from Victorian Studies Volume 44, Number 3 BOOK FORUMReading The Biographer's Tale
Erin O'Connor
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To say that the most exciting work of literary criticism I have read recently is A. S. Byatt's new novel, The Biographer's Tale (2001), may seem to be a contradiction in terms: novels are not scholarly monographs, novelists are not critics (not, at any rate, in the moment of novel-writing), and the distinction, at least as far as hiring and promotion committees are concerned, must be maintained. But in an era of formal indeterminacy and cross-disciplinarity, such distinctions often feel a bit spurious. In Victorian studies, no one makes the distinction look more so than Byatt, who has done her finest writing about both the Victorian period and professional literary study from within the confines of fiction.
Byatt left her own dissertation unfinished, and she left univer‚sity teaching in 1983. Yet she has continued to be a consummate scholar, a writer of great range and erudition, a Victorianist who does Victorian studies not by writing rarified treatises for tiny audiences of specialists, but by writing intelligent, searching fiction for the general public. What Byatt does so well, in Possession (1990) and elsewhere, is to think about how the desire to study literature is shaped by the academic institutions that support it; about how essentially primal impulses to read, write, and learn are molded into conformity with established professional norms, first by a hyper-systematized graduate school, and then by a merit system that recognizes only a narrowly circumscribed, largely inaccessible kind of writing as properly "scholarly"; and to weave those thoughts into narrative in such a way that the affective dimensions of academic work—the special frustrations and unique rewards of it—shine through as both the greatest justification for, and the greatest argument against, professional literary study.
The Biographer's Tale is the most recent moment in Byatt's ongoing exploration of these issues. An academic quest narrative featuring a diminutive graduate student named Phineas G. Nanson who abandons his poststructuralist dissertation for biography, the novel picks up where Possession left off; indeed, The Biographer's Tale is in many ways an inversion of Byatt's Booker Prize–winning story about Roland Michell, a graduate student whose plodding thesis work takes a career- making turn when he makes a series of unexpected discoveries about the love life of a Victorian poet. Michell's research brings him intellectual joy, true love, and job offers, but Nanson's attempt to write the life of a great biographer stops painfully short of such rewards. He is unable to discover even the most rudimentary information about the biographer whose life story he wants to tell. The few manuscripts and miscellaneous possessions he does find only raise more questions about his subject's intentions and integrity than they answer, and his inability to assess the information he has in hand brings only the eventual, frustrated conclusion that biography, like the rest of academic literary study, is "pointless" (276). Where Possession bills itself as "a romance," then, The Biographer's Tale is an academic anti-romance: far from a fantasy of scholarly wish fulfillment, Byatt's latest novel is a chronicle of thwarted research, thwarted dreams, and thwarted career.
Shortly after The Biographer's Tale appeared, Byatt spoke of biography as a form of "possession," explaining her reluctance to write one as a reluctance to be taken over by her subject matter: "I do not wish to spend most of my life on somebody else's life—not one other person's life" ("Primitive Fear of Possession" 16). But as her publication of a novel about writing biography might suggest, Byatt's relationship to the genre is as complex as her relationship to the word possession itself. If one aspect of biographical "possession" is the tendency of the subject to overtake the biographer, another is the biographer's tendency to appropriate his subject. Nanson quickly learns that he must manipulate his material in order to make sense of it; he also learns that his subject was himself a master manipulator, one whose scattered remaining papers show a disturbing willingness to slide out of biography and into fiction.
Still another aspect of "biographical possession" is the question of what kinds of knowledge and methodological skills literary scholars ought to possess, a question The Biographer's Tale pursues at the veiled level of allusion. Though The Biographer's Tale does not rehearse the history of biography, the novel nonetheless knows, or possesses, a great deal of that history. In shape and substance, the whole shadows A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo (1934), an autobiography about writing the biography of the artist, author, failed priest, and accomplished paranoiac Frederick Rolfe. The novel is also rich in references to biographical history. The imaginary biography that inspires Nanson to become the biographer's biographer, for instance, evokes Richard Ellmann and Leon Edel in telling ways: it is written during the 1950s, when Ellmann and Edel both came on the scene, and its author delivers a talk called "The Art of Biography" in 1959, the year of Ellmann's James Joyce and Edel's passionately argued Literary Biography.
