Colum McCann: Contested Realities in the Biographical Novel
- Colum McCann: Contested Realities in the Biographical Novel
Born in dublin in 1965, Colum McCann is a distinguished lecturer and codirector of the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at Hunter College in New York City. He is an internationally known author whose novels have been published in thirty-five languages. His honors include the National Book Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, and the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award in Memory of Princess Grace. McCann has published two biographical novels, Dancer (2003) and TransAtlantic (2013), and he is currently working on a new one tentatively titled Apeirogon.
The biographical novel first became popular in the 1930s. But it was only in the 1990s that it became a dominant literary form. With regard to the biographical novel, the Irish are particularly important since Oscar Wilde was one of the first to author a theoretical reflection about the form: that its aesthetic objective is not to reflect accurately the life of the biographical subject, but rather to use the life of the historical figure in order to project into being the author’s view of the world. Can you talk about your biographical novel in relation to Wilde’s reflection about the form?
First, I want to dispute the idea of a biographical novel. For me, as Clifford Geertz has said, the real is the imagined and the imagined is real. James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom is as real a figure to me as, say, my great-grandfather, who was what we might call “a biographical figure.” For me, Bloom becomes a biographical figure by reading him into being. I do not see a big distinction between what is created in the imagination and what actually, historically, supposedly occurred. My grandfather was alive on June 6th, 1904. He [End Page 134] would have been six or seven years old. I only met him once—in a nursing home in London in the 1970s. But I got to “know” him in a profound way by engaging imaginatively with the language of Ulysses. And through this act of literary creation, through Leopold Bloom, I also get to know myself. So you have to question how imagined was Bloom and how real was he at the same time? And it is not just the idea of the biographical that I struggle with; I have problems with the words “fiction” and “nonfiction.” What is fiction? Fiction means to shape, but nonfiction also means to shape. To my mind the journalist and the biographer are shaping things as much as what the fiction writer is doing.
But they have different truth contracts, don’t they?
What does that mean?
The biographer makes a tacit contract with the reader. The biographer basically says, “I am going to try to give you a picture of this person’s life with as much precision as possible. I am not going to strategically or consciously alter facts about this person’s life, and I am not going to convert this person’s life into a symbol or metaphor.” Given this contract, we would never say to a biographer, your biography fails because you did not portray the subject’s life in a way that would enable me to better understand my grandfather’s life. Novelists are different. They unapologetically change facts about an actual historical figure, and they usually convert their biographical subject into a symbol with which readers can connect. To give you an example, Russell Banks said to me in an interview, “In my novel Cloud-splitter [1998], Owen Brown narrates his story in the year 1903, but in real life, he died in 1889.”1 I asked him why he made that change, and he said, “My novel is about the mind of the terrorist, and I wanted to show that that mindset is still alive in the twentieth century. In order to convert Brown into a symbol, I changed some facts.” We would get really angry with a biographer for making such a change, and we never critique...
