Abstract
This chapter explores the biographical scepticism and anti-biographical sentiment that have shadowed the genre of biography throughout its recent history. The literary-critical perspectives of New Criticism and anti-authorialism cautioned against the assumption that biographies can unlock the meaning of texts or artworks. The chapter relates these familiar arguments to more recent experiments in anti-biography: a study of Ingeborg Bachmann, whose author, Sigrid Weigel, describes biography as ‘anathema’, is read alongside David Nye’s ‘anti-biography’ on Thomas Edison. Refusing to satisfy curiosity about what their subjects ‘were like’, these studies seek to expand the repertoire of questions posed to historical documents and literary texts, and to achieve critical distance from the projections of biographical desire. Closing with a coda on Ingmar Bergman’s pseudobiographical comedy All These Women, the chapter concludes that anti-biographical arguments and pseudobiographical experiments combine in the late twentieth century to form a vital critical strand within metabiographical discourse.
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Notes
- 1.
Waugh, Metafiction, 18.
- 2.
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Biographical Illusion’ [1986], in Biography in Theory, ed. Hemecker and Saunders, 210–216.
- 3.
Bourdieu, ‘Biographical Illusion’, 211.
- 4.
Sigmund Freud/Arnold Zweig, Briefwechsel, ed. E. L. Freud (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984), 137 (letter to Zweig, 31.5.1936); Sigmund Freud/C. G. Jung, Briefwechsel, ed. William McGuire and Wolfgang Sauerländer (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1974), 280 (letter to Jung, 17.10.1909).
- 5.
Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood [1910], trans. Alan Tyson, in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), vol XI [1957], 63–137. See Monk, ‘Life Without Theory’, 547–550.
- 6.
Homberger and Chormley (eds.), The Troubled Face of Biography; France and St Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives; Holmes, Footsteps; Michael Holroyd, Works On Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography (London: Little, Brown, 2002).
- 7.
Richard Holmes, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 375.
- 8.
Holmes, Footsteps, 63, 96.
- 9.
Holmes, Footsteps, 120, 148.
- 10.
On the quest plot in biography, see Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Norton, 1988).
- 11.
Holmes, Sidetracks, 198.
- 12.
David E. Nye, The Invented Self: An Anti-Biography, from Documents of Thomas A. Edison (Odense: Odense University Press, 1983), 16.
- 13.
Holmes, Footsteps, 13–69, recounts the author’s retracing in 1964 of the journey in the Cévennes taken by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1879, as narrated in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.
- 14.
Nye, The Invented Self, 24.
- 15.
Nye, The Invented Self, 16.
- 16.
Nye, The Invented Self, 23.
- 17.
Nye, The Invented Self, 20–21.
- 18.
Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: Wiley, 1998).
- 19.
Nye, The Invented Self, 24.
- 20.
Maria DiBattista, Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
- 21.
Elfriede Jelinek, ‘Der Krieg mit anderen Mitteln’, Magazin II (1984), 20–25, quoted in Andrea Stoll, ‘Nervenströme der Erinnerung: Der lange Weg zur Biographie Ingeborg Bachmanns.’ In Topographien einer Künstlerpersönlichkeit: Neue Annäherungen an das Werk Ingeborg Bachmanns, ed. Barbara Agnese and Robert Pichl (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), 17–29 (18).
- 22.
See Wilhelm Hemecker and Manfred Mittermayer (eds.), Mythos Bachmann: Zwischen Inszenierung und Selbstinszenierung (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2011); Monika Albrecht, ‘Männermythos, Frauenmythos, und danach? Anmerkungen zum Mythos Ingeborg Bachmann’, German Life and Letters 57 no. 1 (2004), 91–110; Michael Eng, ‘“Every name in history is I”: Bachmann’s Anti-Archive’, in ‘If we had the word’: Ingeborg Bachmann. Views and Reviews, ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2004), 262–284.
- 23.
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 294–295.
