Fictions biographiques: XIXe-XXIe siècles (review)

Biographical fiction may be a genre that does not exist. It is a hybrid form that blends thought and imagination, real and possible truths, in the writing of a life. We associate it with writers such as Marcel Schwob, Jorge Luis Borges, W.G. Sebald and Pierre Michon to name but a fewthat find a place in this welcome volume. From the perspective of literary history, the resurgence of biographical fictions in the mid-1980s invites enquiry. Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini reminds us that the resurgence of biography occurred contemporaneously within historiography when the decline of structuralism and Marxism created a space for historians to exercise the methodologies of their profession within the paradigm of biography. The return to biography confronted the historian with fragmentation, the difficulty of determining intentions, the lure of coherence faced with the resistances of the contingencies and contradictions that mark a life. These same conditions and difficulties provided fertile ground for writers of fiction who delight in biography's constraints but also its store of detail that answers, for some, a nostalgia for the real. Traces of the past, as well as its gaps, invite hypotheses, research and the work of imagination in explorations of the what-might-have-been of a life and of its details that refuse to be appropriated by the exemplum. What is refreshing about this volume is the range of perspectives. There can be no simple return to the 'real'. Michel Lafon, for example, looks at Borges's inversions of biographical fictions and details a delightful genealogy of Borges's contributions to magazines – popular, women's, literary – before concluding that 'la bipartition entre fiction biographique et biographie fictionnelle' has, as a result of Borges, become increasingly undecidable. The 'real' of a life is also a challenge for representation. Reading Henri Michaux's 'Une vie de chien', Jean François Louette suggests that as with poems every life searches, in vain, to be translated. And there is another perspective; one that looks for general meaning within a life and within life. This is the enjeu of Marielle Macé's astute readings of the theoretical biographies of Valéry and Sartre. Focusing on the vécu, Michael Sheringham pursues a similar path, convincingly delineating common lines of thought between Sartre and Dilthey that are exemplified in Sartre's empathy for Flaubert in L'Idiot de la famille. A form of empathy that accommodates a mode of understanding that has no certain ground but which offers insight into what we can know of (a) man. Other contributors emphasize self-understanding. In his insightful reading of Michon's oeuvre, Dominique Viart sees the act of writing biographical fictions in terms of a 'creusement de soi par l'évocation de l'autre'. Alexandre Gefen, by way of Paul Ricoeur's thought, argues that biographical fictions respond to an ethical imperative to think 'soimême comme un autre'. Finally, biographical fictions renew our interrogations of the literary: Ann Jefferson's reading of Michon's Vies minuscules returns us to literature's generation of its own uncertainty. The constituent parts of this volume are scholarly and stimulating; the same can be said of the whole.