Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections

ABSTRACT

The introduction to this special issue on ‘Life Writing and Celebrity’ outlines the numerous shared concerns of life-writing scholarship and celebrity studies as two of the currently most vibrant fields of cross-disciplinary Humanities research. Providing summaries of the individual contributions and highlighting the connections between them, it points towards the valuable insights to be gained from initiating a more rigorous theoretical and methodological dialogue between the two fields.

KEYWORDS:

• life writing
• celebrity
• disciplinary dialogue
• agency
• structural framework

In a 2015 keynote lecture, biographer and literary scholar Sarah Churchwell commented on the inherent link between life writing and manifestations of fame and celebrity. The nexus between the two, she suggested, is so self-evident that the term ‘celebrity life writing’ must be considered a tautology since a degree of well-knownness is a prerequisite for almost any biographical project (O’Brien and Eaton 2015). Polemical as it might be, Churchwell’s claim appears legitimate with regard to the dominant forms of life writing, biography and autobiography, especially when considering the historical roots of biography in hagiography and the ways in which biography has subsequently drawn on a long tradition of presenting famous ‘exemplary’ lives in a Carlylean apotheosis of the singularly gifted (male) individual steering the course of history.¹ What Churchwell evokes more immediately, though, is that celebrities today regularly inspire (multiple) biographical treatments across different media, and that life narratives in their various textual and medial forms – be it (auto)biography, memoir, biofiction, painting, film, or TV documentary – are in turn among the chief vehicles in the formation of an individual’s celebrity status.²

While life writing and celebrity clearly are closely related as cultural phenomena and practices, conditioning each other discursively as well as economically, the respective fields of research to which they have given rise run counter each other in at least one respect: life-writing scholars have long questioned and deconstructed fame as the basis of biographical ‘worthiness’, beginning with Virginia Woolf’s famous critique in “The Art of Biography”: ‘Is not everyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography – the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious?’ (Woolf 1981, 125). This critical tendency has come to the fore particularly in studies of women’s lives and postcolonial life writing; in (auto)biographical explorations of ‘everyday lives’ who lack the cultural prominence and media access commanded by the celebrity. The discipline of celebrity studies, by contrast, is predicated on fame, no matter how short-lived or on what basis it has been accrued. Fame constitutes its very subject and raison d'être, and hence – when it comes to life writing – its principle of selection.

That said, the famous life opens a large common ground for scholars from both disciplines, making apparent the lines of inquiry in which the two converge. In the comparative analyses of some recent metabiographical studies, for instance, the focus has been on the ‘representational-ideological agendas’ (Ní Dhúill 2012, 283) behind various biographical treatments of the same biographee (see also Churchwell 2004), that is, on the uses to which famous subjects’ lives are put in different cultural and historical contexts, which represents a central interest also of celebrity studies. Even a brief survey of life-writing scholarship and celebrity research yields a considerable pool of shared, repeatedly invoked buzzwords that point towards the two fields’ many common concerns with notions of authenticity and intimacy; public and private selves; myth-making and revelation; cultural memory and identity politics. Both disciplines shine a light on the ambivalent emotional currents underlying the cultural fascination with both life narratives and celebrity, ranging from an ardent desire for emulation and hero-worship to a vengeful hunger for a socially levelling and humanising ‘dethroning’. What Hermione Lee has identified as a quasi-religious ‘longing for latter-day saints and heroes in an increasingly secularized society’ (2009, 18)³ thus exists alongside a pronounced taste for a debunking of culturally fetishised extraordinariness. The latter tendency is closely tied to the celebration of ordinariness and the (deceptive) media promise of readily attainable ‘DIY celebrity’ that is no longer exclusively tied to traditional markers of ‘greatness’, such as merit, talent, or achievement (see Turner 2004, 52–70).

Just as the ‘telling of life-stories is the dominant narrative mode of our times’ across art forms, media, and genres (Lee 2009, 17), celebrity must today be considered one of the most pervasive phenomena of global media culture that permeates virtually all aspects of life. It therefore comes as little surprise that both life-writing research and celebrity studies have separately evolved into vibrant and innovative areas of cross-disciplinary Humanities scholarship. The close interconnections between these two fields have, however, only recently begun to be addressed. As Michael DeAngelis and Mary Desjardins note in the introduction to their recent guest-edited special issue on ‘Celebrity Biography/Biopic’ for Celebrity Studies, ‘celebrity studies scholarship has rarely analysed biography – in terms of its formal, cultural, inter-medial, ideological, and historical dimensions – even as it serves as the main vehicle of scholarly and popular knowledge of celebrities’ (2017, 489). Some important work that seeks to redress this lack of critical attention has been undertaken by a number of scholars, two of whom are amongst the contributors to this journal issue.

