousseau to thieve "with an easier conscience." Rous­seau characteristically transforms self-exposure into self-defense, perpetually evading culpability. Although the world may judge him ill, those readers who truly know his heart will find him innocent, or so he hopes. Such a desire could not be less Augustinian: Rousseau wishes to affirm rather than to annihilate his fallen self. His doctrine of sincerity assumes, not that he must be reborn, but that he must be appreciated. Consequently the potential spiritual implications of the apple hunt are utterly avoided, yielding instantly to another associated memory.

Whenever Rousseau recalls the pleasant solitude of nature, he is liable to call it an "earthly paradise" or "Paradisial innocence," because he has no idea of artistic form or spiritual development. Once with Mama at Les Charmettes he falls dangerously ill. Amid that Edenic spot where "true happiness and innocence dwell" (214), he confronts mortality and envisions a symbolic rebirth: "I can well say that I did not begin to live until I looked on myself as a dead man . . ." (218); spring appears "like a resurrection into paradise" (222). Here, Rous­seau might plausibly signal development, perhaps anticipating his calling as artist and prophet, or indicating growth beyond his childish emotional fixations. Instead, the possibility dissipates into a welter of "trivial derails which have such a charm for me, but which often weary my reader" (p. 224).

Religious struggles are only one transient element in Rousseau's sensibility, no more important than other intermittent impressions. Reading with the Jansenists at Les Charmettes introduces him to the concept of damnation, a possibility to which he had previously been oblivious. He begins to ponder the state of his soul and devises a test which reduces spiritual travail to farce:

brooding on this melancholy subject, I began throwing stones at the tree minks, and this with my usual skill, which meant that I hardly hit one. While engaged in this noble exercise, it occurred to me to draw a sort of omen from is, to allay my anxiety. "I am going to throw this stone," I said to myself, "at the tree facing me. If I hit it, it is a sign that I am saved. If I miss it, I am damned." As I said this I threw my stone with a trembling hand and a terrible throbbing of the heart, but so accurately that it hit the tree full in the middle; which really was not very difficult, since I had taken care to choose a very large tree very near to me. Since then I have never doubted my salvation (231).

Rousseau probably rites this trivial episode because it was such an uncharacteristic moment of religious introspection. But there are larg­er implications for the whole Confessions than he realizes, because the secular quality of his vision precludes the solutions of spiritual autobi­ographers for the most vexing narrative problems. Consider the bur­den of justifying one's own story. Since Augustine conceived his nar­rative as a confession of sin and a celebration of divine grace, he did not doubt the validity of his purpose. Subsequent spiritual autobiogra­phers, such as John Bunyan and Richard Baxter, inherited the un­equivocal rationale; they were not plagued by self-conscious compunc­tions, because an account of their "experience" (meaning "mental history with regard to religious emotion," as the OED defines it) was virtually required. Nearly every Puritan cast up accounts in diaries and journals, often with subtle analysis; funeral services usually in­cluded a reading of the deceased's conversion narrative. By 1696, when Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae was posthumously published, spiritual autobiography was publically established and thoroughly jus­tified: "It is soul-experiments which those that urge me to this kind of writing do expect that I should especially communicate to them. . .."⁵ In such soul-experiments, seemingly mundane events have intrinsic importance, because they measure the pilgrim's prog­ress, revealing the depths of depravity or promising eternal grace. Since a conversion narrative which might awaken another sinner is unashamedly worth telling, Baxter speaks "conscious of his own sin­cerity and assured of his justification."⁶

The second major issue vexing Rousseau, to which religious writers had a solution, was the question of formal unity: how to give experi­ence a coherent shape. The pious promise of John Bunyan to be "plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was"⁷ is felicitously consistent with this literary imperative: the narrator of Grace Abound­ing to the Chief of Sinners perceives a providential pattern in what had once appeared to the sinner as mere open-ended formlessness. Thus Augustine re-enacts the eternal pattern of fall and redemption because that is God's "design for the salvation of the human race" (p. 158). Theology rigorously governs narrative perspective as well. The re­deemed speaker, enjoying grace abounding, recounts his fallen experi­ence as the chief of sinners moving inexorably toward conversion. The autobiographer is constantly aware of an enormous disparity between the self then and now: conversion to Christianity means the death and rebirth of the soul. Augustine insists that conversion sharply divided him into two entities: his fallen life was "complex twisted knotted­ness," while grace brings "that most profound Unity whence my Be­ing was derived" (p. 19).

