Pure Lives by Reed Whittemore (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews269 "Death and the 'Decision to Live' " that Sophie's death constitutes not a decision for Novalis to commit himself to death but rather to life; his life "undergoes a drastic redirection ofperspective during his period of mourning ..." (73). In the following segment, entitled Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Molnár delineates the growth of Novalis's philosophical thoughts from his Fichte Studies to his fragmentary novel and compares Heinrich's development in the novel to that of Faust. The final section of the book, "The 'Basic Schema' in Historical Perspective," attempts in a most innovative manner to incorporate Novalis into the overall framework ofWestern mysticism with homage being paid to thinkers like Karl-Otto Apel, Jacques Derrida, and especially George Poulet with his Metamorphoses of the Circle. Molnár concludes convincingly that Novalis has a well deserved place in contemporary theoretical thought, thereby giving the book an additional valuable dimension. The author's final words constitute a plea to "focus our attention on the long-neglected implications for practical reason inherent in all forms of communication but demonstrated most effectively in that privileged form of artistic expression we call literature" (202). In the appendix, Molnár provides the reader with a most useful bibliography and a carefully prepared index. This is a provocative and stimulating work for which the author merits recognition, and it needs to be recommended reading for any serious scholar of Romanticism. WOLFF A. VON SCHMIDT University of Utah REED WHITTEMORE. Pure Lives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. 159 p. This is an excellent, rewarding study ofbiography and its changing premises. Delivered in a considered, confident, and personable voice, the thesis best serves to present itself. The historical background of biography is broader and more diverse than modern scholars generally believe. We think ofbiography as essentially modern, developing concurrently with a growing sense of individualism. But although the ancients might have had a more limited sense of the individual than we, they "did have other than collectivist thoughts, ambitions, and lusts" (2-3). And they did give us early examples ofbiography, which we seldom see as such because the conventions they followed are the opposite ofthose modern biographers tend to use. Plutarch's Lives is the first of these, really collections of related biographies ordered by an ideological principle, a moral imperative, and aimed at defining a "broad view" ofhuman character. Subsequent biography followed this principle of selecting according to broad views until Boswell revolutionized the genre toward the prevailing modern idea, that biography should, somewhat inconsistently, exclude such limiting broad views but at the same time include everything possible. I suppose that it's the preference for the documentarían, 270Rocky Mountain Review scientifically including all possible influences but invisible behind his handiwork , over the narrator who admits to having a hand in the construction. Beginning with the Greeks, Western culture found ways to promote social behavior , first developing encomia, perhaps from purificatory rituals, and then using drama, specifically tragedy, to portray the cleansing of faults of eminent persons. It was a short step to Plutarch, whose descriptions ofthe noble actions of superior characters could serve to instill or reinforce ideals of behavior in the audience. Flaws, frailties, "the beast within" that is a sign of ego-driven deviation, were allowed depiction only if part of a public purgation. A new direction was given by Christian hagiographers. They looked not to "studious Greeks," but to ordinary persons, people of lower class and without a public role defining their individual selves. Aelfric, in Lives of the Saints, caught the middle between insight into the psychology of real characters and the archetypal motifs of legend. His contributions bear the mark of fiction, perhaps, but his breakthrough was great for biographical truth nonetheless, for "with the arrival ofChristianity the self, simple but willful, began to assert its centrality in Western thought" (55). Anyway, fiction can sometimes best represent the internal realities of the self. Later, Cellini did much to free the biographer from the "grip of spiritual gravity , letting him deal equably . . . with that beast the human body" (70), while another Renaissance writer, Giorgio Vasari, created an important blend ofcriticism with biography in Lives ofthe Artists, though it...