Abstract
This chapter reflects on the prevalence of digestion as metaphor in discussions of biography. It argues that the ‘indigestible biography’ is symptomatic, not just of the mal d’archive caused by a surfeit of information, but of the larger difficulty of assimilating life to narrative. The ‘biographical illusion’ (Pierre Bourdieu) that life can be rendered as a story deflects attention from those aspects of lived existence that resist assimilation to narrative, from the repetitive demands of the body to the quotidian round of domestic labour. The tension between narrative arc and animal life leaves its trace in the non-sequiturs, discontinuities and paratactical or additive structures often found in biographical texts. Attention to the quotidian opens a reading of biography that can trouble protagonistic or individualist models of cultural significance. The biographical subject may be ‘a bundle of accidents and incoherence that sits down at breakfast’, in Yeats’s phrase; biography’s attention to metabolisms, both local and general, is an often unrealised source of critical metabiographical insight.
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Notes
- 1.
Hegel, Philosophy of History, 32.
- 2.
James Boswell, Life of Johnson [1791] (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 253.
- 3.
For discussions of the cultural centrality of biography from the late eighteenth century onwards, see Peter France and William St Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Ellis, Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Bernhard Fetz (ed.), Die Biographie: Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009); Wilhelm Hemecker (ed.), Die Biographie. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009); and Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 4.
Carlyle, On Heroes, 153–158.
- 5.
Susan Tridgell, Understanding Our Selves: The Dangerous Art of Biography (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 66–68, 76–82.
- 6.
Boswell, Life of Johnson, 271–337.
- 7.
David E. Nye, The Invented Self. An Anti-Biography, from Documents of Thomas Edison (Odense: Odense University Press, 1983).
- 8.
Eunice Lipton, Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
- 9.
Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985).
- 10.
Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
- 11.
Jill Lepore, ‘Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography’, Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001), 129–144 (129).
- 12.
Sigrid Weigel, ‘Hinterlassenschaften, Archiv, Biographie: Am Beispiel von Susan Taubes’, in Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger (eds.), Spiegel und Maske: Konstruktionen biographischer Wahrheit (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2006), 33–48.
- 13.
Lucasta Miller, ‘Lives and Afterlives: The Brontë Myth Revisited’, Brontë Studies 39:4 (2014), 254–266.
- 14.
Holroyd, Strachey, 407–408.
- 15.
Jason Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 7.
- 16.
Lepore, ‘Historians Who Love Too Much’, 133.
- 17.
Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 4.
- 18.
Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
- 19.
Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (New York: Knopf, 1991).
- 20.
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë [1857] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 246; see Miller, The Brontë Myth, 73.
- 21.
Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997), 359.
- 22.
Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. A Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992), 485–486.
- 23.
Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to his mother, 22.9.1859, in Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe: KSA, vol. 1 (June 1850–September 1864), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), 76–77.
- 24.
Gordon Haight, George Eliot: A Biography [1968] (London: Penguin, 1985), 329. The exact quotation is unreferenced; the main sources referenced for this passage are the journals of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes for 1860.
- 25.
Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber, 1993), 490.
- 26.
Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, 495.
- 27.
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook [1962] (London: Flamingo, 1993), 298.
- 28.
Peter Handke, Wunschloses Unglück. Erzählung [= A Sorrow Beyond Dreams] [1972] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 57. On this text as a feminist biography, see Philipp Weiss, ‘Die Grenzen des biographischen Körpers: Peter Handkes Wunschloses Unglück’, in Die Biographie. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte, ed. Wilhelm Hemecker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 311–363.
- 29.
Nye, The Invented Self, 16–17.
- 30.
Stein, Toklas, 11.
- 31.
Boswell, Life of Johnson, 331.
- 32.
George Eliot, Letters, quoted in Haight, George Eliot, 399.
- 33.
Holroyd, Strachey, 318, 422.
- 34.
Silke-Maria Weineck, ‘Digesting the nineteenth century: Nietzsche and the stomach of modernity’, Romanticism 12:1 (2006), 35–43 (here 42).
- 35.
Holroyd, Strachey, 348.
- 36.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 15 vols, vol. 6, 119.
- 37.
Thomas Carlyle, The Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, ed. Alexander Carlyle [1909] (London: Forgotten Books, 2013), 273.
- 38.
Brenda Maddox, Nora. A Biography of Nora Joyce (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), 77–79.
- 39.
Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 4.
- 40.
Monk, ‘Life Without Theory’, 536.
- 41.
Silke-Maria Weineck’s essay on digestion in Nietzsche discusses Ecce Homo, Thus Spoke Zarathustra andThe Gay Science as well as ‘Use and Disadvantage’.
- 42.
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life’, in Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 60; Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe (hereafter KSA), vol. 1, 248.
- 43.
‘It is not the ferocity of the beast of prey that requires a moral disguise but the herd animal with its profound mediocrity, timidity, and boredom with itself.’ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 295. See also Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003), 86 and Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003), 144.
- 44.
Nietzsche, ‘On the uses’, 62; KSA, vol. 1, 250.
- 45.
‘They develop their taste and tongue as they do so as to employ this spoiled taste as an explanation of why they so resolutely reject all the nourishing artistic food that is offered them.’ Nietzsche, ‘On the uses’, 72; KSA, vol. 1, 264.
- 46.
‘Man is encased in the stench of must and mould; through the antiquarian approach he succeeds in reducing even a more creative disposition, a nobler desire, to an insatiable thirst for novelty, or rather for antiquity and for all and everything; often he sinks so low that in the end he is content to gobble down any food whatever, even the dust of bibliographical minutiae’. Nietzsche, ‘On the uses’, 75; KSA, vol. 1, 268.
- 47.
Nietzsche, ‘On the uses’, 78–79; KSA, vol. 1, 273.
- 48.
Nietzsche, ‘On the uses’, 78, translation modified. Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 1, 272.
- 49.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), §593, quoted in Monk, ‘Life Without Theory’, 40.
- 50.
Woolf, ‘The Art of Biography’, 122.
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Ní Dhúill, C. (2020). Digesting the Material: Narrative’s Efforts to Assimilate Life. In: Metabiography. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8_5
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