One of the Grails of cultural studies--the self that writers dream of representing, that theorists yearn to understand--could be formulated as the embodied psyche-in-culture, over time: Age critics believe that "over time" is the dimension of selfhood that most needs to be unfolded and explored. In particular, autobiography and life storytelling could become far more acutely aware of the ways through which people are aged by culture. We could know ( to borrow from C. Wright Mills) not only our apparently private age troubles but our joint age issues.
One issue gets us to the heart of my matter. How do the subjects of a particular culture come up with their narratives of what they call "aging"--those stories, prospective and retrospective, about moving through the life course? Such stories have intensely personal aspects, but they are comprehensible because they are tied to shared models of "the way aging really goes." I call these naturalized narratives the life-course imaginaries: in the plural because those of China, Samoa, etc. presumably are (or once were) different from those of the U.S.A . I use "imaginary" to emphasize their constructedness; "life-course" because the imaginaries influence us not only toward the end of life, not only at the beginning, but lifelong, from early childhood on. The two major imaginaries we confront in the U.S.A are progress and decline.
The "American-Dream"--whatever else it is-- is the dominant form of the model life-course progress genre. As such, it is "invisible"--infinitely repeatable but unanalyzed, flourishing in the half-lit, semi-conscious realm of conversation and writing, where all the other master narratives once dwelt. It is told by people in their everyday lives, over time, about work and its consequences: first to themselves prospectively, then in medias res, and finally, retrospectively.
I first heard one told by my mother, spontaneously, as she was sitting at the dinette table in our house in Brooklyn doing her lesson plans for her first-grade class. I must have been in mid-adolescence, so she was then in her early forties. She'd been teaching maybe four years.
"Well, there was the base pay that I started with--$. . . . [giving the thousands of dollars of the first salary she had earned]; then there was a increase of 3.2% the first year; the second year an increase of [she gave the percent increase each year since], so that makes 2X thousands of dollars .; plus the extra for the in-service courses, plus the extra for the extra degree [she had an M.A.], so that makes 3X thousands of dollars. . . ."
Every year the numbers got bigger, and the implication was that they always would. (They did: thanks to the American Federation of Teachers.) My mother loved the litany. She also loved children and teaching in itself; later, training apprentice teachers; the friends it made her--it was all John Dewey, conviviality and mission. Talk about narrative pleasure! I have heard many self-delighting talkers in my time and judge their solid satisfaction by this oft-told version of an incremental progress tale anchored to a rising age-wage curve.
My father, by contrast, when pressed, told economic stories that featured exciting and puzzling events--running booze to Trenton for a bootlegger during the Depression, working for a "haberdasher"--as well as an episode of failure (six months of unemployment--mentioned once and never again). He had a daily story, certainly: up and out at six in all weathers, home late; hard work. He was a small businessman who went during those years from installing oil-burners to co-owning a landscape nursery, delivering beverages from his own truck, running his own parking lot. There was accumulation, there was saving; I knew he made the mortgage payments. But he told no long-line economic story; he lacked a plot with narrative unity. What he earned was never mentioned. I assumed it veered up and down from year to year. This was frustrating and unsatisfying. I wanted my parents to have matched narratives; I wanted yet another happy progress story as a model and portent. His was incomplete. Or he didn't have one.
Frank Lentricchia writes about unpublished anecdotes that "stand in for a bigger story, a socially pivotal and pervasive biography." My parents' story-telling inducted me young, as must happen to children, into what may be the biggest of those stories. What hers matched, and his did not, I can finally see, was the cultural archetype of success, with its nifty graphic shape (exhilarated story-telling in the kitchen, shopping expeditions made possible by the annual surpluses) and its personally-applicable telos (my future going-to-college, leading toward some unknown career curving above theirs into empyreans of the elite). It was a family life-course story involving even more than two generations, because my mother felt that her success was owed to her immigrant father, who during the Depression had used his earnings as the owner of a window-washing firm to put her through college.
My mother's autobiography had idiosyncratic elements, of course, but because she was permanently hooked into a seniority system it was also a story of the good worklife that many Americans wanted to tell about themselves, and would still like to be able to tell. The local gender oddity was that my mother had the perfect story; my father the ad-hoc, shapeless, deprived one. This inequality gave me at first odd ideas about men, and later, a deep relationship to feminism but an unorthodox one that the Carolyn Steedman of Landscape for a Good Woman would immediately recognize.
