What are we talking about?
In her seminal discussion of women and fiction, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf outlines one of the most important characteristics of fiction in general: the existence of a relationship between fiction and reality. Woolf tells us “Fiction… is likely to contain more truth than fact” (2). This, I believe, is the crux of the problem with that art of biography and of Woolf’s qualms with trying to impose art upon life rather than creating characters with lives of their own. I will focus specifically on Woolf’s short story “Memoirs of a Novelist,” written in 1901, in which the narrator is a critic who reviews a biography of a recently deceased novelist.
Does it matter?
I would say yes. Contemporary fascination with memoir, biography and the based-on-a-true-story trope has grown to new heights in the wake of the James Frey versus Oprah battle of the titans.
Does anyone agree?
Carolyn Kraus points out in her 2008 article “Proof of Life: Memoir, Truth, and Documentary Evidence,” modern literary theorists – in particular autobiographical and literary non-fiction theorists – have become focused on “exploring the fundamental conflict between psychological truth and factual truth” and “have asked whether it’s really possible to separate the two, or whether objective truth is even desirable” (245). Questions about the psychological and factual truths that writers like Kraus examine are directly related to Woolf’s theory concerning the connection between fiction and life.
So, what’s the novel?
Well, it’s a short story. But it’s perfectly suited to the discussion of fiction versus nonfiction because it narrows the scope considerably. It brings us to biographical theory in opposition to fiction, and to the true representation of the life of not only a human but of a capital-w-Writer.
The critic in “Memoirs of a Novelist” is disillusioned with the biography of novelist Frances Ann Willatt written by her friend Miss Linsett. Within the critique, we see Miss Linsett panned, but more importantly the entire concept of biography is criticized. The practice of instituting artificial barriers– chapters, headings, page allotments – do not, according to Woolf’s narrator, belong in a transcription of a human life, especially the life of a writer. Then, the narrator examines the novels of Miss Willatt and finds makeshift clues about their author that, according to the critic, contradict Miss Linsett’s interpretation of Miss Wallat’s life. Ultimately, Woolf’s fictional critic concludes that a more authentic representation is evident in the author’s fiction than in the author’s biography.
What have others written about this story?
Frankly, nothing. However, they have written extensively about Woolf.
In his article “This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography, Reality, and Character,” Ray Monk examines a theme that he believes pervades much of Woolf’s writing on biography. This theme is a synthesis of the concept that “real” human life is almost exclusively internal and “therefore (as facts are essentially external) beyond the reach of nonfiction” (Monk 5). Thus, the novelist has the opportunity denied to other writers: the ability to explore the internal, real life without the restriction of fact, truth, and black-and-white accuracy. The novelist can exist in a gray area where revelations arise without the restrictions of exposition and cerebral rationality.
What does VW think?
Woolf tackles this issue head on in “Memoirs of a Novelist“, beginning with an inquest into the nature of biography:
“What right has the world to know about men and women? What can a biographer tell it? and then, in what sense can it be said that the world profits? The objection to asking these questions is not only that they take so much room, but that they lead to an uncomfortable vagueness of mind. Our conception of the world is that it is a round ball, coloured green where there are fields and forests, wrinkled blue where there is sea, with little peaks pinched up upon it, where there are mountain ranges. When we are asked to imagine the effect of Miss Willatt or another upon this object, the enquiry is respectful but without animation.” (69)
- Woolf is speaking in general about the “right” of knowing the truth about men and women, and questioning if a biographer can supersede this question of right and actually tell the world something about a person that walked the earth.
- Woolf posits the writer – the subject of biography – in direct opposition to the rest of the world, or “it,” as she labels the world in her second sentence, further belittling the right said world might have to delve into a writer’s personal life through a surrogate.
- Woolf persists in using such objective, distanced terms to describe the world. She uses “this object” and other such labels to illustrate distance and separation to magnify the status of the individual in relation to the world which she calls “a round ball,” creating a cartoonish, animated image of something that is treated as so vast, epic, cosmic and important.
- Thus, she makes the individual, the writer, the focus of her musings and shrinks the world to miniscule proportions, a caricature of its grand former self when held in comparison to the life of an individual.
Then Woolf’s narrator tells us that the “enquiry,” or the process of seeking universal truths from Miss Willatt’s life, is “respectful but without animation.”
- Respectful connotes the grand, noble art of biography, perhaps even the noblesse oblige of literature being that great writers must write haughtily about their compatriots to preserve the standing, the academic reputation, of both biographer and subject.
- Woolf’s narrator, however, wants us to consider the importance of animation. The narrator views fiction as a more revealing, more freeing means of talking about life and about the reality of people than biography, which is limited by facts that can only be verified by people who knew the subject’s external life.
- Imitation versus creation is the primary difference between biography and fiction.
What’s the big deal with biography?
Even I didn’t know Woolf had written so extensively about biography, so don’t feel bad. It makes sense, though, as her father, Sir Lesley Stephen, was arguably the most prominent Victorian biographer.
The belief that the importance of external facts within biography is what prevents biography from realistically transcribing human life is a belief of Woolf’s that infuses much of her criticism. Woolf discounts fact not out of distrust for truth but of truth that can only be verified by others. In “The New Biography,” Woolf tackles the idea presented by Sir Sidney Lee that “the aim of biography is the truthful transmission of personality” (Lee qtd. in Woolf 229). According to Woolf, this is exactly the reason why biography – or, for our purposes, any non-fiction representation of a human life – is doomed to fall short. Woolf elaborates,
On the one hand there is truth; on the other there is personality. And if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it. (“The New Biography” 229)
It is not biography itself that Woolf contests but the process of, as she calls it, welding fiction and biography into a “seamless whole.” Woolf does not discount biography as a means of chronicling facts but discounts poorly constructed biographies because they fail to “choose those truths which transmit personality” (“The New Biography 229). Woolf calls on fiction to support her point by pointing out that “each of us is more Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, than he is John Smith of the Corn Exchange” (“The New Biography 234). Thus we return to the fact that in order to have the freedom to choose facts that transmit personality and create a seamless, lifelike whole he or she must rely on fiction.
So what?
We as readers need to question if fact and documented truth is more important to us now than well-crafted fiction. For this reason I have chosen Woolf, the consummate novelist and essayist, to explore the distinction between biography and fiction, to uncover their benefits and shortcomings, and to ultimately examine each genre’s relevance in the life of the author.
