from Frye's A of C, "Theory of Genre" on Confession

[alice wellintown]

Autobiography is another form which merges with the novel by a series
of insensible gradations. Most autobiographies are inspired by a
creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select only those events
and experiences in the writer's life that go to build up an integrated
pattern. This pattern may be something larger than him self with which
he has come to identify himself, or simply the coherence of his
character and attitudes. We may call this very important form of prose
fiction the confession form, following St. Augustine, who appears to
have invented it, and Rousseau, who established a modern type of it.
The earlier tradition gave Religio Medici, Grace Abounding, and
Newman's Apologia to English literature, besides the related but
subtly different type of confession favored by the mystics.

Here again, as with the romance, there is some value in recognizing a
distinct prose form in the confession. It gives several of our best
prose works a definable place in fiction instead of keeping them in a
vague limbo of books which are not quite literature be cause they are
"thought," and not quite religion or philosophy because they are
Examples of Prose Style. The confession, too, like the novel and the
romance, has its own short form, the familiar essay, and Montaigne's
livre de bonne joy is a confession made up of essays in which only the
continuous narrative of the longer form is missing. Montaigne's scheme
is to the confession what a work of fiction made up of short stories,
such as Joyce's Dubliners or Boccaccio's Decameron, is to the novel or
romance.

After Rousseau in fact in Rousseau the confession flows into the
novel, and the mixture produces the fictional autobiography, the
Kunstler-roman, and kindred types. There is no literary reason why the
subject of a confession should always be the author himself, and
dramatic confessions have been used in the novel at least since Moll
Flanders. The "stream of consciousness" technique permits of a much
more concentrated fusion of the two forms, but [307] even here the
characteristics peculiar to the confession form show up clearly.
Nearly always some theoretical and intellectual interest in religion,
politics, or art plays a leading role in the confession. It is his
success in integrating his mind on such subjects that makes the author
of a confession feel that his life is worth writing about. But this
interest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the genius of
the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all
theory into personal relationships. In Jane Austen, to take a familiar
instance, church, state, and culture are never examined except as
social data, and Henry James has been described as having a mind so
fine that no idea could violate it. The novelist who can not get along
without ideas, or has not the patience to digest them in the way that
James did, instinctively resorts to what Mill calls a "mental history"
of a single character. And when we find that a technical discussion of
a theory of aesthetics forms the climax of Joyce's Portrait, we
realize that what makes this possible is the presence in that novel of
another tradition of prose fiction.