Whether as spur, delusion, or reward, the so-called American Dream shapes subjectivity and auto/biography in our secular, capitalist, world. Working Americans of all hyphenations strive in some relationship to it. It may seems purely personal or domestic because it is so often focused on owning a "home," but it is an economic life-course story that can only be realized through the opportunity structures of a particular material world in historical time. The Dream depends on such extrinsic measures as the business cycle, the export of occupations, the lack of adult retraining, the delusive premium on youth, in relation to such factors as our differential access to education, unionization, legal remedies, etc. It requires steady employment, a decent salary, job security, a slight upward slope on the age-wage curve, and no pressure to superannuate oneself prematurely. My mother's relative whiteness made some of these benefits possible (Jews were not yet white-white in the 1950s, but they were whiter than people of color). But the whole material infrastructure as well as the number, ages, and qualities of those who "fail,"is concealed under an innocuous patriotic label that is also apparently ahistorical.
My mother's story introduced me to the allure of progress in the most imposing way. My admiration for her reinforced my belief in age hierarchy. And her story could be prospectively mine. My identification with her, my early disidentification with my father--this original slight bent in my character, self-concept, and narrative wistfulness was confirmed for many years by my shooting up through the public education system, going to Radcliffe, getting an M.A. I seemed to be on my way to joining the elite. In my particular case, the actual progress as opposed to the imagined narrative was thwarted by the academic depression of 1975, the year I received my Ph.D. But rarely do people relinquish their progress imaginary easily; it must be wrenched from them, like an amputation. My 1975 self held tight to her/ her mother's/ our national narrative of progress, gulped down the anguish of missed vocation, found another kind of university job, and by 1988- with some degree of detachment--published a book about the "invention" of the progress novel of the middle years.
Over the years I discovered yet more reason to be sensitive to narratives of aging, both progress or decline. My father's disconcerting counter-example acted as a irritant and stimulant. For a long time my understanding of him was hampered by the lack of fit between his work history and the requirements of the dominant narrative. For most of my adult life I believed that he was stoically telling himself a decline story about his trajectory. I admired his fortitude, but for a long time I couldn't understand why he didn't just change his story.
Over time his watchful daughter reinterpreted his situation and came closer to him. I came to see that in his later self's version, income would have played a small role--he actually wound up quite prosperous by his 1930s' young-adult standard. But it was retirement--late retirement, at about 67--that made an enormous positive difference. He came to visit us, built a shop in our basement and stocked it with tools, played tennis with his grandson, argued less fiercely at family political discussions. Getting out of competitive and exploitative capitalism was the secret of such later-life happiness as he acquired. Maybe he changed his story then; many over-worked and underpaid people do. Or perhaps, on balance, history loomed too large. He was a political animal and his side, the side of the oppressed around the world, appeared to be losing.
On the other hand, I saw the efforts my mother had to make to maintain her favorite narrative. For her, secure income was nowhere near the whole story. She had extraordinary temperamental resilience. But (as it will) her rising age-wage curve cushioned some of life's shocking drops into the pit.
Through these biographical retellings and the readings they led me to, I came to see both the limits and the power of this narrative called the American Dream. As an economic life-course story, it privileges only the part of the life-course that coincides with workforce participation: "life" from the first paycheck--perhaps from part-time hourly work as early as twelve or sixteen--until exit, early or late, voluntary or forced. An economic life-course story also has a reflux effect on the earlier and later ages that "surround" the working life, childhood and old age. They are both cast as unproductive and dependent; at best, sites of idle consumerism. Old age, in particular, can be treated as a shard of life detached from the main site, an archeological fragment that ought to be lovely in itself but is likely to drift into inconsequence, even abjectness. And the comfort (or misery) of old age depends in part on midlife acquisitions--a house, pension, Social Security--tied to your economic history. My father did not feel inconsequential because he made his triumphant escape into retirement with a pool of savings from his years of 13-hour days.
If I had not stumbled upon the concept of the "age-wage profile"--the way age and income intersect over the life course--I might never have connected my mother's story-telling in the dinette with aging. Both their stories showed me how central our economic possibilities are to age auto/biography. The drive to tell "progress" narrative, and its violent twin, the fact and fear of decline, cannot absolutely determine, but they certainly affect any meaningful life story we tell during our working years and beyond about selfhood and development, the fate of the family life-course, friendship, community, avocations.
Having been exposed to such intimate vicissitudes in the two warring master narratives made me in the long run suspicious of their claims and cautious in their vicinity. As long as I live, perhaps, every one of my later selves will have something new to add about its relation to these dominant American narratives. Latterly, at times, I know I occasionally sound like my disillusioned and stoic father. But despite mounting wariness, I must confess that in answer to the question, "Which narrative had the greatest effect on you?" I still find myself trying to write my "experience" as a progress story. Mine are smarter than the usual pop-psych ones, of course--they are narratives of overcoming that give history and culture and adversity their due. But I feel the power of the dominant genre every time I close my mouth to wonder, "How can I make this not sound like a decline story?" Or every time I open my mouth to utter a prospective narrative and find myself sounding like my optimistic mother.
