Multi-Feathered Flock: One Book's Place in Contemporary Biographies

Abstract

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY customarily answers to a set of conven tions we do not associate with art. Traditionally, truth in biography is achieved through a marriage of emotional distance and intellectual scru tiny; the author assumes and maintains distinct boundaries between himself and his subject. Objectivity reveals its multi-tentacled head in a thou sand small features, from the use of the third person to those proofs of purchase, footnotes, to the gathering of interviews, of other voices and perspectives, finding then a certain promise of safety in numbers. All of this accumulates nevertheless into the biographer's implicitly subjective perspective. Many contemporary biographers are calling into question traditional distance between author and subject. Self-reference has crept into the genre just as it has in all literary genres, ultimately accomplishing the same ends: destabilizing or refashioning our concept of truth. The author's self-referentiality may be esthetic, concerning writerly issues, in which the writing of the biography is as much about the act of writing as it is about the ostensible subject or life in question. A kind of meta-biogra phy, Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman is as much an exploration of the disputes among Sylvia Plath's biographers as it is a biography of Plath. Some contemporary biographers borrow elements from other genres. In Julia Blackburn's Daisy Bates in the Desert, the author mingles history, biography, memoir and novelistic improvisation to create a record of two journeys: Daisy Bates's as the first white woman to live among Aborigi nes in uncharted regions of the Australian outback, and Julia Blackburn's as the first of Bates's biographers to delve into the interstices and mys teries of her subject's pathological lying. Blackburn creates a record of Bates's life that is also a record of Blackburn creating that life, her sort ing through the letters, diaries, field notes and photographs, as well as