For autobiographers in the Augustinian tradition, spiritual disci­pline is thus an incalculable literary emancipation. Regardless of sect, they imagine themselves conforming to a similar pattern of conver­sion, fixed by doctrine and convention. Because they feel no responsi­bility to develop any novel organizing principle, the structure and details of conversion narratives are often closely parallel. The divine light is a stringent but effective editor. In Grace Abounding, Bunyan selects only incidents which illustrate his growth in grace, omitting the meaningless vagaries of "my own natural life, for the time that I was without God in the world" (p. 5). Similarly, Jonathan Edwards is unconcerned with the character of his wife in his Personal Narrative, and focuses instead on that "spirit to part with all things in the world, for an interest in Christ."⁸ Spiritual autobiographers in Christendom naturally resemble each other because they share the cardinal Augus­tinian assumption that their identity is defined by the immutable rela­tionship of the soul to its Creator rather than by the factitious individ­uations in their "own natural life" so cherished by Rousseau.

Rousseau recognizes the problem of formal unity: "I have only one faithful guide on which I can count: the succession of feelings which have marked the development of my being ..." Unfortunately, the succession of feelings has no intrinsic pattern other than an oscillating sequence of advances and lapses, until the chain of misfortune binds him.⁹ Fully aware of his failure to organize a coherent narrative, he brazenly cedes this task to the reader:

by relating to him a simple detail all that has happened to me, all that I have done, all that I have felt, I cannot lead him into error, unless wilful­ly.... His task is to assemble these elements and to assess the being who is made up of them. The summing-up must be his, and if he comes to the wrong conclusions, the fault will be of his own making. But, with this in view, it is not enough for my story to be truthful, it must be de­tailed as well. It is not for me to judge of the relative importance of events; I must relate them all, and leave the selection to him (pp. 169-­170).

Rousseau fairly flaunts "the absence of the presence."

The audacity of this proclamation nearly obscures its muddled as­sumptions. Behind the apparent deference to the reader's equity and skill is an astonishing assertion: Rousseau claims to have utterly transcended autobiographical subjectivity and to deliver the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. He presumes that we will admire him, not for what he has done as either a human being or literary artist, but as a veritable saint: he bears witness to virtue and veracity at all costs. We are free to make an assessment, but responsible for "wrong con­clusions."

Bereft of divine authorization, Rousseau invents a new justification for autobiography: he is our prophet of sincerity, a kind of secular saint.¹⁰ It would be anachronistic, not to say amusing, to speak of the "sincerity" of Augustine. "Through the course of my life," Rousseau says, "my heart has been as transparent as crystal, and incapable of concealing for so much as a moment the least lively feeling which has taken refuge in it" (p. 45). In place of Baxter's "assured justification," Rousseau substitutes the claim that he appears without literary artifice or rhetorical mask. His story may be chaotic and appalling, but it is unique and authentic. His principle means of affirming reliability is to offer unprecedented amounts of forthright detail, to imply courageous veracity with exhaustive coverage.

"For him who confesses," remarked William James, "shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue — he lives at least on a basis of veracity."¹¹ Rousseau's basis of veracity has often been challenged, but for the wrong reasons, usually for historical inaccuracies. Much more inter­esting are the unexplored premises of his doctrine of "transparent sin­cerity." No narrative, howsoever factual or artless, is free of literary artifice. Once Rousseau sets his feelings on paper, he subjects lan­guage to the laws of rhetorical polity and dons a "literary" persona.¹² Sincerity is the very essence of Rousseau's strategy: "when we really feel that a heart is speaking, ours opens to receive its confidence . . ." (p. 192). Rousseau would probably be puzzled by Santayana's obser­vation that "living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuti­cle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts."¹³

Rousseau's rhetorical designs are obvious even though he doesn't admit them: he imagines an audience hostile (or at least skeptical), yet susceptible to persuasion. He often addresses or challenges the reader ("I say, imagine all this if you can," p. 29). Gradually he assumes a complicity with the reader, trading his intimacy for our sympathy. He says he could illustrate his happiness at Bossey with six or seven inci­dents but will "strike a bargain" and give only one—as long as he can elaborate to his bean's content. As he progresses, Rousseau supposes that the more we know the more we will like him, although several times he apologizes for including so many details in the service of the whole truth.