But this is enough, I think, about my secrets and those of others, given that I lent us as subjects only for the sake of what Jane Gallop calls "anecdotal theory." What is left for me to do is to underscore my theories.
What I have just read to you is part of what I call critical age autobiography. This kind of self-writing helps us to argue that aging is a narrative. Aging is a narrative. By showing that progress is as much a life-course imaginary as decline, and by showing how subtly and brazenly the narrative war goes on between the two, I hope to have demonstrated that critical age autobiography provides new ways of reading the life course. The genre calls as much as possible for a whole-life perspective. My tale started in adolescence but it goes on and on. If you can now relate your own private story-tellings to your parents' narratives, or to more of the current life-course imaginaries of our time--or if you want to try--I will have accomplished part of what I came here to do.
People have to realize they're not automatically savvy about `being aged by culture' simply by having lived long enough to call what clobbers them `aging,' any more than women understood what being `gendered' was before feminism. Surviving midlife by dint of health and wealth isn't enough to give you a grasp of American age culture and ideology. Passively traversing so-called transitions and stages does not expertise make. Mouthing your era's cliches about `the big 5-0' or describing your eighties (welcome as that might be as an `authentic' `insider' account) doesn't raise age consciousness in the right ways. We must revise ordinary life-storytelling.
To write those pages, I needed, and we all need, a feminist, materialist, critical/cultural, historically-minded, cross-disciplinary Age Studies with one foot planted in the humanities. We need an augmented theory of `autobiography as cultural criticism.' I add to Nancy K. Miller's important feminist concept of 1991 something missing: age. Not rawly- experienced "aging" but being aged by culture. How does any subject get from unconsciousness to insight, about a process that has been kept so biological, ahistorical, overpersonalized, essentialized, passive, and mystified? It would be more exact to call our goal "writing age autobiography for the sake of cultural critique." What feminist autobiography is to being sexed and gendered, and auto-ethnography is to being othered by race or national origins, age autobiography will be to being aged by culture. The Revealer of the conditions of discourse. Ultimately, transforming ordinary life storytelling will be the best way to comprehend our troubled age culture and a sign that we are changing it profoundly. We are merely at the beginnings of the expertise needed.
Cultural studies as-is could deal with my father's worklife and his politics and with my mother's seniority system and aspirations. As a field, it is particularly strong on class and economics (although tenured academics may have a harder time understanding age-wage profiles that don't rise). But, lacking Age Studies, cultural studies cannot not deal with everything--not with the pressures exerted (differently on each of the three of us) by the pre-existing imaginaries, or the adjustments we each kept having to make to our particular narratives as the life-course proceeded. It cannot deal with my strange oscillations over midlife in my professional relation to the dominant narratives. I started by looking for progress everywhere (like my mother) and eventually had to learn to deal with decline (like my father). I started with the age-wage profiles of three people in one family and had to learn to deal with contexts like the media and the New Economy. And now I try to fit their two stories and their two financial circumstances together (like a good daughter of both who is also an age theorist). Maybe my family anecdotes hint at how interactive the two aspects of the structure/infrastructure problem are.
I've said that people who grew up with progress foretold as their future probably hold on to a progress narrative tenaciously. But what happens to their future as the New Economy undermines the factors on which a rising curve depends, making some people's curves droop prematurely, or making them erratic from early on?. When cultural critics say the American Dream is a myth, I want us to be alluding not only to growing inequality and the disappearance of the middle class, but to middle-ageism in general: the factors that devalue people in their middle years--midlife downsizing, the lead ceiling of midlife discrimination, longer unemployment (a month more than younger people), income drops when people do find jobs, early departure from the workforce, humiliation, loss of ability to help one's children. Dominant culture now tries to make age so fraught so early, even for men, that it can override gender, race, class--every other social category and subjectively-wrought identity. I want us to take seriously the middle ageism we suffer and permit in our own academic milieux: jokes about memory loss and "deadwood," disparagement of parents qua parents, identification with youth culture, assaults on tenure.
Finally, I want to propose that, just as there is social justice for different categories of beings, there is such a thing as justice for the life course. I have critiqued the American Dream and positive aging--insofar as they are fairy tales of progress, blind to privilege. But progress is a grand narrative with a difference: its material structures, to the degree that they are democratically shared, support hope, development, family unity, respect for aging, and, thus reconceptualized, progressive political agendas to support modestly rising age-wage curves. How could we make progress narrative so gravely aware, compelling, and fair that living up to its requirements would become a rightful claim on society, on behalf of the life course? These are high, new, persistent questions.
Age autobiographies in quantity, with their better understanding of the embodied psyche in culture over time, are going to be more valuable than existing self-reflective life-writing in transforming age consciousness. Those who write beautiful and interesting ones will be waking up a nation that ignores being aged by culture at the very time when age is becoming the new difference that makes a difference.
Copyright Margaret Morganroth Gullette
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