Biographer and Subject: A Tale of Two Narratives

Abstract

Biographer and Subject: A Tale of Two Narratives": The enterprise of writing biography necessarily involves two distinct, yet related narrative strands: the story of the subject and the story of the biographer coming to know, structure, and recreate the life of the subject. This paper explores the nature of this dialectical relationship through an examination of various experiments in biography and novels that highlight this dynamic. In the end, I briefly suggest ways to theorize this critical and vexing issue in biography studies. Biography itself, as a genre, usually effaces or even erases the stories of biographers' sleuthing and journeys in the interest of creating a clear, coherent, linear narrative of the subject's life. There are exceptions, however, that incorporate or foreground the biographer's own narrative as he or she travels hither and thither, interviewing this person and that person, in an effort to come to know the subject better. Among those exceptions I discuss are: A.J.A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo, Eunice Lipton's Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model and Her Own Desire, and Ian Hamilton's In Search of J.D. Salinger. As Virginia Woolf maintained, fiction, because it is not bound by the expectation of factual representation, provides richer and more expansive opportunities for presenting/representing this intriguing relationship between biographer and subject than does biography. I consider how works such as Henry James's The Aspern Papers, Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, and A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance help us understand that dynamic. Finally, how do we begin to theorize this issue? Frequently the relationship between biographer and subject is figured as parasitical. I suggest, instead, a more symbiotic model, using the work of Paul Ricoeur who, in his description of hermeneutic activity, emphasizes how the configuration of the work is refigured by the reader. This collaboration is made possible by the writer's and reader's shared notions of language and time (represented through narrative). In similar fashion, I suggest, the configuration of a subject's life is refigured by the biographer.