Introduction to Focus: Biofiction—Its Origins, Natures, and Evolutions

In 1937, Georg Lukács clarified when and why the historical novel came into being. While Lukács concedes that there were some historical novels in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he claims that the aesthetic form came to fruition in the early nineteenth century. This certainly makes sense. After the French Revolution, there was concern that such a catastrophe could happen again. Therefore, to understand what led to 1789, there arose in Europe history programs, in which professors used rigorous and scientific methods of analysis to identify and define what caused major historical events. This attempt to systematize history and to establish more reliable methods for doing history explains the rise of the historical novel, an aesthetic form that visualizes the laws and causes of major historical collisions.

Useful and important as Lukács’s study is, it has also had an extremely negative impact on the study of biofiction, which is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure. On the surface, this is because the Hungarian Marxist condemns the biographical novel as an irredeemable aesthetic form that necessarily distorts and misrepresents history. But the real problem is that Lukács treats biofiction as a subgenre of the historical novel, and thus uses unsuitable criteria to analyze and assess the literary form. To understand why the biographical novel should not be treated as a version of the historical novel and why it should be seen as a separate and distinct aesthetic form, it would be useful to identify the forces that led to its rise and subsequent valorization.

The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of history as a science. From that perspective, historical fact became more dogmatically factual and imaginative fiction became more fantastically fictional. Lukács adopted the scientific approach to history and then applied it to literature. So in The Historical Novel, he makes the case for using the “scientific method” in order “to disclose connections in accordance with the objective laws governing them.” In other words, if an author uses “the correct scientific means,” then he or she would be able to access and represent the “objective connections and laws” of major historical events.

While Todd Avery does not discuss Lukács, his recent work, including his essay for this issue, provides us with valuable ways of thinking about what led to the shift away from historical fiction and to the legitimization of biographical fiction. For Avery, one of the major developments of the early twentieth century is the concurrent rejection of history as a science and the rise of history as primarily an art. This would lead to the emergence of corresponding aesthetic forms, and for Avery, it was the Bloomsbury Group that would transmute this intellectual development into “a type of life writing that contains biofiction’s DNA.” The key figure for Avery is Lytton Strachey.

In a 1903 essay, Strachey says that history as a scientific method is extremely limited. While it can provide some insight into the mechanical operations of cultures and societies of the past, “the method by which true conclusions are reached with regard to individual minds of the past cannot be termed a scientific method: it is a totally different method.” Therefore, Strachey concludes that “the only possible way of narrating the characteristics of human minds is by the aid of—not the scientific— but the artistic method.” Thinking of history more in terms of art than science set Strachey on an aesthetic journey that would move increasingly more towards biofiction, a point that Avery intelligently makes in his contribution to this issue by quoting from the preface of Eminent Victorians: “Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past.” Strachey would develop this idea further over the course of his career, culminating in the book Elizabeth and Essex, which, Avery claims, “Strachey deliberately approached …in a biofictional spirit” by “intentionally” manipulating and inventing “historical facts in the service of an intensely personal vision.” To support this claim and approach, Avery quotes a 1927 Strachey letter that could be read as one of the key ideas in a biofiction...