Taking a largely historical perspective, Katja Lee, for instance, has approached celebrity (auto)biographies as ‘rich resources for examining discourses of identity and authenticity, systems of fan convergence, and sites where celebrity cultural and economic capital are both produced and consumed’ (Lee 2014, 87). In part building on the work of Ponce de Leon (2002), Lee has explored the identity performances of Canadian film stars in early-twentieth-century popular magazines and periodicals (see Lee 2016). Oline Eaton, another contributor to this special issue and a biographer herself, has studied the representation, circulation, and appropriation of female celebrity life narratives through popular forms of biographical writing (see Eaton 2017). The genres of contemporary celebrity memoir and autobiography, which entail the promise of intimate access to the ‘authentic self’ of a famous individual, are at the centre of Hannah Yelin’s work. Specifically, her research has shed light on the role of ghostwriting and its implications for the construction of (female) celebrity identities and notions of agency and authorship (see Yelin 2016). In a recently published anthology of key texts in biography theory, Edward Saunders offers some intriguing reflections on the many points of connection and overlap between scholarship on literary biography and literary celebrity. According to Saunders, they are linked by a shared interest in the discursivisation of lives and celebrity reputations; the modes and manifestations of authorial self-fashioning; the subject’s position in the cultural imaginary; and the eternally vexed question of the subject’s life in relation to his or her work. ‘Such parallels and commonalities’, Saunders suggests, ‘demonstrate that the concerns of “celebrity studies” are at the very least mirrored and echoed in biographical criticism’ (2017, 275).

The growing academic interest in the intersections of life writing and celebrity is also reflected by the events programme of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, which in September 2015 hosted a symposium entitled ‘After-Image: Life-Writing and Celebrity’ (see O’Brien and Eaton 2015). Since then, the Centre has developed a lively new research strand dedicated to exploring the complex intersections of life writing and celebrity across historical periods, media, genres, and disciplines. Regularly hosting symposia, workshops, and discussion panels on a wide range of topics, including celebrity interviews, life writing and female celebrity, ghostwriting, or literary celebrity and political persona, the strand aims to offer ‘a forum for a more sustained dialogue between these two closely interconnected areas, highlighting possibilities of theoretical and methodological cross-fertilisation’ (“Life-Writing and Celebrity” 2016; see also Mayer 2016).⁴

We contend that celebrity studies could substantially benefit from incorporating some of the theoretical and methodological tools of life-writing scholarship, allowing for a more rigorous analysis of a set of forms that function as key drivers in celebrification processes.⁵ Equally, research on life writing might be enriched by paying closer attention to the ways in which auto/biographical narratives are informed by celebrity discourses. The auto/biographical subject’s celebrity status often determines whether their lives get written and/or published and gives rise to multiple layers of cultural myth and ideological appropriation that can be challenging for the biographer to prise apart. It therefore seems reasonable to propose that a sharper focus on the ‘celebrity apparatus’ itself, the media and industry processes involved in the production and consumption of celebrity, might help scholars and practitioners of life writing to evade the seductive pull of the famous, myth-encrusted individual and become more sensitive to the interplay of agency and structural framework. In this context, useful insights might also be derived from ‘persona studies’, an adjacent field of research that has gained enormous traction in recent years. It brings together life writing and celebrity studies through its understanding of ‘persona’ as a strategic construction of identity, a ‘form of negotiation of the individual in their foray into a collective world of the social’ (Marshall and Henderson 2016, 1). Such negotiations are not a one-way street, and persona studies is also centrally concerned with ‘the way that the collective interprets this now organised individual entity’ (Marshall and Henderson 2016, 3).

The tension between individual agency and appropriation in the shaping of an individual’s public image through socio-political and cultural frameworks, media industries, and ideological agendas is explored in some form or other by all the contributions to this special issue. Grown out of a three-part seminar on ‘Celebrity and Life Writing’, convened by the two guest editors for the 2016 conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) in Galway, the articles examine the intersections of life writing and celebrity in contemporary English-language and comparative literary and cultural contexts, focusing on historical as well as contemporary subjects. They address, among others, themes of agency, authenticity, appropriation, myth, identity politics, ethics, meta-biography, (re)mediatisation, and genre, with a view to assessing the influence of these concepts on the representation and audience consumption of famous lives.

