Cultures of Fetishism (22 page)

These two eminent writers, although they wrote long before the time of Derrida’s
Archive Fever
, captured the
anarchic, archiviolithic drive
underly- ing his
mal d’archive
. Since Strachey and Woolf appreciated the force and power of the deadly impulses that could murder a biography, they mustered every possible means to bring vitality to the biographical enterprise.

Strachey’s exhuberant aphoristic style ridiculed the pompous sanctities of his subjects—from Cardinal Manning to Florence Nightingale, and even those of the ostensibly plain and simple Queen Victoria, who got a biography all for herself. Woolf, with deliberate intentions of keeping the realities of time and place and person at bay, challenged every biographical propriety. She wrote a biography of the fictional character Orlando, who lived for several centuries and changed sexual identities whenever impulse or circum- stance called for it.
6
Orlando
mocked calendar time, gender conformities,

and conventional biography. Woolf followed that up with
Flush
, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett’s cocker spaniel, portraying the love and elopement of Miss Barrett and Mr. Robert Browning through the eyes of Flush.
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Woolf ’s impudent biographical virtuosity taunted those pathetic souls who plod along, “without looking to right or left.”

In 1961, as Leon Edel was plodding through the third volume of his five-volume biography of Henry James, he presented a lecture entitled “The Biographer and Psycho-analysis” to a group of psychoanalysts. After calling attention to certain similarities between biographer and psychoanalyst, Edel focused on the unconscious motives underlying a biographer’s compelling attraction to his or her subject.

As Edel gave his psychoanalytic interpretation of the origins and effects of the biographer’s compelling attraction, he unknowingly expressed the essence of Derrida’s archive fever. This attraction, Edel stressed, was always “mixed up, in different degrees with all sorts of drives”—curiosity, voyeurism, the drive to power and the need for omniscience.
8
He concluded his compi- lation of the compulsions and impulses that accompany the biographer’s compelling attraction to his subject, with that other, even more powerful drive, that ever-present susceptibility so characteristic of biographical study— the digestive factor, “the impulse toward accumulation and ingestion of data.”
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He cautioned that the gratification of the digestive impulse can, and usually does, result in a very cluttered biography or a biography that never gets written. And thus the stored-up accumulation of data, rather then bringing a subject to life, crushes his or her vitalities and inevitably buries the remains of the dead.

How might a biographer protect himself from the dangers of the uncon- scious forces that inhabit the biographical enterprise? Edel explained to his audience of analysts that a biographer had an interpersonal relationship with his subject much like the analyst has to his patient. And, like an analyst with a patient, the biographer must know
himself
before he can know his subject.
10
Prior to commencing, even before beginning to collect data, the biographer must ask questions like the following: What are the qualities in my subject that arrested my attention? Why did I chose this poet? this painter? this composer? Why not that one? What are the forces underlying my attraction?
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Moreover, in order to pursue the difficult time-consuming task ahead of him, the biographer must identify with his subject.
12
How else to re-experience and appreciate his subject’s feelings, dilemmas, struggles, passions? Yet, Edel cautions that, in these very identifications, there is another danger. In becom- ing this other person for the purposes of biography, the biographer risks everything. He might lose himself in his subject or lose his subject by making him a mirror of himself. The antidote to these potential maladies is for the biographer to ponder his identifications and to make them conscious, or as

conscious as possible.

Early on in his lecture, Edel reprimands the traditional biographer who is disinterested and unaware of his personal reasons for choosing a subject, “inno- cently boasting that he is
objective
, and even ‘scientific’ in his biographical

methods.”
13
However, because he has assembled his facts by the light of his
unconscious
preconceptions, he actually “arrives at a work that is an image
of an image
of himself, and of his identifications and distortions.”
14

The biographer must question the forces underlying his attraction to his subject and ponder the nature of his identifications with that person. Here Edel reminds the analysts of another way in which biographer and analyst are alike. “The dangers of a kind of countertransference
*
exist for him as they do for you.”
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Without fully realizing it, Edel’s countertransference fears bring him to the central dilemma and tension of his lecture, an ambivalence toward transference that would haunt his future writings on biography. Edel’s transference ambivalence would turn out to make him susceptible to the archive fever he deplored.

Should the biographer disengage from his subject? If he does, he might then lose his desire to write biography. If he doesn’t, he loses his objectivity and the subject’s life will become entangled in the biographer’s counter- transferences.

When I first read Edel’s lecture on biography and psychoanalysis, I was puzzled by his fear of countertransference. But, after all, the analysts he was addressing were also suspicious of countertransference. At that time, analysts had recognized that an understanding of a patient’s transference to the analyst yielded valuable insights into the patient’s psychic life. However, countertransference was a thorn in the side of psychoanalysis—to most analysts, something dangerous and menacing that could only act as an impediment or interference with the analytic process. However, even as early as 1950, some analysts in England and France were already viewing counter- transference as perhaps the most crucial dimension of an analyst’s ability to understand his patients. Some analysts went so far as to claim that counter- transference is a prerequisite for analysis, rather than an impediment. And that, furthermore, without countertransference the necessary talent and interest for conducting an analysis are absent. Nowadays, countertransfer- ence is widely considered the analyst’s friend and ally, if she understands and uses it to advance her patient’s availability to the psychoanalytic process.

