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COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
While the practice of biography, the act of representing a life with words, is premised on a belief in the possibility and worth of attempting to know and understand the experiences of others, the question as to how this might best be done remains a cause for serious debate. Through an analysis of two authorized biographies of a single subject, George Orwell, this article will trace the development of two distinct approaches to this methodological challenge.
The first, "externalist" approach--here represented by Bernard Crick's George Orwell: A Life--maintains that biographies and their authors must remain as objective as possible. (1) As such, remembered testimonies are treated as unreliable unless verified by contemporary documentation, and no motivation is extrapolated from action or behavior unless previously acknowledged (and recorded) by the biographical subject. In addition, the externalist biographer is required to suppress his or her personal response to the subject, and resist any temptation to create a unified sense of character which might prejudice the reader's own interpretation of the facts of the life. The second, "empathetic" method--to be represented by Michael Shelden's Orwell: The Authorized Biography--does not advocate an abandonment of the facts, but rather makes a virtue of the author's identification with the subject. (2) In this way, a biographer's sympathy for and affinity with the life he or she is writing is seen as crucial to biographical epistemology; the whole project is an act of sympathetic imagination. In direct contrast to his or her externalist colleague, the empathetic biographer is obliged to employ imagination in order to attribute motives to the subject's actions, thereby creating a novelistic sense of character.
This article will adopt a historical stance in its exploration of the virtues and shortcomings of these two methods. As such, Shelden's more recent work will be interpreted, as it was written, as a response to Crick's earlier effort. In this way, the tendency to portray the empathetic approach in contrast with the externalist one should be understood as a reflection of historical circumstance (i.e., Crick wrote his externalist account first) rather than as a suggestion of subordination. Given that Crick and Shelden perceive (one in the abstract, the other in the particular) their biographical methods as antithetical, I allow each to question the other. When, however, I posit biographical characterization as a third approach to biographical epistemology, I do not intend it as a synthesis of the two, but as something that builds on the foundations of both. Hence, while this third approach is perhaps more aligned to the empathetic method, its emphasis upon the need for factual veracity reveals an obvious debt to externalist practice. In this concluding section, I argue that biographical characterization is produced by the rival demands of fact and fiction placed upon the biographer, who, in attempting accurately to recount the facts of a life lived, necessarily (if inadvertently) also creates something more than a mere reflection of that life--something, in fact, with a narrative life of its own. As such, a biographer's task is to record and interpret facts, to weigh conflicting testimonies, and to incorporate these (empathetically or not) into an imagined story that characterizes the subject's life. Drawing from the narrative theories of Paul Ricoeur and David Carr, I contend that the biographical process of character creation is mimetic of our everyday construction of narrative identity.
This theory of biographical characterization, along with Crick's and Shelden's biographies and my analysis of them, should be read as contributing to an ongoing debate about the role of fact and fiction within biographical epistemology. Virginia Woolf long ago asserted that the need for biographies to tell "true facts" was a defining limitation upon the genre, the determining factor in it remaining a craft rather than attaining the status of art. (3) Others, like Leon Edel and Desmond MacCarthy, have echoed Woolf's notion of the "creative fact" (171) and expressed it axiomatically, as a rule, a guiding principle. For Edel, drawing a distinction between form and content, "a biographer is a storyteller who may not invent his facts but who is allowed to imagine his form," (4) while for MacCarthy--disagreeing with Woolf about the genre's artistic possibilities--"a biographer is an artist under oath," (5) someone free to give imaginative expression to the facts he or she is honor-bound to recount.
Placing less emphasis on the facts and more on the narrative which conveys them, both Ina Schabert and Ira Nadel argue that, by shaping the facts of a life into a life story, a biographer creates a fictional coherence. (6) Schabert contends that, while "single points of evidence" within a biography might be factual, the narrative taken as a whole is fictional "because its coherence is always something which a writer has imposed upon the facts" (7). Similarly, Nadel claims that readers of biography mistake the "artistic ideal of coherence for the historical ideal of objectivity" (156), thereby misinterpreting a literary enterprise as a historical one. Both these arguments, however, are flawed. First, by assuming that the narrative ordering of facts is a distortion of social reality, an imposed fiction, both Schabert and Nadel deny the possibility that this process in fact reflects our lived reality and the meaning we make of that reality as we live it. As with David Carr, I would argue that not only do we, in Western cultures, retrospectively express our experiences (the facts of our lives) narratively, but that we actually experience life this way--in time, through narrative. This is not to suggest that the way a biographer structures the subject's experiences into a narrative will necessarily accurately interpret and record the way the subject experienced them; rather it is to contend that experience itself is not by definition misrepresented by narrative because narrative is how we experience. Second, Nadel's distinction between biography's literary coherence and history's objectivism is spurious because, beyond a bare chronicle of dates, all histories are narratives. As such, histories, like biographies, configure facts into comprehensible stories.
