“[A] Novel Should Be the Biography of a Man or of an Affair, and a Biography, Whether of a Man or an Affair, Should Be a Novel.” Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Experiments in Biography

Abstract

Starting from Catherine Belsey’s recent interpretation of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Saunders reads Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance—a highly experimental memoir, a novel, and an exercise in modernist literary impressionism—as an example of Lyotard’s concept of the postmodern within modernism, on three counts: the self-awareness of its theoretical discussion; the foregrounding of the book’s own fictionality; and its exploration of the relation between writing and subjectivity, articulated especially as it oscillates between biography and autobiography. The latter can be seen in Ford’s sustained use of “the writer” instead of the first person; in Conrad’s notion of the collaborations appearing to issue from “a third person”; and in Ford’s use of the first-person plural to recount his experience of Conrad’s narratives.