Farting Sofa FAQ Part 2: The author's biography, its use and misuse.

Please note:  This is a spoiler-free post, so please no spoilers in the comments. I also have not committed to reading the 12 chapters recently released in German, so this site will remain free of those spoilers for the time being. 

I am postponing my conclusion of the Troubled Blood reread because I think it is important to clarify my position on this topic before the excitement of reading The Hallmarked Man sets in. I have been asked my opinion recently about what I think of the literary analytic method known as biographical criticism, particularly as it applies to living authors like Rowling/Galbraith. As with the Double Wedding Band Model, I thought it best to respond with a public FAQ. 

FAQ 1:  Do you think it is appropriate to interpret fiction in the context of the author's biography? 

Answer:  Certainly. I have done so multiple times. This process is called biographical criticism and is nothing new or original. My experience with this approach includes

• My English term paper from my junior year in high school, where I read a couple of biographies about playwright Noel Coward, and looked at spousal relationships in his plays in light of his own family history. 
• My senior English term paper, when I compared religious poems of T.S. Eliot before and after his 1927 conversion to Anglo-catholicism. 
• I'm happy to say I got A's on both.
• Interestingly, none of the six literature classes I took in college (1 classics, 3 English, 2 Spanish) ever assigned a paper with this approach.
• I used Veronica Roth's published statements about her psychology studies and her past "obsession" with personality testing to  support my argument that the factions of her Divergent series were based on Five Factor personality theory. 
• Interviews with JK Rowling about her experiences with clinical depression and cognitive behavior therapy helped inform the depression section of my first peer-reviewed Harry Potter paper, on psychological disorders whose symptoms are depicted in the Wizarding World. 

Here are some guidelines for biographical criticism for people not familiar with it. 

FAQ 2: How useful is this type of approach to studying literature?

Answer: In my admittedly limited, non-professional experience, it typically offers a modest increase in appreciation for a text. Thomas Mallon, wrote in 2014 in a New York Times Bookends column that biographical criticism adds

an additional, incidental pleasure: Ah, I know where that came from... At its best, it can deepen our emotional pleasure in a novel and our intellectual grasp of it as well. 

But knowledge of the author's life is certainly not necessary for textual analysis. Case in point: my paper on psychology in Harry Potter also included depictions of characters with PTSD (Mad-Eye Moody) and Stockholm syndrome (Winky). No biographical source, to my knowledge, has ever documented that Rowling has any personal experience with either of those conditions, so those sections included zero biographical details. The paper still worked. I do not think biographical research can ever transform or revolutionize a field of literary study.  

FAQ 3:  What are the pros and cons of the biographical criticism approach?

Answer: Sometimes, the author's life history can significantly change your view of a text. Take, for example, Poe's "Annabel Lee." If you know only that the poem was written after the death of the Poe's young wife from tuberculosis, it appears as a tribute of a broken-hearted man who has lost the love of his life, and we feel great compassion for the poem's narrator. When you dig a bit deeper into Poe's biography, and learn that his wife was his first cousin, that he came to live in her parents' household when he was a broke college flunk-out of twenty-two and she was nine, and that he married her when she was only thirteen, the love expressed by the poem's narrator suddenly seems like more of an unsavory obsession, and we start to think that those "highborn kinsmen" who wanted to bear Annabel away from the guy probably had the right idea. I still remember the collective "Ewwwwwww!" of my 8th grade English class when the teacher revealed that bit of biography to us. 

More often, the effect of the author's biography is more subtle. Robin's amazement at how the outrageously expensive Vashti dress transformed her figure perhaps has added significance to readers who know that the writer is not a male British army veteran as stated on the book's cover, but instead a woman who, in a relatively short time, went from severe poverty to not only being able to afford designer dresses, but being expected to wear them to red-carpet premieres. But, that knowledge is not necessary to understand the significance of that scene, which is how it changes Strike's view of Robin and Robin's confidence in herself. 

Cormoran Strike is fond of saying "it was the other way round" when laying out the facts of a murder case to his identified culprit. Expecting biographical criticism to work "the other way round" is problematic.  We can gain insights into a piece of fiction by learning biographical facts about the author, but we cannot accurately discern biographical facts by analyzing the writer's creative works. In the "Annabel Lee" example, if the poem was presented anonymously, it might be reasonable to guess that it was written by a bereaved widower. But, it might also have been written by a son whose mother has died, and who had observed his father's grief, or by someone who simply had the knowledge, imagination and empathy to visualize what a grieving, devoted widower might feel, and write a nice poem about it. Any specific guesses about the poet's life drawn from reading the poem are, at best, highly speculative. If we guessed that Robert Galbraith writes vivid descriptions about the challenges of using a prosthesis because his own leg was amputated, we would be dead wrong.

FAQ 4: Are there special concerns about biographical criticism of living writers?

Answer: Whether the subject is living or dead, it is the critic's responsibility to assure all biographical information used and reported in their scholarly writings is both accurate and ethically obtained. As a psychology researcher and a health care professional, I am likely more used to regulations protecting the privacy of living research subjects (including public figures) than are those trained in the humanities, particularly when dealing with topics that are potentially sensitive or stigmatizing. Adam Kirsh, another writer of the Bookends column cited above, advises scholars to "keep in mind that the goal of literary biography is not to provide subject matter for gossip (or reverence), nor to help us issue an easy moral verdict." 

When the true focus of the scholarship shifts from the fiction to its living author, it can be tempting to speculate about the writer's personal life in the same way as one might speculate about the history, motives and experiences of their fictional characters. To do so crosses ethical lines, and reduces the supposed literary scholar to the level of a tabloid journalist. Living writers, unlike dead ones, can also personally object to scholarship they consider invasive, damaging or libelous; see this cautionary tale of what can happen when well-known authors object to a researcher's methods or conclusions. 

With the internet revolution, popular authors and their readers have more opportunities for interaction than ever before. There is increasing pressure on today's writers to make their lives as much of an open book as their bestsellers. Rowling/Galbraith both entertains readers and promotes books through social media, most uniquely through twitter header and emoji hints for upcoming books, and also through more typical websites, interviews and press releases. Rowling chose to share the Lake and Shed metaphor for her writing process, and it is perfectly natural that those most enthusiastic about her work glommed onto that metaphor and were eager to incorporate it into their analysis. For me, as with Mallon, details from Rowling's Lake add "an additional, incidental pleasure" to my reading; for others, they are much more important to their scholarship. And that's fine; as with the Double Wedding Band model, I make no claim that my preferred approach is the only correct one or superior to anyone else's. 

But we should never forget that it is Rowling's Lake and Shed. Rowling alone can decide how much of the Lake and Shed she is willing to open to tours by readers and scholars. If she has roped off Lake areas for private bathing by herself, family, friends and acquaintances, then common courtesy demands that those barriers be respected. Her Lake and Shed discussion is not an open invitation for scholars to send Dave Polworth in his scuba gear to dive for some artifact that they believe must be lurking at the Lake's bottom, just because they have ransacked her Shed and think that they have successfully reverse-engineered some bombshell life event that inspired Rowling's fiction. 

Even if, like Strike in The Silkworm (in other words, by a near-miracle!) they turn out to be right, it doesn't make their actions ethical. Recall Kathryn Kent, who participated in the investigation only for the sake of attracting more attention to her "Literary Life" blog site. That's a far cry from a detective seeking knowledge. Invasive dredging of the Lake is an activity best left to Rita Skeeters, Dominic Culpeppers, Carl Oakdens and others who refuse to heed Kirsh's warning about gossip, reverence, or easy moral verdicts.