Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 22, Issue 3, 2017

En scène! The Biography as a visible loss

This article is based on the finding that it is unsustainable for the biographer to maintain a strict perception of historical accuracy. Two questions are discussed in more detail. Firstly, how does the biographer handle the realization that he never really grasps the historical truth, although his work is expected to indicate a true record of events based in verifiable facts? Secondly, to what extent should the biographer testify of that awareness in his work? This article advocates a biographical style that visibly incorporates in the text the restrictions that the biographer is confronted with. Special attention is paid to the writer’s biography.

The biographer as a short-sighted historian. Biography, micro- and metahistory

During the first decades of the twentieth century biography, as a vital and living discipline within academic historiography, became more and more marginalised. Young historians, eager to professionalise their craft and to incorporate new social theories and methods, dismissed biography as a short-sighted, subjective, bias, nationalistic and old-fashioned way of writing history. Today, academia still struggles to recognise biographical writing as a scientific genre, and therefore it remains controversial. Or as Richard Holmes has put it: ‘For the most part, it has been left to itself, outside the established institutes of learning’. Biographers have attempted to counteract the academic loss of status by ‘using’ theoretical concepts from other disciplines like micro- and metahistory. But by doing so they more or less have failed to ask themselves whether biography as a discipline initially was rightfully sacrificed by academic historians in their pursuit of history as a modern, objective and professional science.

‘Whoever passes oneself off as a “Marxist”’. Marxist monographs on Multatuli by J. Saks and F.W. Driessen

This paper compares two Marxist biographical monographs on Dutch 19^th century writer Multatuli, by J. Saks and F.W. Driessen, and interprets the differences between their respective approaches in relation to conflicting tendencies within Marxism. Whereas the former adheres to an objectivist (or determinist) strand in Marxist cultural analysis, the latter implicitly relies on a Lukácsian conception of realism and a subjectivist plea for political commitment. In examining these studies and comparing them to Dik van der Meulen’s authoritative biography of Multatuli this article aims to reflect on both Multatuli’s afterlife in the Dutch socialist movement and the relationship between Marxist literary analysis and the biographical approach to literary studies.

Variations on a genre. Three alternative forms of biography

This article presents alternative forms of life description by means of a biography in progress on the Flemish author August Vermeylen (1872-1945). The first form, the ‘turning point biography’ or ‘hapax biography’, avoids too conventional forms of biography by breaking up the traditional linearity and chronological presentation of life facts. One crucial year (here 1939) in the life of the author serves as the starting point. The second form, the ‘institutional generational biography’ intercepts the traditional objection to biographies that their particularity would prevent them from giving a general view on the period described. Thus, Vermeylen’s activities in several associations receive ample treatment. A third pitfall of the traditional biography is her constructive and manipulative character due to the narrative form. This I try to avoid by writing a ‘correspondance biography’ or ‘super individualistic biography’, in which micronarrative resist to all forms of totalizing. This biography on Vermeylen in the first place gives the floor to the women in his life.