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Framing the Questions 29
Rather, the biographer is engaged in a creative act, a crafting and
arrangement of material from the subject’s life into a form that is pleasing
and intelligible in the biographer’s own context.” So biography is now
understood as an open genre, an investigative art: biographies are not
statements of unchallengeable truth, but interpretations of facts,
arrangements of events. And facts are always open to reinterpretation;
events are always open to rearrangement.
Today, no biography is considered definitive; there is always the possibility,
not so much that new information about the subject will be uncovered, as that
a new biographer will offer fresh insight. The biographer is a conduit,
connecting the reader to the subject. But the presence of biographers within
their texts, the power they exercise over the presentation of the life, is often
overlooked. Edel comments: “Readers of biographies tend to take for granted
the facts given them; they do not seem to be aware that there has been an act
of composition.””” And Lois Rudnick suggests that most readers are really
looking for fact presented with all the panache of fiction:
Biographers have to deal with contradictory expectations from their
readers, for whom the goal of a good biography is to provide a true and
convincing portrayal ofa life while reading like fiction.”
So significant is the biographer’s role in composing and arranging the
facts of the subject’s life that biography has sometimes been described as a
form of fiction. Dee Garrison points out that the biographer must employ
“the techniques of the novelist”:
One must shape and order the evidence, deal with flashbacks, develop
believable characters, dramatize crucial moments, and analyze human
: 9
relations ...”
Edel, whilst acknowledging the biographer’s role as a creative composer,
categorically opposes this view: “Novelists have omniscience. Biographers
© Richard Holmes’ exploration of biography opens with the words, “Look back, and the past becomes a story.”
See Sidetracks: Explorations ofa Romantic Biggrapher (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 3.
7 Rdel, Writing Lives, 38.
*8Rudnick, “The Male Identified Woman,” 132.
»” Garrison, “Two Roads Taken,” 67.
‘Sania