Cultures of Fetishism by Louise J. Kaplan

Author:Louise J. Kaplan [Kaplan, Louise J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Psychology, Movements, Psychoanalysis, Social Psychology, Social Science, General, Popular Culture, Sociology, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9781403969682
Google: VjpJe8GwdV8C
Amazon: B005ZOCPW2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2006-10-16T16:00:00+00:00

As the number of biographies written and published increased, seemingly in harmony with the increasing size of the biographies, the anti-biographical forces rose up with renewed force and conviction. Railing against the biogra- phy genre at large, Stanley Fish, in his New York Times Op Ed page column

“Just published: Minutiae Without Meaning,” went on an all-out attack of the biography genre. His article focuses on all of those “details unattached to a master narrative . . . details that don’t mean anything at all, or can mean anything at all, the piling up of details, letters, medical records, the names of boyhood sleds in order to compensate for lack of meaning.”56 Most often biographers are left with “little more than a collection of random incidents the only truth being told is the truth of contingency, of events succeeding one another in a universe of accident and chance.”57

In an essay in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, Ellen Willis spoke fervently against the “sheer heft” of contemporary biographies, “overloaded with details that show off the author’s scholarship but fail to distinguish between the crucial and the trivial.”58

The vehemence of the general attack on biography inspired a few writers to try to muster some arguments in its favor. With all good intentions, John Updike’s defense, “One Cheer for Literary Biography,” ends up sounding very much like another attack. The tone is set when Updike begins with an epigraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks: “There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”59 Updike then tries to counter Fitzgerald’s pessimsim by giv- ing a faint cheer. He argues that certain biographies, like George D. Painter’s “splendid” two-volume biography of Marcel Proust, become a way of re-experiencing the novel, with a closeness, and a delight in seeing imagined details conjured back into real ones, “that only this particular writer and his vast autobiograhical masterpiece could provide.”60 Painter’s biography, Updike comments, “is more of the same, mirrored back into reality.”61

Along the way, however, most of what Updike says about literary biogra- phy is not accorded even the weak one cheer. And to compound matters, even this lonely champion of biography is caught up in the page-counting fad. “Although one rarely sees literary biography on the best-seller list, a prodigious amount of it is produced, some of it at prodigious length.”62 Beginning the tour in his library with Holroyd’s three-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw and Edel’s five-volume James, Updike then takes us out to his barn, where he begins a serious count-down.63 Five-hundred pages for Edmund Wilson, Simone Weil, and Joyce Cary; six-hundred for Oscar Wilde and Ivy Compton Burnett; six-hundred-and fifty for Norman Mailer, seven-hundred each for Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett; eight-hundred for Zola; and the real heavyweight of twelve-hundred for the life of James Thurber. Updike then speculates that maybe length of biography has something to do with length of life. Sylvia Plath, dead at thirty, got only three-hundred-and-fifty pages.

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