la biographie (review)

Reviews Daniel Madelénat, la biographie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984. 222 pp. In recent years, French criticism has produced some articles on biography and a few books on autobiography. Madelénat's book is the first full-length study in many years to deal with biography proper. The title deserves attention. Most authors on biography seem anxious to delimit the scope of their work, clearly stating they are dealing with this or that aspect of their subject, not the whole. Dozens of such titles come to the mind. Without a qualifier, la biographie thus appears as a book intending to be a thorough study, a treatise. The venture is ambitious, even if the ambition is disclaimed by the unassuming lower case. The final statement of the introduction is also a disclaimer: "What is to be found here is nothing but a 'theory' in the old meaning of 'panorama.' " Even post-Freudian theoretical writings on biography consider the activity as a branch of literature, and as such, dominated by aesthetic consciousness. Hence the many references to "art" or "literature," in text and title. Here aesthetic considerations come last, the author's chief aim being to institute biography as a human science . A difficult task since, as he well knows, science implies generalizations while biography thrives on particulars and singularities. At least, he intends to rationalize "this fuzzy, polymorphous, rather heterogeneous field, which is at pains to find a place for itself on the chessboard of cultural taxonomies." He begins by exploring the lexical field of the word "biography," how it came out of the field of the sacred and the official (occupied by the eulogy, the panegyric, the funeral oration, etc.); the persistence of its rival "life" with its unlimited connotations ; the apparition of new words suggesting either full knowledge ("radioscopy," "radiography"), or limited knowledge ("portrait," "profile," "silhouette"), or again a privileged relationship ("memories of," "recollections of). Besides, overspecialization has given birth to learned words, in connection with the nature of the object ("hagiography," "heroography") or with the level aimed at or the method used 362 biography Vol. 9, No. 4 ("pathobiography," "ethnobiography," "psychobiography"). Also, a profusion of complex expressions meant either to exalt the work or to tone it down, according to the author's wish. Then Madelénat studies the semantic field of the word: original meaning, then métonymie, synecdochical and metaphoric uses. Quoting dictionaries (OED, Encyclopedia Britannica, Littré) and authors (Edel, Friedländer, Garraty, Gosse, Maurois, Nicolson) he shows that definitions of biography oscillate between the two poles of extension and comprehension. He ends this section by his own definition: "An account, either written or oral, in prose, that a narrator makes of the life of a real person , emphasizing the idiosyncrasy of an individual existence and the continuity of a personality." After this lexicological spadework, the author studies the spatiotemporal place of biography. The expected chapter on history is preceded here by a chapter on geography . By this metaphoric title, Madelénat means to set forth a network of criteria (based on quantity, quality, and the object) in order to delimit the various provinces of the genre and to (try to) fix their frontiers. A difficult task again because biography is assailed by many heterogeneous elements, subjected to hybridizations, strategies of exclusion and integration, and able to incorporate—which is the case at the momentnew techniques. In short, this chapter lays down a basis for a typology. This is continued in the chapter on history, which concludes Part I and is anything but factual. Borrowing from Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) a semantic neologism : "paradigm" in the sense of "accepted model or pattern," "set of recognized beliefs and values, of techniques common to the members of a group," Madelénat states that the history of biography is that of successive adaptations to new images of man, and of a dialectal opposition between established forms and potential transgressions .1 On these premises, the history of biography—not infrequently divided into three periods: the classical, the romantic, the modern—is described here as that of three successive paradigms. The second part, Epistemology, opens on an inventory of the main criticisms levelled at biography. Madel...