Principles of Biography
Identity from History
There is no such thing as a life lived isolation. 8 Although Virginia Woolf satirized the idea of time and space, she illustrated the biographer's job to place its subject in history and provide a context for the readers. Woolf further explains the difficulty with writing a memoir when she says of her own life: "I see myself in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream." Biographers have a responsibility to zoom in on the fish but also to zoom out and describe the stream. 9 How can we understand a life without knowing the conventions, constraints, and circumstances of the time and place of the subject? Historical context provides a truer representation than we as readers can project from our current standards and perspectives.
Selection
Biographers have the gift (or curse) of choosing what to include from their subject's life. Because it is quite impossible to cover each and every event of a life, selecting for significance is critical. The question seems to be what to leave out. Biographies cannot be vacuum cleaners so, to be effective, the biographer must have a debate with himself regarding what to include, and how blunt to be. If the subject is living and you are in a position to interview and ask questions, what questions should they be? Are embarrassing events in the life of the subject to be included? These are choices John Lewis Gaddis made as he wrote George Kennan: An American Life, showing Kennan's brilliance as a great architect of the Cold War strategy of containment, but also his imperfections as a human being.
Subjectivity
Because a biographer is a person making choices about how and what to write about another person, subjectivity is inevitable. There is no such thing as objectivity here. It is quite unlikely that two different authors would approach the same subject from the exact same point of view. Who we are as writers affects how we present our material. To what extent does where we come from define each of us? We are products of our environment just as are the subjects of a biography. Do the biographer's race, gender, and history determine a perspective? Many examples of this idea appear on the shelves of the libraries and book stores - biographies of a single subject viewed from a perspective, the author's.
Sources
What separates biography from fiction? Although both can, and should be, riveting, engaging stories with moving plots, evolving characters and interesting settings, fiction comes from a great imagination. Biography comes from archives, the paper trail left behind, the figurative bones of a person's life. These bones, these skeletal remains, are the starting place, providing something that is suggestive of the person, likely not the complete picture. Think of experiencing a Picasso painting. He creates an image using shapes that make us think of a face, a body, possibly even an emotion. We work a bit to find the person within the art and eventually someone is revealed to us.
Authors are drawn to research and write biographies about specific people for their own reasons. What might inspire one to write about the life of another? In the Pulitzer Prize winning biography, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, history professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich tells the story of the Hallowell, Maine midwife and healer and her work from 1785 to 1812. Ulrich artfully puts flesh on bones as she crafts this biography. She uses Ballard's ledger-style entries to provide us not only a portrait of Martha but also of her society – the medical practices, religious standards, and family circumstances of that time and place. Was Ulrich's motivation just Martha's story, or was there a broader goal?
Audience
It is the biographer's responsibility to be fair and truthful in representing his or her subject to an audience. Biographers spend a great deal of time sifting through archives and records to discover information on their subject. There may be extensive archives that are comprehensive and complete, as in the case of a figure such as LBJ. It may be the case that limited information remains, as in the simple, straight-forward diary of Martha Ballard. This information is then formed into the narrative of a life, based on that evidence. Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography by Chester Brown is a visual look into the life and death of the 19 th century Canadian revolutionary. Although Brown presents his subject in a comic-strip format, his information is heavily researched and extensively footnoted. He has drawn and written his "narrative" and been fair and truthful to his audience.
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