At the end of the Confessions, Rousseau makes the 'dramatic situa­tion' literal and his rhetorical purpose overt: he describes responses to his reading of the manuscript: "Thus I concluded my reading, and everyone was silent. Mme d'Egmont was the only person who seemed moved. She trembled visibly but quickly controlled herself, and re­mained quiet, as did the rest of the company. Such was the advantage I derived from my reading and my declaration" (p. 606). He expects candor to disarm criticism ("The reader might be surprised ... if he had not grown used to my peculiarities by now," p. 154). In literature, if not in life, sustained first-person utterance does tend to win sympathy: even Milton's Satan very nearly overcomes his bad eminence when given the privilege of telling his own story. Rousseau is certain that to know his heart is to forgive his folly, provided we have "that moral sensibility, with which so few hearts are endowed and without which no one could understand my own" (p. 506).

In espousing sincerity, Rousseau assumes that he knows and remains himself: "his nature" is accessible, innate, and persistent. Although he recognizes infinite variety and constant change, he never­theless has faith in a unified identity: "When I trace my nature back in this way to its earliest manifestations, I find features which may ap­pear incompatible, but which have nevertheless combined to form a strong, simple, and uniform whole" (p. 28). Rousseau cites permanent traits in his character, depicting himself "as I am," (p. 169) recalling moments so vivid that "never have I been so much myself" (p. 157). At times he suggests that his character was simply innate; sometimes he stresses its plastic receptivity to circumstances or impressions (p. 381). Regardless of his momentary emphasis, he has no doubt—unlike subsequent autobiographers who labor mightily to define themselves —that he has found and conveyed his essence: "The true object of my confessions is to reveal my inner thoughts exactly in all the situations of my life. It is the history of my soul that I have promised to recount, and to write it faithfully I have need of no other memories; it is enough if I enter again into my inner self, as I have done till now" (p. 262). No matter how erratic his behavior, Rousseau confidently asserts coherence of character.

The father of Romanticism thus maintains a conventional, even orthodox, conception of personal identity. Throughout the Confessions he uses the term soul (as in "transparent soul"), recalling the Cartesian belief that human identity is given, substantial, and immutable—none of which would have disturbed Augustine. For nearly a century before Rousseau, at least since Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1691), empirical philosophers had preferred the term self, and located personal identity in individual consciousness. By 1739, when Hume attacked the notion of a consistent, unified "self," he could accurately describe the problem as "so great a question in philosophy, especially of late years in England ."¹⁴ Although none of the French philosopher addressed the subject as boldly and systematically as Locke or Hume, the issue remained problematic and significant throughout the Enlightenment.¹⁵ With the signal exception of Laurence Sterne, however, most eighteenth-century novelists and autobiographers re­mained, like Rousseau, scarcely troubled or influenced by the philosophical debate.

Rousseau's relatively outmoded conception of personal identity has a significant literary consequence in that it commits him to an extraordinary degree of congruence between himself then and now, or be­tween narrator and hero; phases of development are vague or blurred. When he recounts how he was mistakenly punished for stealing a comb, he feels his pulse rising as he writes. Similarly, when he con­fesses that he bore false witness against the servant girl Marion, accusing her of stealing the ribbon he had confiscated to present to her, he insists that he is still remorseful every day. The persistence of former feelings is Rousseau's evidence of that "strong, simple, and uniform whole" of his soul. But inherent in all retrospection there is an inevi­table distinction between autobiographical narrator and hero. Spiritual autobiographers like Augustine or Bunyan organize their experience around the great gap between their fallen and redeemed selves; secular writers like Franklin depict their growth from innocence to ex­perience. A dual vision is central to the genre, as Wordsworth perceived: "I seem/ Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself! And of some other Being . . ."¹⁶ Of course Rousseau recognizes that narration differs from experience: "That is how I saw matters then; I see them differently today" (p. 131). The passage of time enables Rousseau to make numerous parenthetical remarks about his youthful simplicity ("Oh how little I knew myself!" p. 131), which gently spoof his silliness. He is amused by his eleven-year-old self posing as a "righter of wrongs" and a "proper knight errant" (p. 35), involved with two grown coquettes. When Mlle. de Vulson became engaged and abandoned her young admirer, Rousseau notes ironically that "Such things should always end on a somewhat romantic note, offering opportunities for a scene" (p. 37). At the time, of course, he was wretched; spying her twenty years later on Lake Geneva he could not even recognize her.

