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PARTISAN REVIEW
biography. Philosophers who pour scorn upon the project of
proving
the existence of either things or God, like lovers who
ridicule the impulse to
possess
the beloved, make a comparable
mistake: they rightly set aside an impossible goal, but they do
not acknowledge the importance of the desire for that goal-or
the complexity of the desire.
In
exploring the biographer's temptation, this lure of es–
sence, I shall note what I take to be its major forms for a biog–
rapher whose subject is a thinker and writer, and then extend my
reflections to the political significance of biography as a mode of
historiography.·
It
seems to me that there are four-at least-forms of the
temptation to capture "the essence of a life." The first stems
from a kind of
esprit de sys(eme:
you want to find the ruling in–
tellectual universal, the key question, the object of your subject's
intellectual quest, and then you want to show the subject's
thought and life in their integrality, in their oneness and
harmony.
The second form of the temptation a lso arises from a need
for synthesis: you select from amongst the strong traits of charac–
ter and signs of habitual disposition those that either harmonize
beautifully or clash intriguingly in order to present a compel–
ling portrait of the subject's personality. You practice a version
of what Virginia Woolf called "The New Biography." The goal
here is vividness, life-likeness. The first form of the essentialist
temptation might, if yielded
to,
result in a portrait of the subject
recollected in tranquility; the second, in a cinema "short" or
novelistic sketch of the subject doing what the subject essentially
did.
The last two forms 'of the temptation present a whole
through a part; rather than being synthetic, they are synecdochi–
cal: the subject is essentia ll y some deed or work he or she did or
made, or the subject is essentia ll y a representative of some ideal.
"I should note that this discussion is res tricted to biographies of people who
were not unwo rthy as people or in the eyes of their biographers. Writing about
evil people, like any form of reflection on ev il, deserves separate allention, be–
cause our modern tradition is conceptually so empty-handed about the whole
topic.
