The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

story, creating a ‘transferential’ relationship to the biographical subject. The biographer,
here, had autobiographical self‐awareness, and awareness of the complexity of the self. 80
This work, especially that by Virginia Woolf (daughter of Leslie Stephen) and Lytton
Strachey, who published Eminent Victorians in 1918, radically disrupted the concept of a
life‐course, and began to question the very principles of biographical identity and
biological unity fostered by their Victorian predecessors. They emphasised the aesthetic
dimensions of biography, with the biographer seen as artist, not chronicler. In their
critique, both satirised the extent to which biographers, as “historians of life, dwell on
the death‐bed scene”, posed a paradoxical connection between biography and death. 81
They pointed to the tension between posthumous memorialisation and the attempt to
‘grasp’ the life as lived, expressed in a language of monuments, statuary and epitaphs.
Here, the biographic and the funereal were intermeshed, with the biographical subject
identical to the dead.
Exponents of this ‘new biography’ saw the role of the biographer as exposing and
revealing the ‘real self’ of the subject, with no disguises. Strachey and Woolf questioned
the categories of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in relation to the subject and opened up dominant
metaphors in biographical criticism, which dealt with some of the key issues of
biographical representation: the relation between biographer and subject, the place of
the body in biography and “the temporality of the life as lived and narrated”. 82
Traditional biography, with its Cartesian foundations, had posited the category of the
‘individual’, which presumed that humans were free intellectual agents whose thinking
processes were not coerced by cultural or historical circumstances. We were offered “a
narrator who imagines that he speaks without simultaneously being spoken”. 83 The
‘new biographers’ of the early twentieth century, on the other hand, began to open up
80 Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, p 90.
81Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, p 93. See especially the essay by Virginia Woolf, ‘The New
Biographyʹ, in Collected Essays, 4 vols, London: Hogarth, 1966/7, vol 4.
82Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, pp 130‐131.
83Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post‐structuralism and Postmodernism, New York: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1988, p 1.
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