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PARTISAN REVIEW
himself. The facts do not matter. And the goal is not to unravel a
mysterious personality, it is to show one being created in vast
geometries of time.
This mode adds to the mode of personality portraiture a
heightened self-consciousness about the biographer 's role and
relation to the subject: that is, the biographer is self-consciously
an artificer, a dramatist. The reader is not swept up in the rush–
ing current of a life; rather, the reader is offered an occasion for a
catharsis-for release from
mauvaise foi
and bourgeois moral
monotony. The truth sought is not literal truth, for no illusion
of merger between biographer and subject is allowed; the biog–
rapher is not to say omnisciently " he thought" or "she felt," but
only (only!)
"This
is the important moment"-the moment
when the subject's ·own concept of self congealed.
Both personality biography and crisis biography have been
very challenging to traditionalist historians and literary critics,
people who prefer chroniclers to interpreters, archivists to arti–
ficers. Writers of biographies who consider psychobiography in
any form a travesty are particularly vociferous about the danger
of letting the unconscious and the irrational loose upon the
pages of the story of mankind . But, although many people of the
" just the facts, please" schools of thought have tried to correct the
excesses of personality portraiture and crisis capturing, the most
forceful correctives have come from another quarter. We do not
any more appreciate biographies in the mode recommended by
Carlyle's
On Heroes, Hero- Worship and the Heroic in History ,
but we do like their modern analogues: biographies in which the
subject is presented as a paradigmatic figure, a man or woman of
the hour, the era, or the century-thus,
Walter Lippmann and
the American Century,
Ronald Steel's careful chronicle of "the
nation's greatest journalist."
If
the literary critical terminology
of deciphering informs personality biography, and the develop–
mental psychological terminology of stages informs crisis biog–
raphy, it is the terminology of philosophies of history and
science that informs the mode of Life and Times. The subject is,
like a Kuhnian paradigm, a definition of the times and also a
boundary at which a revolutionary new time came or will come;
or the subject is, like a Marxian superstructure, "in dialectical re–
lation" to his or her times.
In
this last mode, the status of the subject is of no impor-
