Biography in Broader Sweep

Patricia Hampl, in I Could Tell You Stories (Norton, 1999), offers a wonderful and thought-provoking insight into biography as seen and structured by a number of well-known authors. In a chapter on “Czeslaw Milosz and Memory,” Hampl notes how in framing his own story as a Polish “memoirist” (a writer of memoir), Milosz “is after something different from a story in the usual narrative sense.”

“The solution of the contemporary American imagination in regard to identity is to ‘seek the self,’ uncovering its hidden psychology to ‘get in touch with the unconscious….’" Milocz charts a different course. "Instead of thrusting the individual into the foreground one can focus attention [rather] on the background,” he writes, i.e. on evaluating one’s personal experience as preserved in memory “in the perspective of the changes one’s milieu has undergone.” He is, after all, Polish, and must be understood in that context.

For Milocz and other Europeans like him personal story is hinged to the history of the nation—i.e. to the larger geo-political context in which one’s life has been lived. “He has located the best grace of a memoir,” Hampl writes, “a method which allows the self to function not as a source or a subject, but as an instrument for rendering the world. In Native Realm [his biography] Milocz does not seek a self; he seeks to use a self.”

Surely we all have need to tell our life story in one way or another. Hampl’s point in lifting up Milocz is simply that it is “the fusion of two narratives—the one personal and the other public—that creates a powerful call and reply which achieves poetic form.” After all, what matters in the long run are the insights drawn from relating “the bruised word of our own relentlessly psychological culture” and the more “impersonal” landscape of history.

So what is the point? Tell your story, but do not rob it of the broader contexts in which it has been lived. Let place and time and your ethnic/national/religious rootage contextualize your story--offering both as the rivulet life has made you to be in the broader stream of human history.