As a novel haunted by references to the history of biography—references only available to a reader already in possession of that history—The Biographer's Tale might be said to possess a "biographical unconscious," one whose contents are perhaps all the more meaningful for their being largely unavailable, repressed. Indeed, one of the novel's most interesting suggestions is that literary studies has lost its way because it has lost biography, that the modern English department is absolutely divorced from the very thing that gives it meaning: intent, careful, patient, creative study of writers' lives; study that reaches beyond the flat discursive realm of "textuality" to the people who produced the texts upon which literary critics expend their energy. Such a suggestion will not appeal to readers who do not agree that literary studies as it is presently practiced leaves anything to be desired, but for those who, like Byatt, detect a "fatal family likeness" in the work we have been turning out in recent years, the suggestion that the dispossession of English may have a great deal to do with its disowning of the author is provocative indeed (4).
Byatt's novel caught me at the perfect moment. I was teaching a graduate course on modernism's Victorian roots in which I made a point of providing substantial information about authors' lives. We began with Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918), and spent a class session discussing the form of Strachey's work, its tone, its investment in a very Victorian style of narration, its disinvestment in the Victorians themselves. Then we stepped back in time, and began to read Victorians writing their way—confusedly, sometimes playfully, often angrily—toward the stylistic freeing we now see as quintessentially "modernist." Each week I opened discussion with a lecture on the featured author's life and on the particular moment in which the assigned work appeared, and each week I asked my students to think about the sorts of questions that fell—unfortunately, I believe—by the wayside long ago: Why do you think Charles Dickens chose to write in such murky, convoluted prose in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65)? Do you think it's the prose of a man who has had it with the novel? Or with his audience? What do you think George Eliot was trying to do with Daniel Deronda (1876)? Why do you think Charlotte Brontë chose to rehearse—and rewrite—her relationship with her Belgian tutor in Villette (1853)? They were questions about authorial intentions and attitudes, questions that are technically "off limits" in the theoretically savvy landscape of contemporary literary criticism. That's exactly why I asked them. I wanted to encourage my students to approach the material with something besides sterilized and overused critical paradigms; I wanted to teach them to register the acutely personal nature of writing for each of the authors we studied, and to begin to factor that awareness into their understanding of what an individual work means, or—to use language that is more acceptable right now—of what cultural and ideological work literature does. The result was mass confu‚sion and resistance. Why did I insist on giving so much "biographical background," my students wanted to know? Where was the "critical framework"? Suddenly I was living the flip side of Byatt's facetious plot, trying to sell biography to students sold on theory.
There was a definite irony to this. Practicing poststructuralists—as many of us are—do not trust "facts," which we understand as ideological constructs that naturalize uneven social relations. And as a consequence we tend to discount anything that smacks of a truth claim—one obvious consequence of which is that biographical information (facts), not to mention biography proper (compilations of facts), must be held in stark, unrelenting suspicion by self-respecting literary critics. But biography hardly has a simplistic relation to facts; indeed, the modern history and theory of biography are built on an appreciation for the theoretical complexities of making narratives out of facts, which are never simple or straightforward, and which are at once reassuringly solid and frustratingly intractable.
That history and theory are distinctly Victorian, and they origi‚nate during the 1830s with Thomas Carlyle, who may be credited with inaugurating a critical understanding of biography as an aesthetic of the fact. The biographer of Friedrich Schiller, Oliver Cromwell, John Sterling, and Frederick the Great, Carlyle saw biography as the art of arts: "There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man" ("Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott" 297). He also saw this art of arts as the art of arranging and interpreting facts. Facts themselves are fairly inert: "What are your historical Facts; still more your biographical? Wilt thou know a Man, above all a Mankind, by stringing together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts?" (qtd. in Nadel 5). But facts are nonetheless the source of enormous imaginative vitality: "let anyone bethink him how impressive the smallest historical fact may become, as contrasted with the grandest fictitious event; what an incalculable force lies for us in this consideration: The Thing which I here hold imaged in my mind did actually occur; was, in very truth, an element in the system of the All, whereof I too form part; had therefore, and has, through all time, an authentic being; is not a dream, but a reality!" ("Biography" 257).
