Abstract
Is there a theory of biography, a systematized set of principles regarding the form and composition of the genre? Given the multiplicity of lives and variety of styles of biographical expression this seems an impossibility. However, a theory of biography based on language, narration and myth provides a possible model. More specifically, I believe that an analysis of the function of tropes, the forms of narrative, and the nature of myth in biography can establish a foundation for a theory that emphasizes its generic properties. Shaping this approach is the principle that the literary form of biography derives not from observing a set of rules, nor from the documentation of a life but from the literary act of composition and the dependence of the biographer on language to express a life-story. What gives biography its impact is not the point of view of the biographer, as Strachey emphasized, nor the ‘inner myth’ of the subject, as Leon Edel stresses, but the linguistic expression, narrative technique and mythical elements employed by the author to tell his story.
A study of biographies by the dozen, though it often leaves one pretty much in the dark as to the people biographised, ought perhaps to give one some view as to the art of biography.
Leslie Stephen, ‘Biography’
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Notes and References
Frank Brady, ‘The Strategies of Biography and Some 18th Century Examples’, Literary Theory and Structure, ed. Frank Brady et al. (Yale University Press, 1973) pp. 245, 247.
James L. Clifford, From Puzzles to Portraits, Problems of a Literary Biographer (University of North Carolina Press, 1970) pp. 99–112;
Michael Holroyd in Dennis W. Petrie, Ultimately Fiction, Design in Modern American Literary Biography (Purdue University Press, 1981) p. 81.
Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, ‘Literature and Biography’, Theory of Literature (1948; new rev. edn, New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1956) pp. 75–80;
Boris Tomasevskij, ‘Literature and Biography’, tr. Herbert Eagle, Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav Mateja and Krystyna Pomorska (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978) pp. 47–55. Tomasevskij admits one use for biography, however, when he writes ‘what the literary historian really needs is the biographical legend created by the author himself. Only such a legend is a literary fact’ (p. 55).
See for example Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (1927),
Edgar Johnson, One Mighty Torrent, The Drama of Biography (1937),
Richard Altick, Lives and Letters (1965)
and A. O. J. Cockshut, Truth to Life, The Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century (1974).
An early exception was James Field Stanfield’s, An Essay on the Study and Composition of Biography (Sunderland, 1813).
Leon Edel, ‘The Poetics of Biography’, Contemporary Approaches to English Studies, ed. Hilda Schiff (London: Heinemann, 1977) pp. 53, 56, 42, 55.
Ralph Rader, ‘Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell’s Johnson’, Essays in Eighteenth Century Biography, ed. Philip B. Daghlian (Indiana University Press, 1968) p. 38. In spite of his many useful and valuable comments on the literariness of biography and factual narrative, Rader stops short of citing the power of metaphor, preferring the more indefinite term, ‘image’. However, he accurately perceives the function of figurative language in reading biography when he states that ‘the image constructs the facts, and the facts in turn construct the image’ (p. 17). This reciprocity will be explored in my section on metaphor and metonymy.
Edmund Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972, ed. Elena Wilson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977) p. 479.
Leon Edel, ‘A Manifesto’, biography, I (Winter 1978) 2.
Stephen Spender, World Within World (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951) p. 285.
Hayden White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, Tropics of Discourse, Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1978) p. 125. My argument here opposes Dennis W. Petrie’s claim that ‘biographers seem to fear “consciously rhetorical prose” as much as modern fiction writers seem to revel in it’. Ultimately Fiction, pp. 120–1. Barbara Herrnstein Smith in her work On the Margins of Discourses, The Relation of Literature to Language (University of Chicago Press, 1978) is closer to my approach which understands biography as a prose art creating authorized fictions through the act of discourse.
Also see Edward W. Said, Beginnings, Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975) pp. 156–63.
Virginia Woolf, ‘De Quincey’s Autobiography’, Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1967) IV: 6.
Hayden White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, Tropics of Discourse, pp. 125, 134, 127. For a similar view of language see Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, tr. Richard Howard (1971; Cornell University Press, 1977) pp. 80–9.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Hogarth Press, 1928) p. 110;
Thomas Carlyle, ‘Richter’, Edinburgh Review, xlvi (1827) 177.
Park Honan, ‘The Theory of Biography’, Novel, 13: 1 (Fall 1979) 109–20. All further references are to this version of the essay.
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, tr. Robert Czerny (1975; University of Toronto Press, 1977) p. 7. All further references are to this edition. On the power of metaphor see Ricoeur’s useful essay, ‘Metaphor and The Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, New Literary History, 6 (1974/75) 95–110.
Lytton Strachey, ‘John Aubrey’, Portraits in Miniature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931) p. 29.
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918: New York: Capricorn Books, 1963) p. V.
All further references are to this edition; Michael Timko, ‘The Victorianism of Victorian Literature’, New Literary History, 6 (1974/75) 609. All further references are to this version of the essay.
Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (London: Heinemann, 1967) I: 349, 391–4.
Lytton Strachey, ‘Traps and Peace Traps’, in Charles Sanders, Lytton Strachey, His Mind and Art (Yale University Press, 1957) pp. 290–1.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956) ch. 10, p. 63.
James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. P. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934) I: 30, 486; III: 191.
James Boswell, The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson, ed. Marshall Waingrow (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969) p. 96. Hereafter identified as Corresp. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, I: 5; II: 40; Waingrow, ‘Introduction’, Corresp., pp. xlvi–xlvii.
