Introduction to Focus: Writing the Life of Writing—Biography’s Exigency

Henry Sussman, focus editor

The jury remains out on what it actually is that drives writers. It might have been said, about the time when Rousseau invented the figure of the public philosophe and Sterne tantalized the public with such sought-after perks of authorship as travel, that writing was a claim to authority in a world in which knowledge was rigidly regimented and kept under guard. Under the aura of sublimity, Romantic authors were impelled and compelled by an inspiration emanating from no less a source than the Transcendental. The weird hatch-marks on Captain Ahab’s skin are the literal markings of an uncanny attunement with the operating system of the universe pertaining, at this moment, to writers and other sub-species of original genius. It would be a miscalculation to underplay the generative force that social catastrophe, isolation, and overall drift exerted on the aesthetic contracts of modernism and post-modernism, even as this production was interrupted and otherwise inflected by two devastating World Wars. And firmly entrenched in a cybernetic age as we are, one might now hazard that writers return, again and again, to the frames and scenes of their virtual captivation; caught up in the most intense, accelerating feedback-loops of interactivity that they can manage to develop and sustain—both with the environment and the various programming languages that they have uploaded. Authors, to the degree that they compulsively return to the cybernetically inflected “strange loops” of inscription and transcription, are addicts in a far more benign sense than customarily associated with substance or sex-abuse. Their lives have been shaped and driven by their writing habit, in whichever terms it has usurped full control of their good sense, volition, and life-planning.

While they abound, biographies of writers are in a class apart. They traffic far more in lives that have been structured and shaped by the exigencies of writing than in lives that, through the sorting mechanisms of history and public opinion, have emerged as commodities in their own right. It is our prurient interest in how writers managed to live and persist amid the traumatic demands for concentration, sustained thinking and processing, and ongoing self-administered editing and correction that drives us to consult their biographies. The editors of ABR, who wisely commission this the present Critical Lives, argue that the life of the author sheds indispensable light on the conditions of writing in turn having a fundamental impact on such considerations as the emergent programming languages in an author’s lexicon and tropology; the sequence in which specific artifacts crystallize within the author’s production; familial provenance and domestic arrangements, incursions of historical circumstance, interpersonal factors including friendships, enmities, and socio-cultural circles, leaving their imprint upon sustained textual synthesis. While there is a full gamut of biographies running from glorified PR slingers and celebrity hagiographies to philosophical investigations of their subjects, biographies of writers legitimately claim the status and consideration due the most serious critical reception deliberating upon their subjects: these figures’ overall impact upon the broader cultural contracts to which they contributed and that they, in some memorable sense, both scrambled and updated.

Whether addiction or practice, writing impacts very differently upon the lives oriented to its particular discipline and demands. A spate of recent notable biographies, on figures ranging from Walter Benjamin to Paul de Man, Jacques, Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Cavell (in the latter case, as much memoir as biography) engages the critical community with unusual intensity at the present juncture. It is clear from these books that the life of writing may, on the one hand, result in a comfortable existence defined by stable institutional affiliation and support, critical reception and positive public feedback, and by ongoing participation in intellectual circles of shared value and interest. According to Evelyn Barish indeed, the very moment, c. 1960, when Paul de Man gets his mature critical production in full gear coincides with nothing less than the redemption of earlier choices and proclivities that she casts in a somber light verging on the demonic. But...