Understanding Our Selves: The Dangerous Art of Biography

By Susan Tridgell, Bern: Peter Lang, 2004, 234 pages, paperback, SFR67.00. Reviewed by James Franklin in the November 2005 issue.

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In the latest Weird Science research, thirsty rhesus macaque monkeys were found to prefer looking at pictures of celebrity monkeys to drinking cherry-flavoured water. It's a primate thing, the fascination with what interesting conspecifics are doing, and there is no point in resisting it. At a more elevated level, 'the proper study of mankind is man', and for all the promises of general knowledge of humankind in psychology and, in a different way, novels, generality has to be founded in and checked against the stories of particular lives -- biographies.

The reading public agrees. Biographies outsell novels in English-speaking countries. But the literary criticism industry has by and large considered biographies unworthy of its attention (payback, possibly, if there is anything in the suggestion of Jürgen Schlaeger that the popularity of biography is a reaction to the strength of abstract and dehumanised literary theory). Tridgell's book is a powerfully argued and wide-ranging examination of the flak that the art of biography has received from literary critics and others. The abuse -- from romantics, anti-romantics, Foucaultians, feminists and so on -- is set out logically, given enough rope to hang itself, and seen off the stage in masterly fashion. Tridgell's vindication of biography as capable of delivering important truths about humans (not necessarily all the important truths, but many) is completely convincing.

What about the necessary selectivity in a biography? Is it untruthful to give little attention to some aspects of subjects' lives such as their illnesses? Tridgell considers the treatment of Coleridge's serious opium-induced constipation in several of his biographies. One makes light of his 'intestinal misfortunes which need form no part of this record', while another quotes his letters recording his agonies, treatments and fears of imminent death. As Tridgell says, there is right and wrong here: illness was a significant part of Coleridge's life, so putting it in gives a true picture, leaving it out a false one. The same goes for allegations that biography necessarily falsifies by putting its subject at centre stage. But a life is lived to itself as at the centre of things, and it is not a falsification to tell it that way (Catherine Peters is quoted, 'Even the Agneses and Dorotheas who lead a pale, shadowy existence of support and self-sacrifice on the fringes of solid Victorian Lives of Great Men ... had, one hopes, a firm sense of their own centrality'.) And does writing a life as a narrative with a beginning, middle and end impose a false structure on the messy heap of a real life's events? Not necessarily, since one lives one's own life with plans, memories and an estimate of what the obituaries ought to say. The Church decree of 1215 that all adults in Europe should confess their sins at least once a year made structured autobiography compulsory, and we have not lost the knack of it since.

Tridgell is especially valuable on the role of sympathy in biography and its pitfalls. Given that real modern biography is a record of the inner life at least as much as of external doings (contrary to the robust 1911 view of Sidney Lee that 'Character which does not translate itself into exploit is for the biographer a mere phantasm'), the biographer must somehow imitate the thinking of the subject and convey the results to the reader. Some degree of sympathy -- on the part of both biographer and reader -- is crucial to the act of understanding how the subject thought and felt. A careful chapter on biographies of Nazis exposes the problem -- if we see things from the point of view of the subject, do we find ourselves excusing the inexcusable and obscuring the point of view of the subject's victims? Gitta Sereny's biography of Albert Speer, for example, includes some questionable pages that evoke sympathy for the aged Speer isolated from his family. Tridgell argues that the danger is real, but not insurmountable, since we can keep separate the questions of 'what it was like' for Speer and what it was like for his victims. She also contrasts the case of Speer with Sereny's biography of the much more monstrous Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, whose twisted psychology is conveyed through his own words in ways that demand disgust instead of sympathy.

Can the biographer know a subject better than he knew himself? There may be something ridiculous in the legendary footnote added by an editor to Goethe's ecstatic declaration, 'With her, for the first time in my life; I really fell in love!': 'Here Goethe was in error', but it is possible for a subject to forget or misremember matters a biographer knows (not to mention the biographer knowing the thoughts of others of which the subject was unaware). More interesting is the matter of moral accountability, which Tridgell takes very seriously following Ricoeur, Taylor and MacIntyre. Surely Hitler would have been incapable of reading a morally serious biography of himself that spoke the truth about his criminality, and a biographer of any subject even in the normal range of moral self-deception needs some objectivity and depth to his moral judgement. A close examination of Bertrand Russell biographer Ray Monk's castigation of Russell for his treatment of his granddaughters shows how there can be truth and falsity in a biographer's moral evaluation of a subject.

With an eye to the concessions that need to be made to the limitations of biography, Tridgell's book nevertheless defends with great success the possibilities of biography as a route to the truth about human beings. It will be an essential resource for the literary discussion of biography, which is surely due for the renaissance that biographies themselves have achieved.

Citation

• James Franklin. 'Review: Understanding Our Selves: The Dangerous Art of Biography by Susan Tridgell' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), November 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 30 July 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• Modern Western biography has become one of the most popular and most controversial forms of literature. Critics have attacked its tendency to rely on a strong narrative drive, its focus on a single person's life and its tendency to delve ever more deeply into that person's inner, private experience, though these tendencies seem to have only increased biography's popularity. To date, however, biography has been a rarely studied literary form. Little serious attention has been given to the light biographies can shed on philosophical problems, such as the intertwining of knowledge and power, or the ways in which we can understand lives, or terms like 'the self'. Should selves be seen as relational or as autonomous? What of the 'lies and silences' of biographies, the ways in which embodiment can be ignored? A study of these problems allows engagement with a range of philosophers and literary theorists, including Roland Barthes, Lorraine Code, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Ray Monk, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor. Biography can be a dangerous art, claiming to know 'just how you feel'. This book explores the double-edged nature of biography, looking at what it reveals about both narratives and selves.

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