I steal this idea from Lillian Jackson Braun, who wrote "The Cat Who"* mystery series. In one of them, the reporter Jim Qwilleran interviews members of an artists community, and especially a man who fills his paintings with little rosy-cheeked children who all somehow seem similar. They all look like the artist.
I'm finishing the last dozen or so books on my PhD reading list, and in a meeting with my committee chair today I forgot myself and expressed this idea aloud. It's a philosophical claim, not a textual one, and does not belong in exams. But like James Gee explains, PhD exams are a Discourse, and I am only an apprentice. My committee are gatekeepers, asking me to prove my fluency in their dialect. Their dialect does NOT include philosophical musings. Fortunately, I blog.
Anyhow, my response in that meeting was inane to the point of mortification (aren't they all?). But it's an idea I wanted to tie to the texts I've been studying.
The question which evoked so vapid a response (quoting paperback mysteries from the seventies? Really?) was "how are your vestigial autobiographies interconnecting to the other readings [fairy tale cultural analyses] you're doing?" My mistake was to be speaking the wrong dialect. I was in "casual conversation with fellow academic" mode, not "pop quiz from mentor" mode.
Truthfully, I find mimesis such a universally applicable signifier that all literature appears autobiography, especially literature about children. Childhood is totally inaccessible, and the nearest thing seems to be memory. Even fairy tale writers write about children, but not for them. Few Romantic or Victorian writers turn instead to a nearby child - a fact I find nearly inexplicable. Even writers who seem to be interacting with "real" children (Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddel, for instance) are instead only and necessarily expressing themselves, and more specifically a lost self that can only be reclaimed by narrative.
What is more natural than that when faced with the unknowable, we writers, like Henry James, extrapolate from the known?
Where this idea of Self-Portrait becomes more complicated is when we examine the text as metaphor for the child. If it's easier, imagine a textual child - born of pure words - like Sarah Crewe, or Huckleberry Finn, or Oliver Twist. According to James Kincaid, the 19th Century consumed and perpetuated ad nauseum the belief that a child was empty, appropriate to be filled with culture/civilization/character by a supervising adult. They could be shaped, molded, raised up to suit the parent or nanny.
Wordsworth, who believed the child a kind of priest or avatar of nature, still shared with Coleridge this conviction that the naive poet's connection to the "natural" could be perpetuated into adulthood, creating an ideal poet restricted only by meter, and not the entirety of culture. When raising Hartley Coleridge, they tried the experiment and whatever success they may have had failed out of Oxford and died with him. Their texts, though, live a rather different life.
A physical child is a kind of biological mimesis. If you believe Jung, it also inherits cultural memory. A child in this sense is a kind of self-portrait (moreso if you don't study genetics and live in the Renaissance), but it is not Art. Treating a child like a work of art, to be carefully sculpted or painted, is a protracted and unprosecutable act of violence (see Bourdieu: Pedagogical Violence).
A child is not a text, but a text is also not a child (sorry, Anne Bradstreet). A text is a magical image that removes wrinkles from memory, or deepens them. A textual child is pure obedience, even when you surrender your authorial control to the demands of realism, expectation, or history. Maggie might neglect Tom's rabbits despite his admonitions, but she only does so because Marian made her.
I return now to this idea that all art is self-portrait. When we read a novel, a poem, or look at a landscape painting, or examine a bust, no matter how mimetic the work, the artist cannot help but recreate only himself. Every character, every portrait, every pun. All sight is comprehended by the eye, all sound by the ear. So somewhere in Greece, a potter makes an urn. He expresses what exists in his own mind, and reproduces it by his hand for his eye. He sees himself, perhaps only in pieces, reproduced and sold. The quality of the work and the market value are his silhouette. In England, the poet Keats sees the thing, and writes a poem. He is inspired by the urn, but what he produces does not resemble the urn. Nothing about its commodification or its reception indicate "urn" or "type of urn." But those things are instead the silhouette of Keats. Even were Keats to reproduce precisely what he had seen, it would only be a signifier marked by the singular repetition of the decision to imitate. Like Pierre Menard. A body of work is a collage of selfies.
*Pause* are forgers the only original artists?
We read the poem, but the subjective nature of readership allows us only to see ourselves. It's worse if you're an undergrad. All art is your portrait. All art is a mirror.
*Please tell me y'all remember The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern. EVERYBODY was reading it by the public pool in 1993.
