ABSTRACT
Anyone who has ever read police reports will immediately have noticed how the suspects’ confessions are all remarkably similar. The illiterate petty thief uses the same language as can be found in the formulations of the highly educated fraudster. This is not really the case, of course, but this is what happens once confessions are put into writing. A confession is the outcome of a negotiation. The suspect speaks, but what the officer writes down uses official phrasing and terminology that can later be linked to legal texts known to the officer, but often not to the suspect. Should the petty thief sign the confession, it becomes canonical, so to speak, even though it is in the words of someone else. This phenomenon also occurs with biographies, and with a certain type of biography things are stranger still. Biographer and biographical subject speak to each other, sometimes only four times, sometimes regularly over a period of years, and in the end the subjects declare with their imprimatur that they have not been misquoted or misunderstood. This is authorisation. However, something else nearly always creeps into these authorization agreements, namely the belief of the subject that their imprimatur serves to indicate that they agree with what the biographer has written. Things become more complicated still when the subject of a biography demands in advance that the biography can be published only if the entire text has been authorised. This is ludicrous: a serious biography is not based solely on interviews, but here we see the subject apparently wishing to have the right to ‘authorise’ all the existing documents, letters and diaries, even if they have been written by others.
