The Centre for Postdigital Cultures and the Post-Publishing Research Strand are pleased to announce a seminar on biofictions with talks by Dr Bethany Layne (De Montfort University), and Clare Harvey (Coventry University), followed by a Question and Answer session.
30th April from 2 – 3.30pm – hybrid via MS Teams
(from 1pm in person, including pre-seminar networking lunch)
Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC)
Creative Cultures Building (ICC) – Room G17
Coventry University, Parkside, Coventry, CV1 2NE
Please register here: https://www.eventsforce.net/deepfake
Biofictions, both in print and on-screen, problematise our distinctions between the real and the imagined, between ‘fact’ and fiction – Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, for example, which serves up historical ‘truth’ as a biographical novel (and, via the TV adaptation, as screen drama). There has been an increasing interest in recent years in these genre-defying forms, which are often marketed as ‘true’ stories or ‘based on true events’. The difficulty, however, is that in fabulating the known ‘facts’ of a person’s life, a novelist or film director risks misportraying a lived life, and questions arise as to what extent this is fair to the real person who inspired the narrative. This seminar aims to introduce the ethics and the methods of how we portray – or perhaps risk misportraying – real lives into fictions, and what this tells us about the societal norms in play at the moment of their creation. It will feature talks by Clare Harvey and Dr Bethany Layne, followed by discussion and Q&A.
Literary Deepfake? The Ethics of Writing Biofiction – Clare Harvey (Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University)
This short paper discusses a creative writing experiment recently undertaken at De Montfort University. Participants co-wrote a micro example of the biofiction form, with each person taking the role of both subject and author within a collaborative creative process. Participants’ dual perspective on biofiction thereby gave them a personal insight into the relative rights and responsibilities around fictionalising real lives. By taking as a starting point the practice of writing biofiction, I consider the potential ethical dilemmas faced by authors of this genre, and the potential for subjects to experience reputational damage or other harm through the portrayal of their fictitious namesake.
Clare Harvey is a historical fiction author and doctoral candidate at Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures
‘Damaging and malicious fiction’? Conflicting ‘truth contracts’ in The Crown Season Five (2022) and Spencer (2021) – Dr Bethany Layne (De Montfort University)
This paper explores the contrasting approaches taken to the challenges of writing about recent history in two royal biopics. Season Five of The Crown covers the years 1991-95, including the premiership of John Major and so-called War of the Waleses that concluded with the divorce of Charles and Diana. Pablo Larraín’s art-house film Spencer covers a far shorter yet overlapping period: the Christmas of 1991 when Diana decides to leave her marriage. The texts both grapple with how to depict Diana sensitively and ethically, given her premature death and likely impact of any dramatization on her sons, as well as how to navigate treatment of the outgoing and incoming monarchs. These are problems germane to biopics of the House of Windsor, but which intensify as their setting nears the present day. I first examine John Major’s objection to a plotline in The Crown, in which his character engages in discussions about the Queen’s abdication with the then-Prince of Wales, and with Dame Judi Dench’s calls for a historical disclaimer to be added to future episodes lest ‘viewers, particularly overseas […] take its version of history as being wholly true’. Major and Dench imply that the biopic should abide by the ‘truth contract’ of biography, which promises ‘that nothing will be made up, and that speculations, where permissible, will be marked as such’ (Novak and Ní Dhúil, 2022). Conversely, I argue that the biopic’s truth contract is closer to that of biographical fiction, which insists on the right to alter ‘less significant […] facts’ in service of ‘a more important truth’ (Lackey 2021). This insight ushers in a discussion of Spencer, whose subtitle, ‘a fable from a true tragedy’ subverts the conventional formula ‘based on a true story’, suggesting a relationship to historical fact that is deliberately ambivalent. This is borne out by fantasy sequences that reveal important truths about Diana’s mental state without purporting to be accurate. I thus show how Spencer exploits the biopic’s licence to substitute an “authentic” version of its subject’s life with fidelity to an artistic vision.
Dr Bethany Layne is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester, the author of Henry James in Contemporary Fiction: The Real Thing (Palgrave 2020) and the editor of Biofiction and Writers’ Afterlives (Cambridge Scholars 2020). Her current project, to which this talk is related, is a monograph titled Biopics of the House of Windsor: Crisis and Rehabilitation. This is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic for their biofiction series.