In this small episode Rousseau enacts just the romantic role he always preferred—the chaste page of an older lady. So the liaison permits him to demonstrate his cherished conviction that the child is the father of the man, while affording himself comfortable ironic detach­ment. There is much gently critical self-assessment in the first half of the Confessions: "In my succession of desires and fancies I had always struck too high or too low, always played either Achilles or Thersites; now hero, now scoundrel" (p. 92). Usually Rousseau depicts himself, like young Ben Franklin or James Boswell, as the beguiling ingénu, gradually forced to discard idealistic misconceptions. In 1731, at age nineteen, he held a menial position in the household of Count de Gouvon, more or less as a lackey, but promising substantial advancement. The family recognized his potential and hinted that he might be trained as a courtier for its business and government interests. On a whim Rousseau took up with a ner'er-do-well named Bâcle and deliberately offended his employers to assure dismissal. On what did the vagabonds base their dreams of freedom? A toy called a Hiero­fountain, with which they expected to dazzle the peasants and enrich themselves, but of course their ingenious device soon broke, bursting another romantic vision. At later points in the story Rousseau, as narrator, cites the Hiero-fountain as an emblem of naive illusion (pp. 257, 270).

Unfortunately Rousseau never exploits the theme of growth, as we might anticipate from such early episodes: "some years of experience had not yet radically cured me of my romantic visions, and notwith­standing all my sufferings I knew as little of the world and mankind as if I had not already paid dearly for lessons" (p. 171). Instead, Rous­seau candidly acknowledges that he remains child-like, and constantly tilts confessions toward apology, as in the telling phrase, "notwith­standing all my sufferings . . ." In the first few books, Rousseau is capable of mildly self-critical detachment, even though he remains in love with his foibles. Self-serving hyperbole ("No passions were ever at once so pure and so strong as mine") is usually balanced by deliber­ate exposures of "little romantic folly." At important moments, how­ever, the impulse toward vindication always prevails.¹⁷ For example, when he confesses bearing false witness against the servant girl, he provides heart-wringing detail: "Oh, Rousseau," cries Marion, "I thought you were a good fellow. You make me very sad, but I should not like to be in your place" (p. 87). He insists that Marion's spectre still reproaches him on sleepless nights and that the desire to admit this transgression led to the Confessions. Certain that no one could ac­cuse him of "palliating the heinousness of my offense," Rousseau launches a long paragraph of defense, placed for climactic emphasis at the end of the book. By the conclusion of the paragraph Rousseau manages to transform disgrace into triumph: his heinous crime has been his "sole offense," causing a subsequent "loathing of untruth." Ultimately his sin "must have been atoned for by all the misfortunes that have crowded the end of my life, by forty years of honest and up­right behavior under difficult circumstances" (p. 89). For Rousseau, a sin confessed is more than half condoned.

Such sophistry can be amusing and ingratiating, in small doses. Rousseau's sallies upon our esteem are so blatant that we rarely feel he has insinuated himself into our regard. Besides, he is right to note how comprehensively he damns himself by dramatizing poor Marion as a compelling victim. A few pages of vindication, however, go a long way, and Rousseau persists for several hundred more. He always con­siders purity of motives sufficient justification, regardless of effects or consequences. His vision is hermetically sealed: "consciousness of my internal worth gave me a feeling of injustice, which afforded me some form of compensation and caused me to weep tears that pleased me as they flowed" (p. 397). Rousseau is the incarnation of the Intentional Fallacy: he wishes us to judge him not by his fruits but by his good motives. Diderot pointedly exposed the fallacy in a letter which Rous­seau includes in the text: "I know that, whatever you do, the testi­mony of your conscience will always speak in your favour. But is that testimony alone sufficient? Is it permissible entirely to ignore the opinion of others?" (pp. 442-443). In response Rousseau trembles with rage and professes astonishment, unable to see the pertinence of Diderot's question. As Diderot's questions imply, Rousseau's doc­trine of sincerity overlooks or ignores the possibility of self-deception.

