Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography

Biography is an ancient literary genre. First of all—chronologically and logically it is a part of historiography.

—R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory of Literature

Whether we think of biography as more like history or more like fiction, what we want from it is a vivid sense of the person.

—Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography

Introduction

The cover illustration of the fortieth anniversary edition of E. H. Carr’s What is History?¹ is a close-up of an eye with fluffy white clouds against a blue iris and a dramatic black pupil in the center. Magritte called this painting The False Mirror, an apt image for the untrustworthy nature of our perceptions of the world and, in its use here, for the uncertainties surrounding definitions of history in the past half century. Confusion has often accompanied definition since “history” is a potentially ambiguous term that can be used to mean both lists of verifiable facts and the descriptions that can be made of them. This distinction was essentially the challenge to orthodoxy made by Carr in differentiating between “the facts of the past” and “historical facts,” a distinction expressed nowadays as that between history and historiography. Neither is free from epistemological arguments, often conducted along polarized, binary lines: the objectivity of documented events versus the subjectivity of interpretation; facts versus fictions; historians as seekers after Truth as opposed to agnostic relativists. And, of course, there are the radical theorists who collapse the distinction between history and fiction, making accounts of the past into just another story. Biography, as a part of historiography, has to a large extent avoided such arguments. Even though there have been some telling reflections on their art by individual biographers,² theorizing the practice of life-writing has remained much as it was at the turn of the century when Backscheider and Ellis,³ among others, lamented the lack of any sustained theoretical discussion of biography. The contemporaneous battles between empiricists and postmodernists described in Evans’s In Defence of History⁴ passed biography by. Despite the occasional high-sounding title, such as Edel’s Writing Lives: Principia Biographia,⁵ biography seems uninterested in questioning the principles of composition upon which it is based, which is odd since it draws upon approaches to writing in both history and literature, where theoretical battles have been continuously fought. Writing biography, as writing any historical account, “involves the use of literary techniques and is subject to aesthetic requirements in both style and structure.”⁶ Narrative, common to both historical and fictional writing, is the central theoretical concept; and understanding the nature of narrative in biography—a hybrid genre that is grounded in history but shares many of the characteristics of fiction—is fundamental when considering the aesthetics of composition that underpin a poetics. The educational implications for writing and reading in the arts and humanities that follow from such an exploration of narrative are, as the body of this article seeks to show, to alert teachers and students to the similarities and differences between historical and fictional writing, to the handling of time in storytelling, and to the idiosyncrasies of language and style that writers adopt.

The most influential theorist of narrative discourse and historical representation is Hayden White, who ends his first essay in The Content of the Form with some open questions that stress the function of imagination in any discussion of historical theory: “How else can any past,” he asks, “. . . be represented in either consciousness or discourse except in an ‘imaginary’ way?”⁷ But White’s questions provoke others about the representation of past lives. In particular, how much are structural models from literature responsible for the interpretations we make in biography? Conversely, to what extent do such interpretations emerge from the biographer’s sources and simply find expression in literary forms? The borderlines between history and fiction are constantly shifting, and it is not surprising that some commentators regard White’s views as unduly “influenced by narrative theory in literary studies” and demur at the emphasis he places upon the aesthetic imagination.⁸ Yet, in view of...