My headache in the past week has been an irresistable impulse to write biographically. Somehow I was obsessed with establishing the people behind the story of social change I was telling, to the point that I began to include totally irrelevant details that began to dilute my arguments altogether.
Today as I moved paragraphs around, deleted irrelevant details and attempted at a coherent thesis, I started to see where my own impulse for biography came from, and why it might be detrimental to good academic writing.
My impulse for biography came from a love for strange tales of the individual life. I am fascinated by the turns and twists of fates, by personal losses and gains, by deep experiences and feelings. When I have such materials in my hands, I relish them and cannot stop wondering and writing about them.
This fascination is a good beginning -- it makes the events I am describing palpably real for me. Yet this fascination brings me too close to my materials and makes me perceive things out of proportion. In fact, the most important parameters in my story are things impersonal and structural, things that are lifeless but control life. Therefore, in order to truly understand and be responsible to those whose stories I will retell, I have to pay much more attention to those structures around them, to move from melodramatic writing to analytical writing.
A second fallacy in biographical writing is a kind of historical determinism on a personal level. By recounting a person's life history, I implicitly make the argument that since he or she went through these experiences, therefore, he and she thought about things in this way, and therefore made such and such decision. However, this kind of determinism is often teleological and wrong. In fact, people are very contextual. They say and do things differently according to different contexts. It's impossible to recover who they really are. Furthermore, people are not static--they are perpetually revising themselves in an never-ending process of becoming. Focusing too much on biography, especially a personal instead of an inter-personal one, will result in a narrow understanding of who that person is.
Historical moments are much better conceived as photographs. In a photograph, one sees a slice in time, where all kinds of forces are present. Writing a short history might be analogous to selecting a series of photographs and writing about the linkages between various salient elements in these photographs. Maybe this metaphor is one way to help me keep my eyes on more things than those that feel dear and near.
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