The Seductions of Biography (review)

62 Biography 21.1 (Winter 1998) Laterborn political leaders, who seem to be more flexible than firstborns, have also done a better job of keeping their countries out of war. (298) With the birth of modern society, numerous local cultures have owed their liberating social values, and their respect for individualism, to Reformation laterborns who successfully rebelled. (283) The fruition of the Scientific Revolution is the greatest of the laterborn triumphs I have discussed in this book. By winning this battle over the rules of knowledge, younger siblings successfully transformed this creative domain of human inquiry into a process of perpetual rebeUion. (367) Well, maybe laterborns are most often the good guys of history, and firstborns are the bad guys. But it's probably more productive to consider how the complementary qualities of firstborns and laterborns have each contributed in their own ways to the disasters and triumphs of human history, rather than describing one group in the worst terms possible and the other in the best. Sulloway does acknowledge certain positive contributions by firstborns, but he reports them grudgingly: "The scientific originality of firstborns, which is indisputable, hes in clever puzzle solving, pushing established theories into new but sociaUy acceptable territories. Firstborn Jonas SaIk... and most Nobel Prize winners provide good examples" (356-7). SuUoway probably has a statistical analysis already in progress, or at least an informal scatter-plot, that tabulates positive and negative reviews of his book as a function of the reviewers' birth order. I proudly acknowledge being a firstborn, but according to the book's Appendix 11, "How to Test Your Own Propensity to Rebel," I am also a 100% honorary laterborn. Maybe that's why, in spite of the book's general animus toward firstborns, I feel comfortable with the following conclusions and recommendations. This book is fun. This book is useful. This book is stimulating. Read it. Study it. Give it as a gift to your younger siblings and your laterborn offspring. Alan C. Elms Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff, eds. The Seductions of Biography. New York: Routledge, 1996.219 pp. $16.95, ISBN 0-4159-1090-0. William S. McFeely's rhetorical question in the Preface to this coUection , "Why biography?," begs its opposite: Why not biography? Why has so Uttle of the burgeoning postmodernist criticism been devoted to biography? Why, the editors Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff ask, when biographies are published and reUshed as never before, and Reviews 63 when the lives of women and minorities are being written and interpreted in increasing numbers, should "biography as a genre ... suffer from a lack of legitimacy"? (1). There are a variety of reasons, some directly or obliquely addressed by the compelling essays in this collection. Both New Criticism and poststructuralism strove to put the author and biographical criticism off limits, and succeeding waves of historical and ideological approaches to literary study have demoted formaUst studies of narrative genres. Two other reasons for professional misgivings about biography pertain more closely to the kinds of cultural studies represented in Mary Rhiel's and David Suchoff's collection: the interrelated preferences for the personal and for the present. Postmodernist criticism craves intimacy and immediacy, in however skeptical a fashion; for this, the interventions of the biographer, and the complex histories of biographical narrative, would only get in the way. Most current critical discussion of lifenarrative features recent autobiography as a form that gives birth to unrecognized, inchoate selves abreach the rigid discourses of the past. Biography brings in the midwife, a complicated genealogy, and other ethical and historical interference. Numerous essay collections on life-narrative have appeared in recent decades, though most are exclusively or primarily concerned with autobiography. The Seductions of Biography is a rarity not for its multiculturalism, its recognition of genders and sexuaiities, or its conjunction of poststructuralist theory with late-humanist recognition of "real people," but for its focus on biography rather than autobiography .1 Yet the contributors' nonformalist preoccupations seem to mute the significance of this unusual focus, as though yielding to the more common desire to read biography and autobiography on a continuum. McFeely asserts that no one will "wast[e] time trying to achieve the unattainable: a...