Origins of the Project > Second Symposium (22nd March 2024): 'Authors as Characters in Fiction and Film'

Second Symposium

©️ Doriane Nemes

Entitled ‘The Biopic Genre in Classical Hollywood Cinema’, Tom Brown’s (King's College London) keynote paper explored the biopic subcategory that includes authors as characters whilst noting that it was a minority genre because of the difficulty of rendering writing ‘cinematic’. The transferability of the trope of ‘the historical gaze’ to author-as-character biopics is of note: actors embodying great men are regularly required to seem to stare into the future or verbally address their entourage in visionary terms. This approach transfers well to a biopic like The Life of Emile Zola (1937), in which Zola is portrayed to embody a moment in the conscience of man, addressing posterity. In The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), on the other hand, little use is made of the ‘historical gaze’. Indirect ways are however found to navigate the problem of the ‘uncinematic’ nature of writing: the author’s literary production is incorporated by means of the device of collapsing the boundaries between fiction and life. Other strategies are also adopted: writing is portrayed as work, and Twain’s reputation as a formidable public speaker is used to create cinematic action.

©️Doriane Nemes

In her paper ‘Mary Shelley in Contemporary Fiction’, Antonella Braida (Université de Lorraine) analysed some of the most significant ‘uses’ of Mary Shelley’s life in contemporary novels and plays. She more particularly focused on the special genre of author biofiction to show that contemporary narratives have provided feminist ‘remedial’ rewritings of key episodes in Frankenstein. Shelley Jackson’s work of electronic literature Patchwork Girl, for example, rewrites in hypertext format the episode of the female creature, now reassembled by the dramatised author M/S. Select episodes from Mary Shelley’s life have also become the focus of contemporary bioplays Blood and Ice (2003, by Liz Lochhead) and Conception (2023, by Debora Clair). Both explore the burden of women’s creativity, making use of the figure of the Gothic double. Both provide feminist, remedial readings that free Mary Shelley from her ‘errors’ and make her the spokesperson of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s vindication of the rights of women.

©️ Doriane Nemes

In her paper ‘Haifaa Al Mansour’s Mary Shelley (2017) as Neo-Romantic Biopic?’, Armelle Parey (Université de Caen) discussed Al Mansour’s film in the light of the overall interest for the past that has seen the rise of neo-Victorian fiction since 1990. Neo-Victorian texts rewrite the past with various degrees of self-reflexivity and, more often than not, reinsert in it the forgotten or ignored figures of the past. In a similar vein for the screen, Anna Baccanti has examined ‘“neoclassical” 21st century biopics, which have tended to assume the form of the classic Hollywood biopic in order to subvert its conventions and the canon of Great Men it perpetuates’. Armelle considered to what extent and to what ends the tenets, techniques and practices of the ‘neo-’ approach are applied in Mary Shelley to revisit the real-life figure and the period in which she lived, and to convey a ‘neo-romantic’ representation. Armelle situated the film within the genre of contemporary women artist’s biopics, before considering the narrative and aesthetic choices made to draw an empowered portrait of Mary Shelley, notably in relation to Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.

©️ Nathalie Collé

In his paper ‘Reverse-Engineering the Authentic and the Authorial in Julian Jarrold’s Becoming Jane (2007)’, Matthew Smith (Université de Lorraine) argued that Jarrold’s film is well-informed in terms of Austenian scholarship, presents a combination of ‘authenticity effects’ with realistic aspiration, blurring the boundary between fiction and the real. Matthew argued that beyond this, in the case of many authors, there is a cultural resistance to non‑Cartesian approaches to the representation of the self – that is, sullying the shrine of the genius self centred purely in the mind, and providing the writer with a corporeal existence complete with material needs and physical desires. In one of many instances of ‘metabiopic’, Jarrold’s film touches upon its role in reconstituting a physical existence for its author‑as‑character. The film is interesting in its ‘authenticity effects’, of a piece with the spirit of reversing the sanitisation of the Austenian universe begun even in the lifetime of the novelist. ‘Reverse‑engineered’ sequences are designed to suggest sources of inspiration for the diegesis, preoccupations and aesthetics of Austen’s novels. This interest in reverse-engineering goes beyond creating imagined inspirations for various aspects of Jane Austen’s novels. It engages with the question of female writing as a way to constitute female independence in a very material, financial way.

 ©️ Doriane Nemes

In her paper ‘When Hammett Dreams: Hammett (Wenders, Coppola, et al., 1982)’, Estelle Jardon (Université de Lorraine) explored Wenders’s portrayal of hard-boiled detective novelist Dashiell Hammett, in an approach to the ‘biopic’ genre  which hardly seems compatible with the other examples of it discussed in the symposium since the plot of this film is largely invented and has little to no aspiration to represent anything about the historical facts of Hammett’s life. Hammett’s life nevertheless lends itself to this playful ‘life mirroring art’ treatment since, before taking up writing, he had been an agent for the security company Pinkerton, famous for conducting espionage against the Confederacy during the Civil War and, in his lifetime, infamous for infiltrating trade unions and recruiting goon squads to intimidate workers. The hypotext for the film is Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon (1930) and its 1941 film adaptation, and its ‘meta-noir’ devices include play upon stock characters as well as highly stylised dialogue and narration. In some ways, the film is as much the homage of producer Francis Ford Coppola to film noir as it is Wenders’s creation. Estelle showed how Coppola was interested in seeing a quintessentially American story through the eyes of a European director.

©️ Doriane Nemes

Then, Kathie Birat (Université de Lorraine) gave a paper entitled ‘“It’s the territory that’s important”: Caryl Phillips’s Fictional Representation of Jean Rhys in A View of the Empire at Sunset’. Not only is Rhys not an ‘household name’, but the way in which Phillips presents her life places little emphasis on her celebrity and, rather than focusing on Rhys’s artistic sensibilities, the narrative is organised in 65 vignettes with no apparent connecting thread. However, if one looks at the novel in the light of the complex relations that define any biographical fiction, it is the colonial relationship that establishes a link between Phillips and his subject. Phillips’s use of an extradiegetic narrator blurs the boundaries between self and other, external context and internal perception. Rhys appears as a spectral presence within a web of reflections, making it difficult to separate the narrator’s voice from the characters’. Furthermore, the commentary of the narrator and the use of internal focalisation make it difficult to distinguish between the words of the narrator and those of the characters. This narrative ambivalence has the further effect of suggesting that the words used by the characters are not necessarily their own but that they are influenced by the colonial context.

 ©️ Emma Nelz