ABSTRACT
Shields was the perfect prism through which the current state of autobiographical debates could be observed. He has gone further than anyone else on the panfictionalist track, and he knows he cannot go any further without changing radically the rules of the game, hence the offer to drop entirely the fact/fiction dichotomy and eventually even the name of the game (autobiography). His approach is literally (and not politically, of course) totalitarian, it is an all-or-nothing approach; to be fair, it must appear to him as a way of democratizing complex generic issues, but as I tried to explain in the previous chapter, it only amounts to sweeping ancestral issues under the carpet. Furthermore, claims like the ones made by Shields in his diptych should be more historically informed. Throughout recent history—say, since the birth of the modern novel—there have been many propositions, many temptations to tamper with the most basic rule of the literary game, and authors, not unlike children, have blended facts with fiction and fiction with facts. It is tempting, because it is so easy, so available as a narrative device. This is probably why “[t]he relationship between literarity and fictionality is an issue that is not easily settled.” 1 But what happens if no one, not a single reader, takes note of your narrative prowess? Then, it is as if nothing happened. And if readers and critics do take note, is a form of hybridity automatically created (if one even agrees with the possibility of such a virtual response)? Or, on the contrary, one keeps reading in one’s comfort zone, in the comfort of the genre chosen, only by making slight alterations to one’s horizon of expectations.