It is interesting to measure Rousseau's progress between the Confes­sions and Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire, when he once again takes up the betrayal of Marion. At last he understands that sincerity is no guarantee of authenticity; sincerity is necessary but not sufficient. Yet even in the Fourth Promenade he swerves from self-realization to ex­oneration: the shame of this memory, he concludes, has kept him truthful ever since.¹⁸ But the Rousseau of the Confessions, who is sometimes credited with psychological acumen, never perceived a danger so clearly understood by the spiritual autobiographers. Rich­ard Baxter expects "no more credit from the reader than the self-evidencing light of the matter . . . if he be a person that is unaquainted with the author himself, and the other evidences of his veracity and credibility" (p. 128). Sincerity alone no more makes an autobiogra­pher than ardent love makes a poet. Yet in another sense, Rousseau succeeds all too well: in presenting himself, he exposes the limits of his perspective."¹⁹ Rousseau asks us to assess him favorably without always demonstrating what Baxter calls "the self-evidencing light of the matter," or redeeming the hero's foibles with narrative perspicaci­ty. Rousseau blithely presumes that sincerity excuses any iniquity or folly, and seems blissfully unaware how damaging his revelations can be; the appalled embarrassment of the company to whom he read his manuscript has been shared by subsequent readers.²⁰ He characterizes his long-time paramour and nursemaid Therese Le Vasseur as help­lessly ignorant—unable to tell time, recite the months of the year, or count money: "once I made a dictionary of her sayings to amuse Mme de Luxembourg, and her blunders have become famous in the circles in which I have lived" (p. 311). Later he summarizes their relation­ship with this monstrous self-portrait: "What will the reader think when I tell him, with all the sincerity that he has come to expect of me, that from the first moment I saw her till this day I have never felt the least glimmering of love for [Thérèse] ... The sensual needs I sat­isfied with her were for me purely sexual and had nothing to do with her as an individual?" (pp. 385-386).

No prosecuting attorney could cite evidence more damning than the testimony of the defense. Apparently Rousseau hopes that revelation of his basest motives will secure our complicity; he even includes ac­counts of how the hero fooled himself: "I affected to reproach myself for what I had done in order to excuse what I was going to do" (p. 68). This is a perilous strategy, since Rousseau has always insisted that the narrator and hero are indistinguishable: we may with justice question the narrator's motives. For example, when Rousseau provoked dis­missal from the Count de Gouvon's household to wander with Bâcle and their Hiero-fountain, he admits that his conduct was outrageous: "Thus I imagined that I could put them in the wrong and justify myself in my own eyes by claiming that my action had been forced upon me" (p. 101). We may perceive the same process of neurotic self-justification magnified throughout the entire Confessions; the great pedagogue who preaches the sanctity of the heart's affections also shows us its capacity for vain self-delusion. Even in the spiritual invo­cation, Rousseau reveals a tendency to confuse himself with the Al­mighty: "I have bared my secret soul as thou thyself hast seen it, Eter­nal Being! So let the numberless legion of my fellow men gather round me, and hear my confessions" (p. 17, my emphasis).

What is at issue here, as I have stressed, is not the nature of Rous­seau's religious faith but his artistic muddle. He appears in the Confes­sions as an illustration of Sartre's argument that sincerity is "precisely a phenomenon of bad faith." The terms of Sartre's analysis illumi­nate, by throwing into a very different light, Rousseau's method of "writing and hiding." Sartre writes: "Total, constant sincerity as a constant effort to adhere to oneself is by nature a constant effort to dis­sociate oneself from oneself. A person frees himself from himself by the very act by which he makes himself an object for himself. To draw up a perpetual inventory of what one is means constantly to repudiate oneself and to take refuge in a sphere where one is no longer anything but a pure, free look. The goal of bad faith . . . is to put oneself out of reach; it is an escape."²¹

As Rousseau continues the Confessions, he loses all critical capacity to investigate the problem of bad faith or the question of rhetorical role. He is simply swamped by the "need to take refuge . . . to put oneself out of reach." Instead of examining his life for pattern and purpose, he sinks into a morass of paranoia, which becomes terribly painful to author and readers in the last six books. There Rousseau voices bitter attacks and asserts his saintliness with increasing striden­cy: vengeance and hatred have never gained a foothold in his heart (p. 439); he has fearlessly followed the paths of uprightness, justice, and truth (p. 456); his writing was inspired first by virtuous indignation and then gentleness of spirit (p. 459); he is on the whole the best of men (p. 479); he always behaved with sincerity and disinterestedness almost past belief (p. 590). The price for uttering truth has been a crown of thorns. Thus Rousseau's characterization, even with his mental derangement, is of a piece: in the Confessions we attend a self­annointed prophet and martyr.

