The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [120]
Perhaps inevitably, their chief example is a selection of biographies of Shakespeare, which from the vantage point of midcentury meant the work of Georg Brandes, Frank Harris, and their nineteenth-century precursors, Hazlitt, Schlegel, and Dowden. Since “we have absolutely nothing in the form of letters, diaries, reminiscences, except a few anecdotes of doubtful authenticity,” they point out, there is no real biographical information, only “facts of chronology” and illustrations of Shakespeare’s “social status and associations.”
The vast effort which has been expended upon the study of Shakespeare’s life has yielded only few results of literary profit … One cannot, from fictional statements, especially those made in plays, draw any valid inference as to the biography of a writer.
There is no logic to the idea that emotions and fictional descriptions are linked by anything causal. “One may gravely doubt,” write Wellek and Warren, “even the usual view that Shakespeare passes through a period of depression, in which he wrote his tragedies and his bitter comedies, to achieve some serenity of resolution in The Tempest. It is not self-evident that a writer needs to be in a tragic mood to write tragedies or that he writes comedies when he is pleased with life. There is simply no proof for the sorrows of Shakespeare.”80
They insist that there is no more reason to identify the playwright’s views with that of a wise protagonist like Prospero, or a disaffected speaker like Timon of Athens, than with those of Doll Tearsheet or Iago: “authors cannot be assigned the ideas, feelings, views, virtues and vices of their heroes.”81 Moreover, the same is true of the first-person I of a lyric poem. Whether Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud or not has no effect upon the artistic merit or propositional truth of his verse.
So what uses might biography have? Again Wellek and Warren are clear. Biographical information can explain allusions in the work, can accumulate materials for literary history (what the author read, where he or she traveled, etc.). By literary history they mean tradition, influences, sources. But where they draw the line, as we have seen, is at evaluation. Biography has no “critical importance.” A work of literature need have no correlation with events or data related to the author’s life, nor do those events explain (or cause) the work.
If biography is not literature—or if only some biographies are literature, and those are considered so for reasons of style and form rather than a supposed fidelity to facts—then why worry about the uses of biography? One response would be that the truth claims—and explanatory claims—made on behalf of biographical, autobiographical, or personal facts have, to a certain extent, preempted or short-circuited the role of criticism and interpretation when it comes to assessing literature, not only for “the common reader” but for many specialists as well.
If it is not only the acknowledged faux or hoax memoirs that are fictions, but also all memoirs, and much biographical writing of the speculative (“if he knew this, did it influence him when he did that”) mode, then their truth claims, which may be compelling (or not), have the status, precisely, of fictional truth. Aristotle famously said about plots that he preferred a plausible impossibility to an implausible possibility, and “truth” in this sense, with or without quotation marks, is Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief. The most effective (and compellingly literary) passage on this matter remains that of Nietzsche, in “On Truth or Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical,