Biography and fiction

Abstract

The relations between biography and fiction historically constitute a return to a tradition that is prior to modern and positivist biography, to a state of indistinctness which characterized historical lives as fictional ones. Biography has been seen, throughout times, in its discursive dimension, beyond the strictly literary spectrum, which was observed through mutual genre invasions, considered as a way of transgression. Afterwards, the literary biography was elaborated through the fictionalization of the story of a life, the aesthetical character having privilege over the historical or scientific ones, in a moment when it was less valued as a historical subgenre, centered in the great men’s achievements, aiming at having a new role, then literalized. With these ideas in mind, the present work will explore the notion of transposal as a way to access the various contemporary biographical configurations, according to different strategies through which fiction is used. With a biographical corpus composed by works such as those by Chistopher Ransmayr, Eric Koch, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu and Pierre Mertens, amongst others, the transposal will be analyzed according to three dimensions: the living, the work and the critic. The first way of transposal is related to the transference of reality to writing, thus reconfiguring the past in another time. The second kind of transposal contemplates the relations between the biographer and the biographed subject’s work, in which the original texts may be inserted to make reverberate work into life. The third dimension of transposal is the fictionalization of the critical exercise, related to the cognitive value of contemporary forms of biographic, process in which interpretation and commentary revivify the reading of a work.

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Original in French.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2017.31594