Modern versus postmodern biographies
Quite by accident, I’ve read recently two autobiographies written in completely opposite styles, even though the lives of their subjects have some similarities.
Having visited South Africa, I of course had to buy a copy of Nelson Mandela’s A Long Walk to Freedom. It’s a powerful story, of a rural boy moving to a big city, becoming a freedom fighter, getting arrested and spending the next 20 or so years in jail, before ultimately emerging victorious and founding a new democracy. It’s told in a conventional way, in the first person, practically beginning “I was born in…” That actually makes it a gem to read, because the chronology sucks you in, the desire to know what happens next. It also left me much more educated about the history of the African National Conference and South Africa. What the book doesn’t do great is place one inside the head of Nelson Mandela, feeling for a moment the complex mixture of emotions that must have confronted him in prison. Rather, the narrator just says what he felt in a detailed but rather clinical tone.
I returned home and began reading Vaclav Havel’s new memoir, To the Castle and Back, which discusses his personal transition, from political prisoner under the communist regime to the president of a new democracy, and now to retiree. According to these three phases of his life, there are three types of narration, randomly interspersed: the transcript from an interview about his dissident days; bits of actual memos he wrote while president; and reflections from retirement written during a sabbatical in Georgetown. As a historical document, the biography fails; not even the basic chronology is clearly states, leaving the non-Czech reader totally confused. Perhaps that’s the point however. Havel says directly in several beautiful passages that while his life story after the fact has a certain simplicity, at no point during his life did it ever seem that way to him while he lived it. So, rather than seeing some of the epic speeches Havel wrote, we see his plaintive notes to friends who are late giving him comments on the first draft of said speeches. This book is a philosophically intriguing piece of prose, a biography that tries hard to kill the idea of a life’s narrative, and in the process leaves most of the facts a muddle. Still, one gets a good sense of what it was like to have experienced what he experienced, even if just for scattered instants.