- 24.
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 18.
- 25.
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 48.
- 26.
Ingeborg Bachmann, [Rede zur Verleihung des Anton-Wildgans-Preises], in Bachmann, Die Wahrheit ist dem Menschen zumutbar: Essays, Reden, Kleinere Schriften (Munich: Piper, 1981), 94–97 (94).
- 27.
Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina. Roman [1971], (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 89–103. See Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 189.
- 28.
Bachmann, ‘[Rede zur Verleihung des Anton-Wildgans-Preises]’, 96.
- 29.
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 161, 221.
- 30.
Bachmann, ‘[Rede zur Verleihung des Anton-Wildgans-Preises]’, 96. The grammatical exigencies of German dictate that the original reads in the masculine, ‘whatever cannot be found in his books’ (‘in seinen Büchern’).
- 31.
Francis Bacon, ‘De Augmentis Scientiarum’, [1623] quoted in Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism 1560–1960, ed. James L. Clifford (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 7.
- 32.
Dryden, ‘The Life of Plutarch’, quoted in Clifford, 18–19; see Chap. 1, footnote 16.
- 33.
A lively account of this problem as it affects professional or ‘career’ biography is provided in Meryle Secrest, Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject (New York: Knopf, 2007).
- 34.
Joachim Radkau, ‘The Heroic Ecstasy of Drunken Elephants: The Substrate of Nature in Max Weber – A Missing Link Between His Life and Work’, in Biography Between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography, ed. Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 119–142 (129).
- 35.
Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 1.
- 36.
Radkau, Max Weber, 523.
- 37.
Radkau, ‘Heroic Ecstasy of Drunken Elephants’, 126.
- 38.
Radkau, ‘Heroic Ecstasy of Drunken Elephants’, 136.
- 39.
Radkau, Max Weber, 4.
- 40.
Joachim Radkau, ‘Heroic Ecstasy of Drunken Elephants’, 131.
- 41.
Radkau, Max Weber, 10.
- 42.
Radkau, ‘Heroic Ecstasy of Drunken Elephants’, 125.
- 43.
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
- 44.
Diana Coole, ‘Cartographic Convulsions: Public and Private Reconsidered’, Political Theory 28:3 (2000), 337–354; Birgit Sauer, ‘Öffentlichkeit und Privat revisited. Grenzziehungen im Neoliberalismus und die Konsequenzen für die Geschlechterpolitik’, Kurswechsel 4 (2001), 5–11. For a summary of key interventions in the sociological literature, see Brigitte Bargetz, ‘The Politics of the Everyday: A Feminist Revision of the Public/Private Frame’, in Irina Papkova (ed.), Reconciling the Irreconcilable (Vienna: IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences 24, 2009), online: https://www.iwm.at/publications/5-junior-visiting-fellows-conferences/vol-xxiv/the-politics-of-the-everyday/.
- 45.
Dryden, ‘Life of Plutarch’, in Clifford, 18–19.
- 46.
Dryden, ‘Life of Plutarch’, in Clifford, 18.
- 47.
Nye, The Invented Self, 181.
- 48.
Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, 71.
- 49.
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 18–19.
- 50.
Weigel, ‘Korrespondenzen und Konstellationen’, 47.
- 51.
Heinrich Böll, ‘Ich denke an sie wie an ein Mädchen’, Der Spiegel 27, no. 43 (22.10.1973), 206.
- 52.
Fotis Jannidis, ‘“Individuum est ineffabile” – Zur Veränderung der Individualitätssemantik im 18. Jahrhundert und ihrer Auswirkung auf die Figurenkonzeption im Roman’, Aufklärung 9, no. 2 (1996), 77–110; Dirk Kemper: Ineffabile. Goethe und die Individualitätsproblematik der Moderne (Munich: Fink, 2004).
- 53.
Katherine Anne Porter, marginal note in a biography of her, quoted in Backscheider, Reflecting on Biography, 90.
