ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
419
heroine-and she is thus tamed, prevented from devouring her
biographer. Cate even makes George Sand arise again and speak
in his Preface: she delivers a posthumous diatribe against pres–
ent-day pornographic "lust and license." Cate can summon
George Sand
to
his service because he is convinced that he has
possessed her very essence, recapitulated her.
It
is more than a little ironic that the main biographical
reaction to the temptation to capture a personality-to get inside
the subject's self and speak out,
to
possess the subject's soul au–
thoritatively-has produced not a return to Cassirer-like syn–
thetic vision but a heightening of the personality biography ap–
proach. The third form of the essentialist temptation, in which a
part of the life stands for the whole, has converted personality
portraiture into self-conscious mythologizing.
The main topic of this mode is the subject's achievement of
identity; its form might be described as
Bildungsroman
plus psy–
choanalysis. The moment of identity achievement can come
when Freud's three stages-anal, oral, genital-have all been
undergone, or when Erik Erikson's seventh and last stage has
been reached, or when an "existential crisis" has been met and
survived, and so forth. Some form of developmental psychology
provides the table of contents for the biography of turning
points, the form of biography that had its great days after the
Second World War-after that horrendous and prolonged crisis.
As an example of this type, I offer a passage from Jean-Paul
Sartre's biography
Saint-Genet: Comedien et martyr:
A voice declares publicly: 'You're a thief.' The child was ten
years old.
That was how it happened, in that or some other way.
In
all probability, there were offenses and then punishment,
solemn oaths and relapses.
It
does not matter. The impor–
tant thing is that Genet lived and has not stopped reliving
this period of his life as if it had lasted only an instant.
Sartre presents the moment in which Jean Genet became a thief,
the moment in which his identity was cast as a mythic project
and prepared for future mythologization. The biographer, cap–
turing the life of his subject at an extremity, then tracks the mo–
ment
to
what Malraux ca ll ed
"Ia pointe extreme de I'oeuvre,"
the point in the work at which the subject is most essentially
