Abstract
This chapter asks what biographical fiction (‘biofiction’) can reveal about biography proper. The conceit at the heart of biofiction is that it presents the inner life of the biographical subject. Biographical novels thereby dramatise a fundamental tension in biography between verifiability and interiority (Virginia Woolf’s ‘granite and rainbow’). In a close reading of a bestselling recent biographical novel on Richard Francis Burton, Ilija Trojanow’s The Collector of Worlds, the chapter shows this tension at work. Trojanow’s novel gives a postcolonial twist to the ‘Great Man’ Burton by presenting him through the eyes of his servants in a mode of ventriloquised sousveillance (surveillance ‘from below’). The disenchanted subaltern is a crucial resource for biography: fiction imaginatively reconstructs what archives have failed to preserve. Trojanow’s subaltern narrators remind us that ‘no man is a hero to his valet de chambre’. The chapter concludes with a discussion of this aphorism, explaining its recurrence in discussions of biography since Samuel Johnson.
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- 1.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The New Biography’, in Woolf, Selected Essays, 95–100 (96).
- 2.
Ilija Trojanow, Der Weltensammler. Roman (6th edn.) (Munich: dtv, 2007). Translation: Iliya Troyanov, The Collector of Worlds: A Novel of Sir Richard Francis Burton, trans. William Hobson (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
- 3.
Hobson’s—in places rather free—translation renders this as ‘biographical fact’; the original reads ‘biographische Realitäten’, biographical realities.
- 4.
See Michael Lackey (ed.), Biofictional Histories, Mutations and Forms (London: Routledge, 2017); Stephanie Bird, Rethinking Historical Women: Female Identity in German Biographical Fiction (Oxford: Berg, 1998).
- 5.
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (London: Flamingo, 1995); Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung der Welt (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2005); Colm Tóibín, The Master (London: Picador, 2004); Christa Wolf, Kein Ort. Nirgends (Berlin: Aufbau, 1979).
- 6.
Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins (eds.), Adaptation Studies: New Approaches (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010); Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds.), Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999); the seminal work of George Bluestone, Novels into Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), already laments the dominance of the ‘fidelity’ or ‘allegiance’ paradigm in discussions of film adaptation.
- 7.
Michael Lackey, ‘Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31:1 (2016), 3–10 (5).
- 8.
Ina Schabert, In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography (Tübingen: Francke, 1990); key contributions from the 1930s to the present day are anthologised in Lackey (ed.), Biographical Fiction: A Reader.
- 9.
Trojanow, Der Weltensammler, 7; Collector of Worlds, front matter.
- 10.
Ilija Trojanow, Nomade auf vier Kontinenten. Auf den Spuren von Sir Richard Francis Burton (= Nomad on Four Continents. On the Trail of Sir Richard Francis Burton) (Munich: dtv, 2008), 7.
- 11.
Renders, “Introduction”, in Theoretical Discussions of Biography, ed. Renders and de Haan. While Ray Monk’s emphasis is somewhat different to that of Renders , he also takes issue with idea of biography ‘leaning towards fiction’, an idea that was central to Virginia Woolf’s reflections on biography; in Monk’s view, Woolf is ‘guilty of misrepresentation’ in this regard. Monk, ‘Life Without Theory’, 540.
- 12.
Christopher Ondaatje, Journey to the Source of the Nile (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998) and Sindh Revisited: A Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: 1842–1849, the India Years (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996).
- 13.
Mark Hodder, The Return of the Discontinued Man (London: Ebury Digital, 2014); Silvia Antosa, Richard Francis Burton: Victorian Explorer and Translator (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012); W. B. Carnochan, The Sad Story of Burton, Speke, and the Nile: Or, Was John Hanning Speke a Cad (Stanford: Stanford General Books, 2006); Jon R. Godsall, The Tangled Web: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (Abingdon: Matador, 2008); Felix Baron, The Persian Girl (London: Nexus, 2008); Daniel Gilpin, Burton and Speke’s Source of the Nile Quest (Oxford: Heinemann, 2008); Ben Grant: Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (London: Routledge, 2009); James L. Newman, Paths Without Glory: Richard Francis Burton in Africa (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2010).
- 14.
Michaela Haberkorn, ‘Treibeis und Weltensammler: Konzepte nomadischer Identität in den Romanen von Libuše Moníková und Ilija Trojanow’, in Helmut Schmitz (ed.), Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration (= Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 19) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 243–261 (260).
- 15.
