The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

development, a “narrative of internal homogeneity and cross‐temporal consistency”
constructed with a “Cartesian self‐transparency”. 66 Lives were presumed to be
structured by “objective life markers”, reflecting key, critical points about the life in
question. Through these markers, the lives of ‘real’ persons could be “mapped, charted
and given meaning”. 67
Another feature of the conventional biography was that it presumed that there was a
‘real person’ who lived a life, who was born, perhaps died, and who may have
influenced others. This ‘real person’ was a ‘real subject’, and as such, could be written
about. The presentation of lives was presumed to be objective, truthful and factually
correct, with lives as lived able to be told with reference to objective, verifiable dates. 68
In this realist project, the individual was produced as authentic self, with an identity
able to generate, in Cartesian fashion, its own unique vision of the world: ‘I think,
therefore I am’. The resultant linear biographical product stood as ‘the truth’ about the
‘real’ individual’s life. 69
Mary Evans has gone further to argue that the pattern of the conventional, traditional
biography was also a masculinist one. Evans was concerned with issues of gender in
relation to biography, “if women and men write the same kind of biographies and if
female and male subjects are examined in the same way”. 70 It was male forms of
biography, written by both men and women, which had been organised along strictly
chronological patterns. The subject was usually introduced in the context of their
original family, from which the person emerged “to take his or her place on the stage of
adult life”. The path to adulthood and public achievement was ordered so that the
66K Anthony Appiah, ‘Mass Media, Biography, Cultural Memory: Introduction’, in Mary Rhiel and
David Suchoff (eds), The Seductions of Biography, pp 10‐11.
67Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Biography (Sage University Paper Series on Qualitative Research
Methods, No 17) Newbury Park, California: Sage, 1989, pp 17‐19.
68Norman K Denzin, Interpretive Biography, pp 21‐23.
69For a rather conservative defence of traditional or conventional biography and its realist concern for the
‘truth’ of people’s lives, see Eric Homberger and John Charmley, eds, The Troubled Face of Biography,
based on a 1985 conference on ‘Modern Biographyʹ held in Britain.
70Mary Evans, ‘Masculine and Feminine Biography’, in David Ellis (ed), Imitating Art, p 108.
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