flitting on fiction

I don’t tend to stick to my notes - but I DO write them none-the-less… here’s what I have for discussion in my first seminar tomorrow morning:

Seminar – “in these presentations, you will systemically argue for a particular reading of the assigned material”

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
Position:
Absolute truth/nonfiction is impossible in biography (as in most, if not all, other works).

A biographer must make choices re: what to take out and what to leave in – and those choices are far more likely to reveal facts about the biographer than about the subject.

Narrative discourse answers who (actors) doing what (events) when (times) where (places) – and readers “will feel themselves reasonably entitled to expect all four of them to play an at least implicit role in any narrative” (O’Neill, 32). A story can change drastically, however, depending on the choices the author makes in each area. As O’Neill says: arriving at “what actually happened” – whether the story is fiction or nonfiction – based on the facts presented “is always and in a very central way precisely a game structure, involving its readers in a hermeneutic contest in which, even in the case of the most ostensibly solid non-fictional accounts, they [the readers] are essentially and unavoidably off balance from the very start” (O’Neill, 34).

Are the choices Strachey made in writing his biographies of his 4 eminent Victorians different? Was he concerned with presenting the ‘truth’ of his subjects’ lives?

Evidence re: his motivation being the story, not the truth includes:
• Begins with factual error (Manning born in 1808, not 1807)
• Research based on secondary sources (Purcell, Chung diary, etc) – little/no evidence of fact-checking, even among sources
• Preface promises not to lay bare the facts, but to “lay bare the facts of some cases, as I understand them” (Strachey, 6).
• Borrowing from the “wings of Historical Imagination” (Strachey, 14); use of questions rather than statements throughout (especially Gordon section, eg. 204); “one would like to know more…. But it is time to return to the solidity of fact…” (205)

In other words, he makes little secret of the fact that in his mind, the story is more important than the truth. Is that a bad thing? Does it negate the status of his work as art? As biography?

To put it into the framework Novitz poses in his article about the movie Shine: The book has all the ingredients, and the formula works. But is it an artistic success; is it, artistically speaking, a good book?
Novitz’s objections to the movie tend to centre on the use of artistic license. He details the many ways that the movie is inaccurate – similar to many authors’ criticisms of Strachey’s work. In the Oxford World’s Classics edition, for example, both the introduction and notes provide many examples of places where Strachey has used inaccurate information.

Novitz:

“All of this makes for bad biography - “bad” not just in the sense of being hurtful and immoral, but bad, too, in the sense of being inferior or substandard. And if one allows, as I certainly do, that biography is itself an art form, then it is bad art.” (101)

What about Eminent Victorians? Was it bad art when it was published? Has that changed? Does timing matter? (I.e. if the main players are all dead and can’t be harmed, does the biography then become art?

“However, any literary or cinematic work that claims to be a biography thereby claims to satisfy two conditions. The first is an accuracy condition according to which any biography must offer an accurate account of at least some - usually the central - details of the subject’s life. To the extent that it fails to do so and actually manages to distort these details, it is substandard or deficient and, in the worst cases, not a biography at all. The second is a sincerity condition according to which the author of any work that presents itself as a biography purports, non-ironically and with perfect seriousness, to portray (some of) the actual details of a subject’s life in ways that give us an adequate picture or account of that life.” (102)

Does Strachey’s handling of the subjects of EV satisfy the conditions Novitz suggests are key to the art of biography?
Does he “violate art” through his inattention to ‘the truth’?

My argument:

Strachey doesn’t claim to be sticking entirely to the truth. He is concerned with the creation of the story. In an ideal world, he would be able to create the story without embellishment or reliance on “Historical Imagination” or others’ inaccurate works – but even then, he would still have to make decisions about what to omit, what to include, and how to depict the who, what, when and where of his narrative.

Even if Strachey (and those involved in producing Shine, for that matter) had stuck completely to “proven facts” – i.e. the truth – the final form of the work would still not be an accurate depiction of “the truth” of the subjects’ lives.

O’Neill’s discussion includes that of fictional worlds – and he points out that the worlds captured in literature are “every bit as fictional” whether they are based on “real” places such as Amsterdam, or fictional worlds such as Narnia. The same holds true for depictions of people and events. All exist in the one real-world dimension of time (42) – the art of biography captures only the perception or depiction of the who, what, where and when of the narrative by the author as interpreted at the time of writing – and then again by the reader at the time of his/her interaction with the text.

The art of biography is an art - and while close adherance to the ‘truth’ is desirable, a full rendering of the ‘truth’ of any subject’s life is impossible. At best, one can only expect a narrative that expresses the perspective of the author at the time of writing. The final work, then, reveals not only a portrait of the subject of the work - but also, to some extent, of the author.

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