Page 314 - Contribution To Phenomenology

BIOGRAPHY AS A CULTURAL DISCIPLINE 307

uses it to explain the subject's various theoretical inquiries and intellectual
development. As such, it is an attempt to unite the "Life and Thought"
of the subject into a coherent integral whole. The second form is also
guided by the need for synthesis or coherence. It, however, stresses the
strong traits of character, or dispositions, and seeks to demonstrate how
they harmonize into a whole, or why they clash. It frequently involves a
novelistic sketch of the subject doing what the subject essentially did. This
is biography as personality portraiture.
The other two forms attempt to exhibit the spectrum of a life through
the prism of a part; that is, such biographies are synecdochical rather
than synthetic. The third form, favored by psychobiographers, attempt to
represent the subject as essentially some deed, event, or crisis, that
provides the key to understanding the life; i.e., the establishment of what
Edel calls the "life-myth," or pivotal episode that structures the bio-
graphee's often implicit sense of identity. Sartre, for example, in his
biography of Jean Genet, locates this mythical key in a boyhood episode
of Genet in which the child was labeUed a thief. For Sartre, thiefhood
became a sort of triumph that Genet incorporated as his identity, which
he proceeded to champion and cherish. By construing Genet as transfixed
by this childhood memory, in which a child is extinguished and a thug
rises from its ashes, Sartre portrays Genet as a dead man suitable for
biographical framing. (Note, although I have used Sartre's biography as
an instance of this form of writing biography, it can be argued, per-
suasively I believe, that Sartre's other philosophical commitments prevent
him from succumbing to this essentialist assumption.)
The fourth form, which appears to be in decline, attempts to charac-
terize the subject as a representative of an age, or some ideal. The
subject is presented as a symbol, or an embodiment of something larger,
as vestige of the past, a symptom of the present or a harbinger of the
future or, personified as Liberty, Wisdom or Justice. The attempt here
is to present the subject of this sort of biographical portraiture within a
panoramic painting.
The demand to deliver a comprehensive account of the biographee
that collaborates and confirms the thesis of the text that the biographer
is offering will invariably emphasize closure and progress towards
individuality, rather than openness, discontinuity and ambiguity. Hence, the
temptation to claim that the biographee has been discovered in her
essence and hence authorize the interpretation of the life. Resisting the
essentialist temptation, however, does not vitiate the biographical