on wanting to know more about TRP (a bit long)

[Doug Millison]

Not too long ago, in the context of a VL passage that shows Prairie
learning about Frenesi's experience by viewing the films Frenesi made, we
talked a bit about my wondering aloud at what we can learn about an author
from reading the author's writing, and whether this is even a desireable
project.  Here's an example of a critic speaking of the contradictions
inherent in wanting to know more about the lives of the authors we love.
This comes in the course of an article about the recent biography of Victor
Hugo, a writer who was very much in the public eye -- a very different case
from that of Mr. Pynchon, who offers us little but his writing through
which to learn about him.

"Šit is precisely when dealing with figures such as Hugo that one feels
obliged once again to question the desirability, if not the very
feasability, of literary biography.

"It is not simply that giants do not bear close scrutiny (as Gulliver
discovered to his utter discomfort when he had to blimb into the bosoms of
the court ladies of Brobdingnag), but more essentially, there is this basic
evidence:  the only thing that could justify our curiosity is precisely
what necessarily escape the biographer's analysis:  the mystery of artistic
creation. Hugo's long exile was the climax of his life, but these
momentuous twenty years could be described in merely one sentence:  He sat
in front of the ocean and he wrote.

"The thesis that literary biography is doomed to fail by its very nature is
not new, and creative artists have expounded it most persuasively. Proust
wrote an entire treatise on the subject, Contre Saint-Beuve, and it would
be rather fatuous for me to attempt rehashing it here. Closer to us,
Malraux summed up the issue quite pointedly:  'Our time is fond of
unveiling secrets - first because we seldom forgive those whom we admire;
secondly, because we vaguely hope that, amid these unveiled secrets, we may
find the secret of genius. Under the artist, we wish to reach the man. But
when you scrape a fresco, if you scrape it down to its shameful bottom
layer, all you get in the end is mere plaster.' [André Malraux, Les Voix du
silence (Paris:  Gallimard, 1952), pp. 416-418] But well before him, the
indignation which a poet must experience before our indiscreet appetite for
biographical information was most memorably expressed by Pushkin:  'The mob
reads confessions and notes, etc. so avidly because in their baseness they
rejoice at the humiliations of the high and mighty. Upon discovering any
kind of vileness they are delighted. He's little, like us! He's vile, like
us! You lie, scoundrels:  he is little and vile, but differently, not like
you.' [Pushkin in a letter quoted in Volkov, Conversations with Joseph
Brodsky, p. 141]

"Note that I am quite aware of my own contradictions. If my readers derive
any enjoyment from this little article, they should also keep in mind that
a great deal of its information was directly drawn from Robb's work. And
even as I question the point of writing literary biographies, I know all
too well that I shall continue to read them - especially when they are as
intelligent and readable as this one."

- Simon Leys, "Giant", New York Review of Books,  17 December 1998, p. 57,
in a review of Victor Hugo:  A Biography by Graham Robb and Shadows of a
Hand:  The Drawings of Victor Hugo by Ann Philbin, Florian Rodari, et. al


D O U G  M I L L I S O N  [http://www.online-journalist.com]
"All these voices. Why not pluck a few words from the multitudes rushing
toward the Void of forgetfulness?"--Thomas Pynchon