Rethinking the biographical canon: Silences and gaps in Colm Tóibín’s "The Master"

Abstract

Over the last number of decades, the biographical canon has become the focus of scholarly attention for several reasons: revision of the essential concepts of (self)-identity, keen interest in liminal literary forms, searches for new forms of assessment of the artist’s creative output and new interpretive methodologies. Biofiction as a genre encompassing both documentary and fictional elements represents not only the biographical subject proper but also the author’s subjective orientation. The case study of a recent biofiction about Henry James (“The Master” by the Irish gay writer Colm Tóibín) suggests that silence as a semiotic practice and cognitive failure plays an important role in this particular example of the numerous biographies of James and functions not to uncover the sites of suppression of a presumably gay protagonist but acquires a universal, ontological meaning, signifying the fatal solitude of the artist, which is very close to the main credo of James’ own writing.