Body, Corpus, and Corpse: Delineating Henrik Ibsen in A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale

Abstract

Over the past half-century, the number of literary works that fictionalize the lives of identifiable historical people has expanded exponentially. Linda Hutcheon identified the development in the 1980s as historiographic metafiction,1 and more recently scholars have set out to create typologies of the various subgenres that problematize and experiment with the hybridization of fact and fiction. In such texts, historical data about a person who once lived are used explicitly in order to construct that person as a character in a work of fiction. Such works often overtly thematize the traditional distinction between the factual and the fictional. This type of writing has been classified variously as ?fictional biography', ?biofiction', ?fictional metabiography', ?the biographical novel', and ?biographical fiction'.2 Fictionalizations of the lives of literary authors make up a surprisingly substantial subset of this phenomenon.3 Yet despite the efforts to create typologies of this development, little has been written about the broader theoretical implications of this type of writing. In what follows, I shall explore how biographical fiction problematizes and challenges our received notions about fact and fiction as separate categories. I am interested in how writers of this kind of fiction adapt and revise a different empirical writer's life itself, rather than (or in addition to) specific works produced by that writer, and in how such writing changes the way we as readers think about the author-character, and indeed about the conceptual boundaries of fiction itself. As a test case, I will examine the fictionalization of the life of the nineteenth-century dramatist Henrik Ibsen in A.S. Byatt's novel The Biographer's Tale (2000), a text preoccupied with conceptual boundaries of many kinds. My suspicion here is that, through complicating the boundaries between fact and fiction in the life of the historical author (in this case Ibsen) specifically, the writer engages in a kind of literary reception.Byatt's complex and self-reflexive novel has, along with a few others, become a recurring example in discussions of biographical (meta)fiction:not only their content, but also their complex structures, intertextual networks, and metabiographic self-consciousness foreground the paradoxical relation between life and writing which the somewhat oxymoronic term ?biography' somewhat unsuccessftilly tries to conceal.4Byatt's novel depicts the efforts of a fictional postgraduate student, Phineas G. Nanson, as he attempts to write a biography of a fictive biographer whom Byatt names Scholes Destry-Scholes. Phineas comes to believe that the key to Destry-Scholes lies in understanding why his archived papers include notes toward biographies of no fewer than three historically prominent people, Carl von Linnaeus (1707-78), Francis Galten (1822-1911), and Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906). This narrative is interwoven with excerpts and citations from other texts, some fictive, some existing, either by or about these historical figures. In what follows, I shall first outline a model for thinking about how the transgressive nature of biographical fiction might serve as a form of reception, before moving on to analyses of the ways in which Byatt uses Ibsen's body, Ibsen's literary corpus, and, finally, a photographic representation of Ibsen's corpse in her fictional investigation of Ibsen the author.Biographical fiction and the author functionDennis Kersten argues that biographical fiction not only responds to and incorporates literary theory but also functions as a form of theory itself.5 While Kersten rightly links biographical fiction to questions of texts and textuality, authors and authority, subjects, and subjectivity, I would argue that this critical engagement also extends to questions specifically related to the ethics of life writing.6 In particular, we need to ask where and how an author like Byatt sets the boundary for where the history ends and the fiction begins in a literary account of an historical person's life. …