Richard Holmes is the renowned biographer of Shelley and Keats and of books about biography, especially Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. He is a Romantic in two senses: his subjects are Romantic poets, and his view of biography is suffused with the importance of feeling as a form of knowledge. So he writes in This Long Pursuit that the biographer should “physically pursue his subject through the past.” The biographer has to be there, Holmes insists, to get inside his subject: “He must feel how they once were.” Among biographers this notion has taken hold and made of Holmes himself a romantic figure––the fellow who has been there and done that. He serves, too, as a rebuke to armchair biographers who do not rough it (sleeping outdoors and braving all weathers) as Holmes has done in his (it must be said again) pursuit of his subjects. In short, the biographer as hero, ladies and gentlemen.

Holmes’s biographical axioms disintegrate if, like Hegel, we push a thesis to its extreme. How limited is knowledge if it depends on your gps? As Holmes himself knows, in fact it is not possible to position yourself in your subject’s place, since that place is forever changing––not only in space but in time. At best, the biographer can dredge for fragments of the past and like Proust get a whiff of history in a biscuit. For antithesis, I will cite a fictional example: In Absalom, Absalom!Quentin Compson