Page 316 - Contribution To Phenomenology

BIOGRAPHY AS A CULTURAL DISCIPLINE 309

pictures, both still and moving, a thousand scenes."^ Because biographies
always exceed the boundaries of the purely factual, by making inferences
and positing connections between diverse events in the individual's life,
they are always approximations and provisional and hence subject to
revision. The implicit monistic impulse to capture the life as it really was
must thus be tempered. Objectivity is not necessarily compromised, but
must be pursued by a clear recognition that interpretive techniques which
have the capacity to enlighten and broaden our understanding of an
individual life can affect, compromise or even distort the veracity of the
portrait.

II. The Relevance of Biography as a Cultural Phenomenon

Opinion regarding the practical value of biography has been mixed. Its
detractors argue that the practice is simply an occasion for pernicious
vilification, which may explain the strong antipathetic reaction towards
biographies as gossipy, intrusive, prying and predatory. Biography has
been called "a disease of English literature" (George EUot); practicing
biographers are disparaged as "psycho-plagiarists" (Nabokov) and as
"always superfluous" and "usuaUy in bad taste" (Auden). Nevertheless, in
the main, biographies are lauded for their salubrious, even therapeutic,
qualities. Samuel Johnson was voicing a common view when he effused:

no species of writing seems more worthy of culmination than biography,
since none can be more delightful, none can be more certainly enchain
the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to
every diversity of condition.^

Johnson's laudatory endorsement of the genre is charming but beguiling
since it portrays biography as a pleasant diversion and, assumes, rather
than spells out its theoretical motivations and practical aims. Hence it is
worth rehearsing some of its theoretical and cultural consequences. The
psychologist Gordon Allport offers the following extensive, but by no
means comprehensive, list of purposes for the practice:

" Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York, 1969), vii.
" Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Brady and W.
K. Wimsett, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 182.