1If one were to ask which literary forms—biographical or autobiographical ones—have lately offered the greatest challenges and inspiration for literary theory, the answer would be obvious: autobiographical forms are still leading the way, although they have recently undergone certain transformations. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, autobiographical literature has prompted researchers either to draw up demarcations or to do just the opposite: to suspect a tinge of fiction in all forms of autobiography.

2 In the case of biographical texts, too, those boundaries become extremely important, and I will try to show that this happens for at least two mutually intertwined reasons. The above-mentioned boundaries, so tempting for theory, are not the only ones to play an important role here. Equally promising for contemporary literature, it turns out, are the challenges posed by the life story an “other”.

3 Here I should point out that literary scholars, including those working in Poland, have already outlined what we could call the basic contours of the relationships between fact and fiction—relationships with which the forms of biography have always been embroiled. These scholars (such as Maria Jasińska (1970) and Małgorzata Czermińska (1995) for instance) have produced many important terminological differentiations. The most frequently used classification begins with fact-based genres and ends in the realm of fiction. It presents itself as follows: biography, fictionalised biography, biographical narrative (closest to facts), biographical novel (including the biography in novel form or vie romancée). This classification continues to expand in various ways (Czermińska 1995).

4 That said, there are other reasons for the recent popularity of genres on the borderlands of fiction. Their narrative character turns out to be remarkably important—not only for biography, incidentally, but also for autobiography. Narrativity is often perceived as an overriding category, one that blurs the difference between fiction and fact apparently by definition.1 This is where a potential for learning and understanding is seen. Fiction, meanwhile, especially as defined in constructivist theories of cogntion, becomes an epistemological category. I am not going to give a detailed account of the rivalry between these two vast categories of fiction and narrative—both play an important role here —but it is worth recalling a few obvious and fundamental matters.

5 The theories of the plot scheme developed many years ago turn out to be very attractive across today’s humanities. Reading cultural discourses through the lens of narrative allows us, first of all, to recognise the different functions of narrative, from its function as a basic cognitive disposition through the pre-structure of speaking about the world, to its role in guaranteeing identity.2 Secondly, such a reading also helps us differentiate, to understand narrative as a basic mental disposition or to treat it as a sphere of mediation that supports self-awareness.3 Thirdly, it helps reveal the tension between the cognitive dimension and the aporias of cognition, and finally, the fourth and perhaps most important point is that it relates quite strongly to saturating narrative with a fictional, worldmaking dimension.4

6 Unsurprisingly, this situation was bound to provoke debate. After all, it is impossible to shrug off and, indeed, it is inspiring. Some believe that every narrative has a tinge of fiction, but there are also those who favour demarcating boundaries and defining the specificity of fictional as opposed to factual narrative. Their attention focuses on narratives based on facts, that is to say historical ones as well as autobiographies and biographies. These segregationists tend to focus on examples of literary works that blur the line between fact and fiction, including examples that draw on literary forms of biography. They also tend to highlight the question of fiction’s narrative and paratextual markers, while remaining perfectly aware that ever new devices – ones that are seemingly reserved for fiction—are being applied to narratives about authentic facts. What is more, these scholars emphasise that paratextual markers themselves are used to engage in games with readers” expectations. Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s novel Marbot: A Biography [Marbot: Eine Biographie] (1981) is frequently cited as proof of how this pact is breached (Genette 1993; Cohn 1999; Schaeffer 1999).5 This is not only because the subtitle does not correspond to the content (the life of a fictional writer); above all, this novel is cited on account of its sustained use of narrative strategies reserved for biographies of real individuals. Critics were duped by the convincing mystification of Hildesheimer’s book and the photographic documentation included in it. Scholars of such rank as Gérard Genette, Dorrit Cohn or Jean-Marie Schaeffer took the trouble to describe this novel’s subtle strategies. Whether we recognise Hildesheimer’s novel as a new and perhaps unique genre variation (as Cohn does)6 or as a ruse, a well-constructed mysti|fication that leads the reader astray,7 we can treat it as a manifestation of contemporary tendencies in telling the story of another person’s life.

