Metabiography

Reflecting on Biography

Caitríona Ní Dhúill

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030346621
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030346638
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

- Argues for a new approach to biography: not primarily as a source of knowledge about past lives, but as a resource for thinking through and beyond the very idea of life's narratability 

- Covers a variety of texts from the eighteenth century to the present day

- Uncovers the prehistory of the burgeoning field of enquiry now known as metabiography  

© The Author(s) 2020

C. Ní DhúillMetabiographyPalgrave Studies in Life Writinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introducing Metabiography

Caitríona Ní Dhúill¹

(1)

University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

Caitríona Ní Dhúill

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

To make a biography is to claim equality with its subject, wrote the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1926, and the disapproval in his tone was palpable. ‘Some people have approached me wishing to write my biography’, he noted: ‘What a strange endeavour! One can imagine that they have not grasped what is at stake. […] The anecdotes—the places I’ve stayed—the encounters—the influences. Inability to capture the purely intellectual adventure.’¹ As so often in the writings of literary authors—Oscar Wilde would cast the biographer in the role of Judas among disciples²—the biographer figures in Hofmannsthal’s remarks as a prosaic chronicler who, plodding conscientiously through the factual details of the poet’s life, would inevitably miss its point.

Yet this was only part of the story; some years earlier, Hofmannsthal had written that ‘everyone writes his own biography; to be an artist is to understand this and to publish it in abridged form’.³ Here, collapsing biography into autobiography (as was still common at the time), he echoed Goethe’s notion of the literary work forming ‘fragments of a great confession’, a notion that still has the power, over two centuries after Goethe , to embarrass and provoke the anti-authorialist, sceptical conventions of an academic literary criticism that by and large continues to prefer its authors dead and its works of art autonomous. Hofmannsthal’s inconsistency on the topic of biography is unexceptional. It is a genre and practice that has called forth a dizzying array of incompatible viewpoints. These are the subjects of this book.

Some of the issues Hofmannsthal touches on—biography’s reliance on presumption, its tendency through the weight of factual minutiae to lose sight of the bigger picture, its inevitable failure to access the subject’s inner life—are still hotly debated in discussions of the genre today. Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography explores the peculiar tension between these often justified criticisms of biography and the tenacious fascination exerted by the genre’s project of capturing life in writing. What I aim to provide in the following chapters is, first, an overview of the key issues in debates on biography—primarily in English and German, with occasional forays into French and Scandinavian perspectives—from the late eighteenth century to the present day. The book draws together the main strands of these debates and arguments, consulting a deliberately eclectic range of sources that includes biographies, biographical novels, biographical and anti-biographical studies, philosophical essays, and miscellaneous writings by key figures in the history of modern literature, alongside the wider critical literature that has grown up around these figures and their works. Second, Metabiography argues that the key term of its title, metabiography, is a belated but helpful addition to longer standing debates in literary and historical studies concerning metafiction and metahistory . I explain why biography is late to the ‘meta’ game, investigate the methods and findings of the small number of studies that are self-designated metabiographies, open these up to a wider range of materials, and account for the differences between understandings of the term in English and German.

Willed eclecticism—the decision to range widely across text-types and historical periods and to insist on a dialogue between anglophone materials and sources from other European, particularly Germanophone contexts—is a committed methodological choice in this book. It requires me to guard vigilantly against any temptation to slip into a cultural essentialism that would claim that biography is written or read one way in one cultural context and another way in another cultural context. Any such claim or assumption quickly dissolves when confronted with the sheer diversity of biographical practice and reflection on biography in any cultural context. The same goes, more or less, for questions of historical periodisation. Several shifts in biographical convention can be observed in the period from the mid-eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, with a noticeable upwelling of reflection on biography in the early decades of the twentieth century. My focus is less on distinguishing between these historical periods than on enabling readers of biography to make connections across time. The contingencies of my own disciplinary formation and linguistic skill-set have played a part in the selection of the materials and the shaping of the project; and with such a wide-ranging topic as biography—a cultural practice that is as old as, if not older than, human literacy—it is necessary to set limits, acknowledging that these are to a certain extent arbitrary. While the focus is on modern biography in Western Europe and the English-speaking world, with particular emphases in the periods of literary modernism and the late twentieth century, the insights arrived at will be productive for readers and researchers conversant with literatures and biographical materials from languages and periods other than those referenced here. At precisely the moment when the very notion of a national literature, and a national philology as a discrete discipline arising out of it, is rightly coming under immense pressure as national boundaries themselves become contested and precarious zones in an era of global interconnectedness and disruption, the insights and methods of alternative ways of framing literary and cultural study—through concepts such as world literature and transnational or transcultural literature—require to be acknowledged. Metabiography does not yet speak in the vocabulary of ‘transnational’ or ‘transcultural’ biography, but begins to formulate some of the questions such an endeavour might pursue. The question of how to negotiate the risks of a difference-flattening universalism that is ill equipped to deal with specificities, versus the arguably greater risks of overly hypostatising claims about, say, the ‘Germanness’ or ‘Englishness’ of particular approaches, is the knife-edge on which adequate recognition of difference seeks a precarious balance.

