In his autobiography, where his fictionalizing his « real life » borders on the unbelievable, as well as in his fictional biographies, where authorial personae freely create the figures of their biographees, Anthony Burgess juggles his way between authorial truth commitments and blatant invention. The epistemological void revealed by postmodernist metabiographies is not thoroughly absent, but Burgess’s erudite « biofictions » eschew such melancholy brooding on the impossibility to resurrect the biographee, and, instead, celebrate virtual possibilities of existence, myths, fantasies and simulacra – and, doing so, deflate the naïve seriousness of academic or popular versions of the genre. At the core of Burgess’s literary experiments in the [auto]biographical mode lies a contradictory tension between his desire to fully convey the bodily, individual, de-mythified reality of these lives, and the novelist’s mytho-poetical tendency to filter them through the lens of his Catholic and Manichean worldview. Are his Marlowe, Shakespeare, Mozart, Napoleon and Keats but spectral fictional figures, whose historic real selves have been cannibalized by the idiosyncrasy of the novelist-biographer ? Burgess’s « biofictions » are a confluence of several artistic selves, but also of several ways to comprehend the relationship between life and writing [critical essay, biographical chronotope, modernist flow of consciousness, intertextual quotation], thus reasserting the organic connection between life, creation, and the work of art. His romantic-humanist quest for the singular existential selves of his artist predecessors challenges, from within the text, modern thanatographic textuality.
