Life-writing without letters

fielding and the problem of evidence

Martin C. Battestin

pp. 90-106

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

Our postmodernist contemporaries give too little credit to the wisdom of the past. Before Hayden White, Fielding knew that historians were the real romance-writers, that Cervantes, not Mariana, had written the true history of his countrymen — and indeed not of his countrymen only, but of "the World in general".¹ And Richard Rorty's notion that truth is indistinguishable from fiction is no more radical than that of the pious biographer Agnellus, who a thousand years ago, when he could find no facts about his subjects, wrote resolutely on, explaining — in words I took for a motto to the biography of Fielding: "I invented lives for them, and I do not believe them to be false."²

Cited authors

Rorty Richard

White Hayden