Biofiction

Having discussed some issues around the presentation of self in previous posts through particular influences and examples, this post is going to be a little more abstract. I'm going to consider some of the claims made by Max Saunders in his book, Self-Impression: Life-writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Writing (2010). This lengthy study examines the emergence of certain kinds of Modernist writing in the twentieth century out of late nineteenth-century biographical and autobiographical texts.

Saunders' book is very handy because of the deft way in which it manages some of the terminology around these topics, considering labels such as biography, autobiography, life-writing and autobiografiction (I'll return to the latter in a bit). One starting point for Saunders is Philippe Lejeune's concept of 'formal autobiography' or 'contractual autobiography', 'in which real author, narrator, and the name on the title‐page all coincide, and seek to interpret their own life' (p.3). Saunder's claim, however, is that the texts and writers he is interested in find ways in which to break that contract and find 'new ways to combine life‐writing with fiction' (p. 4). Specifically, he argues writers who break this 'autobiographic contract' call into question or 'complicate' 'the identity of author, narrator and subject' (p. 18).

Professor Max Saunders

There are a couple of important arguments here. The first has to do with the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. Crudely put: if a novelist makes stuff up, that is (usually) less bothersome to readers, because that's what fiction is: making stuff up. If a historian makes stuff up, it becomes a problem, because the value of their work tends to rest on its relation to truth and empirical fact - that's the nature of non-fiction. In these cases, Lejeune's categories suggest that we could think about these rough conventions as a kind of contract - a loose agreement between a writer and their readers about how the writer will behave. Since we tend to think of biography and autobiography as non-fiction, there's a broad expectation that their value lies in the truth of what they have to tell us about the lives they describe.

But what happens to this contract when writers use some of the forms and techniques we associate with telling stories - with fiction? Saunders suggests that the texts he looks at call into question Lejeune's contract and, what's more, this has wider consequences. His writers do not only blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction in writing about their lives, Saunders argues, they call into question how we understand lives altogether and what we understand by self and identity. He identifies 'the disintegration, around the turn‐of‐the‐century, of what might be called (by analogy) auto/biographical realism—narratives confident they could deliver objective truths in narrating a life' (p. 11). So the repercussions go even further and may complicate our understanding of 'truth' and fact altogether. 

Sigmund Freud

Saunders uses composite term 'autobiografiction' to convey this complex mix. And this seems like an excellent term to describe what Moore does in Confessions of a Young Man. As I've described in previous posts, we shouldn't conflate George Moore the writer with 'George Moore' the narrator of Confessions, even when he invites us to do so - this work is slippery and elusive about such autobiographical identifications and it invokes various fictional techniques and devices as part of that. 

Saunders, however, might not agree. But before I consider that, there's historical aspect of his book that is also vital. Revolutionary ideas about self-hood are commonly associated with philosophical, political and psychological developments in the twentieth century. Think, for example of the effect of Freud's work on how we understand self and the relation between the conscious and unconscious life of our minds. Or think about how the widening of the electoral franchise and broad liberalisation of Western society in the C20th brought changes in attitude towards what kinds of life are worth telling or knowing about. But Saunders' deliberately locates this development earlier, in the nineteenth century: 

Autobiography experienced a crisis in the later nineteenth century, partly because its project came to seem impossible. Developments in the form that constantly push towards the limits of self‐understanding keep discovering that the self has a perplexing capacity to elude such attempts at description. (p.10)

Walter Pater

Hence the trajectory of Self-Impression, which traces the roots of developments in modern fiction to the fin-de-siècle. There is some excellent material here about Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater that makes these claims very strongly. Indeed, Saunders has been really useful to me in unlocking how and why Pater's critical writings and fiction are so important for understanding George Moore and his approach to subjectivity and the self.

James Joyce

But Saunders' book also confuses me. As I was reading it, his account of 'autobiografiction' seemed exactly to capture the tricky and evasive relationship that Moore adopts in relation to autobiography. But surprisingly little space is given to Confessions of a Young Man in Self-Impression and when Saunders does mention Moore, he briefly dismisses the idea that 'rather, works of autobiografiction's alter ego, impressionism' (p. 262) and shifts the discussion onto work by Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. I'm still processing this argument - trying to work out whether Confessions would really be better described as 'Impressionist Autobiography'. The end result is similar: the line that Self-Impression traces back from Modernism to the late nineteenth century is very helpful, for example, if you want to connect what Moore does to a novel, such as James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). But at the moment, I'm still clinging to the feeling that 'autobiografiction' better captures the slippery nature of Moore's novel - the way that it eludes absolute or final identification with other more widely recognised forms of writing such as 'impressionism' or 'autobiography'.