Art and Artifice in Biography

Abstract

Biography is quite properly regarded as grounded in historiography. Its business, so convention has it, deals with documented, verifiable facts and with deploying them to reconstruct a life story in clear, unembellished language. But historiography, like history itself, moves on and carries biography with it. Modern biographers continue to engage with well-worn arguments about the nature of their genre but, more significantly, following the historians’ lead, they have become increasingly alert to the uncertain status of the stories they tell, the instabilities of ‘facts’ as their raw material, and the idiosyncrasies of the language they use. Biographical writing throws such issues into relief more prominently than writing fiction or writing history not least because its poetics — the generic principles that govern its form and procedures — shares features with both. In what follows, the opening section revisits the basic issues of genre as the context for the subsequent discussion of the three fundamental components of biographical writing: story-making, the role of facts, and the language in which it is cast. This discussion leads to a brief conclusion about the relationship between ‘Lives’ and lives, finding that biography is uniquely well placed to elucidate for readers the primacy of the narrative imagination both in life and literature.

Biography is an ancient literary genre. First of all — chronologically and logically — it is a part of historiography.

(R. Wellek & A. Warren, Theory of Literature, 1949)¹

In the family of literature, biography seems to be the product of a strange coupling between old-fashioned history and the traditional novel.

(Michael Holroyd, ‘What Justifies Biography?’ 2003)²