7This short introduction appears for good reason. In the present article I am interested in biographical forms that nourish contemporary theories (to cite Hillis Miller (1977)); in other words, I focus on the forms touching on issues which are especially attractive for the theory of fiction and the modern humanities. Finally, I am interested in biographical forms that bring out the problems of fictional narrative as an anthropological phenomenon. I believe it is worth analysing how the representation of another person’s life story is problematised in works that are situated within the realm of fiction but that also disclose or destabilise their own fictional narrative in different ways. (I should mention that my analysis focuses on the novel and short story.) Thus the questions that are quintessential to me bear on the self-reflexive, metafictional dimension of biographical narrative. By the same token, scholarly and popular biographies, situated outside of fiction, do not fall into my field of interest. My intention is not to complement or broaden the existing classification of biographical forms.8 And finally, my aim is not to present a comprehensive catalogue of contemporary ways of telling another person’s history.9 Essentially, what I’m dealing with here is contemporary Polish prose, though it would be impossible to omit what I see as flagship examples of world literature.

8 My assumption is that biography in literary fiction always implies a certain effect of authenticity, and thus at least it appears to be linked—perhaps only with a thin thread—to biography in the classical sense. We see this effect in the silva rerum; we see it when it appears, almost like a direct touch of the authentic, as a ready made (e.g. in Miłosz’s poem “Lauda” it takes the form of a biography of father Jucewicz quoted from Gabriel Korbut), and we can see it thanks to formal mimetism, e.g. in the case of the biographs in Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel Pulp [Miazga]. This effect is also found—though only as a trace—when the subject represented in a work of fiction is the very situation of writing a biography.

9 I am far from claiming that biographies—as I understand the term—have repressed autobiographical forms, but every now and again these two forms go together.10 Contemporary forms of mythobiography11 in particular bring these links to the fore. I have in mind two novels: Tadeusz Konwicki’s Bohin Manor [Bohiń] and Anna Bolecka’s White Stone [Biały kamień].12 Each of these narratives is based on hypothetical reproductions of an ancestor’s history (Konwicki’s grandmother and Bolecka’s great-grandfather) and in both cases the reader is apprised of the situation of retelling the family story. In Bohin Manor we frequently come across interjections such as these:

My grandmother Helena Konwicka, my grandmother whom I never saw in this life [...]. (Konwicki 1990, 23)
I keep fighting my way back over the dunes of time past […], back to my grandmother Helena Konwicka, whom I never saw. And I never knew anyone who had met her […]. Yet I pursue her across the terrain of intuition, lakes of longing, and through dense mists of uncertainty. (Konwicki 1990, 98)

10In Bolecka’s novel, meanwhile, we read:

I didn’t know my great-grandfather. I was born fourteen years after he died. (Bolecka 2001, 7)

11What’s more, the main narrative strategy is highlighted in both novels. It combines a referential effect and fictionality, producing the effect of a reality that is authentic and imagined at the same time.

12 Of course we could also list differences. For instance, Konwicki’s story about the life of Helena Konwicka focuses on events that seem important from her grandson’s perspective, while Bolecka covers her forebear’s life as a whole. Konwicki’s first-person narrator, who relates events from his grandmother’s life based on supposition, constantly thematises his perspective of a fictional witness. The frequent repetition of his family name not only brings out the family connection, but it also establishes a special referential pact. In Bolecka’s novel, the first-person narrator only draws attention to herself at the beginning and near the end. (The story as such is told in a third-person narrative that often approaches the figural.)

13 Here is what they have in common: their strategies allow them to enter a pact with the reader, a pact about the continuous undermining of references that appear authentic, a pact about emphasising the narrative’s fictional dimension. Konwicki designs a narrative “I” that creates the past, Bolecka builds a framework in the first person, then projects a third-person narrator endowed with creative power. In neither case does this strategy boil down to speculation. Instead, it allows a comfortable entry into the inner life of the two books’ respective protagonists.

