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biographers. We have all read the sort of biography that simply sets forth a sequence of events, "one damn thing after another." But in a really good biography, the documentation has been selected and shaped into an unfolding story; and the story has been infused with explanations, judgments, informed speculations. The presence of an explanation implies an explainer, a narrator, and I want to focus my essay today on the way that "explainer" arises as the defining literary characteristic in a biography. Imperative in a successful biographical narrative is the presence of a storyteller, who introduces her- or himself at the beginning of the book, steers the narrative through its exposition, and brings the story to a satisfying end. Sometimes that narrator appears in the book as a character, speaking in the first person; most often, however, the narrator is transparent, not personified - as in the phrase "then the Queen died of grief." In distinguishing the category "first person" from the category "transparent," I do not mean to imply that the transparent narrator is impersonal; to my ear, the words "then" and "of grief are inflected with a voice of authority, of judgment. That is, the transparent narrator is not the passive voice of scientific papers; nor the depersonalized "objective" voice to be found in works of social science, and in most works of literary criticism. I mean merely that the subjectivity of the transparent narrator in a biography is expressed in other ways than being associated with a speaker in the first person. Moreover, the subjectivity or point of view of that narrator is always contemporary, whether or not the subject of the book is contemporary, because the story of a life is always addressed to an audience in the present. These points can best be made with the help of a few examples from really good biographies; I'll begin with Ian Hamilton's biography of Robert Lowell.2 Hamilton's book opens with a quotation from Lowell's

IN April 1960, Anne Sexton for the first time wrote "poet" rather than "housewife" in the "occupation" block of her income tax return. Married since 1948, mother of two daughters, Sexton had been publishing poetry for three years. The change in her status as citizen was significant for Sexton and for American literature. No poet before her had written so frankly of the female realm of family life, nor of its pathologies. And few poets, women or men, achieved success so expeditiously: nine years from drafting her first poem to being awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Sexton's unprecedented metamorphosis from suburban housewife into major poet appears, at first glance, a fairy tale. The real interest of its improbability, though, lies in Sexton's exemplary struggle against two seemingly unrelated handicaps: that of being a suburban wife and mother without a college education and that of being, at recurring intervals, certifiably mad. At age twenty-eight, Anne Sexton quite unexpectedly began turning herself into an artist. During the years of her apprenticeship, in which she produced two highly regarded books, Sexton's good fortune included working with several established younger poets-W. D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, James Wright-who immediately recognized her originality and with the Boston poet-teacher John Holmes, who censured it. Friend and adversary, Holmes measured Sexton's work by the literary standards and conventions of an older generation. The chronicle of their relationship provides

The brutal and tragic end of the writings of Goldmann, just when people were still expecting that theoretical synthesis that he was one day planning to publish, necessitates a return to disparate texts asking aesthetic questions in order to seize the outlines of a firm theory concerning the quality of artistic works. The absence of a theoretical formulation by Goldmann himself immediately creates difficulties. The most fruitful source we may tap indeed remains the article "L'esthbtique du jeune Lukics," which appeared in Meditations in 1961 and was reprinted in Marxisme et sciences humaines. For in this essay where he examines the first three works of Lukacs1, Goldmann immediately presents the problem of the essay as a genre as it is developed by Lukics beginning in 1910. In this mirror through which he meditates, Goldmann questions himself about his own work and informs us about the status of his own discourse. Speaking of Lukacs' aesthetics, he defines his own in so far as it is true that "the essay remains an intermediary form to the extent that it only presents its problems because of a particular reality. Thus it is always a work with two dimensions. That of the object it refers to and that of the problem it raises."2 That Goldmann preferred to enunciate the problems of a sociological aesthetic which is his own "because of" the aesthetics of Lukics rather than to present an autonomous theoretical exposition in itself defines one of the dimensions of this aesthetic. The aesthetic does not possess theoretical autonomy, it can only be the object of a particular science.