Page 310 - Contribution To Phenomenology

BIOGRAPHY AS A CULTURAL DISCIPLINE 303

seamless whole"—to present the "fertile fact; the fact that suggests and
engenders/*^^ Put differently, the task is to describe **who" the subject is
rather than simply **what" she was.
If biography is conceived as a search for a historically verifiable truth,
then it is a historiographical problem that typically attempts to recreate
or reconstruct a person in terms of acts and events. The historian qua
historian views the biographical subject as the sum total of her actions
and deeds in the context of her historical situation. If biography is also
seen as an attempt at understanding the biographee's personality, or
"interiority," it becomes an interpretive problem. It will involve adopting
assumptions about how overt behavior is to be understand and explained
in terms of talk about motives, causes, intentions and projects. It becomes
an artistic problem as well to the extent that it is seen as an attempt to
portray creatively the personaUty as an integral unity. Moreover, it will
involve the use of the tropes of metaphor and metonymy and such
notions as proportion and unity. While each task can be seen as
independent of each other, most biographies are a product of all three
tasks in various degrees of attentiveness.
Typically, since there is no direct access to the biographical subject,
the biographer proceeds indirectly. This process can be viewed as a four-
fold.^* First, it would require a fact-finding enterprise that catalogues and
chronicles the major events of the subject through the preparation of a
morphology of that life by delving into the documentary evidence, Uterary
artifacts, and other anecdotal material. Biographical material falls into two
main categories: primary and secondary. Primary materials relate to the
documents that originate during the lifetime of the biographee and are
written by, to, and about him or her. Secondary documents consist of
background materials that help flesh out the context and period of which
the life took place.
Second, it would require an investigation of the psychological make up
of the subject and the articulation of the manner by which the subject
understood and acted in her world. This will often involve having to
navigate elusive labyrinths of personal disguise, by masks and personae.

^^ Virginia Woolf, "The Art of Biography," 171.
^* Cf. Gail Porter Mandell, Life into Art: Conversations with Seven Contem-
porary Biographers (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1991) and The
Craft of Literary Biography, edited by Jeffrey Meyers (New York: Schocken Books,
1985).