Biography and Autobiography : A Comparative Analysis
What is a Biography?
Difficulty in writing a Biography
It is almost an axiomatic truth that biography is a very difficult form of art. A biographer, unlike a historian, has to collect all the relevant and necessary documents and facts. He should construct his biography in such a way that it ultimately assumes the status of an art-form. Johnson has very pertinently observed: “History can be formed from permanent monuments and records: but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing everyday less, and in short time is lost forever.”
It is a strenuous and uphill task, indeed to collect all the requisite materials for a biography. Again, compared to other genres of Literature i.e. drama, fiction, etc, biography in modern form is too young. Its origin dates back to the 18th century. The simple reason for this belated origin of biography is that until the 18th century, there was a death of genuine interest in and a becoming curious about the private lives of eminent personalities. It was not until the 18th century that a combined operation of this curiosity and interest produced this new genre of art. It was only in the 19th century that the biography attained a full-fledged growth. A biographer has to work under several taboos, restrictions and obligations. He does not command the liberty of a novelist. Within the orbit of very much restricted liberty, a biographer has to work out. He does not dare to flout the facts or intersperse it with imagination simply because he has a constant fear that at any deviation his characters may be labeled as fictitious. This explains why most of the Victorian biographies were panegyrics. The biographers had so satisfied all by waxing eloquent on the virtue of their characters and also by covering up or omitting the shortcomings or disqualification.
Purpose of Writing Biography
The essence of the biography is to keep the old alive. The purpose of the biography lesson is to increase our flexibility of mind, breadth of outlook and Catholicity of taste and judgment. A book written by Mary Hawkins Pilkington states the purpose of the biography, "Calculated to impress the youthful mind with admiration of virtuous principles and detastation of vices." That is to say, the purpose of the biographical book is to create attraction towards all good attitudes and to hate towards all bad attitudes.
Principles of Writing Biography
The biographer has to take care of a few things.
- First of all, you have to start writing based on the short content. Even if initially you have little knowledge on the subject, you have to begin somehow.
- Second, the biographer should have a deep insight. The writer must have a deep insight into the person whose biography will be written.
- Third, he needs to be aware of contemporary zeitgeist ( junkaest). No other character can be made small in order to magnify the life of the intended person.
- Fourth, it is imperative to follow the correct chronology in the biography.
- Fifth, if the author wants to propagate any particular principle or theory through biography, then the artistic beauty of the book is disturbed.
- Sixth, biography is the creation of a special art like painting. The biographer must remember that even though he is the creator, there is no place for personal thoughts in his creation. He has to be neutral in all matters.
Best Biography Examples
Biography is as old as recorded history. Rulers and magnates of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia had their deeds incised in stone and clay. The Old Testament contains many brief lives of patriarchs and prophets, and the four Gospels of the New Testament can be described as parallel lives of Jesus Christ .
Three notable examples of biographical writing in classical times are Memorabilia, a recollection and defense of the Greek philosopher Socrates by Xenophon; Parallel Lives by Plutarch, which the English playwright William Shakespeare used as a source book; and the gossipy and anecdotal Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius. Plutarch is one of the oldest living biographers in the history of European literature. His biography of Mark Anthony is one of the best biographies in the world.
‘Byron’ by Thomas Moore in English literature; Notable biographies include Shelleym by Peacock and Cromwell by Carlyle and Gray's Memoirs by Mans. The publication in 1791 of The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by James Boswell, is generally thought to have established Boswell as the first great modern biographer and to have inaugurated a “golden age of biography” that has extended to the present day. Vrindavan Das is the first notable biographer in Bengali literature. His ‘Chaitanya Bhagavat’ is composed in verse according to the tradition of the time. Krishnadas Kabiraj's 'Sri Chaitanya Charitamrita' is one of the best biographical books written in Bengali language. However, according to modern critics, these are not Biography, Hagiography
Ashwaghosa's 'Buddhacharita' written in the ancient Buddhist era; Sister Nivedita’s ‘The Master as I saw him; Romain Rolland’s ‘Life of Ramakrishna’;
Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari, Life of Donne by Izaak Walton, Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744). Johnson's The Lives of the English Poets (1779-1781), Life of Sir Walter Scott (7 volumes, 1837-1838) by John Gibson Lockhart and two biographies of Thomas Carlyle (1882, 1884) by James Anthony Froude, Lytton Strachey, author of the popular and influential Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921), Leon Edel's study of the life and work of the American author Henry James (5 volumes, 1953-1972); Richard Ellmann's 1988 book on the Irish writer Oscar Wilde, which won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize; James Gleick's Genius (1992), about the American physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman; and David McCullough's Truman (1992; Pulitzer Prize, 1993), an account of the life of the American president Harry S. Truman.
Autobiography:
Autobiography is created by trying to tell your own life story. I want to have a hint of perfection in that. If any two or four incidents of life are mentioned, even if the mind of the reader is happy like a short and interesting story, that composition cannot be an autobiography. An autobiography should be a complete sphere of his life.
Characteristics of Autobiography
•It tells the life story of its author. Autobiography is the name of telling one's own life story and highlighting the evolution of one's mind through it.
•In writing about personal experience, one discovers himself.
•It is not merely a collection of anecdotes – it is a revelation to the readers about the author’s self-discovery.
Example: Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield and J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye.
Autobiography, Biography & Memoir
The autobiography should be a complete picture of life. And its purpose fails if that whole picture of life is not in a motion picture. That is why there is a difference between an autobiography and a diary. Everyday events in the diary keep one of our days fixed forever. They are all full day by day, with little sign of lifelong fulfillment in them. An incident of a day in temporary excitement may sit across a large part of a diary page but it may have no place in painting a complete picture of life. So Rabindranath said nicely, “If I had been foolish enough to write a diary every day, then the testimony of daily life would have eroded the truth of my whole life. So a diary can never be the same as an autobiography. That is why Isadora Duncan, in her book My Life, says, "Incidents which seemed to me to last a lifetime have taken only a few pages; intervals that seemed thousands of years of suffering and pain, and through which in sheer of The self-defense, in order to go on living, I emerged an entirely different person, do not appear at all long here. " Isadora Duncan is very clear about this, "No woman has ever told the whole truth of her life. The autobiographies of the most famous women are a series of accounts of the outward existence of pretty details and anecdotes that gave no realization of their real life. For the great moments of joy or agony they remain strangely silent. Dr. Sukumar Sen, a veteran literary critic, says of the difference between a biography and an autobiography: "Simply put, a biography is a proclamation or declaration, and an autobiography is an affidavit about oneself. A biography is a picture of a ripe mango." Autobiography is a peeled form of ripe mango: Biography and autobiography are like amchoor and raw mango sour.
One who can honestly narrate the story of life and experience, the truth in his book, which is nourished with beautiful and unimaginable vitality, is as impeccable as the literature of eternity. Too much humility or too much self-awareness is detrimental to an autobiographer.
Example
In English literature, St. Confessions of Augustine; Confessions by J. J. Rousseau; Gibbon's Autobiography; M. K. Gandhi's My experiments with truth; The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin, My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard, Self Portraits: Fictions by Frederic Tuten, The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
The Box: Tales from the Darkroom by Gunter Grass
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