Category: Publications Page 5 of 6

by Joanny Moulin
Aix-Marseille Université

We are witnessing the rise of ‘fictional biographies’, or ‘biographical fictions’, which Alain Buisine has conceptualized by coining the word ‘biofiction’, in a 1991 article in the Revue des sciences humaines (vol. 4, n° 224, 1991). In his 1941 essay “Epic and the Novel”, Mikhail Bakhtin described what he called the phenomenon of “novelization” of other literary genres. Today, as if by some quirk of literary history the wheel had finally come full circle, the novel seems to undergo a ‘biographization’, and literary science, now extremely well armed — and perhaps over-armed — to analyze the novel as the fictional genre par excellence, finds itself grappling for adequate methodological tools, in the absence of a fully-fledged theory of biography. The examples of biofiction in contemporary literature are so many that it is hard to know where to start or which to pick. No doubt as a sign of the times, the 2014 Prix Goncourt was awarded to Lydie Salvayre for Pas Pleurer, a biofiction where she relates the life of her own mother during the Spanish War, and the Renaudot went to David Foenkinos for Charlotte, a verse-biofiction of Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon, murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, at the age of twenty-six. The 2015 Renaudot and Goncourt des lycéens awards winner is Delphine Le Vigan, for D’après une histoire vraie, a novel staging a fiction writer turning to non-fiction to overcome her blank page syndrome.

If one was to select, with heartrending arbitrariness, only two remarkable examples, one in Britain and one in France, perhaps it would not be unwise to mention William Boyd’s Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart (2002), and Benjamin Jordane, L’Apprentissage du roman (1993). Any Human Heart presents itself as the diary of Logan Mountstuart (1906-1991), a fictitious writer, which whom Boyd follows up on the hoax biography of an American artist in The New Confessions. In his peregrination, Mountstuart meets and interact with both fictional and real-life characters, famous writers and other celebrities. The pleasure one derives reading this biofiction, brilliantly demonstrating the compatibility of the two modes of reading, is the same as with a conventional novel, redoubled by a challenge comparable to the one exerted by a biography, as the reader’s appetite keeps being whetted by the outside-text historical references.

L’Apprentissage du roman is a different case, for Benjamin Jordane is a fictitious author, invented by Jean-Benoît Puech, who went so far as to co-edit with (fictitious) Yves Savigny an anthology of biographical essays (by real and invented authors) on Jordane in 2008. The story behind Jordane’s L’Apprentissage du roman is worth summing up. Puech, born in 1947, was twenty-one in 1968, the year of ‘The Death of the Author’. He was an admirer of Louis-René des Forêts (1916-2000), a friend of Raymond Quenaud, lionized by the formalist Young Turks of the journal Tel Quel. In spite of all the Nouvelle critique dogmas he was being taught, Puech wanted to meet des Forêts in flesh and blood, and he did so, and wrote a diary about their conversations and correspondence. When Puech asked permission to published this diary, allegedly in 1989, Louis-René des Forêts adamantly refused to grant it. So he started changing all the names to get round the interdiction, including his own, and chose the first name of Jacob’s younger son, Benjamin, and an equally biblical family name. Only seven years later did he blow the hoax, publishing the original version of the diary under his own name as Louis-René des Forêts, roman (2000) on the year of Louis-René des Forêts’s death. Puech’s other invented author, Yves Savigny, published in 2010 Une biographie autorisée. Jean-Benoît Puech says: ‘Savigny becomes my biographer, he becomes for me what I have been for Jordane’ (in Les nouvelles écritures biographiques, eds R. Dion & F. Regard, 2013).

Jean Raimond
Robert Southey, The Exterminating Angel
Michel Houdiard, 2015

In a letter to a friend date 26 July 1796 the young Robert Southey, who had just made a promising start as a poet with his revolutionary epic Joan of Arc, characteristically wrote: “I saw five or six men on Sunday stoning a dog to death—and I heard the dog’s cries—and I wished I had been the Exterminating Angel”. An emotinal, nervous, almost pathologically shy man, Southey would often react in a violent way to defend causes which he considered just. Leading a secluded life in the Lake District, he kept actively participating in the social, economic, and plitical debated that prevailed in England during the first half of the 19th century. The life of this committed writer appointed Poet Laureate in 1813 was an unending crusade against evil. His two most llustrious ennemies were napoleon, whom he not seldom beheadedin his dreams, and Lord Bron, the very embodiment of Satanic foreces in his view. This biographical study should help the reader properly estimate the volumious work—too long relegated to an undeserved purgatory—of a talented man of letters whose influence on the Romnatic movement was far greater than is commony admitted.

Jean Raimond, a former president of the University of Reims (France), is Professor Emeritus of English Literature, and honorary chairman of the “Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur”. He has contributed to a French tarnslation (with critical introductions and notes) of Kipling’s works for La Pléiade, Gallimard, and is co-editor (with J. R. Watson) of A Handbook of English Romanticism. Many publications of his deal with major British figures of the Romantic period.

Joanny Moulin
Élisabeth, la reine de fer
Paris : Éditions du Cerf, 2015

Comment naquit, sous la main de fer d’une héritière improbable, l’Angleterre que nous connaissons ? Cette biographie-monde de Joanny Moulin restitue à la fois un personnage majeur de l’histoire et un moment clef de civilisation. Elle tisse dans le même récit la marche irrésistible d’une reine vierge vers le pouvoir absolu et l’ascension soutenue d’une puissance insulaire vers la domination planétaire. De l’Irlande aux Indes, d’Édimbourg à Istanbul, des officines de la City aux couloirs du Vatican, voici une fresque qui mêle querelles de successions et guerres de religions, emprisonnements et assassinats, révoltes paysannes et rivalités continentales sur fond de batailles terrestres et d’incendies maritimes. Ces hommes de talent que furent le corsaire Francis Drake, l’espion Francis Walsingham, le bourgeois Thomas Gresham, le théologien Thomas Parker, l’écrivain William Shakespeare ne firent-ils que servir le rêve de revanche de la fille d’Anne Boleyn, la souveraine décapitée, et d’Henry VIII, l’ogre monarque qui l’avait reniée ? N’est-ce pas au contraire parce qu’elle fut à la fois femme et politique incomparable qu’Élisabeth Tudor bâtit une nation si résolue à affirmer son indépendance qu’elle en fit pour le reste de l’Europe, et jusqu’à aujourd’hui, la « perfide Albion »?

Joanny Moulin
“Remarques sur la vie de William Wordsworth”
in Wordsworth, Lectures critiques
Ed. Denis Bonnecase
Paris : Houdiard, 2015 : pp. 7-23

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