Citizen Joyce, or My Quest for Rosebud

1 write this personal essay as one who has, it must be acknowledged at the outset, committed biography?a descent into sin that has made me what Finnegans Wake calls a "biografiend."2 Any biographer who feels it desirable to keep up with critical and theoretical trends might at first worry about the way in which, after all, as Malcolm Bradbury reflects in his pseudo-biography My Strange Quest for Mensonge, "what with the Death ofthe Author and the Disappearance of the Subject," any "biography is bound to be a problem these days."3 True, the reading public seems unaware of the awkwardness of the biographer's situation. Memoirs and biographies (even literary biographies, though mine excluded, unfortunately) often turn up on or in fact dominate best-seller lists, and A&E's cable program Biography, broadcast six days a week, has even spun off a popular magazine. Justin Kaplan has gone so far as to claim that ours has become "a culture of biography. "4 In a Postmodernist climate, readers longing for a traditional story line, with a beginning, middle, and (when the subject is dead) end, take for granted that they can find such qualities in biographies, and almost invariably their assumption is correct.5 But any thoughtful biographer who shares the sense that biographies tell straightforward stories from an authoritative perspective is bound to confront harsher realities early on. I would like to share some refleetions based on my own experiences.