Abstract
This essay looks into two different approaches to autobiography as an instrument of critical reading of literary texts. Firstly, one will examine how the typology of autofiction established by Vincent Colonna may be of use in an analysis of the way Salman Rushdie has brought his own biography into his novel Midnight’s Children in an attempt to address both his Indian-based readers and the community of diasporic Indians and postcolonial critics living overseas. Secondly, the concept of the literary self-portrait, developed by Michel Beaujour, will be employed as a reading tool in an analysis of how V. S. Naipaul’s autobiography has served the writer as a starting point in his metafictionalization of his own writing career.
Highlights
The history of literary theory is permeated by certain debates which seem to have served as keystones to the building of its established body of concepts and methods
The first one is called fantastical autofiction, and is defined as a narrative where “the writer is at the centre of the text, but they transfigure their existence and identity into an unreal story, regardless of the constraints of verisimilitude”
Salman Rushdie has been living away from his native India since the mid-1960s and is currently a New York City resident, which means he has written the bulk of his work away from his country of birth
Summary
The history of literary theory is permeated by certain debates which seem to have served as keystones to the building of its established body of concepts and methods. The first one is called fantastical autofiction, and is defined as a narrative where “the writer is at the centre of the text (like in an autobiography), but they transfigure their existence and identity into an unreal story, regardless of the constraints of verisimilitude” As for this “projected double” of the writer, Vincent Colonna claims they “become ‘out of the norm’ [in its most literal sense], a pure hero of fiction nobody would ever bother to read as an image of the writer” Salman Rushdie has been living away from his native India since the mid-1960s and is currently a New York City resident, which means he has written the bulk of his work away from his country of birth This fact leads one to categorize him as an Indian diasporic writer, at least if one is to give credit to Peters’s formulation above, which postulates that diaspora, as a characteristic state of “the dispersed”, is more strongly defined as a set of “lateral and decentered relationships” between them. It is explained by Saleem, who, in his insistence that what he has written “is nothing less than the literal, by-the-hairs-of-my-mother’s-head truth” (Rushdie, 1991b, p. 230), feels baffled that anyone might disbelieve his account of facts and accept the State’s version of reality, which, to him, sounds no less fantastical. (Saleem/Salman’s bitterness towards the Indian State, in particular of Indira Ghandi, is a remarkable undercurrent in the book, which requires special treatment elsewhere.)
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