Re-thinking Literary Biography: A Postmodern Approach To Tennessee Williams (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 417 origins in white property relations and the chattel status of women, although white women and black women experienced these material effects as oppositions , forever ensuring their division. I do not think Culley sufficiently explores either a common subjectivity base, if this claim can be made, or its class-divided effects. The argument for an American women's autobiographical tradition, like the argument for an American woman's "self," remains a tautology—"selffulfilling — relying on an appeal to "womanhood" that is an unexamined residue of American white male cultural-economic privilege. LAURA HlNTON The City College of NewYork NICHOLAS PAGAN, Re-thinking Literary Biography: A Postmodern Approach To Tennessee Williams. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. 150 pp. 829.50. Nicholas Pagan's succinct and provocative book attempts to reconcile postmodern suspicion, in some cases skepticism, about the biographical project with traditional biography's distrust of theory, especially arcane Continental literary theories. The postmodern insistence that it is language that speaks in a text, not the author, obviously butts its head against the popular image of biography as the discovery of the "real" author in his or her works. Pagan asserts, however, that a better understanding of the writings of seminal thinkers like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida and a more sympathetic application of their deconstructive methods to the texts of a writer like Tennessee Williams can result in a new kind of literary biography, more open-ended and rich. Pagan begins his project with a respectful but critical overview of traditional attempts to construct the connections among author, biography, and literary work. While he does not want to "take anything away from the work of the biographers who frequently have noble intentions, have undertaken copious research, and have offered us loving portraits of their subject," he cannot avoid the conclusion that any literary biography that posits the existence of an author absolutely knowable from his texts is doomed to failure. Such efforts he labels "naive," "emotional," "romantic," and "based largely on unstated and unexamined suppositions." Ironically, most biographers know this, but are undeterred: "Literary biography, then, lives off the impossibility of its own project." No less a Quixote than his predecessors, Pagan sees in the deconstructive theories of Barthes and Derrida a way of respecting the difficulty of reading the author in his works while acknowledging the common sense apprehension that he or she is in there somewhere. First, he sets to work to combat the popular notion that, for the deconstructionists, the author is dead and therefore irrelevant to literary criticism. Barthes' celebrated 1968 essay "The Death of the Author" has to be read, according to Pagan, as a piece of polemical overstatement , wherein "Barthes is questioning the nature of the link between authors and their books," trying to jolt the complacent reader from his or her simpleminded referential bias. Appropriating Barthes' notion of "intertextuality," Pagan suggests that texts can reveal an author's "inscription" in an intertextual network, so that what we have is not filiation between author and texts but connections and resonances. Pagan demonstrates the workings of intertextuality in 418 biography Vol. 17, No. 4 his discussion of Orpheus Descending and its earlier version Battle of Angels. Using the tree imagery of these two Orphic plays, a network of references is established with Ovid's Metamorphoses, Virgil's Georgics, Dante's Inferno, as well as with other Williams plays like Suddenly Last Summer and The Night of the Iguana. Orphic music, in addition, is linked to blues music, and their dual associations with solitude and loss converge most spectacularly in A Streetcar Named Desire.The playwright 's inscription emerges from reading the network of these allusions: "the adjectives that spring to mind here are plaintive, melancholy, and relentless." Pagan's claim that "the intertextual resonances that I have established here may provide us with more accurate pointers to the author's biographical self than traditional source studies would" seems rather flimsy at this point in the argument. But he then turns to Derrida's work on the proper name to supplement and enrich Barthes' model of intertextuality. Perhaps it is here that Pagan's analysis is at its most suggestive and persuasive. He takes the...