Aristotle, ‘Poetics’, The Basic Writings of Aristotle, tr. and ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941) p. 1479, 11.5–8. Aristotle adds that ‘a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of similarity in dissimilars’ (ibid.) Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, pp. 33, 237.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1923; New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1959) p. 259. Cf. Michael Holroyd’s recent comment: ‘the aim of most biographies these days is to explore the connection they make with their subject, and give it a literary pattern, a shape’. ‘History and Biography’, Salmagundi, 46 (Fall 1979) 25.
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious’, Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970) p. 119.
Roman Jakobson, ‘The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles’, Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971) p. 1114.
James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–63, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950) p. 260. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, I: 392, 38. All further references are to this edition.
See William C. Dowling, Language and Logos in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Princeton University Press, 1981) especially ch. III, ‘Structure and Absence’.
P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster, A Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) I: 104. All further references are to this edition.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, ‘Metonymy’, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980) p. 39.
Robert Bisset, Life of Edmund Burke (London: George Cawthorn, 1798) p. 3.
Leon Edel, ‘Biography and the Narrator’, The New Republic, 152 (6 March 1965) 26.
William C. Dowling, ‘Boswell and the Problem of Biography’, Studies in Biography, ed. Daniel Aaron (Harvard University Press, 1978) p. 87. Dowling in this essay and in his two books on Boswell is one of the few critics to analyse the problem of biographical narration in detail. See especially, pp. 80–7, ibid.
For a discussion of the problem of objectivity and interpretation see Dowling, Language and Logos in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Princeton University Press, 1981) pp. 12–22 and passim.
On narrative contracts see Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) pp. 192–202.
Robert Martin Adams called Joyce ‘the best literary biography of our time’; Dwight Macdonald expressed the hope that it ‘will become a model for future scholarly biographies’; Frank Kermode praised it as ‘superlatively good’. All quoted on jacket cover, Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965). All further references to this edition. More recently, Edward Mendelson has complained that it is a life described through literary criticism and written as though it were a psychological novel. See Mendelson, ‘Authorized Biography and Its Discontents’, Studies in Biography, ed. Aaron, pp. 21–2.
Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley, A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973) I: xi, xv. All further references are to this edition.
For examples of the confusion in the text see I: 232–4, 255–6, 277–84; II: 11–12, 169–75, 250–1. Additional comments on the narration can be found in James Olney, ‘Most Extraordinary: Sybille Bedford and Aldous Huxley’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 74 (Summer 1975) 376–86 and in George Steiner, ‘The Last Victorian’, The New Yorker, 17 February 1975, pp. 103–6.
Bernard Crick, ‘Introduction’, George Orwell. A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980) p. xxiv.
Leon Edel, ‘The Figure Under the Carpet’, Telling Lives. The Biographer’s Art, ed. Marc Pachter (Washington: New Republic Books, 1979) pp. 24–34;
Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters, Virginia Woolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) pp. viii–ix.
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, ‘Preface’, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., 12th edn (London: John Murray, 1881) I: vii. The biography originally appeared in 1844. Yeats in Justin Kaplan, ‘The Naked Self and Other Problems’, Telling Lives, p. 46.
Izaak Walton, ‘Life of Hooker’ in Donald Stauffer, English Biography Before 1700 (1930; New York: Russell and Russell, 1964) p. 95.
Freud to Arnold Zweig, 31 May 1936, The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Arnold Zweig, ed. Ernest L. Freud, tr. Elaine and William Robson-Scott (New York: Harcourt Brace World, 1970) p. 127.
Northrop Frye, The Great Code, The Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press, 1982) p. 43. On the individual becoming the universal, see pp. 46–7, 220.
Brigid Brophy, Prancing Novelist, A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank (London: Macmillan, 1973) p. 106. All further references to this edition. For a summary of her relentless corrections to earlier biographies, see p. 115.
Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature, An Introduction (1974: Yale University Press, 1976) p. 197. On this topic also see Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 263. In ch. 1 of Orlando the narrator writes ‘(… that was the way his mind worked now, in violent see-saws from life to death, stopping at nothing in between, so that the biographer must not stop either, but must fly as fast as he can and so keep pace with the unthinking passionate foolish actions and sudden extravagant words in which, it is impossible to deny, Orlando at this time of his life indulged.)’ (p. 44).
An example of a biography following a rhythmic structure is Karl Miller’s Cockburn’s Millennium (London: Duckworth, 1975).
Otto Rank, ‘The Artist’s Fight with Art’, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings, ed. Philip Freund (New York: Vintage Books, 1964) p. 201. James Adas, biographer of Delmore Schwartz, once quipped ‘reading biographies is like meeting famous people; it puts a familiar image in jeopardy’, New York Times Book Review, 14 December 1980, p. 1. 48.
On language and myth see Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, tr. Susanne K. Langer (1946; New York: Dover Publications, 1953)
and Albert Cook, Myth and Language (Indiana University Press, 1981) p. 266.
Thomas Mann, ‘Freud and the Future’, Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (New York: George Braziller, 1960) p. 373.
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© 1984 Ira Bruce Nadel
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Nadel, I.B. (1984). Biography and Theory: Steps towards a Poetics. In: Biography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09033-4_6
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