Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Scientific Life Stories

2011; University of California, Los Angeles; Volume: 4; Linguagem: Inglês

0160-2764

Michael Shortland, Lisa Lentini,

Academic Writing and Publishing

No field of literature has been so poorly cultivated as the autobiography, Herbert Read once wrote, and none so bereft of unquestionable masterpieces. I Bereft of masterpieces? Had Read perhaps forgotten Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, Goethe, Stendhal and Tolstoy? And what of Casanova, Petrarch, Cellini, Berlioz and Gide? This must surely have been momentary lapse on Read's part, or had he good reason to pas over such weal th ofgood, masterly, writing? In fact, a John Pilling has recently pointed out, Read had no reason at all, or at least offered none.2 Our suspicion is that Herbert Read, never the most synthetic of critics, was barned and disappointed by the very range of literary autobiography, range which makes it at once ubiquitous and unclassifiable. Literary criticism has often approached books as Linneaus did flowers and insects, with mind to ordering them (that is, in terms familiar to us from Michel Foucault's Order of Things, with will to power). A genre that encompasses such unruly species as Sartre's Les Mots, Yeats's Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, and Darwin's Autobiography is sure to make mockery of any easy schemes of classification. Such books perhaps belong in the literary equivalcntofLinneaus' category 'Chaos' (into which he put amoeba) or perhaps 'Cryptomania' (the home of ferns, mosses and fungi). Making sense of autobiographies by finding home for them in some classification, or in the canon, is not, I think, very useful approach, although it does serve the function of drawing attention to some much-neglected writing. (If Herbert Read has said that no field has been so poorly cultivated as autobiographical criticism, he would have been closer to the truth). What is useful, atlcast as first step, is to undersumd what autobiographies do, what work they perform, and how. In this article we examine three autobiographies written by scientists. Some may be surprised to learn that Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein wrote about themselves at all, still less that they did so interestingly. The reason has been spelt out with his usual forthrightness by the eminent biochemist Erwin Chargaff, who wrote in 1968 that the scientific autobiography belongs to 'most awkward literary genre', whose practitioners typically lead 'monotonous and uneventful lives' and typically offer 'the account of career, not of life'.3 Chargaff added that the career is likely to lack compelling interest because, by contrast to the arts, 'it is not the men that make science; it is the science that makes the men.' Without Milton, in other words, we would have no Paradise Lost, but Newton's