You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Naturally the writer's life will be seen as irrelevant to his works if you reduce biography to the level of gossip. But if you respect the biographer's art, a better alternative presents itself. Rather than maintain that a philosopher's moral character has no bearing on his thinking, wouldn't it make more sense to suppose that the life and thought of a philosopher, a writer, or a literary theorist must interact in numerous complex and significant ways?
In a series of essays on the life and death of Sylvia Plath, Janet Malcolm (1993) draws the following distinction between fiction and non-fiction. “The facts of imaginative literature,” she writes, “are as hard as the stone that Dr. Johnson kicked. We must always take the novelist's and the playwright's and the poet's word, just as we are almost always free to doubt the biographer's or the historian's or the journalist's” (138). The shock value of this statement derives from its reversal of the usual alignment of poetry, drama, and fiction with the realm of illusion, non-fiction with fact. “In imaginative literature,” she continues, “we are constrained from considering alternative scenarios—there are none. This is the way it is. Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open” (138). The point she is making is that biography is a matter of interpretation, a particular construction of the available evidence, from a special angle of vision. This should not be news to a contemporary practitioner, yet the striking thing to me about Freudian biography is precisely its consistency, its failure to present competing perspectives on the same (and gradually expanding) body of materials.
Freud himself, I believe, is largely responsible for this phenomenon, having first created, then promulgated a construction of his life which continues to circulate in the work of