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Biography has at times been an immensely popular genre, and giventhe numerous biographical volumes currently in print, it appears that itspopularity has risen during the last quarter of the twentieth century tothe point of rivaling fiction in sales.(1)During a symposium at the Library of Congress in 1986, Kenneth Lynn and W.Jackson Bate suggested that the present interest in biography isattributable to movement within the academy away from traditionalscholarship as well as to a more general distaste for the contemporarynovel ("What is Biography?" 40-41). From this point of view, biographyserves as a kind of "conservative" corrective to the abuses of "liberal"academics and "postmodern" writers; this attitude is evident in Bate'sassertion that "biography has replaced the Victorian novel" ("What isBiography?" 41). To be fair, the apparent antipathy of biographers towardacademics is itself attributable to the latter's indifference to thisgenre. Indeed, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its popularity,biography has never quite achieved a high level of acceptance within theacademic world. For example, it has frequently been dismissed byhistorians for not being historical enough, since biographers tend tofocus too much on private matters and rely too heavily on conjectureand/or fabulation instead of sticking to the facts of historical record.In addition, biographers (especially political biographers) are oftenviewed as falling into the trap of "present[ing] their subjects asextraordinary and omnipotent, or alternatively, as predictableindividuals..." (O'Brien 50) whose lives serve either as examples to beadmired or as mere templates of their times. In short, as Patrick K.O'Brien states, in spite of their "otherwise laudable concerns to instructand to entertain their readers, [biographies] tell historians all toolittle about the core aspirations of their discipline..." (51).
Biographies have not fared much better among academics dedicated toliterature. According to Paul Murray Kendall, "Biography is a genuineprovince of literature-the notion is accepted by default rather than bydebate-but a province which that kingdom has generally tended to ignore"(4). There is little doubt that biographical texts are often overlooked inliterature courses, except when they are treated sociocultural texts whichserve a secondary role to literary work. It can be argued that such anassertion more applicable to departments of foreign languages than todepartments of English, but even there the interest in biography is stillless keen than that shown in autobiography. And so, biographyremains in a kind of academic no-man's-land, part history and partliterature but not quite enough of either to gain wide-spread acceptanceinto the canon.
One reason for this ambivalence is due to a general uncertainty as towhat a biography should do in the first place. Here again, there areextreme positions. At the one end is Sir Harold Nicolson, advocate for the"pure biography" which "is written with no other purpose than that ofconveying to the reader an authentic portrait of the individual whose lifeis being narrated" (153). For Nicolson, this desired authenticity ischaracterized by a seriousness of purpose (and therefore relatively freeof irony or satire) and respect for the biographee (155-56). On the otherend of the spectrum is Patrick K. O'Brien, who states unequivocally that"to convince historians at large that the biographical approach issomething more than media driven and market led, biographies must begin toutilize large areas of modern historical scholarship that are oftenconspicuously missing, and not only in the writings of amateurs on theborders of professional history" (56). O'Brien is reacting, in part, toNicolson's notion of biography as encomium, just as Nicolsonhimself was reacting against the iconoclastic approach taken by LyttonStrachey (of Eminent Victorians fame) and his followers.
Both Nicolson and O'Brien unabashedly proclaim their definition as theright and good one to which a biography should conform to the exclusion ofthe other, but I would propose that neither of their positions is tenablein and of itself. It appears that biography must necessarily exist alongthe continuum between O'Brien and Nicolson by assimilating elements fromboth definitions. On this point I agree with Robert Blake, who has arguedthat "biography is doing or should be doing at least two things"; thefirst is to be accurate, that is, "to get the facts right in so far asthis is possible and not to make them up when this is impossible" (76).The second thing is to provide an interpretation of those facts, for asBlake comments: "A biographer who tries to avoid interpreting [the facts]is abdicating from his central task. It may be difficult to make such aninterpretation. It may be the case the two (or even more) interpretationsare possible. What is sure to kill a biography is to make nointerpretation at all" (77). For Blake, the need for interpretation givesrise to yet a third element, presentation; in Blake's words, "How does oneput across the picture which ... one has decided to be the correct one?"(85). The answer to this question can only be found, I believe, inliterature, more specifically, in narrative. Indeed, Nicolson's definitionabove explicitly mentions the narrative nature of biography, and O'Brien,in spite of himself, acknowledges that narrative is an inescapable aspectof all biographies. Moreover, Paul Honan has maintained that "goodbiographies ... usually make so much more of the narrator than do goodrealist novels: the biographer as narrator-commenter becomes a chief meansby which the cold retrospective factuality in a Life is relieved" (118).
