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PARTISAN REVIEW
"new biographical style" offers us "revelations." This is to say, Reagan
himself constructed, willy-nilly, a fictive life, and Morris, in this politi–
cal spectacle of an authorized presidential biography, composed a char–
acter for hi msel f through wh ich to render Reaga n's sci f-constructions
authentically. His language is full of the vocabulary of the theater. Not
a character searching for an author, but a play about a movie.
The whole conception,
to
my mind, brilliantly parallels in biographi–
cal form Edelman's analysis of political spectacle. That Morris and Edel–
man worked without awareness of each other's writings nicely confirms
the insightfulness of both analyses. "News about politics," Edelman
writes, "encourages a focus upon leaders, enemies, and prohlems as
sources of hope and of fear, ohscuring the sense in which they are cre–
ations of discourse, perpetuators of ideologies, and facets of a... trans–
action." A strategy for analyzing politics as spectacle, Edelman
concludes, "must begin with language that highlights the controversial
perspectives inherent in these terms and calls attention to the formations
they conceal." Morris gives the reader a signal that he is going behind the
usual focus upon actions and motions
to
seize, instead, upon creations
and constructions, lighting up the ohscure, exposing his fictive discourse,
and refocusing upon the transaction between signified and signifier in
any biographical enterprise, but especially in this eminently political one.
If
Morris's "biographical style" is new, and if it makes unprecedented
admissions about the object of political biography, what he is doing is
merely more explicit about what other political biographers have done,
but denied doing. Except for such hooks as A.
J.
A. Symons's
The Quest
for Corvo,
his models are not primarily biographical, but, inevitably,
works mi xi ng memoir, biogra phy, a utobiogra phy, and fiction. Such
books as Henry james's
A Small Boy and Others
and
Notes of a Son
and Brother,
Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past,
and john Dos Pas–
sos's
U.S.A.
most aptly show us his way with
Dlltch.
In both of his late books, james asserts that he cannot speak directly
about others in his life-his dead brother William chief of all-unless
he invents himself through a point of view. What he writes about
William is not
William,
but his own perception of William; his percep–
tion consists of his writing ahout his writing ahout William. Like
james's, Morris's method is intensely visual-James called his the
"scenic method." Morris's narrator, too, gazes and gazes at Reagan,
focused by the Reagan enigma. Morris's narrator looks and looks-for
674 pages. Always troubled by extremely poor eyesight, Reagan devel–
oped an extraordinary capacity (since he could not see well) for being
looked at, through others' hetter eyes; and Morris, who is himself