14 This is the principle that applies in these works: things that are unknown, or accessible only through traces of retold memories, can be subordinated to the power of creativity and arranged into an orderly plot. In White Stone, the great-grandfather’s wandering is simply called “the beginning of the world” (Bolecka 2001, 7), while in Bohin Manor we read:

In my imagination, I was always stealing after my father; […] I craved knowledge of his secret. (Bolecka 2001, 136)
But I am not seeking solace and I have no need of the truth, because I create my own truth […] a truth that I compose myself out of memories […] so that I can leave behind a gravestone […]. (Bolecka 2001, 137)

15 It turns out that to project into the past, to reproduce one’s family history through fiction, is not only an attempt to create oneself, but it is also a quest for a guarantee of identity. It is a reaching out towards another person’s life, and yet it stabilises the narrating “I” and fosters self-understanding by offering at least the hope of regaining wholeness, of reaching the state that Miłosz describes in his poem “Late Ripeness”: “For where we come from there is no division  / into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be” (Miłosz 2001, 747). In each case, biography is combined with the creation of a self-narration, since in each case the telling of the forebear’s story goes hand in hand with an evocation of the past, a journey through time, with the aim in effect to transgress this time and to arrive at a mythical unity beyond time.13 And yet in each case this unity is revealed to be merely fictional.

16 In biographical narratives, to reveal this fictional dimension can also serve other purposes. Biographical narratives can disturb the ontological status of the world in which the protagonists’ lives unfold. What I have in mind is neither the novel that reconstructs a life story and inserts fictional elements (such as dialogue or the protagonist’s thoughts) into a novelised narrative (after all, this approach is inscribed into the genre principles of the biographical novel, and in this framework it presents the reader with an obvious intervention); nor do I have in mind the narrative based on open hypotheses, a work written in the subjunctive case, as we can see for instance historical essays such as J.M. Rymkiewicz’s Grand Duke [Wielki książę, 2011]. I see these variants as still belonging to the realm of epistemological fiction. My interest is limited to biographies of real-life figures, biographies created as fiction, biographies that show their protagonists in ways that are deeply at odds with generally well-known facts. Such counter-factual constructs—as well as constructs based on hypotheses—often appear in contemporary historical fiction. Teodor Parnicki’s novels are well-known examples, though of course this type also appears elsewhere. Remarkably, Parnicki’s late novels combine hypothetical and counter-factual constructs with possible versions of his own life story, etc.14 The introduction of life-writing into possible worlds – counter-factual ones as well as hypothetical ones—takes place in dialogue with the reader. There are many ways for a writer to signal (for Parnicki this seems to be a must) that what is being shown of a life is merely one of its possible dimensions. I hardly need to add that biographies of this kind belong to the type of novel known as historiographical metafiction. An analogous case can be made for Stefan Chwin and Krystyna Lars’s recently published collection Shared Bath [Wspólna kąpiel]. The blurb tells us that “We have always been fascinated with the idea that everything that exists is only one variant of the Possible. To see that Otherness that borders on the real” (Chwin & Lars 2000).

17 In Shared Bath, projections of what is possible touch on singular and often critical events in the lives of notable individuals; Stefan Żeromski receives the Nobel Prize; Jan Lechoń decides not to commit suicide; Tadeusz Borowski’s “cut wrists are healing well” (Chwin & Lars 2000, 55). Transgressing what is Real can also involve time warps: Mickiewicz walks down Krakowskie Przedmieście in Warsaw and “on the other side of the street he sees Tyrmand, who, noticing him, quickens his pace” (Chwin & Lars 2000, 51).

18 Thus this particular type of biographical narrative either takes on the form of multiple versions—which are sometimes only indicated as a concept—or it takes the form of close-up scenes, such as in Shared Bath. In each case, the sequence of historical events shines through from behind the projection, and it is taken for granted that these events are known to the reader. In Shared Bath, the techniques of creating a narrative close-up—such as free indirect speech rendering a character’s train of thought, a description that pays much attention to detail, etc.—have an elevating effect, which helps the imagination capture a moment that was not fated to come to pass. Like the flash of an epiphany, a single event that never took place throws a different light on a well-known life story.

19 At the same time, when events from the lives of authentic individuals are transposed into the dimension of unrealised possibility (as in Wisława Szymborska’s poem “In Broad Daylight”), they raise questions about which of the worlds we exist in.15 In the first place, it bears repeating, such events problematise these worlds’ ontological dimension.

