The Magic of Biography. Why Are We Fascinated by Other People’s Lives?

Biography and Truth: A Bit of Invention

Biography is a genre with a long tradition. Its roots date back to antiquity, and the first author of this type of work is believed to be Plutarch. His Parallel Lives (1st century CE) perpetuate biographies of prominent figures of the ancient world. The biographical writing of the next eras typically included individuals who were regarded as an authority, such as medieval and modern saints, scholars, or politicians. Today, the secondary heroes of the so-called great history increasingly join this group.

In the Eyes of Literary Scholars

While reading a biography typically starts from a desire to learn the truth about the other person, these kinds of stories combine fact and fiction equally. This is due to the fact that biographies in books or movies are always recounted from the creator’s point of view, who chooses which facts to include, and they always employ a particular narrative. For many years, literary scholars had not appreciated book biographies. Especially during the period of structuralism domination, they saw them as a less serious literary genre. After all, from the perspective of 20th-century structuralists, the most important thing was the text and the ability to accurately interpret the meanings it holds.

The birth of poststructuralist thought in the second half of the 20th century has not significantly changed the skeptical approach of scholars to biography. Representatives of this current – such as Jacques Derrida and Hayden White – claimed in their works that story is the primary source of reality. In other words, everything is text, and none of us has access to facts in the traditional sense.

Since the 1980s, the representatives of the humanities have increasingly moved away from this way of thinking, pointing out that biographies are equally the product of facts and the creator’s imagination at play (and the reader’s/viewer’s/listener’s). Nowadays, we are usually aware that a book or a movie memoir is often exaggerated, and the perfect representations of online superstars, whose lives we closely monitor on social media, only include selected facts. Knowing that, can we, therefore, conclude that in biographies we are seeking something different than the traditionally understood truth?

Biography as a Source of Cognition

As Anita Całek, a literary scholar from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, proves, one of the main reasons why we read biographies is the desire to meet and understand another person in the space of the text, to empathize imaginatively with the history of their life. Although the above assessment also applies to invented stories, the researcher argues that unlike novels and fiction movies, biographies have their rules. Referring to the reflections of Dutch philosopher Frank Ankersmit, Całek shows that, in contrast with fiction, the basis of biography is facts. Even though they are subject to literary “processing” and influenced by the author’s cognitive limitations, they still form a picture of existing reality. They are not a true reflection of it, but a creative transformation, and a representation.

The Mirror of Our Existence

Unlike with fiction, reading a biography usually gives us the impression of connecting with the truth about another person’s life. Philippe Lejeune, a French literary scholar, described this phenomenon as an autobiographical pact. By this, the reader acknowledges that the biographical narrative refers to people and events having their counterparts in reality. When we read biographies of famous (or lesser-known) people, however, we want more than just information about the lives of our heroes. For us, these stories are also a kind of mirror in which – by confronting the other and experiencing their story in our imagination – we can look more profoundly at our existence.

Thus, not only do biographies have a cognitive function but also an escapist one. Reading them allows us to temporarily suspend our existence and experience the history of another as if it were a story of our own life. A similar motivation can be associated with running away from everyday problems into the world of fantasy. Nonetheless, there is a healing component to encountering someone else’s life in this manner. It opens us up to empathy and allows us to compensate for the fact that our fate has been determined to some extent by the choices made in the past.

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Biography and Truth: the Repository of Meaning

As Umberto Eco writes in his book Six Walks in the Fictional Woods:

Since fiction seems more a comfortable environment than real life, we try to read life as if it were a piece of fiction.

The scholar’s diagnoses correspond with the experience of many of us. We try to see our lives as an ordered structure in which every decision and experience, both good and bad, has an objective or subjective meaning. We give this meaning by creating stories and organizing our existence into a narrative whole. In contrast to the words of the Italian semiotician, it is worth recalling the gloomy words of the protagonist of the novel The Investigation (1959) by Stanisław Lem:

What if the world isn’t scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle – what if it’s like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole? What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings, events that only have middles, things that have fronts or rears but not both, with us constantly making categories, seeking out, and reconstructing […] although, in reality, we are all no more than haphazard fractions (transl. A. Milch).

In the eyes of the hero, reality falls apart when he is unable to describe it. The results of the eponymous investigation into corpses disappearing from suburban South England morgues elude rational cognition, and thus cannot be framed in a meaningful story. In his philosophical-gothic crime novel, Lem proves that man is a narrative being. The skill of creating stories is the foundation of our cognitive abilities and, at the same time, the only means to make sense of chaotic existence.

In a similar tone, Anita Całek writes in the article “Narracja w biografiach fikcyjnych” (“Narrative in Fictional Biographies”). The researcher argues that the contemporary fascination with biographical writing has an inseparable connection with existence in a world devoid of metaphysics and the absolute. In Całek’s opinion, delving into the biographies of other people allows us to tame the fear of mortality and face the truth about the finitude of our lives. The popularity of biographies suggests that narrative has become our cure for metaphysical emptiness in modern times.

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Whose Biographies Are We Interested In?

The biographical interests of modern readers are very broad today. Among the bestsellers are books devoted to celebrities, politicians, as well as well-known figures in culture and art. At the same time, in the modern publishing market, one can observe an increase in the publication of books devoted to the supporting heroes of “great history” – characters who have not permanently inscribed in our collective imagination, but rather function on its peripheries. The “shadow figures” understood in this way can include, above all, those who, for years, had been deprived of their voice, and thus – representation in the mainstream of culture.

In recent years in Poland, in the wave of the so-called folk turn, books on the history of peasants and peasant women have been published – such as Chłopki. Opowieść o naszych babkach (“Peasant Women. A Tale of Our Grandmothers”) by Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak, and books devoted to less popular “actors and actresses” in the history of great artists, such as Panny z Wesela (“Misses from the Wedding”) by Monika Śliwińska.

We also deal with a similar phenomenon in fiction. Contemporary novelists are more and more eager to reach for the stories of such figures as Makryna Mieczławska (the forgotten heroine of Polish Romanticism) or Jakub Szela, whose dark legend we know from school textbooks. The discovery of lesser-known biographies is often accompanied by attempts to reinterpret the collective image of the past, which we are trying to rediscover today. The example above illustrates that reading about others can be key to both intellectual understanding and empathetic engagement with history, and consequently, our own times.

Translation: Marcin Brański

Polish version: Magia biografii. Dlaczego fascynują nas życiorysy innych ludzi?