In a recent Booktube video of mine talking
about the non-fiction I read, I mentioned that I wasn’t a fan of biographies
and memoirs, which prompted some comments below the line. So I thought I’d
expand my thoughts and reasoning to try and delve deeper why I’m just not drawn
to reading these personal stories.
I guess if I was at all drawn to biographies,
we might be talking three categories of people – Historical Figures/ Politicians:
Artists/Authors/Musicians/Creatives; Sports stars/Athletes. I am completely
uninterested in business moguls/entrepreneurs, even if as many assert, they
are filled with self-help exhortations of how to succeed the way they did. I dislike
self-help books even more than biography!
I studied history at university. It
made me hostile to further study of the subject (I changed my degree for my
final year, so heartily sick of the subject I had become). But one of the
things about History as an academic subject, is that you are discouraged from
considering the personality and character of its (supposed) main movers, because
adjudging a great leader’s character make up is not as scientific as the
documents and sources that allow historians to form their theses about
historical events and movements. So what could a biography of Lenin or Garibaldi
tell you that you could definitively feed into your knowledge and appreciation
of the Russian Revolution or Italian unification and independence? Nothing
according to how History is practiced today. In my review of Laurent Binet’s
wonderful novel “HHhH”, I go into considerable detail about the limitations of Academic
History and you can view that here if you’re interested. Oh and this is why I
don’t read Historical non-fiction as well.
In some ways, sports stars and
creatives suffer similarly to my mind. When I watch my team on a sports field,
I am only interested in how they perform and the outcome of the match. I have
no interest in what they get up to outside of the sports arena. If I did, I’d
probably be spitting feathers as they likely demonstrate a less than devoted dedication
to their profession – making adverts, starting fashion lines, working off their
adrenaline highs post-match etc. All perfectly legitimate activities, just ones
I’d rather not know about. The one thing I’m fixated on is their sporting
prowess, but apart from having little desire to know its development and coaching
from childhood, any such biographical exploration would fail to yield answers.
Who knows where talent comes from? You are to some extent born with it, but
yes, you have to work hard to develop it to its fruition, but I don’t find such
studies terribly enlightening, much as I don’t find successful entrepreneurs
breaking down their hard work routines on the road to success terribly involving either.
And it’s similar for artists and
creatives. We just don’t know where creativity comes from. (I have a bullet
point schemata see at the end, but it’s not presented as definitive). A
biographer, or even a literary critic, can analyse the life of an author and
not unreasonably point to significant events and relationships that influenced
certain things in their writing. But to do so is reductive. In making such
linkages, it seems to be saying that a particular literary work would not have
been produced in that form without this incident happening or that particular relationship. Picasso’s various muses were directly transposed to his canvases
(albeit through the distortion of Cubist representation), so without those
particular women the canvasses would have looked very different. But that is
only partially the case. Picasso had an artistic vision, one he kept developing
throughout his career. He would have painted Cubist representations of people
and women in particular, even without the individual muses he did take into his
bed. For any artist, it’s the work transforming their personal material into
something that speaks more universally than it would without such work being
done on it that is key. So to read about the incidents and relationship of an
artist may allow us to directly parse a specific work of theirs, but can it sum
up the whole artist? Which incident applies to what stage of an artist’s
career? Does it only inform the work made around the time of the incident, or
does it continually feed into their whole artistic vision for their work? Who
can definitively say, not the biographer that’s for sure.
I also feel it’s worth trying to
preserve that mystery of where good art comes from. Creativity is an intangible,
why try and dissect it and match it to specific events that are likely not to
tell the whole story anyway. Like I say, most artists have a much more comprehensive
artistic vision (or philosophy if you prefer) informing their work, into which
specific events and relationships may be interwoven, but they never out-rank
the vision as a whole. I don’t read the lives of authors to pick up a few tips
on our craft. They have their process and I have mine, which I know to be somewhat
idiosyncratic. Could I share some processes with tubercular Franz Kafka who
never left continental Mitteleuropa in his life, or perhaps Stefan Schweig on
the run from country to country trying to outwit the Nazis? I don’t credit so,
though like Kafka’s novel “Amerika” about a country he’d never seen, my current novel is set in a country I have never visited. But that’s probably where the
similarity ends.
Why I don’t read memoir is even more
tightly focused than why I don’t read biography. I can at least accord the need
for biographies of people who have died and no longer can expand their oeuvre
in whatever field they specialized in. The biographer as archaeologist, putting
back together the shards of the departed subject. But I can’t justify in my
mind the significance of memoir. What percentage of memoirs are truly warts and
all, whereby the memoirist reproduces in full ugliness their bad decisions,
hateful behaviours and the like? There are plenty of biographies that are
hagiographies, but the tendency is even greater in memoir when it is the subject
themselves at the helm, with their finger poised over the self-censorship
button. Maybe it isn’t even a conscious airbrushing, maybe they just don’t see
anything negative about how they’ve conducted their lives; but then such
deluded fools are never going to be people I want to read about anyway. I accord that trauma memoirs have a use, I just have no desire to read them. I grew up in a house that contained an addict. I know what addiction looks like. I have no compunction to read other versions either for comparison, or more especially, not for pleasure either.
Secondly, memoirs are barely
non-fiction. The arrangement of a person’s life into a coherent narrative for a
reader, is so far removed from how anyone lives their life. There is no
narrative order to our lives, and though there may be constants and repetitions
in our behavior, we are still living minute to minute, day to day, week to
week, having to react and respond to events that arise, most of which won’t
make the final cut for the memoir. The act of ordering a narrative is
tantamount to creating a fiction. I’d just rather read that sort of thing in a
novel.
So there you have, why I don’t read
biographies and memoirs. Please feel free to comment and disabuse me of my
prejudices,
Sidebar:
Creativity may involve some or all
of the following:
1 1) An inherent curiosity about the
world
2 2) Not accepting things as they appear
(rejection of the surface)
3 3) A sense of outsiderness, or being
apart from how others regard the world
4 4) A fully knitted-together view of
reality that differs from the consensus view (this will likely form the basis
of your artistic vision). This view does not have to be coherent or fully stack
up
5 5) An ability to execute and deliver
works of creativity based on the above
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