Issue No. 594
Culture
Previous issue
Site map
|
|
11 - 17 July 2002 Issue No. 594 Culture |
Current issue Previous issue Site map | |
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Plain Talk
The literary world is suffering from an endemic malaise: biographies. Referring to John Bayley's memoir of his late wife Iris Murdoch, Kathryn Hughes comments, "The book by which Iris Murdoch is in danger of being most remembered is not by her at all." Indeed Murdoch's obituaries by and large discussed Bayley's memoir far more than any of her novels.
It can no longer be denied that these days as much biography is published as fiction -- a consequence of the voyeuristic urge to enter into another person's life, comparing it with one's own. The novel was once sufficient for satisfying this brand of curiosity. Victorian fiction, for example, supplied what Hughes calls "useful life maps". Its characters were as three- dimensional, and the events of their lives as lifelike, as those of present-day biographies. Contemporary fiction, by contrast, fails to perform this function. According to Hughes, indeed, it is hard to get worked up about the fate of anyone who appears in a new novel.
The resurgence of biography -- a straightforward form of documentation -- is in part due to the fact that modern fiction "has invested all its considerable cleverness in trying to convince the reader that the world it describes never existed".
People's lives, presented exactly the way they happened, are seldom interesting. The exotic, the scandalous, the unexpected are among the most essential biographical seasonings. Indeed, to quote Hughes again, "at times it seems as if there is a psychological striptease going on, with the biographer acting as MC." Hence the revelation, for example, that a certain, leading writer or artist had homosexual or lesbian tendencies; or, more simply, that they had an infinite number of lovers.
One question that persistently comes up is how authentic, how true to life, these biographies are. How can the biographer prove the validity of the information he provides? How, in practice, does he or she establish it? In reconstructing an often deceased person's private life, biographers experience a range of difficulties from withheld information, letters and journals to scattered or incoherent evidence. Even where evidence is available and valid, though, biographies will always be beset by doubt.
Unlike scholars, biographers are concerned that their books should read like engaging narratives; so they do not cite their sources every time they provide a piece of information, and there is no telling whether the information is accurate.
One essential trap in which the biographer is inevitably caught is viewing his subject from the perspective of his current preoccupations. Contextual damage always results; and at best the subject ends up being distorted. Something that might have been entirely normal, indeed even glorious in the past, might be rather unacceptable or scandalous at the time of writing. Kipling was an imperialist and a racist, for example; but in context these traits should not, as they do now, undermine his integrity.
Hughes believes that male subjects suffer more from this tendency than their female counterparts. In this feminised age, she insists, a subject who displays pre-1970s masculine behaviour -- she mentions promiscuity, alcoholism and violence -- is quite naturally at a disadvantage. Contextual shifts affect even the perception of beauty, for a woman who might have been remarkably attractive some 150 years ago might appear unattractive now.
Yet there are signs that biographers are changing the way they conceive of their role: no longer "the knower and disposer of someone else's secrets", the biographer is increasingly an interpreter, a subjective fabulator, of a life with which he is familiar and in which his interest is sustained. More thoughtful biographers are facing up to the limitations of their power, some of them even admitting that, in places, they simply do not know what happened. The more gaps that exist in the chronology of the life at hand, consequently, the more truthful the narrative is thought to be. One wonders, nonetheless, if this attitude will satisfy the conventional biography readers, who like to believe that there are places were real life happens to real people.
|
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
