Biography v literary fiction

Book group choice for the summer is the current (4th) volume of the Robert Caro LBJ bio, so that's what I'll be reading for much of the time over the next few weeks - a rare divergence from my regular diet of literary fiction. Makes me think about the essential differences (and similarities) between literary fiction and serious biography. They have much in common: in both cases we examine and experience the development of a character over time, conflict between characters and between a protagonist and society, a general arc of a story through which a protagonist confronts an obstacle or challenge and overcomes the challenge (or dies trying). Both also use character as a lens through which to see society at large, in a particular time and place. But reading a biography, as an experience, is not at all like reading a novel: in a biography, for the most part, we already know the arc of the story (not true in reading a memoir, which is why memoirs are like a shortcut to fiction, often) and we read to examine the interstices and to deepen our understanding. Starting the LBJ bio, I "know" everything that's going to happen, but along the way will have the knowledge expanded with new understanding, new (to me) information. I'm not a huge fan of historical fiction, and I think part of the reason is that it feels to me like a cheapened biography: I want and expect or at least prefer it when novelists create a world, rather than expropriate the world: historical fiction sometimes seems to me parasitic, and often really dull. But can you imagine the reverse?: a biography of literary character? A biography of Hamlet, Shylock, Pip, Mrs. Dalloway? It's been done, tried (the Hours, q.v.), but again I feel cheated and disappointed when a novelist expropriates the work of another: it makes the original work of fiction into a specimen, flattens rather than deepens. Rather than blog on Caro's bio over the next few weeks, I will be, on the side, sneaking in some poetry, so while reading Caro I will post on various poems I am reading - mostly, poems that have meant a lot to me over the course of my reading life and that I hold, to some degree, in memory and that I return to from time to time. I'll try to explain why.