<i>The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr.</i> (review)
1987; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/bio.2010.0476
ISSN1529-1456
Autores Tópico(s)Narrative Theory and Analysis
Resumo170 biography Vol. 10, No. 2 although they are aware of the many deceptions autobiography is susceptible to. The biographer can empathize, identify, and cleave to his subject all he wants, but he can never get inside the character the way the self-biographer can. Psychobiography has come along to provide a category to deal with this awkward problem. (Edel quotes Nabokov's calling biography "psycho-plagiarism.") This longing might only be wistful thinking; again the example of Sartre's Roquentin reminds us that RoquentinSartre cannot get inside his own life any better than he can inject himself into Rollebon 's. In writing about their past lives, autobiographers are just as dependent as biographers on finding external events to serve as objective correlatives for internal developments, and establishing a narrative progression to give them shape. The autobiographer 's apparent advantage may reside only in the greater freedom with which he is able to invent or select his inner states, unencumbered by the biographer's responsibility to external fact. The novelist in the realistic tradition, some of the biographers here imply, is completely free to narrate, although it may be argued (without bringing up the question that modern novels have become as fragmented as everything else) that once a novelist has invented his characters he is bound to be consistent to the "facts" of their lives. The biographer's dilemma, in other words, would seem to be shared also by both the historian and the novelist. While all the essays in this collection are lively and probing, Frank E. Vandiver's "Biography as an Agent of Humanism" stands out for its incisiveness, and also for its sensitivity to useful contemporary developments in other fields. Barbara Tuchman's "Biography as a Prism of History," another especially fine and thoughtful essay, reminds us that one of the attractions of biography is that "it encompasses the universal in the particular," although here again the contemporary skeptic might object to the confidence of this statement in the discernibility of universale or the holistic singularity of particulars. This volume serves a useful purpose in making the reader of biographies (and perhaps writers new to the field) aware of the intractable problems inherent in biography. After finishing Biography as High Adventure this reviewer went off to read or re-read a number of biographies, and found that he was asking of them questions of a much more probing nature than before. Burton Pike Graduate School and Queens College, CUNY Gary Scharnhorst, with Jack Bales, TL· Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1985. 192 pp. $17.95. Though his name is a household word, Horatio Alger, Jr., hasn't really been read for generations. Occasionally available in obscure paperback reprints, however, Alger has been a neat foil in college courses on "The American Dream." His corny characters, predictable plots, and flaccid moralism have seemed to demonstrate how vapid and insipid popular laissez-faire capitalism sounds beside such complex, "serious" literary works as Franklin's Autobiography, Thoreau's Waiden, Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. And the "facts" of Alger's life have been irresistible: the sickly, puny youth scornfully dubbed "Holy Horatio" by other boys; the Harvard years (his landlady showing up at his door stark naked one night, the account goes, Alger promptly removed to REVIEWS 171 quarters where "there [was] more respect for decency"); his fling with a Parisian café singer who chased him to America, where he finally eluded her on the docks; his "adoption" by the Newsboys' Lodging House in New York, which gave him story ideas but stunted his emotional growth and stifled his creativity; his beloved, adopted Chinese boy, Wing, killed under the hooves of a runaway horse; his trip West, where instead of forgetting, he went mad; the descent into bathos upon his return, when he was mistakenly arrested as a murderer; and, a final pitiful act, his unsuccessful pursuit of a married woman to France, resulting in his ultimate insanity and decline. These episodes have entertainingly illustrated that the gap between public image and private reality has tragic implications for American dreamers, that the very...
Referência(s)