'Storying' lives: biography as story and the ethical imagining and 'holding' of lives

Abstract

With questions of 'truth' and 'imagination' continuing to confront biography as a genre, this paper seeks to foreground recognition of the role of 'story' and the ethical imagining and 'holding' of subjects in biography. It argues that the telling of a life requires its forming as 'story', a process that is necessarily creative and which, especially when fictional elements are incorporated, can also deepen understanding of issues of authenticity, genre and authorship. Its creation or composition as story is argued to occur irrespective of the style of the biographical writing; more specifically, story provides a framework for choosing and arranging all kinds of content, from facts to factual gaps and silences. It is the means of grasping, holistically, the movement of the life in question and, in this way, treating it justly and humanely - ethically. In this process, elements such as facts are mediated as stories, or parts of stories of the life of a person, indicating that not only does biography require story but the two are inseparable: without story, there is no biography. However, questions of authenticity can arise when 'story', as the process of relating, is conflated with fiction. Is a particular story of a life, or a story within it, to be believed? It might conversely be argued that facts themselves are only stories with a certain status, stories that are taken to be 'true' and no longer questioned, but invoking binaries such as fact vs fiction does not guarantee greater biographical understanding or richness. If, however, the biographical work is held as 'story' and allowed to move in an imaginative space instead of taking truth and imagination to be opposite poles - one or the other - a more authentic faceting of the life in question may be produced.