The Treacherous Imagination: Intimacy, Ethics and Autobiographical Fiction by Robert McGill (review)

Taking its cue from Philip Roth’s The Counterlife – “The treacherous imagination is everybody’s maker. … We are all each other’s authors” – Robert McGill’s study insightfully explores the multiple and complicated interconnections between fiction and the authors’ intimates or proximate others.⁴ It is a very systematic and pleasant book that strikes an elegant balance between a writer and critic’s view on the transgressions of fiction, the betrayals of authors, and the “biographical desire” of the readers. As one finds out from the enticing preface, McGill is a fiction writer himself, having published a novel before the current study. His dual stance of writer and literary critic gives him both good insight into the creative process per se and the ability to analyze the reception of a text from several perspectives (the author’s, the reader’s, the critic’s), which he can nuance and counterpoise.

The book has four large chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion; all parts have suggestively titled subsections. The introduction sets the ground for the numerous analyses and presents McGill’s critical lenses, which frame his examinations. Drawing on psychoanalysis (although engaging only very briefly with it), he establishes “infidelity,” “desire,” and “betrayal” as key concepts in discussing the workings of fiction in relation to its intimate others. Gérard Genette’s view on the paratext is nicely expanded to refer to numerous forms of authorial performance that supplement or comment on literature, while the adaptation of Philip Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” leads to the author’s definition of autobiographical fiction as a “lens through which one reads.”

Chapter 1, “A Short History of Transgression,” stands out for its historical breadth and McGill’s ability to synthesize. The author traces moments from the ancient Greeks to the present in order to delineate a history of fiction’s autobiographical transgressions and their implications in a particular cultural or historical moment (legal issues, literary publicity, or public scandals). From the story about Socrates’s reaction to Aristophanes’s caricature of him in The Clouds to the ethos of self-exposure in contemporary culture, McGill highlights key moments in the Western literary canon.

McGill’s deft analysis of multiple paratexts in Elizabeth Stern’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and Philip Roth’s novels, which constitutes chapter 2, “Biographical Desire,” foregrounds the fictional writers’ ways of engagement with the biographical details in their work. The chapter offers a detailed analysis of Stern’s book and a tour de force of Roth’s “fictional selves” and paratextual apparatus in over seven novels. In chapters 3 and 4, “Fiction’s Betrayals, Intimacy Trials” and “In Bed with an Author,” McGill offers a broader and more balanced material; this enables him to focus and comment on a wide range of fictional and real responses to fiction writers’ potential transgressions from their very intimates, relatives (spouses, parents, children, or siblings), friends, or (ex-)loves. Synthesis and detailed analysis come skilfully together in these chapters, making them strongholds of original research and solid argument in the book. A.S. Byatt, Hanif Kureishi, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Philip Roth, and their proximate (real or fictional) others, as well as Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Coetzee, Sylvia Plath, and Bharati Mukherjee, who are briefly but meaningfully referred to, inhabit the second part of the study. McGill presents the reader a gamut of situations of authors encountering their proximate others in order to problematize (and often redeem) the ethical implications such forms of fictional transgression might trigger. Both chapter 4 and the conclusion of the book end on a rather idealistic note, which is consistent with McGill’s passion for the topic. He urges authors to find a path of “responsible indiscretion while engaging reciprocally with their intimate others” and finds this space of uncertainty that fiction creates to be one of “potentiality.”

The biographical disclosure with reference to the aims of the study – this is a book...