- 54.
Nye, The Invented Self, 184.
- 55.
Nye, The Invented Self, 16.
- 56.
Eng, ‘“Every name in history is I”’, 265.
- 57.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 50–52.
- 58.
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 303.
- 59.
Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, 377; see Miller, ‘Lives and Afterlives’, 264.
- 60.
Georg Simmel, ‘Das Geheimnis und die geheime Gesellschaft’, in Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, ed. Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 383–455.
- 61.
Bachmann, Malina, 345.
- 62.
Simmel, ‘Das Geheimnis und die geheime Gesellschaft’.
- 63.
The contributions in the issue of Life Writing devoted to letters deal with various aspects of epistolarity, such as the performativity, reciprocity, and materiality of letters, as well as the question of whether letters evidence connection as much as, or more than, absence. See Kylie Cardell and Jane Haggis, ‘Contemporary Perspectives on Epistolarity’, Life Writing 8, no. 2 (2011), 129–133; also Liz Stanley, ‘The Epistolary Gift, the Editorial Third-Party, Counter-Epistolaria: Rethinking the Epistolarium’, Life Writing 8, no. 2 (2011), 135–152. See also Anne Bohnenkamp and Waltraud Wiethölter (eds.), Der Brief – Ereignis und Objekt (Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld, 2010); Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982).
- 64.
Weigel, ‘Korrespondenzen und Konstellationen’, 44.
- 65.
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 (47).
- 66.
Audrey Tennyson, ‘Talks & Walks Notebook’, quoted in Jon Stallworthy, ‘A Life for a Life’, in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 27–42 (33).
- 67.
See Peter France and William St Clair, ‘Introduction’, in France and St Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives. The Uses of Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2.
- 68.
René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature [1949] (London: Cape, 1954), 78–79.
- 69.
Terry Eagleton, ‘Buried in the Life: Thomas Hardy and the Limits of Biographies’, Harper’s, November 2007, 89; quoted in DiBattista, Imagining Virginia Woolf, 9.
- 70.
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 295–351.
- 71.
Adam Mars-Jones, review of Gordon Bowker, James Joyce (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010), Guardian 1.7.2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/01/james-joyce-gordon-bowker-review.
- 72.
Patricia Ingham, Dickens, Women and Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 133.
- 73.
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 297–298.
- 74.
Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 70.
- 75.
Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 147.
- 76.
Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 73, 85.
- 77.
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 20.
- 78.
Nye, The Invented Self, xx.
- 79.
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 165.
- 80.
See also Weigel, ‘Korrespondenzen und Konstellationen’.
- 81.
Caitríona Leahy, Der wahre Historiker: Ingeborg Bachmann and the Problem of Witnessing History (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 30–31.
- 82.
Ingeborg Bachmann, Gespräche und Interviews, 60, quoted in Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 193.
- 83.
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 205, 233.
- 84.
See Chap. 2, footnote 1 above.
- 85.
DiBattista, Imagining Virginia Woolf.
- 86.
Jessica Benjamin, ‘The Shadow of the Other Subject: Intersubjectivity and Feminist Theory’, in Psychoanalysis at its Limits: Navigating the Postmodern Turn, ed. Anthony Elliott and Charles Spezzano (London: Free Association, 1999), 79–109.
- 87.
Weigel describes this process in terms of citation: ‘Reading, too, is quotation – not of another text, but of one’s own text in the other’ (‘nicht eines anderen Textes, sondern eines eigenen Textes im anderen’). Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, 234.
- 88.
Ingmar Bergman, För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor (All These Women). Sweden 1964. DVD: Tartan Video 2004, notes by Philip Strick.
- 89.
Dorrit Cohn, ‘Breaking the Code of Fictional Biography: Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot’, in Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 79–95 (85).
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Ní Dhúill, C. (2020). Inscribing Absence: Missed Targets and Missing Subjects in Anti- and Pseudobiography. In: Metabiography. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8_7
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