Over the years, as I became friendly toward countertransference, my analytic experiences began to teach me that
my
countertransferences, when I was able to be aware of them and make them conscious, were as much

* The psychoanalytic terms,
transference,
and
countertransference,
have various meanings depending on the particular school of psychoanalysis. In this chapter on biography, I am using the term transference in its most direct and usual sense. Transference is about the feelings, thoughts, fantasies, wishes, and infantile conflicts aroused in the biographer in response to her subject’s character, actions, feelings, thoughts, fantasies, and infantile conflicts. When these transferences can be made conscious, they are a source of information and vitality in the writing of the biogra- phy. However, since a biographical subject, unless he is still living, cannot have a transference to his biographer, the biographer cannot have a countertransference in the most technical sense of that term. While some analysts still believe in the idea that countertransferences represent inter- ferences and impediments, most present-day analysts believe that the analyst’s countertransfer- ences to her subject are not only useful, but indispensible to the psychoanalytic process.

a source of my analytic insights as were my patient’s transferences. At some point during my reconsiderations of countertransference, I was reminded of Edel’s fear of it. I re-read his paper and indulged myself in some private interpretations, which I now make public.

According to Edel, identifications were acceptable, even necessary to the biographer’s sympathies with his subject’s plight—
if
the biographer could make these identifications conscious. It was the transference-countertransference that had Edel worried. The way I reasoned the tensions in Edel’s remarks, they had something to do with the differences between rationality and irrationality. Identifications, whether conscious or unconscious, are understood to be ego/superego/ego-ideal formations, and therefore, however nonrational and conflict-ridden these internal structures actually are, the word “ego” dig- nifies them with the stamp of reason, order, and rationality.

Transferences,—the patients’ responses to his analyst that derive from cer- tain elements in his own psychic life;—and countertransferences,—the ana- lysts’ various responses to his patient’s transferences,—are responses that derive partly from the analyst’s psychic life and partly from his sympathy with the patient’s psychic life, and are not part of the supposedly rational everyday world we live in. Edel, I interpreted, was made anxious by the irrationality of those mysterious, vagrant, and mischievous life forces that are inherent in writing lives.

In
Writing Lives
, Edel’s
Principia Biographica
, transference issues had become central to his biographical wisdom. Nevertheless, despite his increased understanding of the process and his greater awareness of the differences between identifications and transferences, he still had a profound mistrust of transference.

Before tackling the problems of transference, Edel invites us to imagine the surface of the biographer’s table—buried under piles of books, certifi- cates of birth, certificates of death, diaries, testimonials, newspaper clippings, and so on. Edel gives considerable attention to the vast assortment of items that clutter the biographer’s worktable, which obviously has to be much larger and stronger than the tables of other writers, as if the image of that impressive collection of data could overpower the menace of transference.

It is worth pursuing the possible relationship between Edel’s persisting mistrust of transference and his unrelenting apprehensions about archives. Throughout Edel’s
Principia
, the two ostensibly distinct topics incessantly rub against one another, embracing in an unacknowledged liebestod.

In the first chapter of
Writing Lives
, Edel addresses the common dilemmas and challenges that biographers must face up to. He cites the wisdom of Lytton Strachey, who had described biography as “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing.”
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In an emotionally resonant passage, Edel elaborates the full meaning of Strachey’s words:

Delicate because the biographer seeks to restore a sense of life to the inert materials that survive an individual’s passage on earth . . . and to shape a like- ness of the vanished figure. Humane, because inevitably the biographical

process is a refining, a civilizing,—a humanizing process. And because it is a del- icate and humane process, it partakes of all the ambiguities and contradictions of life itself. A biography is a record in words, of
something that is mercurial and as flowing, as compact of temperament and emotion as the human spirit itself
. (
itals
. mine)
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Edel then points to the biographer’s main dilemma: The biographer “must be neat and orderly and logical in describing this
flamelike human spirit which delights in defying order and neatness and logic
”
(itals
. mine).
18

Edel’s ambivalence about the human spirit arrested my attention. On the one hand, his words are a radiant testimony to that spirit. On the other, they confirm my interpretation of his fundamental fear of the irrational. Edel worried about what might happen if that vagrant, flamelike spirit were given expression without the restraints imposed upon it by archival data. Although there is a certain ambiguity in Edel’s position
vis á vis
order and neatness and logic, in the end he favors reason over the unknowable and uncontrollable human spirit—which so delights in defying the forces of law and order.

Obviously, I see these matters differently from Edel. Archive fever, the impulse to accumulate data, is not merely an expression of lawfulness, but also a device that deprives biographies of the transference vitalities that bring a subject to life. The bulking material reality of archives and facts is employed to still the flow of psychic reality, to squelch the flamelike human spirit that defies order and neatness. After all, the uncertainty and ambiguity of those mercurial and flowing vitalities of the human spirit pose a threat to the emotional and intellectual certainties of the biographer. To put it bluntly, biographers sometimes use archives to silence their transferences. However, when a transference is allowed to speak up and make itself heard, the biographer can use it to help her understand her subject.
Unacknowledged
transferences are the troublemakers and it is these that breed and nourish archive fevers.

Writers like Edel, who not only write biographies but write about biography, are reluctant to welcome transference as a potential ally in the struggle with archive fever. A biographer, however, can no more rid herself of transference than she can do away with her need for archives. The archival instinct can act as a restraint on transferences. Transferences, if they are made conscious, can serve as an antidote to archive fever.

A biographer always has a transference to the person she is writing about. It can be a most valuable tool for illuminating the psychic vitalities of a biographical subject. However, biographers, in their efforts toward achieving objectivity, tend to view their personal feelings and thoughts and fantasies about the subject of the biography as an impediment, something to be deliberately ignored, denied, repressed, and, whenever possible, silenced altogether. Sometimes, when transferences might press forward to become recognized, they are regarded as intrusions and banished.