MC: A Memory of his Childhood						Michael Pruess
FH: "Fictional versus Historical Lives"					10/19/10
										Rhetoric 129
										Paper #1

x(a + b + c) = ax + bx + cx
	In her "Fictional versus Historical Lives," Dorrit Cohn examines the boundary between biography and the novel, drawing up conclusions as to distinctive features of both. Sigmund Freud's biography of Leonardo da Vinci, so innovative and different from the rest of its genre, at first strikes us as bizarre: its status as a biography comes into question. It does little to commemorate or even mention most of Leonardo's accomplishments, serving as a meager documentation of the man's life in action compared to such works as Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. Moreover, a Freud himself says notes early on, it goes places few have gone before: "If a biographical study is really intended to arrive at an understanding of its hero's mental life it must not—as happens in the majority of biographies as a result of discretion or prudishness—silently pass over its subject's sexual activity" (MC, 16). Whether Freud's assumption regarding the purpose of "biographical study" is an accepted one or not, he certainly pushes boundaries by applying psychoanalytic practices in his work, and the end result is a book that presents itself quite differently from the hagiographic commemorations of the past. Ultimately, however, it becomes clear that Freud's biography is, in fact, biography—neatly fitting Cohn's own parameters.
	The most fundamental feature of biography, be it first- or third-person, according to Cohn, is its referentiality: it is "a discourse that refers to the past of a real" person (FH, 30). This criterion is hardly convincing on its own—E. M. Forster's distinction between a real and fictional Queen Victoria in his Aspects of the Novel comes to mind—, but it is still a criterion, and Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory of his Childhood certainly meets it. Drawing on both Leonardo's own writings and those of countless other biographers who had tackled the subject, Freud attempts to come to an understanding of a real person who existed in the past.  
	The strongest distinction Cohn finds between fictional and biographical accounts of a person's life regards the manner in which the internal life is depicted. On pages 26-27, she notes that psycho-narration ("a technique where the narrator's voice is clearly set off from the language that runs through his subject's head") takes a different guise in biography than it does in fiction (FH). The key difference is that the language becomes framed in conjecture and inference (FH, 27). The reasoning for this is clear—if we seem too certain in writing things we have no way of knowing to be true, we are writing fiction.
	Most of Freud's claims regarding Leonardo regard his inner life, topics never discussed with anyone, or, if discussed, never recorded, sealed away forever in a seemingly inaccessible past. Freud deals with Leonardo's potential homosexuality, the artist's family situation as a child, his relationship to his parents, and so on, and he makes strong positive claims that would initially seem to, within Cohn's paradigm, push his work outside the bounds of historical biography. However, these statements read nothing like how a fictional work would. Cohn says that "the result [of the conjectural/inferential] is usually a highly heterogeneous textual surface that cannot readily be mistaken for the homogeneously omniscient inside views ruling third-person novels" (FH, 27-28). We never have that kind of danger. Indeed, Freud never once so much as writes a speech bubble for Leonardo, whether conjectural or not; rather, he pens such sentences as these: "In his unconscious he was still tied to [his mother] by erotically colored feelings, as he had been in childhood" (MC, 54). The tone is clinical, the narrator remains. Freud never truly attempts psycho-narration. As doing so would actually subvert his own project (psychoanalysis deals primarily with the subconscious), the only words he puts into his subject's mouth are potential "translations" of notes in Leonardo's diaries, and these read like fairly straightforward deconstructionist analyses. 
	Still Cohn's criterion should apply, for even without psycho-narration, if something is posited with a guise of factuality when in fact it is impossible to 'know' it, it becomes fiction. Let us for a moment disregard whether or not proponents of psychoanalysis would argue that their method constitutes sufficient evidence for such claims as Freud makes in the text; we will take the psychoanalysis as fantastic delusion on Freud's part and continue along to the final chapter of his book. After seventy pages of drawing conclusions about Leonardo's mental and sexual character, Freud writes, "I am far from over-estimating the certainty of these results" (MC, 85). He goes on to explain that the entire work was essentially an experiment designed to test the usefulness of applying psychoanalysis to biography (MC, 85). In disclosing this, Freud is putting brackets around his entire treatment of Leonardo and saying "this is uncertain." Just as ax+bx+cx can be simplified to x(a+b+c), so too has Freud essentially simplified every explicit statement of conjecture that Cohn would have demanded into a single admission that can be distributed to all the parts of his argument. 
	So it is that Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory of his Childhood deals with a real person and does not trespass across Cohn's fiction/non-fiction boundary. Though Freud spends the majority of the book presenting what seem to be unbridled positive arguments regarding things he should have no way of knowing—putting aside, once again, the issue of whether or not psychoanalysis provides the kind of evidence that should alleviate the need for conjecture—his concluding chapter adequately clarifies his project, and at no point along the way do we mistake what we are reading for a novel. It is a biography—an experimental biography, to be sure; but whether it has failed or succeeded, it is a biography nonetheless.