The egocentricity and confusion of the Confessions undermine Rousseau's reliability. His voice becomes so pathetically solipsistic that the apostle of affliction loses all authority and elicits only pity. Rousseau would have served his purpose better by concluding with Book VIII, shaping his story into the "distinctive Romantic genre of the Bildungsgeschichte, which translates the painful process of Chris­tian conversion and redemption into a painful process of self-formation, crisis, and self-recognition," in the words of M. H. Abrams.²² Instead he tries to transform picaresque into hagiography.

Rousseau's moment of self definition, that sense of fulfilling his in­choate potential, occurs when he decides to become a writer. His iden­tity as an artist unites his longing for truth and beauty, his zeal for lib­erty, his sympathy for the oppressed and helpless, his delight in nature—many of the disparate, fragmented elements of his nature. Here is his ecstatic description of how he envisioned the prize­winning discourse on "The Inequality of Mankind":

For all the rest of the day, wandering deep into the forest, I sought and I found the vision of those primitive times, the history of which I proudly traced. I demolished the petty lies of mankind; I dared to strip man's nature naked, to follow the progress of time, and trace the things which have distorted it; and by comparing man as he has made himself with man as he is by nature I showed him in his pretended perfection the true source of his misery. Exalted by these sublime meditations, my soul soared towards the Divinity; and from that height I looked down on my fellow men pursuing the blind path of their prejudices, of their errors, of their misfortunes, of their crimes. Then I cried to them in a feeble voice which they could not hear, "Madmen who ceaselessly complain of Na­ture, learn that all your misfortunes arise from yourselves!" (p. 362).

This passage epitomizes Rousseau's autobiographical self-definition in several ways. His quest takes place alone in nature, as a deliberate, self-conscious venture ("I sought and I found"), which endows Rous­seau with a prophetic vision of universal significance. But mixed with the vatic grandeur ("I proudly traced ... I dared ... my soul soared . . .") is an ominous note: Rousseau's "feeble voice" suggests that pathetic self-pity which mars the whole Confessions. Most crucial, this moment of potential self-discovery becomes another example of "writing and hiding myself." Transcendence is imagined as another refuge, a sanctuary on high, from which height Rousseau can be the inviolate, ultimate arbiter. In this apotheosis he need not heed his own admonition to mankind: "learn that all your misfortunes arise from yourselves!"

Unfortunately Rousseau's exaltation fades; no sooner does Rous­seau discover his focus than he loses it. By Book IX, when Rousseau cites "the thread of my narrative," (p. 379), the reader may wonder where in the labyrinthine maze that thread can be found. Later, when he introduces "the great revolution in my destiny . . . the catastrophe which divided my life into two such different parts" (p. 441), he means the notorious quarrels with d'Epinay, Diderot, Grimm, Mme. d'Houdetot, and the whole nest of vipers who betrayed him. Hence­forth the Confessions record one side of a series of ruptures which to Rousseau's paranoid imagination have a conspiratorial unity. By the last book, Rousseau abandons all pretense of narrative control_ At least three times he interjects to say that his experience is so painful and chaotic that he can only proceed haphazardly (pp. 553, 574, 579). Few readers ever wish the story longer than it is_

Thus Rousseau reverses the pattern of Augustine's Confessions, which begin in "that broken state" of fallen life and progress toward "that most profound Unity" of grace. Rousseau fails to affirm any such transcendent vision or to imagine any secular alternative: he marks the demise of the spiritual premises which had justified and or­ganized autobiography. It was left to Wordsworth, a generation after Rousseau, to renew the genre in The Prelude, which structures devel­opment from Edenic innocence through fallen experience to redemp­tive imagination. The Prelude epitomizes the Romantic analogue for the spiritual quest of yore: "The way-faring Christian on his laborious pilgrimage to heaven-haven . . . is converted into a hero whose journey is an education in experience through stages of awareness which culminate on the level of intellectual maturity—a stage of integrity, power, and freedom in which the protagonist finally learns who he is, what he was born for, and the implicit purpose of all that he has en­dured on the way."²³ Because Rousseau never discovers the inchoate purpose of his experience, he fails to convey that integrity which is most crucial to the autobiographer: not the personal "sincerity" of strong feeling, but the artistic integrity of unified vision. Only by real­izing the problems and possibilities of the autobiographer's narrative role can any writer make the story justified, organized, coherent, and exemplary. In the Confessions we hear not the voice of self-knowledge but, one hopes, the cause of greater self-knowledge in others.

NOTES

1.  Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 142.