For Carlyle, the beauty of biography lies in its possession of real referents. Likewise for Robert Louis Stevenson, who extolled the formal challenges of telling factual stories:
I like biography far better than fiction myself: fiction is too free. In biography you have your little handful of facts, little bits of a puzzle, and you sit and think, and fit 'em together this way and that, and get up and throw 'em down, and say damn, and go out for a walk. And it's really soothing; and when done, gives an idea of finish to the writer that is very peaceful. Of course it's not really so finished as quite a rotten novel; it always has and always must have the incurable illogicalities of life about it. [. . .] Still, that's where the fun comes in. (qtd. in Nadel 11)
A few decades later, Virginia Woolf coined the term "creative fact" to express the methodological essence of biography: "By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the greatest. [. . .] He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders" (197). Victorian and modern thinking about biography is not blind to the difficulty of working with and reading about facts; that difficulty is what makes the genre valuable to writers and readers alike.
But we other Victorians are not so interested in the poetics of the fact, and my students were right to wonder what knowing about Dickens's love of walking and Brontë's fatal attraction to her married tutor would add to their methodological dossiers. Biography and theory are at opposite ends of the literary critical spectrum, the one occupying the contemptible status of filler ("background"), the other standing as the support structure without which literary analysis cannot proceed ("frame‚work" or "apparatus"). Antipathy to the genre has always been strong—Rudyard Kipling called biography the "Higher Cannibalism" (qtd. in Ricketts xi), Vladimir Nabokov spoke of it as "psycho-plagiarism" (qtd. in Holroyd 11), James Joyce of the "biografiend" (55)—and in scholarly circles, literary biography's emphasis on the writer's relationship to his work has consistently run counter to major critical ideas. So antithetical are biography's premises to those of the intentional fallacy, the death of the author, and the rise of poststructuralist skepticism—not just toward facts, but toward the idea of the coherent individual—that biography has become a sign of theoretical inadequacy.
Today, biography reveals an ideologically suspect unwillingness to relinquish the problematic fantasy of stable subjects with knowable, essentially linear lives for a more sophisticated if less comforting concept of the subject as dispersed, multiple, more transcoded than essential, more other than itself. The apparent conceptual poverty of a genre built on the premise that "lives" can be known has meant that biography has neither a criticism nor a following in academic circles. There is no real, shared sense that biographical information might be essential to any responsible critical framework, nor that biography might itself be a viable critical framework in its own right. At best, biographies are regarded as useful condensations of primary source material—something to skim if you need some quick and dirty background. We are very far from considering them to be first-rate works of scholarship, further still from seeing them as art, although biographers themselves have for decades clamored loudly for both.
So I can't really blame my students, for whom the twin pressures to master "literary theory" and to reject so-called "unsophisticated" or "atheoretical" approaches are intense. But I can't help wondering: What does it say about our profession that we are training the next generation of literary scholars not to be concerned with writers' lives? That we are training them, in fact, to be repelled by them? Our theories, our scholar‚ship, and our pedagogy all send the message that authors—their private and professional histories, their beliefs and habits, their aesthetic and political intentions—are all but inessential to "textual" analysis. We have become a strangely dehumanized humanities. This is one of the many "facts" The Biographer's Tale possesses.
The Biographer's Tale is not itself an argument for biography. But in casting biography as a potential antidote to the "fatal family likeness" plaguing contemporary literary criticism, Byatt nonetheless asks us to think harder—and better—about biography than we have yet done. The Biographer's Tale is a literary critique of literary criticism, and as such it poses a distinctly academic challenge: to work out why biography has such a low intellectual status, to ask what that says about the profession's values, to calculate what is lost when the idea of the "literary life"—for which biography is a massive metonymy—matters so little, and to imagine what we might gain by welcoming it into our research, writing, and teaching.
