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Rethinking History: The

Journal of Theory and
Practice
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Transforming Biography:
From the Claim
of Objectivity to
Intersubjective Plurality
Luisa Passerini
Published online: 08 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Luisa Passerini (2000) Transforming Biography: From the Claim
of Objectivity to Intersubjective Plurality, Rethinking History: The Journal of
Theory and Practice, 4:3, 413-416, DOI: 10.1080/136425200457083

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 Rethinking History 4:3 (2000), pp. 413–416

• M I N I AT U R E •

Transforming Biography: From the Claim of

Objectivity to Intersubjective Plurality

Luisa Passerini
European University Institute, Florence, Italy
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The future of biography can be explored by looking at the itinerary of his-

torian Robert Rosenstone, whose recent, innovative works have, among other
things, provided important contributions to our understanding the relation-
ship between Žlm and history.
In 1975 Rosenstone published a biography of John Reed entitled Roman-
tic Revolutionary that was later translated into many languages, including
Italian. Structured in the traditional way, the biography is well documented
with footnotes and bibliographical references. At once scholarly and easy to
read, its narrative follows Reed’s life both in a chronological and spatial way.
The reconstruction of Reed’s life is accurate, vivid, and deeply empathic. One
of the best parts of the book is the picture of Greenwich Village bohemia
before the Great War. This setting – perhaps not by chance – was also the
most convincing part of the Academy Award winning Žlm, Reds (1982),
which was based upon the book and on which Rosenstone worked as a his-
torical consultant.
Both the Žlm and the book pursued the subject of Reed in what might be
called an objective manner, though the Žlm covered only the last Žve years of
Reed’s life. But there is no doubt that the book conveyed its story in a much
more effective way than the movie, and we can certainly say that Romantic
Revolutionary represents an exemplary and classical biography.
Thirteen years later, Rosenstone produced another biographical work,
Mirror in the Shrine (1988), which had as its subjects the three Americans
who lived and worked in Nineteenth century Japan: missionary William Elliot
GrifŽs, scientist Edward S.Morse, and writer Lafcadio Hearn. Each man rep-
resents an instance of the encounter between the vastly different cultures of
the US and Japan. Each also represents the possibility of how intelligent
Americans could come to appreciate the culture of this Asian society.
One hint of the change in Rosenstone’s biographical approach lies in the
multiplicity of his subjects: three instead of one. Alongside them, a fourth
subject emerges, the author himself. Rosenstone consciously utilizes his own
personal encounter as a sojourner in Japan (in the 1970s) as a way of tran-
scending the traditional paradigm of narrative history, based on the so called
realistic novel as a model and well exempliŽed in the biography of Reed.

Rethinking History ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
 414 Luisa Passerini

In Mirror in the Shrine, Rosenstone adopts a diversity of voices and narra-

tive techniques. For instance, he uses the second person ‘you’ in several differ-
ent manners: as a way of addressing the reader directly, as a way of speaking
to one of his characters, as a way of debating within himself about the difŽ-
culties of writing such a book, or even, sometimes, as a way of doing all three
things at once. This is only one of many narrative strategies that show him
tearing down the walls that normally surround historical storytelling, walls
that rigidly separate present and past, or author, character, and reader.
Rosenstone also seems to use what he has learned from his Žlm experi-
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ence, techniques of assembling images, or using words as if they were a

