Editing the self: David Hume's narrative theory

Eighteenth Century

Volumn 43, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 137-160

  Valenza, Robin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 62949151507     PISSN: 01935380     EISSN: 19350201     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Peter Jones's 1976 article, "Strains in Hume and Wittgenstein" makes a convincing argument about what Hume's and Wittgenstein's respective philosophies do have in common (in Donald W. Livingston and James T. King, eds., Hume: A Re-Evaluation [New York, 1976], 191-209).
2. On moderation and happiness, see Adam Potkay's The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca, 2000). While I disagree with Potkay's assessment that Hume's Treatise was supplanted by his later work, as Hume gives several indications over his lifetime that his later philosophical works were intended to make the form rather than the matter of the Treatise more available to his readers, Potkay's book is highly attentive to both the overarching patterns and the details of Hume's work. It primarily treats topics and texts of Hume's different from the ones I have chosen to discuss here. On this subject, see also Christensen's Practicing Enlightenment.
3. (Quoted in Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry, ed. John Robison (Edinburgh, 1803), lxxiv.)
4. Cambridge Companion to Hume (New York, 1993), 345. This is the same Dr. John Arbuthnot who would a year later be immortalized in Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot."
5. These questions were inspired by an aside in Patricia Meyer Spacks's materful study, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 13. In referring to My Own Life, she remarks that through his autobiography "the great questioner of personal continuity . . . vividly asserts his own," a potential contradiction in Hume's oeuvre that I investigate here.
6. Life, 356.
7. History, 349.
8. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch. (Oxford, 1978), 268. Hereafter cited as Treatise.
9. Many modern editions of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding leave out much of chapter three, from which I quote in this section, because this chapter was printed in abbreviated form in the posthumous edition of Hume's works in 1777. However, all editions of the Enquiry from 1748 to 1772 contained this material, and chapter three makes little sense without it. Oxford University Press has remedied this omission in their recent edition. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Tom L. Beauchamp, ed. (Oxford, 2000), 19.
10. For more on Hume, his library, literary taste, and possible modern influences, see Peter Jones, "Hume's Literary and Aesthetic Theory," Cambridge Companion to Hume (New York, 1993);
11. Hume's Sentiments: Their Ciceronian and French Context (Edinburgh, 1982);
12. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, The David Hume Library (Edinburgh, 1996);
13. and Teddy Brunius, David Hume on Criticism (Stockholm, 1952).
14. Poetics, XXIII.
15. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (New York, 1999), 103-104.
16. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, 1978), 49.
17. See also Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, 1978),
18. and Tsvetan Todorov, ed., Communications 11, special issue on Vraisemblance (1968).
19. Donald Livingston, Hume's Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago and London, 1984), 60.
20. I refer here, for example, to Edmund Husserl's The Phenomenology of nternal Time-Consciousness. Livingston discusses the finer points of the relationship between Hume and later Continental philosophers in Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, 48-59; for an examination of Hume's relationship to past and present Anglo-American philosophers, see Livingston, 109-111.
21. David Carr, "Narrative and the Real World," Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, eds. (SUNY, 1997), 7-25.
22. R. McRae, "The Import of Hume's Theory of Time," discusses the fiction of duration and the discrete nature of Humean time. (In David Hume: Critical Assessments, vol. 3, ed. Stanley Tweyman [New York, 1995], 25-34.)
23. In "Narrative Time," Paul Ricoeur refers to narrative as the way time is expressed in language: "I take temporality to be that structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity and narrativity to be the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent." (In On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell [Chicago, 1981], 165-186.)
24. Similarly, in their seminal work on oral narratives, William Labov and Joshua Waletzky write that temporal sequence defines narrative as such and marks it as different from other kinds of "recapitulation of experience." ("Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience," Journal of Narrative and Life History 7.1-4 (1997): 12-13;
25. reprinted from Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts: Proceedings of the 1996 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society ed. June Helm [Seattle, 1967].)
26. Treatise, 84-85.
27. Hayden White delineates a difference between a simply chronological story and narrative in that narrative contains a "structure of meaning" which also must have a conclusion to be a finished story, i.e., narrative. From a phenomenological point of view, indeed, even White's own, Hume's ending memory's stories in the present moment might not, in fact, be a moment of closure, but within Hume's own particular teleology with its focus on the present-as-endpoint, the present is, in fact, potentially the only true moment of closure. ("The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell [Chicago, 1981], esp. 5-6.)
28. I borrow the term "representational mode" from Alastair Fowler's Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA, 1982).
29. This term is related to Genette's argument that narrative is not so much a form but rathera manner; see Gérard Genette, "Boundaries of Narrative," New Literary History 8.1 (1976): 11.
30. For more on "referential productivity" and autobiography see Paul de Man, "Autobiography as Defacement" MLN 94 (1979): 928-30
31. and Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, 1980).
32. Here I have adopted Genette's convention of using "the word story for the signified or narrative content (even if this content turns out, in a given case, to be low in dramatic intensity or fullness of incident)" and "the word narrative for the signifier, statement, discourse or narrative text itself." Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, 27.
33. For a splendid account of the development of the concept of "character" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Deirdre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago, 1998).
34. Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction (Princeton, 1970), 34-48.
35. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, J. B. Schnee wind, ed. (Indianapolis, 1983), 41.
36. Adam Smith, whom Hume charged with the posthumous publication of My Own Life, published it in 1777 with a slightly altered title and introduced by a letter that filled in some details of Hume's life. See "Strictures on the 'Account of the Life . . . of David Hume'" (1777) by "Tobias Simple";
37. "Letter from Adam Smith, LL.D. to William Strahan, Esq." (1777)
38. Adam Smith; "Letter to Adam Smith" (1777)
39. George Home. Also, "Supplement to the Life of David Hume, Esq." [includes a copy of Hume's will] (1777)
40. S. J. Pratt; "David Hume" (1799)
41. James Caulfield; "Anecdotes of David Hume" (1800)
42. Alexander Carlyle; and "The Life of David Hume, Esq." (1800), William Smellie.
43. Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement, vol. 36.
44. The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Grieg, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1932), 2.318. Hume's wishes were not respected in this regard; his Life was issued in pamphlet form and not prefaced to his complete works until the nineteenth century.
45. See Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment; Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley, 1994), esp. 168-74.
46. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story, 168.
47. J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York, 1990), 45-46.
48. In a way, this essay complements Loma Clymer's recent essay on "Corpse Theory" (The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 40.2 [1999]) in which she demonstrates how dead and dismembered bodies become narrative.
49. On the changes in Hume's style over his career, see M. A. Box, The Suasive Art of David Hume (Princeton, 1990),
50. and Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998).
51. In David Hume: Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1985), 223-24.
52. "Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics Worth Recovering?" Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.1 (2000), 1-20.) Leo Damrosch suggests that some of the difference between how poetry and novels were perceived in the eighteenth century may also have to do with the usual plots of narrative poems as distinct from the typical plots of novels. More specifically, Damrosch notes that when we know the story very well in advance of reading, we read differently.
53. ("Pope's Epics: What Happened to Narrative," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29.2 [1988], 202.)
54. I refer here, for example, to experiments such as the ones described by Greg J. Neimeyer and April E. Metzler in The Remembering Self (New York, 1994), 105-35.