2.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, tr. J. M. Cohen (Penguin, 1954), p. 17. All subsequent references to this text are identified by parenthetical nu­merals.

3.  Saintsbury remarked that if the Confessions "were not autobiography, it would be one of the great novels of the world," in History of the French Novel ( London, 1917), I, p. 391. And Northrop Frye notes that in Rousseau "the confession flows into the novel, and the mixture produces the fictional autobiogra­phy . . ." in The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1957), 307 P.

4.  The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Books 1-X, tr. F. J. Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), p. 158.

5.  Richard Baxter, The Autobiography, Being the Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. J. M. Lloyd Thomas (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1931), p. 103.

6.  Baxter, Select Practical Writings, Vol. II, ed. Leonard Bacon (New Haven, 1831), p. 4.

7. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 82.

8. Jonathan Edwards, Personal Narrative, in Basic Writings, ed. Ola E. Winslow (New York: Signet, 1966), p. 82.

9. Marjory Sabin, in her excellent study English Romanticism and the French Tradi­tion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), shows how Rous­seau links events "through causal words and phrasing: `enfin,' 'achievement de,' `determiner,' ... The ends of the chains always reach to Rousseau's pres­ent experience and to one of those fundamental traits of character which it is the task of the autobiographer to analyze and defend," pp. 70-73.

10.  J. H. Huizinga's superb biography Rousseau is subtitled The Self-Made Saint. Although I wrote this essay before reading Huizinga, I am delighted to see a bi­ographer subject Rousseau's whole life to rigorous and skeptical scrutiny. Huizinga justly asks, "How could a character so feeble, a thinker so incoher­ent, a littérateur whose prose is so patchy, have earned world-wide recogni­tion as a figure of great historical importance?" See Rousseau: The Self-Made Saint (New York: The Viking Press, 1976), p. 268.

11.  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1902), p. 452.

12.  Marjory Sabin, notes Rousseau's "deep distrust of art which he expresses so often in both personal and philosophic terms," p. 7, and observes later that Rous.seau "comes to his autobiography as an experienced philosopher of lan­guage," p. 18. Paul deMan, in his book Blindness and Insight ( New York: Oxford University Press, /971) p. 17, comments that "Literature, unlike everyday language ... is the only form of language free from the fallacy of unmediated expression."

13.  George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (New York: Scrib­ners, 1922), p. 131.

14.  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby.Bigge (Oxford U. Press, 1967), p. 259. See also Robert H. Bell, "David Hume's Fables of Iden­tity," PQ (Spring 1975), pp. 471-483.

15.  For a comprehensive treatment of this subject, see Jean A. Perkins, The Concept of the Self in the French Enlightenment (Geneve: Libraire Droz, 1969).

16.  William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Ernest Selincourt (London: Oxford Uni­versity Press, 1970), p. 20 (Book II, 11.31-33).

17.  I disagree with the idea that "One of the many lessons Rousseau taught subse­quent novelists was that even with the literal identity of subject and narrator, the mere span of time separating the two provides sufficient distance to allow for all the potentially ironical divergence in point of view between character and narrator that a novelist could require," in Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 157.

18.  J. J. Rousseau, Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire (Paris: Editions Gamier Freres, 1960) pp. 41-60. For example: "j'y vins Bien confirmé dans l'opinion dejà prise que le Connais-toi toi-meme du Temple de Delphes n'etait pas une maxime si facile a suivre que je l'avais cru dans mes Confessions" (p. 42) and he wonders "s'il est des cas oil l'on puisse t romper innocemment" (p. 44).

19.  deMan, following Derrida, analyzes another work by Rousseau in terms which might be applied to the Confessions: “he ‘knew,’ in a sense, that his doctrine disguised his insight into something closely resembling its opposite, but he chose to remain blind to this knowledge,” p. 116. deMan cites Derrida on the “difference between an implied meaning, a nominal presence and a thematic exposition.” See Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie, cited above.

20. Two examples of nee-classical reaction arc Burke, who attacked Rousseau as “the philosopher of vanity,” and the author of “those mad confessions of his mad faults,” in Works of Edmund Burke IV, (London, 1866), p. 27. Johnson at­tacked Rousseau every time his name was mentioned, including his famous answer to Boswell’s query, whether Rousseau was as bad as Voltaire: “Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.”

21. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Robert D. Cumming (New York: Modern Library, 1966), p. 158 and pp. 159-160.

22. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1971), p. 96.

23. M. H. Abrams, p. 193-194.