The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

person, and to organise human experience. Indeed, the relationship between biographer
and subject is more complex than that for which the passive model allows. 122
Also important is the relationship between biographer and those with whom the subject
was close. Sometimes, more interests may be involved, as when the existence and
identity of a political organisation depends on and is interwoven with the symbolic
power of an individual identity, a biographic presence of a leader. In some cases these
struggles result in conflicts with an estate of a deceased, which tries to assert control
over the rights to an author’s life. Janet Malcolm described one such case in her book The
Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath’s survivors resented the
interpretive freedom of the reader. Ted Hughes bemoaned the “absolute power and the
corruption” that came with the right of the critic to say what they pleased about the
dead. At issue was the question of ownership of “the facts of our lives” after death.
Comparing biography to burglary, Malcolm contended that “we do not ‘own’ the facts
of our lives at all. This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are
first observed”. 123 To be observed involves dispossession of our lives. We can never own
our lives. Yet the biographer seizes the life of the subject as a “transgressive” act,
engaging in metaphorical theft, stealing that which is not owned. 124
For such struggle to take place, however, need not imply open warfare. It takes place
even where there is no awareness of its presence. There will always be a dialogue
between the biographical process and autobiographical traces, even where no
autobiography as such exists. These narrative traces are to be found in archival
collections, interviews, diaries, and other forms of life‐writing and self‐production. They
122 See the biography of Simone de Beauvoir by Deidre Bair (Simone de Beauvoir ‐ A Biography, London:
Jonathan Cape, 1990) in which she merely follows these tracks laid by De Beauvoir in order to
demonstrate the validity of these self‐images, without analysing De Beauvoir’s conscious attempts to
construct herself in particular ways; Mary Evans, ‘Masculine and Feminine Biography’, pp 112‐113.
123 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, London: Picador, 1994, pp 8, 46‐7, See
also Janet Malcolm, ‘The Silent Woman’, The New Yorker, No 69, 23‐30 August, 1993.
124 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, p 9. See the discussion by Barbara Johnson, ‘Whose life is it anyway?:
Introduction’ in M Rhiel and D Suchoff, eds, The Seductions of Biography, pp 119‐121. But see Chapter
Two for a discussion of the case of Martin Luther King, Jr, and the attempt by the King family to control
and benefit from the proceeds of King biographic memorialism.
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