Zhao Chapter 5 Overview

Zhao Baisheng, A Theory of Auto/biography

Chapter 5, Section 1: Three basic tropes of the "new biography"

Professor Zhao makes reads here from representatives of what he calls the "new biography," following Virginia Woolf's term. Lytton Strachey appears here, and also Emile Ludwig, Gamaliel Bradford, Philip Guedalla, and André Maurois. Zhao's purpose is to identify the three most crucial tropes of these writers' biographies that makes their work a viable genre. His point is that biographical literature has always been an important form of Western (read: English) literature, but after the "wave" of new biographies in the 1920s and 1930s, biography could be said to be a crucial literary form; something similar is true in the Chinese case.

The three tropes (called here "broad axes" 板斧, an extremely popular and versatile usage that worries one with its vagueness) that Zhao identifies are: the primacy of artistic technique (藝術第一), the need to explain (務必解釋), and a premium placed on "human interest" ("心的趣味").

1. Rather than discussing the primacy of artistic technique in general, Zhao moves quickly to the issue of whether a biography can be considered a "portrait" and the language of painting thus be applied to describe technique. A rather ambivalent consideration of Andre Maurois' biography of Disraeli finds that Maurois close attention to the Punch cartoons lampooning Disraeli definitely make his work more attractive to readers, and perhaps do not harm their "accuracy" as historical accounts. Unfortunately, this is not discussed with any amount of detail.

2. As my longer notes attempting to unpack this section suggest, this is the trope that interests me most deeply. That virtually all of the 1920s-30s biographies of major artists and political figures apply techniques of binary comparison (Lee will have his Grant, Disraeli his Gladstone) strikes me as a very real insight of Zhao's, though perhaps not completely generalizable (Napoleon surely was not compared to Wellington throughout Ludwig's biography, yes?). I suspect that a biographical subject's personality is staged, more often than not, by showing how she is different. She is discriminating, distinguished, different. I also suspect that Professor Zhao's connection between comparison and Foucault's "effective history" is a solid connection, but once again Professor Zhao simply does not elaborate on this at any level of detail at all.

3. Gamaliel Bradford's Biography and the Human Heart (1932) exemplifies Zhao's sense that in the world of the new biography, historical background is not as important as psychological analysis to craft the personality of the biographical subject. It's unclear why Zhao chose Bradford: Bradford's belief in the essential unchanging basic nature of the soul, and his conception of his role as a "naturalist of souls" are troublesome -- even Zhao admits the static model of personality found here jars with with the other new biographers. Zhao is likely relying heavily on Mark Longaker, whose 1934 work may well have been the last to take Gamaliel Bradford seriously. (Who are some better representatives to illustrate psychological tropes in biographical literature?).