20 Thus, in the examples presented so far, the pact of the novelistic biography is transgressed in various ways. In mytho- and automythobio|graphical family histories, which are based on a search for one’s own identity, our understanding of the represented world is destabilised, though at the same time it is supported by the fictionalising quest. In the case of virtual narratives, it is the ontological dimension that is destabilised, though in the background the epistemological aspect also shines through. For an entry into possible worlds turns out to be “one of the paths towards a somewhat better understanding of what happened—when we say—‘really’” (Chwin & Lars 2000).

21It’s a different matter with biographies of literary fiction, where cognitive processes are thematised. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s biogra|phical short stories are particularly dense with narrative devices that bring out those processes. This is the case with short stories about real-life individuals, such as “The Fading Antichrist” [“Gasnący Antychryst”], “The Prince of Milan” [“Książę Mediolanu”], “Casanova's Labyrinth” [“Labirynt Casanovy”], “Deep Shadow” [“Głęboki cień”] or “The Philosopher's Stone” [“Kamień filozoficzny”], as well as with short stories where the genre form of a biographical story based on mimetic formalism contains a fictional story. This happens in the short stories “From the Life of Diego Baldassara” [“Z biografii Diego Baldassara”] and “Ugolone Da Todi: An Obituary of a Philosopher” [“Ugolone z Todi: Nekrolog filozofa”]. Herling-Grudziński usually exposes how he arrives at a search for the true version of the events: detectival strategies, the reproduction of a court case (“Deep Shadow”), stylistic devices that spill over into parody16—all these support the credibility of how his characters’ fate is arranged into sequences of cause and effect. By citing historical sources or already existing biographies he portrays his characters’ lives in chronological order or through time loops, but most frequently from the vantage point of their death.17 Sometimes the compositional construction of these biographies is crystal clear—they take on the form of a portrait, or they are built as a parallel. What is more, in general the narrator oscillates continuously between the first-person form (e.g. while getting to know the sources) and the third-person form, which allows him to get inside the character without having to fall back on the conditional mood and in a way that is typical of fiction. That changeable distance, in biographies of fictional characters, evolves into the strategy of a witness of a life story. This is where the self-referential level is very clearly related to a parody of the genre. (We shall return to this strategy later.)

22 In every case, the process of inquiry and of presuming (a character’s fate, psychological position, world-view) becomes the primary goal. The quest to capture the “inert pulp of life”18 in the framework of the narrative, the quest to contain that pulp within the structures of the mind, is the goal itself. In other words, the search does not signify certain knowledge: the short story usually works as an approach towards truth, rather than its attainment. However, the difficult narrative is worth the effort, as the short story carries the promise of understanding another person’s life. This is why it is undertaken in the first place. Herling-Grudziński’s work is free of despondency and scepticism. But let me repeat: the epistemological potential inherent in the narrative has more to do with bringing out the very process of searching than with certain knowledge.

23 It is the above-mentioned strategy of the witness of a life story that allows the mechanisms of biography to be staged. This strategy, which we can find in Herling-Grudziński’s short story “Z biografii Diego Baldassara”, is built into the pact of literary fiction and it references the respectable tradition of famous biographies, such as Goethe’s (Eckermann) or Samuel Johnson’s (Boswell); it is also well known thanks to Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. When the biogra|phers are personally acquainted with their subjects, their meetings and conversations become the focus of the story, and so does—especially—the process of writing. This strategy (besides the fact that it can be deprived of biological finality—to put it bluntly, it need not end with the death of the biography’s protagonist) also carries possibilities that are essential for the bio|graphical novel today. Above all, it carries the possibility of overt mutual self-creation. Thanks to this strategy metafictionality is able to attain its zenith.

