Page 312 - Contribution To Phenomenology

BIOGRAPHY AS A CULTURAL DISCIPLINE 305

matic techniques, directs the reader's impressions, images and interpreta-
tion of the subject. Such transformations, caused by the exigencies of lan-
guage and the act of composition, ideally alter the shape but not the
legitimacy of fact. As Desmond MacCarthy's famous dictum puts its, "A
Biographer is an artist under oath." Biography, aesthetically speaking, is
guided by the twin impulses of realism and idealization, although it is
necessarily more conservative than fiction since its task is primarily one
of description and explanation.
Hence, it is important to recognize the interpretive nature of the
enterprise. A biography is a structured narrative that utilizes figurative
language to organize, chronicle and "emplot" the story that constitutes a
life history. This occurs through uniting discrete facts of the life with
certain modes of plot structure so that the parts form a new whole iden-
tified as *story'. Since biography uses figurative language and tropes as a
means for representing or expressing a life, questions can be directed at
the viability, reliability and veracity of these tropes. As such, biography
is not an "innocent" form but a concerted strategy to achieve a particular
end. As these strategies are a product of methodological and philosophi-
cal assumptions, the claim that a life can be captured and represented
in a biography must be scrutinized and circumscribed in light of the
techniques that contribute to its form.
Practicing biographers have been very sensitive to the methodological
problems implicit in it's practice and have been actively engaged in
attempts to formulate a Linnaean classification of biography. Harold
Nicolson, whose The Development of English Biography is probably the
most rigorous attempt to arrive at a definition of "the elastic category"
of biography, classifies biography as either "pure" or "impure." The main
causes that contaminate a biography are "the desire to celebrate the
dead," "the desire to compose the life of an individual as an illustration
of some extraneous theory or conception," and the "undue subjectivity in
the writer."^^ Paul Murray Kendall, who notes that "modern biographies
display an infinity of gradations," proceeds to differentiate among "eight
perceptible types": fi-om "the radical left appears the novel-as-biography,
almost wholly imaginary . . to works of such high specific gravity that
.
they are little more than compilations of source-materials. Hovering above
the center of the scale appears the radiant-plumaged "super-biography,"

^^ Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1968), 9-10.