It is my contention that biography must be considered as a symbioticform, for it necessarily relies on historical investigation for its sourceand accuracy and on narrative for its presentation. It can be argued thatthe degree to which these different elements are foregrounded will affectthe nature of the biography; in other words, an emphasis on facts willmake it more "historical" or an emphasis on interpretation may make itmore "literary." However, this apparent binary opposition itself can beinterpreted as a false dichotomy, and both Hayden White and Paul Ricoeurhave written about the essential similarities between historical andnarrative discourses. Concerning the latter's theory, which haveprofoundly influenced his own, White writes:
For this reason I would argue that biography is an almost emblematicform for the theories of White and Ricoeur, for it embodies the discursivecontinuum that unites, rather than separates, history and literature.
To what degree then can biography be considered an art form? Is itenough to look and sound like a novel or short story to be "art"? Butcannot historical narrative also be considered artistic? (This seems to bea logical extension of the theories of White and Ricoeur.) Here again, Iwould argue that biography is a combination of two different butcomplementary kinds of art. The first I shall call "techne" (after theGreek work for art, craft, and skill) to refer to the necessary attentionto scholarship and accuracy discussed above by O'Brien and Blake. Thisaspect is related to what Paul Honan (d'aprs SusanneLanger) has termed the "hypostatic" function in biography, that is, theneed for specificity by naming personages and events (116). I shall callthe second kind "ars" (after the Latin for method, way, means, and device)to refer to the very construction of the biography, including the need forinterpretation through narrativization. This is in turn related to Honan's(and Langer's) "abstractive plane" by which the personages and eventsnamed are talked about and which permits the assimilation of otherelements into the biography "so long as they are brought interestingly andrealistically to bear on the illumination of the biographee" (116).
This last statement is particularly important, for a biography mustincorporate elements other than names, places, and dates within itsnarrative in order to give a "fully contextualized" (O'Brien 56) versionof the subject's life. Indeed, Edmund Morris has advocated for the use bybiographer's of "more fully developed" arts such as "fiction...paintingand photography and drama and the cinema" (30).(2) Although Morris asserts that biography is"closely allied to portrait photography, in that its basic composition isdetermined by reality"(30), I maintain that there is an importantaffiliation with painting, especially with respect to the work of CarlosRojas, as we shall see. Indeed, many of the writers who discuss "the artof biography" make use of painterly metaphors, not the least of whom isNicolson who frequently refers to biographies as sketches or portraits andindirectly scolds the followers of Strachey for not knowing how to use a"sable brush" in their application of irony (156).
The role of the biographer, then, is equated to that of researcher,novelist, photographer, and painter, but how is this role to berepresented within the biography itself? Morris argues for aheterodiegetic role, which he refers to as "orchestration" (31). In otherwords, "The ideal biographer should be godlike in the Flaubertiansense-apparent everywhere, visible nowhere. Or to compare him once againto the photographer, let him arrange every frame to his satisfaction; oncehe has done so, let him step out of the picture, taking his shadow withhim" (Morris 33). O'Brien would no doubt approve of this. Of course, suchan ideal biographer is not only a practical impossibility, the very notionruns contrary to Blake's insistence on the need for interpretation of thefacts. This interpretive role requires that the biographer have some kindof contact with the subject, and this requires a kind of "psychicimmersion" (Kendall 16) in the material. As Ortega y Gasset wrote inGoethe desde dentro (1932), the biographer must view his subjectfrom inside, with this admonition: "No se trata de ver la vida de Goethecomo Goethe la vea, con su visin subjetiva,sino entrando como bigrafo en el crculomgico de esa existencia para asistir al tremendo acontecimientoobjetivo que fue esa vida y del cual Goethe no era sino uningrediente" (401; Ortega's emphasis). With this in mind, I propose thatthe role of the biographer is analogous to that of Goya in La familiade Carlos IV: present and detached, observing and observed,interpreter and interpreted.
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