Joanna Scott and the Biofictional Art of Educating the Eyes

Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure. While writers have been authoring biographical novels for more than two hundred years, it was only in the late 1980s that it became a dominant literary form, resulting in stellar publications from luminaries such as Gabriel García Márquez, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Charles Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Vargas Llosa, Peter Carey, Olga Tokarczuk, and Hilary Mantel, to mention a notable few. ¹ Yet many have been extremely critical of the aesthetic form. For instance, in The Historical Novel Georg Lukács condemns the biographical novel as an irredeemable aesthetic form because it necessarily distorts and misrepresents history.² In this same tradition are Lucien Febvre, a French historian and one of the founders of the Annales School of History who faulted the biographical novel in 1938 because it is loaded with “blunders, mix-ups and gaffes” (7), and Carl Bode, a scholar of US social history who condescendingly dismissed the literary form in 1955: “the biographical novel deserves more to be pitied than censured” (269). In 1965, Paul Murray Kendall formulated a new reason for criticizing and dismissing this aesthetic form. Instead of seeing the biographical novel, what Kendall refers to as “the novel-as-biography,” as a subgenre or version of the historical novel, he treats it as a form of biography, but because it is “almost wholly imaginary” (282), he denounces it for imaginatively taking “the place of biography where there can be no genuine biography for lack of materials” (283).

In this essay, I discuss Jonathan Dee’s scathing critique of bio-fiction in his 1999 article “The Reanimators: On the Art of Literary Graverobbing,” not so much because this work offers compelling insight about biofiction but because it clearly articulates many of the negative and misguided assumptions about the genre that have been circulating since the 1930s. In the article, Dee, who has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and whose novel The Privileges was shortlisted for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, confesses that he is concerned about the “veritable epidemic” of what he believes to be a relatively new literary form, which engages in “the practice of conscripting flesh-and-blood people into novels” (77). He decries this biofictional practice, which, he claims, has come to dominate in the 1990s, and he says that it reflects the dire state of contemporary literature: “It says something important―and, to those of us who care about making the case for the novel’s continued vitality, something ominous― about the way in which fiction writers imagine their relation to the world.” Given his alarmist language (“epidemic” and “ominous”), it might seem that a novel with a real person as the protagonist is doomed to failure. In reality, Dee has high praise for Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (Virginia Woolf), J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (Fyodor Dostoevsky), and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower (Novalis). I focus here on Dee’s denunciation of Joanna Scott, who, he argues, is partially responsible for the decline in contemporary literature, even though he concedes that she published an impressive biographical novel about Austrian artist Egon Schiele. Dee’s decision to target Scott is useful for scholars because she has now authored many biofictions and has best clarified and justified what the aesthetic form actually does. Therefore, using Scott’s articles, interviews, and biofictions to refute the central claims in Dee’s article will enable me to bring some clarity and precision to the scholarly conversation about this literary form.

Biofiction History

Before detailing Scott’s apologia for biofiction, I briefly discuss one of Dee’s most egregious misconceptions. According to this American novelist, the biofiction “vogue” of the 1990s “can probably be traced to the great and gaudily successful changes in the course of nonfiction writings in the 1960s and ’70s” (78). The claim is that works like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) made...