Remediating life writing: a look into Gigante’s, Campion’s, and Roe’s biographies of John Keats

In a letter written in the 1870s, George Eliot defined biographers as “a disease of English literature”. Scholars should certainly be less biased than Eliot, but biography as a literary genre is undeniably rooted in British culture. English literature is in fact “filled with a long and proud tradition of life writing, all the way from the exemplary and moralistic to the critical and iconoclastic” (Bostridge 2004: xi), as the massive Oxford Dictionary of National Biography proves with its over 50,000 biographies written by about 10,000 contributors. After the well-known works of Walter Jackson Bate (1963), Robert Gittings (1968) and Andrew Motion (1997), three new biographies of John Keats have been issued over the last four years. Before Denise Gigante’s insights into the life of Keats as the brother of the less-known George (The Keats’s Brothers: the Life of John and George, 2011) and Nicholas Roe’s John Keats: A New Life (2012), in 2009 Jane Campion hit the box office with the motion picture Bright Star, a romantic, romanticised and poetic biography of the last three years of Keats’s life and his troubled love for Fanny Brawne. By looking into these three works in relation to existing knowledge on Keats’s life, this paper tries to ascertain to which extent the constraints imposed by different media (and hence by different targets) may change the way biographical facts are presented, provide new knowledge and contribute to the creation of a popular myth. As a matter of fact, as Bolter and Grusin remarked over a decade ago, no medium or single media event can do “its cultural work” in isolation from other media or other social and economic forces, while at the same time every medium constantly refashion itself in order to “answer the challenges” posed by the other media (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 15). On the one hand, Campion’s film is worth investigating as an instance of remediation for making biographical facts fit the screen and the public of moviegoers, and it seems interesting to consider both the script and the non-verbal content of her movie in relation to the content available through other media. Because of the hybrid status of the film, it is crucial to reflect on whether Campion ought to be regarded not only as a film director, but also as an author or a biographer. On top of that, as far as the creation of a popular myth goes, it seems equally pertinent to take into consideration the relationship existing between remediation and “repurposing” as a “practice of adapting a ‘property’ for a number of different media venues” (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 273) in order to investigate the ways in which Campion’s Bright Star may have affected (or was influenced by) other cultural products and markets. On the other hand, biography as a genre raises similar questions, as it is a “bastard” product of the “unholy alliance” of “fiction and fact” (Holmes 1995: 15). Just like Campion’s film may be considered a hybrid, so should biography as a genre: as Bostridge (2004) notes, there seems to have been much debate going on about whether biography should be considered a branch of historiography or literature. Besides, if, to borrow Bolter and Grusin’s words once more, refashioning within a specific medium is to be considered as a case of remediation, Gigante’s and Roe’s works should be taken into consideration as part of the intertextual network they establish with the existing biographies of Keats. The subheading of Roe’s work seems particularly interesting from this point of view. Furthermore, it is also worth trying to figure out whether the decision of the publishing industry to issue two new biographies within a span of just one year was somehow encouraged by the success (and the revenues) of Campion’s motion picture. Having mapped these points, I shall finally consider Gigante’s and Roe’s written works and Campion’s motion picture contrastively, in order to pinpoint their approach in analysing and narrating Keats’s life. The aims is to understand whether and why they have decided to embrace or discharge what Gillies names the “cradle-to-grave approach” (Gillies 2009: 58) and, with specific reference to Bright Star, to explore how a film may deal with biographical facts that would be confined to the space of endnotes in a written volume.