The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [118]
We might contrast this way of writing a life with the kind of work that resembles the televised docudrama or “dramatic re-creation.” In the filmic version, actors perform on-screen as a voice-over offers the play-by-play of a real (but restaged) event. Shadows loom out of the darkness; scenery (a lonely road, a family mansion) offers an atmospheric B-roll boost; flashbacks increase the suspense. The language associated with the voice-over narrations in docudramas is heavy with subjunctives—would, could, might—and suppositions masquerading as rhetorical questions: “Did she know?” “Would he attempt?” “What was going through his mind at that moment?”
I have been calling the mode of biography that functions in this manner speculative, by which I mean a language heavily laden with subjunctives and similar suppositions: “There is reason to think that if she had”; “Were he to meet her then, as perhaps he did, they might have found”; “Having been to France, he would have known that.” Rather than being brought to life by specific textual evidence (Darwin’s diary, Abigail Adams’s letter), these hypotheticals are presented instead of evidence. By a certain authorial sleight of hand, they become the evidence whose absence they conceal. Moreover, contemporary culture has increasingly come to accept such fantasy projections as evidence, so eager are we to “know” the characters (historical, modern, famous, or infamous) about whom these real-life stories are told.
Horse Sense
My favorite example of this kind of projection taken to its logical extreme is Laura Hillenbrand’s fascinating biography Seabiscuit: An American Legend, in which the technique of imagining what is going through the mind of the protagonist is employed to show us the inner thoughts of a racehorse.70
The word celebrity appears a number of times in Hillenbrand’s narrative, and appropriately so. The horse, who, in his racing heyday, liked to pose for photographers, was called “Movie Star” by reporters. As the reader follows the “making of a legend” from obscurity to celebrity to calamity to bittersweet triumph, it becomes clear that the book can be compared to works like Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (David Shipman), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. But there is one way in which Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit differs, of necessity, from the celebrity biography. A staple of the celebrity biography is that curious set of tenses and moods (from optative subjunctive to free indirect discourse) through which the author attempts to project the thoughts, or putative thoughts, of the celebrity subject. “One aspect of pre-production which pleased Garland was the make-up tests.”71 “The visitor was unwelcome, though Marlene realized that one way or another he was as inevitable as history.”72 “As always, when in trouble, Jack turned to his father.”73 A certain genre of horse (or dog) story uses the same kinds of voice and mind projection—think Jack London—or even, as in the case of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, is told in the first-person voice of the subject: “When I was young I lived upon my mother’s milk, as I could not eat grass.”74
In Seabiscuit, the central figure’s consciousness is never so baldly anthropomorphic. But at the center of the book, surrounded by taciturn trainers and jockeys, is the silence of the equine legend, a silence marked, as if anxiously, by recurrent attention to what was going on in his mind. “Seabiscuit had the misfortune of living in a stable whose managers simply didn’t have the time to give his mind the painstaking attention it needed,” we are told about the horse’s early overraced and undervalued years, while jockey Red Pollard’s natural empathy “had given him insight into the minds of ailing, nervous horses.”75 At a turning point in Pollard’s career, when he finally guides Seabiscuit to a significant victory, the author’s prose can’t resist turning toward the psychological projections familiar from a certain mode of celebrity biography:
Seabiscuit