Examining rich and varied fields of social and cultural practice, both life-writing research and celebrity studies cut across an impressive range of diverse disciplines and, consequently, methodological approaches, as reflected in the contributions to this special issue. Its opening article, Timo Frühwirth’s ‘close viewing’ of a 1967 Austrian TV profile of celebrity poet W. H. Auden, draws on the methods of film analysis and Stuart Hall’s work on narrative identity construction to investigate the attempts of Austrian television producers at rendering foreign fame legible within local frames of reference. In a metaphorical move that stories Auden’s life and work alongside those of Austrian poet Josef Weinheber, the Austrian Portrait obliterates not only Weinheber’s problematic ties with National Socialism but also Auden’s criticism of Nazi politics, as Frühwirth reveals. The producers’ audio-visual strategies are shown to rely on the truth effect of the documentary genre in appropriating ‘foreign fame’ for the needs of a small-nation celebrity culture.

Fátima Chinita’s contribution on Peter Greenaway’s recent biopic of famous film director Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015), is similarly concerned with audio-visual life narrative. Chinita approaches her subject through the lens of biopic theory and draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque to shed light on Greenaway’s simultaneous depiction of Eisenstein as ‘great master’ of Soviet film and grotesque anti-hero. While on the level of plot Eisenstein in Guanajuato seems to focus almost exclusively on its biographee’s private adventures and to demonstrate little concern with his professional achievements, its dialectical representation of Eisenstein functions as an implicit ode to the cinematic vision of a director who is today revered as a master of synaesthesia and montage. Translating biographical sources and Eisenstein’s own writing on film into the multilayered aesthetic of his biopic, Greenaway at the same time endows his project with an autobiographical note, declaring his directorial practice through that of his predecessor.

The entanglements of fame and appropriation, art and life, of biography and autobiography, are also at the heart of Rosemary Kay’s article on the Dickens Myth, a study of the afterlives of the Victorian celebrity author Charles Dickens. Regarding both biography and biographical fiction as decisive factors in the cultural memorialisation, and commodification, of notable figures from the past, Kay compares John Forster’s early Dickens biography The Life of Charles Dickens (1872–74), Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008), and her own forthcoming novel Anchorage, focusing on the cycles of (self-)fictionalisation, reiteration, and revision that historical celebrity figures like Dickens engender. Kay’s particular interest in the ethics of the authorial appropriation of lives illuminates not only the investments of authors in their real-life subjects but also the mutability of the Dickens myth: its continuous shape-shifting through ever new biographical and biofictional treatments.

Annette Rubery’s and Eva Sage Gordon’s contributions both foreground questions of agency in the (self-)fashioning of celebrity and investigate visual art as a medium of life writing. Rubery proposes a reading of popular eighteenth-century actress Margaret Woffington’s sick-bed portrait – Peg Woffington in Bed (circa 1758) – as an alternative mode of life writing to which the dying thespian resorted in order to circumvent the fabrications and sensationalism of Grub Street biographies and take control of her image. Placing the portrait in the context of eighteenth-century funerary art, the cult of sensibility, and the burgeoning celebrity cult surrounding actresses, Rubery argues that Peg Woffington in Bed counters the dominant representation of actresses as loose women, instead positioning its subject as a formidable tragedienne.

In a similar vein, Eva Sage Gordon discusses the memoirs of Józef Boruwłaski, a Polish-born performing dwarf (1739–1837), and pop star Michael Jackson as counter-narratives to the dominant perception of these two public figures. This unlikely pairing reveals a number of surprising parallels. Gordon uses Diego Velázquez’s famous court painting Las Meninas (1656) as a starting point for conceptualising celebrity as disability, drawing on both celebrity studies and disability studies to investigate the ethics of looking at ‘special’ figures. She uncovers a tendency in both the Memoirs of Count Boruwlaski (1820) and Michael Jackson’s 1988 memoir Moonwalk to counter a perceived dehumanisation with a self-narrative whose function is not only to revise the authors’ public image but also to mend a disabled self-image.

Katja Lee’s and Oline Eaton’s articles address the role of journalism as a medium for life writing and centre on auto/biographical constellations in which a renowned male writer narrates the life of a star actress. Lee undertakes a close reading of Canadian writer Arthur Stringer’s extensive 1918 profile of silent screen superstar Mary Pickford in MacLean’s magazine. At a time when celebrity profiles were a well-established genre, Stringer ostensibly utilises his work on Pickford to venture an ironic critique of the conventions of celebrity journalism – conventions that he, however, is shown to embrace at the same time. The popular writer foregrounds his own experience of encountering his famous subject, adopting a persona that permits him to distance himself from the genre and invites readers to identify with him. In a rather generic fashion, this strategy entails the promise of a glimpse of the ‘real’ Mary Pickford, as Lee observes: of revealing the person behind her public mask.