Confronting these dilemmas, my preference is to dial down the volume on the question of cultural difference (which is often a disguised preoccupation with the chimaera of cultural ‘identity’) and to listen, instead, to what each text, each biography, each biographical novel, and each set of reflections on biographical issues has to say about the larger questions that draw us to biography in the first place: questions about relationships between life and writing, between self and other, between individual lives and collective histories. This, arguably, is one of the enduring strengths of biography; as Liz Stanley has argued, biography, like autobiography , ‘stops in their dubious tracks “women this” and “women that” categorical statements’, pointing to ‘the residue left over after all structural explanations have been exhausted’.⁴ Stanley’s concern was primarily with gender difference, as it intersected with differences of class; but something similar holds for how we might most productively approach questions of cultural difference in biography.

A culturally varied—for which read, not solely Anglophone—account of the debates and arguments that have developed around biography in the modern period, then, is one of the main contributions this book seeks to make. This account is offered as part of the larger attempt to clarify the contours of metabiography as both method and stance. Chapter 2, ‘Approaching the Master’, charts the recent rise of the term metabiography, referring to notable examples of studies that are self-designated metabiographies, examining their methods and claims, and comparing them to each other. I discuss the relationship between metabiography and the more established terms metafiction and metahistory , noting that the long-standing conception of biography as a hybrid genre that shares characteristics with both fiction and historiography can be replicated on the meta-level to some extent. Metabiography—a fuller definition will follow in the next chapter—takes a step back from biography, seeking to establish a level of reflection, distance, irony , and self-consciousness with regard to the claims, assumptions, and conventions of biography, while in turn galvanising and transforming biographical practice. Furthermore—and crucial to the innovation of this book vis-à-vis previous metabiographical studies—metabiography is a way of reading biography. Much as Paul de Man has proposed that the autobiographical should be viewed less as a genre than as ‘a figure of reading or of understanding’,⁵ I argue here that metabiography allows readings that can unsettle, perplex, and ultimately enrich approaches to biographical texts.

Having set the parameters for the discussion of metabiography in Chap. 2, I turn in Chap. 3, ‘Reading the Hero’, to one of the more troublesome legacies of the biographical tradition: heroic discourse and the protagonistic narrative of the ‘Great Man’ . Focussing on Thomas Carlyle and his less well-known successors in German neo-Romanticism (chiefly Ernst Bertram , and more generally the writers in the orbit of the poet Stefan George ), I address biographical practice in its most assertively pre- or anti-modernist forms—which are also its most trenchantly masculinist. This enables me to retrace and reframe the familiar narrative around Bloomsbury modernism’s re-invention of biography. Most Anglophone studies of biography incorporate the Bloomsbury narrative, according to which Lytton Strachey , Virginia Woolf , and their contemporaries enacted a decisive break with Victorian positivism and re-invented biography along impressionistic lines. There is much that holds good in this account, and I will refer to it frequently in my discussion; but what is too often missing from it is an acknowledgement of contemporaneous developments in other languages and cultures, as well as a sufficient acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of biographical practice in the pre-modernist period. The fact-ridden, eulogistic Victorian biography derided by the Bloomsbury modernists was to some extent their own straw man; when we look closer at the Great Man model of Carlylean biography, seeking, as I do in Chap. 3, to read it metabiographically, it begins to appear more complex and capacious than at first sight. Seeking in Carlyle a genealogy for the strikingly anti-modern approaches to biography practised by the Stefan George circle writers, and showing in detail how these play out in Ernst Bertram’s book on Friedrich Nietzsche, I advance an alternative take on developments in biography in the period from roughly 1830 to 1930. This allows me to relativise some of the claims that have been made by and about Bloomsbury and to offer a richer contextualisation of biographical innovation in the early decades of the twentieth century. The undeniable masculinism of the heroic biographical tradition, confronted head-on in Chap. 2, sets the scene for a gender-theoretical appraisal of the genre and for the discussion of feminist biography in my final chapter.

Chapter 4, ‘Rethinking the Protagonist’, picks up the t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introducing Metabiography
• 2. Approaching the Master: Gender, Genre, and Biographical Tradition
• 3. Reading the Hero: Biography and Self-Transformation from Carlyle’s On Heroes to Bertram’s Nietzsche
• 4. Rethinking the Protagonist: Subaltern Narrators and Biographical Fictions
• 5. Digesting the Material: Narrative’s Efforts to Assimilate Life
• 6. Medial Envy: Image-Text Relations in Biography
• 7. Inscribing Absence: Missed Targets and Missing Subjects in Anti- and Pseudobiography
• 8. Gendered Narratives: ‘She’, ‘He’, and Their Discontents in Biography
• Back Matter