92
PARTISAN REVIEW
notes, so regularly and with such portentous weight do political biogra–
phies fall from the presses.
My subject today is how biographers remember and represent the
political personality in our time. For forty years the political scientist
Murray Edelman has taken political fictions or "constructions" as his
subject for investigation. He writes, in
Constructing the Political Spec–
tacle
(
r
989):
I treat people who engage in political actions as constructions in two
senses. First, their actions and their language create their subjectiv–
ity, their sense land our sensei of who they arc. Second, people
involved in politics are symbols to other observers: they stand for
ideologies, values, or moral stances and they become role models,
benchm3 rks, or sym bo Is....
Political persons are, for him, "continually evolving constructions," not
beings, but fictions of beings; their lives are interpretations of fictions,
and, we could add, their biographies are the recreated spectacles of
these constructions.
Saul Bellow captured the same fictive condition in
Mr. Sal11l11ler's
Planet
(1979).
As Dante in the netherworld saw not persons, but spir–
its, representations of persons, stream before him, so Sammler walks
down Broadway and sees a river of imitative fictions: "the barbarian,
Redskin, or Fiji, the dandy, the buffalo hunter, the prospector, trouba–
dours, guerrilla, Che Guevara, the new Thomas
a
Becket....One could
not be the thing itself-reality. One Illust be satisfied with the symbol."
Placing Bellow's general observations concerning the prevalence of
fictive personalities side by side with Edelman's analysis of political con–
structions prompts us to suspect what political biographers know with
particular keenness, even if only in their bones-that the lives of politi–
cal figures are so thoroughly suffused with ficticity that to read their
autobiographies or memoirs accurately, and, above all, fully, or to com–
pose biographies about them, requires our willing suspension of insis–
tence upon fact or "truthful" memories, and a happy immersion into a
stream of fictions. Before he became a psychoanalyst, the art historian
Ernst Kris wrote an instructive little book about the lives of artists,
showing that additional accounts are composed of conventions; an
artist's life is written not as it was, but as it should have been. This is
true of saints' lives as well. But it is especially true of political lives: they
must be rendered as fictions, because the political figures created them–
selves as fictions, necessary ones. And this is especially true today, when