This brief sketch of some of the theoretical issues surrounding biographical uses of fact and fiction maps the epistemological landscape in which my interpretation and my criticism of Crick's and Shelden's biographies are grounded. By limiting the focus of this article to two biographies of the one subject, I hope to elucidate and illustrate the central arguments of the debate with specific, textual examples taken from these important rival approaches to biographical method.
Many writers have tried to stop their biographies from being written. Some, like Henry James, attempted to burn the primary evidence, to cremate the written life before it could be born, while others, like George Orwell, placed their faith in the strictures of law, hoping legally to control access to their personal papers from beyond the grave. (7) Neither method has proven particularly successful. James has been the subject of numerous full-scale biographies, and Orwell's embargo served only to create a subgenre of pseudobiographies--partial biographies masquerading as works of literary criticism and/or personal memoir. Over time, Orwell's attempted ban was thwarted so olden and to such increasingly creative effect that, in 1972, his second wife and literary executor, Sonia Orwell, decided that the best defense of her husband's legacy was to disobey his directive and anoint Bernard Crick as his official biographer. (8)
Unlike most biographies, Crick's life of Orwell is accompanied by a lengthy introductory essay which outlines the author's approach to the genre. This, combined with the transcript of an address he gave at the University of Hawaii in 1987, provides us with a detailed account of his biographical theory, against which we can measure the success of George Orwell: A Life. (9) A political scientist by training, Crick is wary of biography's reliance on remembered testimonies and oral history, claiming that "memory unsupported by documentation is not to be trusted" (Life, 45). (10) In keeping with this skepticism, he makes little demand upon the reader's trust, reluctantly positing his own interpretation of Orwell's character for us to judge. While not seeing himself as a mere chronicler of empirical facts, nor as a behaviorist (Bio, 289), he often appears to be both. "None of us can enter into another person's mind," he writes. "To believe so is fiction. We can only know actual persons by observing their behavior in a variety of different situations through different perspectives. Hence the great emphasis I found myself placing on reporting the views of his contemporaries at unusual length and in their own words, neither synthesizing nor always sensitively resolving them when they conflicted" (Life, 30).
While it is technically true that in George Orwell: A Life, Crick is neither a chronicler (this because of the presence of a narrative) nor a behaviorist (this due to the absence of any attempt to measure or predict behavioral responses to external stimuli), he is, less ambiguously, a biographical positivist, hence, his attempt to limit the narrative to a reporting of the facts, and to represent its subject as an agglomeration of observable actions and behavior. (11) This also accounts (at least in theory) for his disavowal of suppositions regarding Orwell's motivation and intent. In adopting this positivist approach to biography, one that admits to the narrative only that which can be proven (i.e., corroborated), Crick effectively denies the biographical Orwell an interior life, a subjectivity, a character. He does this, not from any ontological, Barthesian conviction about the subject's death or nonexistence, but rather from an epistemological belief that the interior self is unknowable, or, at least, unverifiable. For Crick, only a person's actions can be reliably known; what motivates these actions can only be imagined, and imagination has little place in his positivist brand of biography.
By claiming to be above belief, to be a narration of facts devoid of imagined motivations that require the reader's belief, the subject of a positivist biography is, of necessity, unbelievable. Unlike a work of realist fiction, where a privileged (because imagined) access to motivation and a carefully crafted sense of interiority creates a "believable" character (someone we believe to be like us), a positivist biography creates something more akin to a biographical shadow, a historically accurate outline of a human figure that glides across the same terrain as the life lived but remains internally blank. As the shape and direction of a real shadow is determined by the location of the light source projecting its image, so the appearance of the shadowy figure cast by the facts of a lived life can alter depending on the standpoint of the biographer. Although wedded at the feet to empirical evidence, a biographical shadow remains a distortion of the person it represents (thin and elongated when the facts are too few, bulbous and bloated when they are too plentiful), because the process of researching and writing a biography is unavoidably contingent and selective. Crick tacitly acknowledges this by subtitling Orwell's biography A Life, thus suggesting that another positivist biographer could use the same set of facts to create a slightly different shaped biographical shadow.
Where I have labeled Crick's epistemological approach...
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