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Reflections on Biography (review)
- Biography
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 23, Number 4, Fall 2000
- pp. 762-767
- 10.1353/bio.2000.0052
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Biography 23.4 (2000) 762-767
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Reflections on Biography is a problematic book, raising, but not answering, a series of troubling questions. Essentially written to enhance the reading practices of those for whom biography remains an appealing genre, it nevertheless resists theorizing its subject, substituting anecdote and citation for analysis or interpretation. Contributing to its descriptive nature is a fascination with statistics, from the circulation and sales of biography to numerical comparisons of introductions that begin with personal statements to those that do not. The criteria for the sample group is slightly quirky: only biographies that have won awards are selected, as if that alone would certify works that were creative, imaginative, or in literary terms, successful.
The organization of Reflections on Biography reflects its practical and illustrative focus. After an "Introduction" more noted for its emotive language than assessment--"At every step, biography is wonderful and terrible" (xvi)--Backscheider divides her study into two categories, "The Basics" and "Expansions," although the terminology is misleading, since the first sounds more like a recipe collection, and the second like afterthoughts. In the first section, she explores the authorial presence of the biographer in the text, the problems of obsession over one's subject, the misleading aspects of evidence, and the treatment of personality and how it embodies various cultural assumptions.
Throughout this half of the book, which lacks any cohesive argument but contains innumerable examples (indeed, some paragraphs provide only a tedious litany of names and one-sentence examples), there are dated issues and incomplete textual readings. Pages, for example, are devoted to the question of the "magisterial" voice of the biographer, a concept that in this age of postmodern biographical concerns has long disappeared. Yet Backscheider, fixated on a generation of biographers from the sixties and seventies--Richard Ellmann, Leon Edel, R. W. B. Lewis--has paid little attention either to more recent assessments that have now questioned the value of the lives written by this triumvirate, or to the developments in biographical theory that have revised these earlier approaches. The respective lives of Joyce, James, and Wharton by Ellmann, Edel, and Lewis are received uncritically as canonical texts, when in fact, each has been re-examined. Serious issues regarding Ellmann's comprehensiveness, for example, have been posed by various scholars, who have also begun to query the objectivity of the biography as new information on Ellmann's relationship with Joyce's brother, Stanislaus, has come to light. 1 Recent work on James, notably Sheldon M. Novick's Henry James, The Young Master (1996), [End Page 762] focusing on James' sexuality, has shown up the shortcomings of Edel's life, while more feminist rather than historical readings of Edith Wharton--Shari Benstock's biography, for example--have indicated limitations in Lewis's account.
The decentered writing of the late twentieth century, and the theoretical re-positionings initiated by Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and others, have undermined the idea of the unifying biographical vision and voice. Virginia Woolf's Orlando prefigured many of the problems of biographical construction, while its stress on the multiple lives of a single subject initiated the deconstruction of the so-called magisterial voice and unified vision which preoccupies Backscheider. Richard Holmes, in fact, confirmed the problematics of what Orlando demonstrated when he acknowledged that "the biographer has always had to construct or orchestrate a factual pattern out of materials that already have a fictional or reinvented element" (17).
A disturbing essentialism characterizes the first section of Backscheider's study, underscored by her determination to accept without question troubling terms like "the best." Correspondingly, there is the easy approval of normally doubtful categories. For example, in her analysis of award-winning biographies, there is a peculiar innocence over the politics of prizes and the external factors that select the winners--more a lottery than anything else, according to many nominated writers. Backscheider also perpetuates conventional and misleading dichotomies between academics and the reading public, arguing that the former cannot write for the latter, or do...