24 This is the case in one of the most acclaimed novels of the second half of the twentieth century—Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). The story revolves around the fictional editor Charles Kinbote’s commentaries on a poem by an equally fictional poet, John Shade, who was killed in uncertain circumstances (though in front of his biographer). We should keep in mind the fact that Pale Fire actually draws on different genre forms: it consists of a foreword and commentary by Kinbote as well as Shade’s poem, which is placed in the middle part. Thus we can say that the plot develops through the relationship between the text that is being commented on and its commentary. However, the poem describes the poet’s life, while the commentary turns out to be an attempt at a biography.19 The commentator tries to be a biographer at the same time, but he is a biographer who—given that he was personally acquainted with the protagonist of his tale—usurps the right to know about the secrets of his personality. But this is not all. Kinbote/Botkin, implicitly the King of Zembla or a Russian emigrant, also believes that the poem he acquired after Shade’s death contains all the suggestions that he had made to the poet. And these suggestions were significant for him, since the poem was also supposed to contain elements of its future commentator’s life story—Kinbote himself. Thus by reading and commenting on the poem Kinbote effectively writes his own version of his life as well as Shade’s. His record of his reading of another writer’s autobiographical poem is thereby transformed into a new biography. Which of the accounts represents the true version of the events in question? And did Shade inscribe Kinbote’s suggestions into his poem, or is Kinbote’s claim a false attribution? These are the implicit questions inscribed into Nabokov’s novel. These questions did not fail to catch Brian McHale’s attention, for whom “Pale Fire […] is a text of absolute epistemological uncertainty […]. Thus, we not only hesitate among hypotheses, but also between an epistemological and an ontological focus” (McHale 1987, 18–19).

25 McHale’s argument is convincing. Nabokov’s novel is indeed a story about the crisis of the commentary, the crisis of interpretation, and, at the same time, as McHale suggests, a story about the crisis of epistemology. Let us add that in Pale Fire this crisis bears on our understanding of the world as well as on our understanding of ourselves and others. The fact that the reader is kept in a state of uncertainty about what actually happened indicates above all the monadic nature of the subject and a complete skepticism concerning interhuman relationships. Thus the very staging of a biographical narrative indicates our entrapment within the unknowable, while the telling of another person’s story turns out to be—despite the obvious desire for harmony—a misunderstanding and an (intentional or unintentional) appropriation or domination of the other.

26 A story about another person’s life can come to stand for the represented world in an even more telling manner, usually giving rise to key principles behind the plot’s construction. Clearly, the strategy of the witness of a life story supports such forms, though a biographical story can also come to stand for the represented world when the description of someone else’s fate is identified with both a journey in the literal sense and a journey through one’s own life in the symbolic sense. This kind of situation appears in Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night [Dom dzienny, dom nocny]. We should begin by saying that this novel is saturated with a sense of ambivalence: on the one hand the narrative is endowed with a particular power—what is told has a chance to come into existence, “because apparently the story of the winter has to be told before the summer can come” (Tokarczuk 2002, 7). But on the other hand the narrative functions as a desire to uncover truth, to get to know the other, as a desire to attain knowledge in its fullness, while epistemological certainty can absolutely not be taken for granted. Clearly, there is no exaggerated optimism here. What is essential is that a network of narratives is woven around the world of the novel; sometimes these narratives are fragmentary, sometimes they contain a coherent plot within the main frame of a first-person narrative. Another important point: connections in that network are particularly dense in the history of the monk Paschalis, the hagiographer of Kummernis (also known as Wilgefortis or Wilga). This history surfaces at different points in the novel, eventually giving rise to a unifying whole. The monk’s telling of the story of the saint who never actually became a saint (even though authentic documents regarding her case have survived), or rather: his creation of that story in a state of inspiration is linked to his own maturation. His hagiography goes hand in hand with the female narrator’s telling of his story, and with his Bildungsbiographie. The stages of his initiation are inextricably linked with the protagonist of his hagiography. The devotional images of Kummernis show a crucified female body with masculine facial hair. Her outward appearance, which combines the characteristics of both sexes, is explained in the story as a gift from God that allows her to evade her father and to remain in the convent. But her hermaphroditism also has a parallel in Paschalis; the transgressing of gender links the biographer and his protagonist. The hagiographer desires to be a woman and dresses to resemble the opposite sex. The writing of a biography becomes his way of experiencing and of becoming aware of his own body. By writing the biography, the transsexual Paschalis also identifies with his protagonist’s androgyny, and the transgression of the limits of gender leads directly to the contamination of opposites that saturates Tokarczuk’s entire novel.20 This merging of opposites, seen throughout the novel, reflects a longing for wholeness (see Lizurej 2001). And yet, even though different forms of that longing are mirrored in one another, wholeness remains unattainable. Why? The novel highlights the fact that our understanding is narrative in nature. Through the process of narrating the world we are able to feel at home in it. But this narrative dimension turns out to be dependent on time. Time and narration only have the ability to guarantee identity, that the world will be explained, and nothing more. Two straightforward references to this issue can be found in the novel: first, in the beginning, in the scene of the dream-seeing, and then in Kummernis’s vision, which is constructed as a parallel with the scene that opens the novel:

