Biographies vs Novels: do novels really teach us something?

[lokariototal]

Which one do you think teaches you more about life? I sincerely think biographies are BETTER cause they deal with REAL lifes, real problems, real victories. They are more relevant. On the other hand, novels are fiction, they are not reality, they are a story that someone made up in their minds. Do you think we can REALLY learn something from a novel?

[neilgee]

It depends what you mean by "life", for me. Is life something that can only be confirmed by provable facts about what somebody did with their life or can life be seen as meaning more than that?

George Eliot wrote novels yet she's incredibly informative about the feel of the times she wrote about - explaining how society functioned in the days when only landowners had votes, for example - and she entertains me in a way that biographies and history books generally don't.

[mal4mac]

Great novels teach you more about life because they concentrate on the real issues and don't get bogged down in too many extraneous, unimportant facts & details. Great novels are not just 'made up', they are based on the total life experience of the greatest geniuses. I wouldn't dismiss biographies completely though, they can help throw light on some novels. An example is Ellmann's biography of Joyce. Try reading it at the same time as Joyce's "Portrait". Ask yourself which is teaching you more about life? Which is more entertaining? Which is better? Ellmann provides some useful background material, but Joyce is far superior in 'teaching you about life', and in all aesthetic considerations. (And I have no doubt Ellmann would agree with me!)

[virginiawang]

I don't like to read biographies. In fact I've read none except one, which is not really a biography. It was Confession of an English Opium Eater. It was wonderful.
I don't want to think of my life as being mundane and prosaic, and I always wish to invest it with the nature of a novel. I think life deserves more meaning than just provable facts.

[Apathy]

Great novels teach you more about life because they concentrate on the real issues and don't get bogged down in too many extraneous, unimportant facts & details. Great novels are not just 'made up', they are based on the total life experience of the greatest geniuses. I wouldn't dismiss biographies completely though, they can help throw light on some novels. An example is Ellmann's biography of Joyce. Try reading it at the same time as Joyce's "Portrait". Ask yourself which is teaching you more about life? Which is more entertaining? Which is better? Ellmann provides some useful background material, but Joyce is far superior in 'teaching you about life', and in all aesthetic considerations. (And I have no doubt Ellmann would agree with me!)

Another great example is Piers Anthony's 'Biography of an Ogre' and try reading his 'Incarnations of Immortality' series at the same time.

[mystery_spell]

Novels can deal with real life situations without being one hundred percent true. The author of the novel definitely puts in some of his/her own experience, making the novel a reflection of him- or herself in some way. Biographies can be boring, but it depends. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar is considered to be autobiographical, but she does not use her own name and tell the story as if it is herself. We can learn both from novels and biographies, though learning from a novel is much more enjoyable (to me, at least).

[Apathy]

While biographies give the facts, they can only give the facts. A novel can delve into the darkest corners of someones sebconcious or bring you face to face with horribly real subjects. I myself have learned more about life from science fiction such as 'Mimsy were the Borogroves' and 'Feed' than from any biography. A biography will tell you one story from one perspective and a novel can tell you several stories from hundreds of perspectives. 'To kill a mockingbird' changed millions of peoples lifes while history books about the civil war are a chore. Novels can bring you back or forward in time so you can feel 'what was' like you were there and explore the 'What if'. you can see things through the eyes of someone who you would hate in real life or from the eyes of one who you would never meet because they live on the opposite side of the world or speak a different language.
"poloticians use lies to cover up the truth, artists use them to tell the truth that otherwise wouldn't be heard"

[DWolfman]

I almost didn't post because Apathy pretty well sums up what I intend to say.

The key to me is "what happened" as opposed to "what could happen"

No one will ever live the same lives of the biographies. We will all be faced with our own dilemmas, opporunities, problems, and choices. We will all have decisions to make as to whether things can be improved both in our lives and our societies. Creative expressions such as novels, poetry, fictional drama, etc. allow us to explore those options.

And in a vast majority of biographies, doesn't the subject become noteworthy because they chose a different path to follow than the norm?

[neilgee]

Another thing I dislike is the similarity of format in biographies. You always have to plough through alot of childhood and family facts that arn't particularly relevant or interesting but the biographer seems to be obliged to include.

The best autobiography I ever read was by the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope. It's probably only as revealing as a Victorian novelist wants such a book to me but it's always readable.

[stlukesguild]

The initial question presumes that the "purpose" or "goal" of literature (or of art as a whole) is to teach us something, where Oscar Wilde (who was never wrong about anything) knew that "All art is quite useless". To me the experience of art/reading IS the goal... just like the experience of life... and not some vague concept of an unknown ending or reward is the goal. One of my favorite expressions of this idea is to be found in the Conclusion from Walter Pater's The Renaissance:

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, --for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the sense, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch...

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biased by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve --les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passion, the wisest, at least among "the children of the world", in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion --that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

Far more briefly Anna Quindlen writes:

Books are the means to immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens, and Dr. Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky. Over and over again Heathcliffe wanders the moor searching for his Cathy. Over and over again Ahab fights the whale.Through them we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

My only interest at this point are those biographies that attain to the level of art (Boswell's Life of Johnson, Rousseau's Confessions, DeQuincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, etc...) although admittedly I have read my share of the usual collections of hard, dry facts that give you a certain grounding with regard to the achievements of various historical figures.

[mortalterror]

My only interest at this point are those biographies that attain to the level of art (Boswell's Life of Johnson, Rousseau's Confessions, DeQuincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, etc...) although admittedly I have read my share of the usual collections of hard, dry facts that give you a certain grounding with regard to the achievements of various historical figures.

I read Confessions of an English Opium Eater back in October. It didn't strike me as being as interesting as other autobiographical drug narratives I've read before. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Naked Lunch were better. While I enjoyed De Quincey's Opium Eater, I liked his Vision of Sudden Death more.

Oh! It just occurred to me that since you show such fondness for Rousseau you might like knowing that he's a character in Shelley's Triumph of Life. He plays Virgil's role in the Divine Comedy. What do you think of that?

[PeterL]

If biographies were written honestly, then they might show more about life, but nearly all biographies are slanted, so I don't hold biographies in high regard. Novels are more variable. They are all slanted, but the slants go in every way, rather the way that actual events are. Of course, the question of whether one or the other can teach a reader depends more on whether a reader is capable of learning.

[PeterL]

I read Confessions of an English Opium Eater back in October. It didn't strike me as being as interesting as other autobiographical drug narratives I've read before. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Naked Lunch were better. While I enjoyed De Quincey's Opium Eater, I liked his Vision of Sudden Death more.

Naked Lunch is not an autobiography (although there are some elements of memoir to it), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a work of fiction.

[Pryderi Agni]

While biographies give the facts, they can only give the facts. A novel can delve into the darkest corners of someones subconscious or bring you face to face with horribly real subjects.

Appropriate enough. Sometimes what we need is false consolation, not true acceptance. In that regard, novels are invaluable.

If biographies were written honestly, then they might show more about life, but nearly all biographies are slanted, so I don't hold biographies in high regard. Novels are more variable. They are all slanted, but the slants go in every way, rather the way that actual events are. Of course, the question of whether one or the other can teach a reader depends more on whether a reader is capable of learning.

Precisely!

[mortalterror]

Naked Lunch is not an autobiography (although there are some elements of memoir to it), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a work of fiction.

I know that, but they are heavily autobiographical, to the point that it barely makes a difference. They're at least as factual as Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and that is shelved in Biography.