So what would a more biography-friendly profession look like? Most basically, it would admit biography as a valid critical form and as a viable subject of study. It would foster a pedagogy committed to training graduate students to be biographers as well as theorists. And it would foster a theoretically astute criticism of biography, one capable of sorting out its mixed generic affiliations, its varied cultural work, its historical significance, and its shifting aesthetic and political goals. Such a criticism would be closely tied to Victorian studies. Some of the finest twentieth- century literary biographies have centered on nineteenth-century writers (Gordon Haight's George Eliot [1968], Edel's Henry James [1977], Ellmann's Oscar Wilde [1987]). And some of the most influential nineteenth-century writers were also biographers, among them Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Henry Lewes, and Edmund Gosse, while others were subjects of landmark works in the history of biography (Scott, Brontë, Carlyle). Looked at this way, biography has as much to offer Victorian studies as Victorian studies has to offer it. It could bring Victorian biography—and by extension the neglected field of Victorian nonfiction prose—back into focus. It could necessitate revisionary thinking about related genres—elegy, memorial photography, hagiography, portraiture, and especially the novel, which developed alongside biography and which, as we have seen, functioned as something of a foil for biography's definition. More importantly, biography offers us a chance to renew our commitment to the humanism that ostensibly defines the humanities.
A fundamental premise of biography is that vital connections between human beings can be formed across time and space: "Biography is essentially social," Ellmann observed (2). Biography is also historical: The notion of life-writing as a vehicle of a new, specifically sociable style of imagining began to be discussed during the late decades of the nineteenth century. Robert Goodbrand, writing for the Contemporary Review in 1879, noted that the "modern attainment" of biography is inseparable from that other "modern attainment," the "passionate interest in the individual" that enables people for the first time in history to "look at their fellow-men with an interest that terminates simply in himself" (20). Half a century later Woolf echoed him: "Interest in our selves and in other people's selves is a late development of the human mind. Not until the eighteenth century did curiosity express itself in writing the lives of private people. Only in the nineteenth century was biography fully grown and hugely prolific" (187). As a genre that constituted itself as an agent of a new and necessary form of curiosity—one, I would venture, that had much to do with the blank anonymity and alienation of modern, urban life—biography has much to teach us on both historical and methodological fronts.
To see biography as a genre that enabled a historically new kind of attention a century ago is to begin to be able to see the particular inattentiveness of a criticism that balks at biography. For it's not that the style of attention biography enables has died out—biography remains the one genre of humanist scholarship that actually commands a wide audience—but that this style of attention has been intellectually invali‚dated by a criticism increasingly unwilling to credit methodologies more aligned with "conservative" and "ideologically suspect" humanist prerogatives than with "radical" and "transgressive" poststructuralist ones. So it is that we write biography—the sign of humanist scholarly endeavor—out of our curricula, our scholarship, and our reading. And so it is that we sacrifice a kind of attention, a particular form of imagining, to a set of fashionable theoretical premises whose costs we have yet to assess. In its purest sense, literary biography is the palpable, put-together evidence of one writer's attempt to research and question and imagine his or her way into the mind of another writer. Reading biography allows us to witness that attempt, to experience it vicariously, and even to launch an attempt of one's own. It is quite something to be in the presence of a sustained scholarly effort to understand another human being. No matter that we can never really imagine our way into another's world, or life, or work. What's important is that we try.
University of Pennsylvania
WORKS CITED
Byatt, A. S. The Biographer's Tale. New York: Knopf, 2001._____. Possession: A Romance. New York: Vintage, 1990.
_____. "Primitive Fear of Possession." Independent 2 July 2000: 16.
Carlyle, Thomas. "Biography." Fraser's Magazine 5 (1832): 253–60.
_____. "Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott." Westminster Review 6 (1838): 293–345.
Ellmann, Richard. "Literary Biography." Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. 1–16.
Goodbrand, Robert. "A Suggestion for a New Kind of Biography." The Contemporary Review (1879): 20–28.
Holroyd, Michael. "The Case Against Biography." The Threepenny Review 79 (Fall 1999): 11.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939.
Nadel, Ira Bruce. Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form. London: Macmillan, 1984.
Ricketts, Harry. Rudyard Kipling: A Life. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999.
Woolf, Virginia. "The Art of Biography." The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942. 187–97.
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