At once I realized the whole truth about the world—that it is time that prevents the light from getting through to us. Time keeps us apart from God and as long as we are within time, we are imprisoned, doomed to fall prey to darkness. Only death releases us from its shackles, but at that point we have nothing left to say about life. (Tokarczuk 2002, 136)

27Thus it might seem that temporality as a determinant of narrative understanding (of the world, “the other” and oneself, as Ricœur would say (Ricoeur 1991)) also creates an unsurmountable obstacle. In these circumstances, the only thing left to do would be to weave narratives and to live in them. But it is not for nothing that Tokarczuk’s novel is saturated with ambivalence. The narration can be guaranteed eternal life and thus it does have the ability to facilitate the transcending of time: “The person telling the story is always alive, in a way immortal—he’s beyond the reach of time” (Tokarczuk 2002, 228). It is no wonder that these sentences conclude one of the versions of the end of Paschalis’s history.21

28 We have come to expect biographies to be marked by a desire to discover the other, no matter if that is promising or not. But things are more complicated when the life represented not only eludes order (that, too, we have become used to), but when it also involves the addition of ever new embodiments and attempts to identify with other people’s life stories. Izabela Filipiak’s short story “The Russian Princess” [“Rosyjska księżniczka”] is an attempt to record such a life. Franciszka Szankowska, who went by Anna Anderson and also claimed to be the Russian princess Anastasia Romanova, created multiple versions of her story. A clear reconstruction is unfeasible, and yet the narrator, though she is aware of this situation, never ceases to try. Her story can only take the form “of shards, of splinters, like after an explosion” (Filipiak 1997, 193). This shard-like biography must begin the story over and over again; it quotes newspaper articles, describes photographs, and finally refers to a film about Anastasia.22 At the same time, the writer constantly highlights her attempts to bring order into the facts, thus calling attention to the metafictional dimension: the story is about the addition of more and more intermediate layers. But this very excess represents our only chance to get closer to Anna-Anastasia. What’s more, the narrator’s similarity to the protagonist of her biography is all but foisted on the reader: they share a sense of alienation, a need for love, separation from a man, depression, closeness to death, fascination with changes in the “I” and a search for other incarnations. Anna-Franciszka’s difference becomes—as is usual in Filipiak’s works—the object of empathy. And yet, the very process of describing/creating the character’s appearance, her body (be it triumphant or humiliated), and also the attempts at empathic mediation gradually bring about a loss of the narrator’s own identity. Despite the fascination, the situation is frightening. (“I was afraid that I’d become her, just as she’d become Anastasia” (Filipiak 1997, 160).) At one point the thing that is fascinating and dangerous starts to become real and threatens the writer: “I have ceased to exist outside this text. I’m not there, beyond this record. I was a Russian Princess? Yes, for sure, I must have become her for a moment” (Filipiak 1997, 206). The only possible narrative that serves to uncover the other—the shard-like narrative—is transformed into a sketch of a landscape after the explosion, after the transgression of one’s own limits, a landscape that links both women. This explosion, whose dimensions reach epiphany and trauma, is not described overtly, but it requires “relearning language” (Filipiak 1997, 206). At the same time, however, it cannot be forgotten.

But I never lost my memory. I allowed invisible writing to appear under my skin, something like an internal tattoo. This is where the longing originates that I am not trying to rid myself of—quite to the contrary, I would like to sustain it. This is where the sensitivity originates that has many names […]. (Filipiak 1997, 206)

29What remains is locked in a coded narrative that cannot be communicated.

30 We could say that we have come full circle: in the novels presented in the beginning (the family biographies) the dominant element is a quest supported by attempts to weave a coherent narrative. In the shard-like narrative (Filipiak), however, the point of arrival is an entrapment in the sphere of the unspeakable, a code known only to the subject; the first type is dominated by the imagination, the second by the body.

