A Biographical Novel: towards a Definition of the Genre

I would like to initiate a discussion on the genre of biographical novel (and, consequently, biographical-novel-about-a-writer) by means of locating it on the map of narrative regimes of fiction and non-fiction. A traditional biographical novel is intent on capturing the essence, the existential quality of an individual's life. Its aim is to arrive at the knowledge of the real other. In short, biographical fiction should be an ideal combination of what Hannah Arendt calls ‘what’ the person is and ‘who’ he is (the ‘what’ refers to a type, a character, i.e. man's qualities, gift s, talents, shortcomings; the ‘who’ stands for the living essence of the person). But before it can reach such an aim, it first needs to negotiate its way between two opposite orders. Being aware of the tensions or frictions between recalcitrant facts and fictional models, its difficult enterprise is to accommodate the two orders: factual and fictional.

Out of three essential distinctions of any narrative, i.e. time, person and level, the distinction of a person is of the utmost interest to me since it runs through fictional narrative and factual narrative, establishing opposition between heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narratives. Philippe Lejeune has demonstrated that the canonical form of autobiography is characterised by the equation author = narrator = character, while biography by the equation author = narrator ≠ character.