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“His Life, His Works”: Some Observations On Literary Biography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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For some time it has been fashionable in literary circles to reject what is called scornfully the biographical method. It was inevitable. No mode lasts forever. Sooner or later, there is a change. This method was the law for too long. It had no rival. Under its tutelage the motto for teaching literature was “the man, his work”. It was by its authority that students were taught that La Fontaine was in charge of waterways and forests and master of the hunt before writing his Fables, that they had to learn by heart; or that Beaumarchais had been a clockmaker, musician, secret agent and business man before inventing the character of Figaro, proposed for their admiration. There has been a reaction. Our irreverent and contentious age has put an end to that absolute sovereignty. For a good quarter of a century this practice and the assumptions on which it rests has been on trial, in the name of the various and at times even contradictory conceptions and theories about the nature of literature. These have in common, however, the belief in the independence of literature with regard to the human being who was the instrument of its creation, as well as the anathema cast by this fact on what is commonly accepted as “referential illusion”.
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- Copyright © 1987 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 A convenient résumé of "La Mise en cause de la méthode biographique" will be found in the first pages of the article by Jean-Claude Bonnet, "Le fantasme de l'écrivain", in Poétique, 63 (an issue on "Le Biographique"), Sept. 1985, pp. 259-260.
2 See the article by François Taillandier, "Des succès (presque) assurés", followed by bibliographic lists organized by Claude Combet, making up the dossier "Biographies" in Livres hebdo (June 24, 1985) pp. 65-83.
3 Auguste Rostagni, Introduction to his edition of Suetonius "De poetis" e biografi minori, Turin, Chiantore, 1944, p. V.
4 See Edna Jenkinson, "Nepos—An Introduction to Latin Biography", in Latin Biography, ed. T.A. Dorey, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967, p. 2.
5 See Gerard Walter, Introduction to his edition of Vies des hommes illustres of Plutarch, "Pléiade", 2 vol., 1951, Vol. I, p. XIII; and especially Duane Reed Stuart, Epochs of Greek and Roman Biography, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1928, pp. 129-154.
6 Cf. J.-C. Bonnet, art. cit., pp. 260-262.
7 Originally dated July 21 and 22, 1862 these two articles were collected in Nouveaux lundis, Paris, Michel Lévy, Vol. III (1865) pp. 1-33. For quotations taken later from these articles the pagination referring to this volume is indicated between parentheses after the quotation.
8 Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, "Pléiade", 1971, p. 829. The quotations given later from the text of Proust are based on this edition. The pagination is indicated between parentheses after each quotation.
9 See Harold Cherniss, "The Biographical Fashion in Literary Criticism", University of California Publications in Classical Philology, XII (1943), pp. 279-292.
10 We would be curious to know the prototype of the formula. Would it be due to Louis Racine, author of Mémoires concernant quelques particularités sur la vie et les ouvrages de Jean Racine (1747)? The title of Mémoires by the two secretaries of Voltaire, Longchamp and Wagnière, was chosen by the two scholars who edited them: L.P. Decroix and A.J.Q. Beuchot.
11 François Taillandier, art. cit., p. 66.
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