94
PARTISAN REVIEW
They said
to
the man with the blue guitar,
"You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as thcy are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
The biographer, or before him, the politician, who can invent well
enough to make seeming real simply asserts: "Things as they are, are the
fictions 1 play on thc blue guitar."
Two recent biographies of political figures, Edmund Morris's
Dutch
(on Ronald Reagan) and Bill Turquc's
Illventing AI Gore,
make that
assertion by writing spectacles of political fictions of being and becom–
ing.
If
we are to remember these political persons, we need, most of all,
to follow in the wake of the fictions they made, or, in the instance of
Gore, continue to make.
I have, of coursc, no way of knowing what literary models Edmund
Morris had in mind in his construction and re-construction of Ronald
Reagan's life. In several interviews which he gave between
1992
and
] 999,
while he wrote his book, he often touched on the subject of fic–
ticity. "Ronald Reagan," he said, "was totally interior. He lived inside
his head, in the proscenium arch of his own imagination. He was not a
deliberate deceiver. . .. "
These remarks alert us to a lot: first, Reagan's "real" life was hidden,
"totally interior"; second, his reality consisted of his imagination and
was enacted-acted-in the theater of his mind; and third, while he did
(in some sense) deceive others, and even himself, it was not by calcula–
tion but by nature and habit which became a ta lent, because the outer
man was a continuous, natural creation of the inner one. Not a "man
without qualities," but one for whom his qualities were fictive.
In order to give a "good enough" portrait of Reagan, therefore, Mor–
ris concluded that the subject determines the narrative style; "I wrote
that way because
I\ eagan
was that way": the history or life-account of
a fiction must be recounted
by
a fiction. And so Morris crcatcd a nar–
rator, neither Morris himself nor an omniscient obscrver, but a wholly
new invented being whose own "real" fictive mcaning is, like Reagan's,
"wholly interior." He tells us what Melville called an "inside narra–
tive"-a story, from his own inner being, of Reagan's hidden life of the
imagination, whose derivative was the complex wcb of his documented
activities. Morris described the narrator this way:
All I have done in the way of fictionalizing myself. .is
to
make
myself Reagan 's contemporary, in effect extending...c1oseness of