Eaton’s contribution is concerned with another case of autobiographical projection in celebrity life writing: Norman Mailer’s Marilyn: A Biography (1973), a controversial work of creative nonfiction about actress Marilyn Monroe, much maligned for its intrusive first-person narrator and its creative handling of biographical facts. Eaton discusses the influence of New Journalism on Mailer’s style and situates the genesis of his book in the context of American nostalgia for the 1950s and the Watergate investigation. This method of ‘historical adjacency’ enables her to explain the initial reception of Marilyn as well as its affective history. Pointing to the function of celebrity lives as vehicles for the processing of varied cultural and political concerns, Eaton calls for a revaluation of Mailer’s book not only as a central factor in shaping Monroe’s posthumous reputation but also as a document illustrating the complex relationship between fame, national politics, and literary culture at the time.

In the final contribution to this special issue, biographer Marcus O’Dair reflects on his experience of writing the life of musician Robert Wyatt – a cult figure of British popular music for many decades. Mobilising Bakhtin’s notion of the polyphonic novel for biography, O’Dair discusses his method of integrating numerous interviews in his text, whose different perspectives and occasional contradictions refuse to blend into a coherent, unified narrative. His particular focus is on the troubling generic status of authorised biography (frequently conceived as ‘autobiography in disguise’), which he conceptualises with reference to paratext theory and Phillippe Lejeune’s notion of the autobiographical pact, thus providing new insight into a genre that has long been an important medium of celebrity life writing.

This special issue of Life Writing thus reflects the multiple ways in which the theoretical premises and new findings of life-writing research and celebrity studies speak to each other and thus generate a constructive cross-disciplinary dialogue. It reveals the interplay of entextualisation and (re)mediation of reputations with historically shaped and culturally specific manifestations of celebrity. These processes are subject to a wide range of ideological agendas that attribute vital social functions to the famous auto/biographical subject both as a source and product of representation.

Notes on contributors

Sandra Mayer is a Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Vienna and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, where she co-ordinates the Centre’s ‘Life-Writing and Celebrity’ research strand. In her current book project she explores the intersections of literary celebrity and politics in and through autobiographical life writing from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Oscar Wilde in Vienna (Brill Rodopi, 2018) and (co-)editor of special issues on ‘Literary Celebrity and Politics’ for Celebrity Studies (2017) and ‘The Author in the Popular Imagination’ for Forum for Modern Language Studies (2018).

Julia Novak is an Elise Richter Research Fellow at the Department of English, University of Vienna. She is currently working on a book project on biographical novels about famous historical women artists and is the author of Gemeinsam Lesen (Lit 2007 – a book on reading groups) and Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance (Rodopi 2011). Her (co-)edited books and journal issues include Staging Interculturality (WVT, 2010), Ireland in/and Europe (WVT, 2012), a special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik on Poetry and Performance (DeGruyter, 2016), and Experiments in Life-Writing (Palgrave, 2017). www.julianovak.at.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [grant numbers T922-G30 and V543-G23].

Notes

1 For a brief discussion of the origins of biography in hagiography, see Lee (2009, 19–38). In “The Hero as Divinity”, the first of his lectures that make up On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Thomas Carlyle famously stipulates: ‘The history of the world is but the biography of great men’ (Carlyle 2013, 41).

2 See also DeAngelis and Desjardins (2017, 489), Saunders (2017, 270). According to Olivier Driessens, ‘celebrity capital’ accrues from ‘accumulated media visibility that results from recurrent media representations’ (2013a, 552).

3 In this context, Chris Rojek has drawn attention to the semi-religious signification and iconography of celebrity, famously arguing, ‘To the extent that organised religion has declined in the West, celebrity culture has emerged as one of the replacement strategies that promote new orders of meaning and solidarity’ (2006, 179–180). See also John Frow’s seminal essay “Is Elvis a God?” (1998), in which he emphasises the lingering centrality of religion and its legacy to contemporary cultural phenomena.

4 Podcasts of selected papers from the symposia ‘Celebiography: Life-Writing and Celebrity in Dialogue’ (19 November 2016) and ‘Life-Writing and Female Celebrity’ (4 November 2017) and the roundtable discussions on ‘The Celebrity Interview’ (17 January 2017), ‘Ghostwriting and Biography’ (7 November 2017), and ‘Literary Celebrity and Political Persona’ (14 May 2018) can be accessed through the OCLW Podcast Archive: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing/podcasts.

5 Olivier Driessens defines ‘celebrification’ as a ‘process by which ordinary people or public figures are transformed into celebrities’ (2013b, 643).