Michael Hofmann, ‘Postkoloniale Begegnungen in der globalisierten Welt. Indien und Afrika in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur: Ilija Trojanow: Der Weltensammler und Christof Hamann: Usambara’. http://www.germanistik.ch (published February 2010), 17. See also Matthias Rath, ‘Von der “(Un)Möglichkeit, sich in die Fremde hineinzuleben”. Kulturelle Assimilation als Desintegration am Beispiel von Ilija Trojanows Roman Der Weltensammler’, Arcadia—International Journal for Literary Studies 45 no. 2 (2010), 446–464; Andreas Mittermayr, Kosmopolitische und kosmopolitisch-engagierte Literatur am Beispiel Ilija Trojanows (unpublished diss., University of Vienna, 2011).
- 16.
Gabriele Lotz, ‘Historische Reiseromane: Erzählprosa von Christoph Ransmayr und Ilija Trojanow’ in ‘Kennst Du das Land…?’: Fernweh in der Literatur, ed. Christoph Parry and Liisa Voßschmidt (Munich: Iudicium, 2009), 75–84.
- 17.
Trojanow, Der Weltensammler, 351; Collector of Worlds, 300.
- 18.
Trojanow, Nomade auf vier Kontinenten, 5.
- 19.
Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 229.
- 20.
Trojanow, Der Weltensammler, 49; Collector of Worlds, 34–35.
- 21.
Trojanow, Der Weltensammler, 64; Collector of Worlds, 48.
- 22.
Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography, 215.
- 23.
Julian Preece, ‘Ilija Trojanow, Der Weltensammler: Separate Bodies, or: An Account of Intercultural Failure?’, in Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 119–132 (124).
- 24.
Trojanow, Der Weltensammler, 137; Collector of Worlds, 112, translation modified.
- 25.
Trojanow, Der Weltensammler, 140; Collector of Worlds, 114, translation modified.
- 26.
‘Truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible […] Nor can we name the biographer whose art is subtle and bold enough to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow.’ Woolf, ‘The New Biography’, 100.
- 27.
Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung der Welt [Measuring the World] (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2005), 9, 281.
- 28.
Trojanow, Der Weltensammler, 170–173.
- 29.
Samuel Johnson [Autobiography], in The Idler 84 (24 November 1759), in Samuel Johnson: The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 299.
- 30.
‘All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies. No man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime, involving, as it must, the truth about his family and his friends and colleagues.’ George Bernard Shaw , An Autobiography 1856–1898, ed. Stanley Weintraub (London: Reinhardt, 1970), 1.
- 31.
Michel de Montaigne, Du repentir. In Montaigne, Essais, ed. P. Villey & V.-L. Saulnier. Online edition, ed. P. Desan, University of Chicago, http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/montaigne/, 808.
- 32.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (= Werke 3) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 489; Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1956), 32.
- 33.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, in Goethe, Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers. Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Kleine Prosa. Epen, ed. Waltraud Wiethölter (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag), 433.
- 34.
Carlyle, On Heroes, 157–158.
- 35.
Carlyle, On Heroes, 109.
- 36.
Giuliano Campioni et al. (ed.), Nietzsches persönliche Bibliothek (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003), reproduces the relevant passage from Arthur Schopenhauer , Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Ergänzung zum 3. Buch, Kap. 31 (Vom Genie).
- 37.
Arthur Schopenhauer , Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 3rd edn. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1859). Vol. 2, 439. Jeder große Mann nämlich muß dennoch oft nur das Individuum seyn, nur sich im Auge haben, und das heißt klein seyn. Hierauf beruht die sehr richtige Bemerkung, daß kein Held es vor seinem Kammerdiener bleibt; nicht aber darauf, daß der Kammerdiener den Helden nicht zu schätzen verstehe;—welches Goethe , in den »Wahlverwandtschaften« (Bd. 2, Kap. 5), als Einfall der Ottilie auftischt.
- 38.
Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 196.
- 39.
Julius Thelen, ‘Das Dasein zwischen Komödie und Tragödie: Zum ersten Abschnitte der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft’, in Nietzsche als Dichter: Lyrik, Poetologie, Rezeption, ed. Katharina Grätz and Sebastian Kaufmann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 339–376 (360–361).
- 40.
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 65–67.
- 41.
Trojanow, Der Weltensammler, p. 193.
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Ní Dhúill, C. (2020). Rethinking the Protagonist: Subaltern Narrators and Biographical Fictions. In: Metabiography. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8_4
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