What is Happening in the Text

Dorothy W responds to my response to her original post about the utility of biographies by reconsidering her initial resistance to biographically-grounded criticism:

Ultimately, I think context is useful in interpreting literature — it can help you understand what is happening in the text itself — and biography is one form of that context. Biography shouldn’t be used to close down other possible interpretations, but it doesn’t necessarily do so, any more than other ways of reading do.

Dorothy's example of the way "biographical information" can help us understand what is happening in the text itself is its application to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to which we might bring our knowledge of Mary Shelley's use of her husband Percy in her depiction of Dr. Frankenstein:

What this identification of Frankenstein with Percy Shelley allows a reader to see is that the novel may be critiquing not only the kind of ambition Frankenstein exhibits, but the version of Romanticism and particularly the adoration of the Romantic hero valorized by Percy Shelley. The novel then becomes, in part, a way of rewriting Romanticism itself.

As Dorothy herself admits, it's possible to "see the larger point about Romanticism without knowing a thing about Percy Shelley" (in fact I myself am one who has for years seen that point whenever I've re-read Frankenstein, and I will admit I do indeed know very little about the life of P. B. Shelley--or about the life of Mary Shelley, for that matter). But she believes that knowing about Mary's critique of her own husband's self-image "adds a sharpness and focus to the argument that wouldn't otherwise be there."

In my opinion, there's a very fine line between a careful reader adding "a sharpness and focus" to an interpretation already arrived at and less careful readers concluding that "Victor Frankenstein is Percy Bysshe Shelley." Once that "interpretation" has been established, it's very difficult to insist that such a claim is overstated, that nuance is required. The biographical cat is out of the interpretive bag and, in my opinion, to the detriment of Frankenstein, which can now be read as Mary Shelley's brief against her husband while all of the novel's other themes and devices can be safely overlooked.

And there's also a difference between "biographical information" and a full-on biography. One can be "informed," say in a class studying Frankenstein or by an introduction to the novel of the sort Dorothy found in her own reading edition, that Mary Shelley may have been critically exploring the kind of Romanticism expressed in her husband's work in her portrayal of Victor Frankenstein. This may or may not be useful information (since one could discern without it whatever "critique" of Romanticism Shelley is offering by reading the text closely), but it certainly does not require reading a biography of either Shelley in order to profitably interpret the novel.

Finally, just as biography does not necessarily "close down interpretation," neither does ignoring it necessarily deprive the reader of some essential purchase on the text, without which the reading experience is going to be impoverished. Those who have read biographies of the author do not have crucial knowledge that the biography-deprived lack. Good biographies may provide useful "context," but I would still maintain that readers who go to biographies for critical context rather than actual criticism, or go to them first, are making it more likely they will ultimately "close down" their reading of a literary work rather than deepen it.

Comments

[Luther Blissett]

Dan, there's nothing specific to biographical information that will shut down interpretation. Learning that "things fall apart" is an allusion to Yeats could do the same. Learning the historical meanings of English words likewise. Any information could potentially delimit the range of meanings.

[Nigel Beale]

Proust is with you Dan, when he attacks St. Beuve, and says "a book is the product of a self other than that which we display in our habits, in company, in our vices."

[Amateur Reader]

Do you have advice for how to stay on the right side of the fine line?

For example, say I already know that Socrates and Beatrice were real people. Is there a way I can read Plato and Dante without being hopelessly corrupted by this knowledge? Since I already know that Stanley Elkin was a 19th century Romanian clog dancer who stunned the world by retiring at the height of her fame to write a number of witty, elegant, prophetic novels, is there any way I can read her books without interpreting them as allegories of the politics of the world of Eastern European folk dancing? How do I get the cat back in the bag?

[Dan Green]

"Do you have advice for how to stay on the right side of the fine line?"

Don't draw it in the first place. Again: acknowledging that we know that Socrates and Beatrice were real people seems to be defining biography way down.

[Amateur Reader]

My preference is strongly against drawing the line! A reader brings an enormous variety of information to any book - history, language, geography, imagery, and other texts, lots of other texts. It's is all potentially enriching, very much including literary history. No lines drawn here. Your claim seems to be that some of this information is uniquely corrupting, possibly because you have seen its misuse by bad readers. But I don't understand how the admirable resistance of shallow undergraduate ideas leads to the pulping of Plutarch.

Nicholas Boyle may know more about Goethe's life than anyone on earth. He also appears to be a superb Goethe critic. Maybe this isn't a contradiction?

My reductio ad absurdums are, of course, attempts to pin down the logic of your ideas. Apologies if they're too snarky. But they're meant seriously. If I'm defining biography too far down, where do you define it?

[Dan Green]

"If I'm defining biography too far down, where do you define it?"

I'm defining it as the sort of thing that is now about the only long-form commentary on literature that's ever reviewed in most book reviews--the thick, sometimes multivolume biographies of writer's lives in which everything that can be known about the writer's activities is thrown in. Plutarch is a whole other subject.