In Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989), a highly atypical variation on the genre of autobiography, Updike adopts a mode of “impersonal egoism” to explore the lode of memory, with an attitude that he qualifies as one of “scientific dispassion and curiosity.” If personal identity, the autos in autobiography, can refer only to the individual’s differences on a backdrop of community similarities, Updike’s exercise in “impersonal egoism” tends to revert the focus, in an autobiography of the self that in a sense defies its purpose and foils the expectations of the genre. Looking at himself as though from the outside—not so much after Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” as almost entomologically or anthropologically—he endows the personal and the unique with a communal dimension in a process that combines egoism and community, individual self and collective identity, by making the self the central access road to the other and to the universe. The writer’s self-consciousness is thus simultaneously a return to the self and an opening on the world.