Other people’s life stories fascinate us, and we seem to have an urgent need to record these stories. As writers continue to experiment with the formal and aesthetic possibilities of rendering their subjects’ lives in ever new ways, the modes of writing about historical lives have diversified enormously, and continue to do so. The proliferation of public interest in accounts of historical lives in recent decades—captured by such buzzwords as “biography boom” or “memoir craze”—is reflected in the similarly expanding field of life-writing studies, as scholars regularly re-conceptualise their object of study to keep pace with the rapid evolution of life-writing forms and to incorporate the new insights their discipline has yielded. Within this context, the term “life-writing” itself has emerged to reflect the diverse work conducted in the field. It has now come to stand for
a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction , and biographical fiction , but also letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings, . . . marginalia, nonce writings, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms. 1
Biography and autobiography—two extensive fields of cultural production and academic research now commonly subsumed under life-writing—have in turn come under scrutiny as scholars have attempted to accommodate newly developing forms and direct our gaze to the manifold guises that writings about “real people” can assume. Thus, in their primer Reading Autobiography (2010), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson discuss the limitations of the term “autobiography” for contemporary scholarship—its politics of exclusion as regards, for instance, ethnic identity. Following Julie Rak and Leigh Gilmore , Smith and Watson propose a shift from autobiography as genre to “autobiographical discourse,” using the adjective to designate “self-referential writing” in a more inclusive manner. 2 Hermione Lee’s revised, very broad definition of “biography” in Biography: A Very Short Introduction (2009) as “the story of a person told by someone else” 3 appears also to pay tribute to the diverse shapes that specific “tellings” can take. However, in common use, the term “biography” is still primarily taken to denote factual cradle-to-grave narratives in book form, while “life-writing,” as a loose umbrella term, explicitly encompasses auto/biographical fiction, as Zachary Leader notes in the above definition. That fiction these days habitually registers on the life-writing radar is reflected also by the event programmes and the work conducted at various centres for life-writing research 4 as well as by the awarding in 2016 of the prestigious Erasmus Prize to novelist A. S. Byatt —for her “inspiring contribution to ‘life writing.’” 5
The present essay collection examines “experiments” in life-writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries which are located at the intersections of auto/biography and fiction, so as to shed light on the ways in which writers have engaged with, and extended the range of, modern auto/biography. Andrew M. Colman describes experimental methods in the natural sciences as being “uniquely powerful in allowing rigorous examination of causal effects without the uncertainties of other research methods.” 6 While for scientists such experimentation may serve to establish certainties, writers have long demonstrated that literary experiments tend to have the opposite effect: they open up alternative and multiple ways of reading and pose new epistemological challenges. 7
The recent explosion of experimentation in life-writing is testified by the proliferation of genre designations such as “meta-autobiography ,” “autotopography ,” “creative non-fiction ,” “false novel ,” “autofiction ,” “biofiction ,” “auto/biografiction ,” “autobiographical non-fiction novel,” “auto/biographic metafiction ,” or “heterobiography ”—a few of the forms considered in this volume. Such generic labels attempt to specify the ways in which texts depart from the tenets of traditional biography and autobiography and, more specifically, capture the relationship of fact and fiction and the relations between the writing and written subjects that these texts reconfigure. What all of these forms share, and which is, according to the editors of the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, a defining mark of literary experiments in general, is a “commitment to raising fundamental questions about the very nature and being of verbal art itself”—questions which mainstream literature “at all periods . . . is dedicated to repressing.” 8
Negating and Expanding the Auto/Biographical Project
Genre labels such as “auto/biographic metafiction” and the self-reflexivity attributed to literary experimentation in the above claim can quickly evoke the ironic and self-conscious play typical of postmodernist fiction . However, such an easy association can become reductive for two reasons: it limits our understanding of the heuristic value of auto/biographical experiments, and it may obscure our view of the historicity of auto/biographical experimentation by framing it as only a post-WWII phenomenon. One can certainly identify a postmodern scepticism and irony in a branch of life-writing experiments that negates the possibility of auto/biographical representation—that is, of the writer’s ability to reach the core of his or her subject. Such texts constitute what Caitríona Ní Dhúill describes as “anti-biography ,” embodying a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” 9 David Nye’s Invented Self: An Anti-Biography from Documents of Thomas A. Edison (1983) is a famous example here: the many Edisons Nye presents to his readers in non-linear fashion do not add up to a coherent, unified self.
But there are also departures from generic conventions that extend, rather than deny, the parameters of auto/biography—be it by choosing a mode of writing that more accurately reflects the condition of the modern subject, a style that is felt to do justice to, and therefore to more faithfully represent, a particular person, or a form that activates additional levels of auto/biographical communication. A well-known example of the latter is Art Spiegelman’s auto/biographical comic Maus (1991), a non-realistic graphic representation of Jews as mice and German Nazis as cats. As Irene Kacandes notes, this is a highly effective way to visualise the vulnerability of Holocaust victims vis-à-vis their tormentors. Spiegelman thus manages to “convey some aspect of the ‘realness’ of certain life experiences” 10 by modifying conventional life-writing forms. In contrast to anti-biography, this second type could be called an “experiment for the purpose of life-writing” (expanding on Kacandes’s notion of “experiment for the purpose of autobiography”). 11 The present essay collection examines both types of experiments: those tending towards anti-biography as well as others that push at the boundaries of existing forms to mould them into something that better suits the writer’s efforts of representation.
Victorian Realism and Auto/Biography’s Invisible “Tradition of the New”
Next to avoiding a too narrow focus on “negative,” self-denying forms, the second reason for being cautious about any necessary association of experiments in life-writing with postmodernism is, I believe, more obvious: life-writing, like any other field of literary production, has its own extensive “tradition of the new” 12 that reaches back further than the “postmodernism” label would suggest. Life-writing scholars such as Ruth Ho...