Hassan Najmi’s Gertrude and the Journey from Biography to Biofiction

Abstract

Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, and while studies about biofiction have been surging for the last ten years, there is still some confusion about the literary form. Specifically, some scholars treat biofiction as biography rather than fiction. To clarify how biofiction functions and signifies, Michael Lackey does a close analysis of Hassan Najmi’s Gertrude, a biographical novel about Gertrude Stein. Like many scholars, Najmi’s narrator thinks biofiction is a form of biography, but through his study of prominent artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, who did bioportraits, he comes to understand what biofiction is and how it signifies. To be more specific, biofiction fictionalizes and metaphorizes rather than represents the life of a real person in order to create new ways of seeing and being in the author’s present and for the future. Because Najmi’s narrator so intelligently reflects on the way biofiction functions, the novel Gertrude usefully brings some needed clarity and precision to biofiction studies.