writing biography and grand narrative and flawed people

I used to be a big fan of biographies. I wolfed them down like a famished soul feasted at a sumptuous repast. I know what I was looking for--it was the search for patterns of life which, when discovered in another person whom I admired, I could translate to my own situation so that I could, likewise, have "success." It wasn't precisely clear to me how I would do this--e.g., how I would "translate" Woodrow Wilson's religious commitments and doctoral training and writing to my own life in order to "launch" my own career in public life, but I was nevertheless fascinated by the story of how he did it, and I vowed to do the same.

In so reading biography, I was following a tradition that went back as far as Plutarch in the 1st/2nd century CE, who looked at biography as a genre to aid moral instruction. Not only could we study the life of Caesar, for example, and learn what it was in his character that propelled him to greatness, but we could study Plutarch's parallel lives, in which he tried to weigh why one person achieved greatness and another didn't. By studying biography, then, I could have dozens of moral lessons at my beck and call with which I could try to shape my own life. And, indeed, I used these lessons also to exhort others to live nobly, suffer patiently, cultivate ambition or whatever the "lesson" was that I learned.

The Insufficiency of the Plutarchian Model

But as way led to way and I lived longer, I began to see that the joint task of accumulating moral lessons and applying them to my life became problematic, and that for two reasons. First, it didn't seem to do me any good, and second, it began to run up against a newly-developing understanding of biography that I adopted--that a person's life is not simply a sort of exhortation to others but is itself witness to a flawed human who was often mired in his (and I just read biograpies of guys) own problems and, in fact, never really "solved" many of them. In other words, I began to recognize something about the genre of biography that I hadn't previously seen--that the overarching way to tell a person's life story has more to do with the regnant philosophy of the age of the biographer than anything inherent in the life of the subject. The "moral example" type of biography fit America very well not simply in the times shortly after the founding of the country, but also in those times where consensus was assumed to be the goal of political life. Biography was philosophy's handmaid, teaching us that great men also developed their character in such a way as to aid in the development of 20th century goals.

But then in the 1970s-1980s, after we all realized how flawed America was and how it fell so short of its aspirations and values, biography also began to see its subjects as very flawed. Rather than being black and white, life was a mixed plaid. The value of a subject's life was not so much that it gave us inspiring examples to follow but that it showed us the result of choices made (and often unwisely made) in the context of a society whose values were often not our own. Biography, then, wanted to emphasize the strangeness of the subject, his frailty and limitations, his weaknesses. In a strange sort of way, this approach to biography renewed the Plutarchian goal of biography as moral example, because it tended to "teach" that flaws in character, like the poor, have always been with us, and that influence and even grandeur can characterize people who were so flawed. Nevertheless, our philosophy of life in the past few decades, which stressed the fallibility and weakness of humans, has helped us explain, without going crazy, both Bill Clinton and GW Bush.

The Times They Are A'Changin'

But I see another change in how we assess human nature that is now imperceptibly growing in influence in American culture, which soon should be reflected in biography. It is not the "postmodern" theory of life, which really influenced biography in the 1990s and into the 21st century, which believes that life is a series of fragmentary events that often carry different meanings from their successor and predecessor events, and that therefore the weaving of a "grand narrative" of life is suspect. Rather it is the growing sense, influenced by the entry of what I would call "Buddhism-lite" into our culture, that the evolution of a life is, or ought to be, from greater desire for control to release of control, from a sense that you know a lot to the sense that you know nothing, from the mind that masters to the mind that is empty. I suppose I am not really clear on how this will shape our understanding of biography in the future, but it suggests to me that the subjects whom we admire will be those who realize that the whole notion of a person "shaping" or "influencing" a culture is questionable, and that we are more like small dinghy's cast about on the waves of life than anchors resisting the onslaught of the waves.

In other words, the future of the biographical genre belongs to authors who will describe subjects who are committed to their own apparent self-effacement. In the wake of South Asian tsunamis and Katrinas, the lesson that biographers may learn, and increasingly portray, is that no one really "shapes" life. We are all molded by the erosive winds of nature and forces fully beyond our control. Who will be the "poster boy" for this new kind of biography? I have an idea, but I don't want to share it here and now. I want this idea to gestate in me...and you.

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