Amid delimiting political realities, biofictions offer potent outlets to protest powerlessness or the inevitability of such outcomes and to speculate on alternative pasts and futures. For example, they may invite us to revise and reimagine the lives of those who contributed and who were left out of official narratives. Emma Donoghue has referred to biofiction as “voicing the nobodies.” Colum McCann has emphasized the “contested realities” and obscured truths that many writers of biofiction explore—the effort to challenge and interrogate claims to truth and trust. By imaginatively making visible voices and meanings that power has so often obscured, biofictions are inherently political spaces that have the potential to challenge dominant, authoritarian modes of determining the world.
The political uncertainties we face are not only the risks of physical dangers to ourselves and our planet—although those are very real—but also to the confidence and trust we have in sources and claims to veracity. These conflicts are exacerbated by misleading fictions and conspiracy theories masquerading as fact. In this regard, Michael Lackey explores the first major surge in biofiction in the 1920s and 1930s, especially among German writers, who developed cunning strategies for criticizing oppressive political regimes. Lackey shows how Bertolt Brecht’s play about Galileo, set in seventeenth-century Italy, uses biofictional metaphors to expose the deceptive, dangerous language and logic of the so-called “Christian” nationalism of the Nazi regime.
By challenging dominant conceptions of biographical figures both elevated and marginalized by history, Alexandre Gefen and Alison James look at differing aspects of how biofictions interrogate the potentially misleading “exemplarity” of some lives and the overlooked invisibility of others. Considering how biofiction might contribute to a politics of equality, Gefen draws from works by Phillipe Vasset, Pascal Quignard and Pierre Michon to argue that this genre aims to give both visibility to the “infamous,” showing the banality or ordinariness of such individuals, and to provide a window to the greatness of the tiny. In turn, James studies the uneasy duality within biofiction, by which the real serves as model or exemplum for the fiction, and the created fiction purports to shed new light on reality. Analyzing works by Emmanuel Carrère (Limonov), Lauren Groff (Matrix), and Lola Lafon (The Little Communist Who Never Smiled; Mercy, Mary, Patty) in which the singularity of the individual competes with narrative roles of national hero, saint, celebrity, or clinical case, she contends that the fault-lines of biofictional exemplarity are also sites of resistance to fictions unrooted from reality.
Lastly, in her paper Virginia Rademacher draws from Naomi Klein’s concept of doppelganger culture to discuss biofictions that expose the dangerous doubling that applies not only to the individual but to entire societies that are partitioned from seeing the other and from recognizing our shared humanity—the very real consequences of manipulating and obscuring the differences between fictional play and reality. By examining critically the connection to factual realities and the distinct but equally significant responsibility to how we use fiction, she argues that biofictions offer potential antidotes against post-truth contagions. With reference to recent works by Javier Cercas, Lauren Groff, Colm Tóibín, and Maggie O’Farrell, she explores how writers of biofiction use invention not to imitate or supplant real life but to incarnate its more invisible layers.
With biofiction, life becomes literature, and literature reveals the fragility and flux of our biographical lives. This session considers how biofictions are both an outgrowth of a dispersive, uncertain reality and a mode for navigating this context, modeling alternatives for how we manage and rethink its possibilities and pitfalls.