31 Most importantly, two dimensions appear in relief in contemporary biographical narratives, though in different ways, namely the ontological dimension and the epistemological. But if we imagine one pole to represent the desire to believe in the sense or meaning of narration and in the narratability of meaning, then what appears on the other pole will be a crack between the need to narrate—and at the same time to understand—and a sense of the impossibility of narration. It will be a crack between necessary narration and impossible narration. In interhuman relations, however, these narrations oscillate from the attempt to discover the other to a desire to get to know oneself.

32 And even though the situations described here are extremely different, we must admit that they seem to share the same potential to generate fiction. For it turns out that whatever steps we take to introduce order, the common element in all types analysed here—though the strength varies—is metafiction.

33 Of course we may wonder if the biographical story (in the sense I used here) does not simply embody and exploit the features of contemporary prose. But we might also put it differently: humankind’s situation in the world, across time and now, as well as the focus on the other (which is characteristic of this particular literature) help generate ever new fields to open up before the biographical narrative, while they also contribute to making it ever more visibly present in contemporary fiction.

Notes

• 1 Let us recall Doctorow’s famous statement: “There is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand it: there is only narrative” (Doctorow quoted in Cohn 1999, 8).
• 2 On contemporary notions of narrative see Rosner (2001; 2003). I have also tackled this issue in the context of the relationship between fiction and narrative (Łebkowska 2001).
• 3 This position is closest to Paul Ricœur’s.
• 4 In the sense that Nelson Goodman uses in his book, Ways of Worldmaking (1978).
• 5 In Poland, “biography” has been discussed by Mitosek (2002).
• 6 Cohn emphasises, however, that Hildesheimer failed to flout the code of fictional biography, since he endows his protagonist with knowledge a century ahead of his time: the journalist Marbot is said to have died in 1830, but his diaries, cited in Hildesheimer’s “biography”, contain views that could have been taken straight out of Freud’s works.
• 7 This is how J.-M. Schaeffer sees it.
• 8 For instance, I do not deal with epistolary forms, although they are the key construction principle behind A. Bolecka’s novel Dear Franz [Kochany Franz, 1999].
• 9 Here I should mention that literary scholars today use the term “biography” to refer to the life story of a fictional character. See for instance Czyżak (1997); Czapliński (1997); or Gosk (2002). Their definition of the term is much broader than mine.
• 10 I am not concerned with the genre’s margins as analysed by Lejeune, such as the third-person autobiography (see Lejeune 1989).
• 11 Czapliński coins this term (1997).
• 12 For an interesting analysis of mythical stylisation in Anna Bolecka’s White Stone see Mizerkiewicz (2001).
• 13 Konwicki writes: “Where is my grandmother, the grandmother I have created, the Helena Konwicka who is experiencing love along with me and who will one day die along with me” (Konwicki 1990, 137-138). Bolecka opens her novel with an epigraph from Jung: “I am youth and old man at one and the same time. […] I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.”
• 14 For a broader discussion on this topic (including Parnicki’s work) from the point of view of possible worlds see Łebkowska (1998).
• 15 Naturally I am borrowing Dick Higgins’s question, which McHale also used in his books on postmodernist prose (McHale 1987).
• 16 If we compare the short story “From the Life of Diego Baldassara” with Hildesheimer’s novel Marbot, we must admit that the differences are apparent to the naked eye. In Herling-Grudziński’s short story the reader is constantly reminded that this is a fictional story.
• 17 Włodzimierz Bolecki suggests that all of Herling-Grudziński’s biographical short-stories about philosophers should be called “necrologues’ (see Herling-Grudziński & Bolecki 1997).
• 18 On Herling-Grudziński’s frequent use of the metaphor of the pulp see Nycz (2001).
• 19 The notion that Nabokov’s novel refers to biography as a genre is also supported by the telling epigraph from James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.
• 20 Lizurej (2001) provides a comprehensive and convincing discussion of this topic.
• 21 It is telling that Marta—a character steeped in mythical reality—does not have a life story: “What would I gain from her life story, if indeed she has a life story to speak of? Maybe there are people with no life story, with no past or future, who appear to others as the eternal now?” (Tokarczuk 2002, 7 translation modified).
• 22 I also wrote about this short story in Łebkowska (2002).