The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [119]
He was a new horse.
In the fiftieth start of his life, Seabiscuit finally understood the game.76
In its own way, this description is a triumph. It makes the point that the author wants to make, but in order to do so it becomes necessary to project her feelings, or the reader’s, into the mind of the horse.
Seabiscuit is meticulously documented, with silent notes placed at the back of the book, so as not to disturb the narrative flow. Given the nature of the story, most of the sources are newspaper articles, features from Turf & Sport Digest or the Daily Racing Form, audiotapes of race calls, films and newsreels, or previous versions of Seabiscuit’s life story. But in none of these is there a viva voce interview with the biographical subject. If Seabiscuit felt that he was “a new horse,” if he brimmed with “cool confidence,” if he “finally understood the game,” it was something said by others, or by the biographer, not (how can one resist this? it is, after all, the point of the cliché) straight from the horse’s mouth.
Since the distinctions I am drawing—between the technique of speculation and the style of free indirect discourse—may seem to be minor or evanescent, let me try to make them sharper by saying that what I’ve called speculative biography imputes motives, intentions, and causes, linking historical events in an arc of character intentionality that is a fictional construct. Why did X do this or that? Perhaps he thought; did she imagine; were they hoping? Here it may be helpful to see how a reviewer described a recent book about the life of the poet Robert Frost:
The book is billed as a novel, but this is only because it is speculative rather than veritable; it is more properly classified a vie romancée, a bio enhanced with the loosey-goosey methods of fiction. Variations on this form have become increasingly fashionable in recent years—so fashionable, in fact, that two fictional portraits of Henry James alone were published in 2004, with another trailing along the next year.77
In a work like Colm Tóibín’s The Master: A Novel (one of the two fictional books about James noted in the review) it seems as if the term novel allows the author to have things both ways: the gravitas of biography and the freedom to identify and psychologize that comes with the writing of a certain kind of fiction.
Insincerely Yours
Half a century ago René Wellek and Austin Warren wrote briskly in their Theory of Literature about the relationship between literature and biography—a relationship they considered dangerously misleading:
No biographical evidence can change or influence critical evaluation. The frequently adduced criterion of “sincerity” is thoroughly false if it judges literature in terms of biographical truthfulnesss, correspondence to the author’s experience or feelings as they are attested by outside evidence. There is no relationship between “sincerity” and value as art.78
As specific counterexamples, they adduce “the volumes of agonizingly felt love poetry perpetrated by adolescents,” and “the dreary (however fervently felt) religious verse which fills libraries.”
The sincerity issue (Wellek and Warren are clearly speaking back to Lionel Trilling) connects to biography and to the memoir. Their point, firmly stated and reinforced by examples, was that any assumption about a direct or causative relationship between the facts of a life and the work of a writer disregards something fundamental about the nature of literature: “The whole view that art is self-expression pure and simple, the transcript of personal feelings and experiences,” they contend, “is demonstrably false.” Again, “the biographical approach actually obscures a proper comprehension of the literary process, since it breaks up the order of literary tradition to substitute the life-cycle of an individual.” It also “ignores” what they call