James Joyce, J. M. Coetzee, and Truth in Fictional Autobiography: Generic Hybridity and the Claims of Fiction

Reviewing some of James Joyce’s narrative strategies in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and related techniques employed by J. M. Coetzee in the two volumes of his Scenes from Provincial Life (Boyhood and Youth), this paper explores theoretical complexities involved in the genre of fictional autobiography. Resisting the trend to collapse autobiography and other putatively factual narrative prose genres into fiction in general, the paper presents a case, deriving from Joyce and Coetzee, for re-assessing rather the truth claims and truth functions of fictional discourse. Autobiography as a narrative form can be truth-disclosive for the writing self, as for the reading self, and it is perhaps more productive to focus not on the role of artificiality in the process but on that of truth.