camera that brings us close-ups, or intercutting scenes which are not directly
connected. His narrative includes a self-reexive mode, one which allows us
to see history as a subjective encounter between human beings and the traces
of the past.
None of these techniques prevents to book from being, in all respects,
scholarly in terms of its historical documentation and clear in terms of its
structure. Its Žfteen chapters, which alternate between the three characters,
unroll like a poem with the rhyme scheme of ABC, ABC. And yet, though the
structure is precise, the story leaves room for uncertainties and doubts in its
assertions. After a concise and enlightening prologue, the book opens with a
section that raises the very issue of how to narrate the story: ‘How and where
to begin? With the personal or the historical? The history or the historian?’
(p. 1). We Žnd the similar words at the beginning of the Žnal chapter too:
‘How to conclude? With the personal and the historical. The history and the
historian’ (p. 272); words which voice doubts that are well known to every-
body who has engaged in similar enterprises, but that are rarely admitted
aloud. If on some pages Rosenstone steps into the story, intermingling his own
experiences with those of his subjects, he always does so with clarity and
mastery.
The three biographies in the past develop and interlace to create a fasci-
nating tour de force. While never abandoning his characters, Rosenstone’s
own subjectivity is expressed in such a way as to give voice to epistemologi-
cal doubts of the sort expressed in much post-modern theory, raising such
questions as: to what extent can we assume the continuity of the subject in
the same way the classical novel (and the biographies modelled on it) always
took for granted? Was the man who lived twenty years ago the same one as
today? Was the author who Žnished writing a book the same one who began
it in different circumstances and with different emotions and experiences
some years before?
Mirror in the Shrine is a book that discloses what biography, to a large
degree, has always been: not a story of the past but also a mode of self-explo-
ration, an autobiography, a transformation of the author. All biographers
 From the Claim of Objectivity to Intersubjective Plurality 415

know this to some extent but few are fully conscious of it and rare is the biog-
rapher who openly admits such ideas.
What I Žnd particularly valuable is Rosenstone’s clarity in giving expres-
sion to an approach that I, myself, have experimented with in my last work
about the relationship between the idea of Europe and the idea of romantic
love – amore cortese – that is the willingness to make explicit the subjective
aspects of one’s study. In the case of Rosenstone, it is his own subjectivity and
not that of his subjects which allows him to make explicit ‘that critique of
the Western culture from a Japanese point of view, which has been left buried
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and implicit in their stories’.

Here we are far from the old claim of objectivity and very close to its trans-
formation into inter-subjectivity, a mode which Siegfried Kracauer long ago
suggested as the only way for history to really be objective. Still, the author
always maintains some distance between himself and his subjects, and under-
stands well that they, themselves, would have been surprised and maybe even
upset by the claims he makes in the present.
In my view the route followed by Rosenstone is exemplary because he has
gone all the way along the two different paths that today are open to biog-
raphy and, more generally, to history. Of the Žrst path, he has accepted the
Žction of objectivity, which has given substance and image to one of the myths
of our times. Of the second path, he has embraced the challenge of
post-modernism, which seems so difŽcult to apply to the historical narrative.
Without giving up the perspective of history, Rosenstone tries to express the
plurality of his subjects and the intrinsic multiplicity of each subject; he does
not assume an a priori unity nor does he fall into an extreme fragmentation.
He has imported a variety of expressive styles into the elastic genre of biog-
raphy, which desperately needs them. He has also recognized that the narra-
tive forms of the traditional history – which he had already mastered – are
not the only possible ones. During this complex operation, he has remained
cautious enough not to push his approach so far as to totally unhinge the
competencies of the historian and the borders of the Želd. Yet he has, rather,
questioned these borders in a resolute and convincing way.
Answers to the questions that Rosenstone’s work poses could and should
inspire other narrative experiments. Biography today must accept the chal-
lenges that history faces in the areas of both methodology and narration.
While retaining the need of an historical critique of the sources, many avenues
are open to an experimental history that meets the needs of our times. The
choice of the object to study also cannot escape the demands of the present:
if John Reed was an important symbol of radicalism in the 60s and 70s, the
multi culturalism represented by the three biographies of Mirror in the Shrine,
the stories of people caught between such disparate worlds, is a central theme
at the end of our Millennium. To create a suitable biography for our times,
 416 Luisa Passerini

we need at least this: that authors admit the intersubjectivity of their own
scholarly activity and that they restore subjectivity to the people whose lives
they study.

Note

Translated from the Italian by Marco Casari. This essay Žrst appeared in 1999,
Contemporanea 2: 302–5, and is printed with permission of the editor of that journal.
Downloaded by [Uppsala universitetsbibliotek] at 10:28 11 October 2014

References

Rosenstone, R (1975) Romantic Revolutionary. A Biography of John Reed, New

York: Alfred A. Knopf. Italian translation, (1976) John Reed rivoluzionario
romantico, Roma: Editori Riuniti.
Rosenstone, R (1988) Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan,
Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.