In a century that claims to have defeated distance, cultural distances are growing. More than a question of technology or cartography, bridging them requires an effort of the temporal imagination. Building on Pheng Cheah’s (2016: 8) understanding of worlding as a “process of temporalization,” this paper argues that biofiction, whose insight into the past is doubled by a capacity to straddle temporal regimes and play with narrative conventions, provides unique tools for a layered perception of the world in time, irreducible to a one-world narrative but also dislodged from solipsistic nationalist fantasies or methodologies. Parallel to what Wai Chee Dimock (2006: 163), called the “non-standard mapping” of space, biofiction offers a “non-standard mapping” of time, reflecting rich interiorities through poetic licence or artifice. My two examples, Anchee Min’s "Pearl of China" (2010), a biofiction of Sinophile Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck, curiously “the only American author to make it into [Auerbach’s] Mimesis,” (de Graef 2015: 313), and Caryl Phillips’s "A View of the Empire at Sunset" (2018), a fictionalization of episodes from the life of Caribbean author Jean Rhys, each layer the temporalities and rhythms of two different cultures. Propelling each transnational narrative is the figure of the outsider female writer, whose rebellious response to being brought up in an alleged periphery and being instructed to aspire to an Anglophone centre unsettles the location of home and the meaning of exile. By staging Rhys’s return to her native Dominica in her mid-forties and Buck’s reconstruction of a Chinese garden on American soil as a consolation for not being allowed entry into Maoist China, the two novels unfold the promise of a feminine remapping of history, which departs from conventional biographical time and reintroduces the worlding temporality of storytelling, for which there is “no one way of comprehending truth” (Min 2010: 151). Though Phillips and Min share some aspects of their background with their protagonists, they are both aware of the contextual differences and of their subjects' biases (Phillips, in Tunca & Ledent 2020: 465, Min, in Lackey 2019: 146), which inform the artifices they use to represent the enmeshed cultural temporalities inhabited by the now canonized female outsiders. While Min's model is the Chinese parable with its plot twists, reshaping history as myth, Phillips opts for a more realist framing of flashbacks, inspired by Rhys's early novels, which he favours (Phillips, in Clingman 2017: 594). Though different, the two strategies converge in their resistance to a closed and univocal notion of history and in their ability to mold Life Writing into the protean forms of fiction, creating new possibilities for the cross-temporal mapping of cultures.

This paper examines the intersection between biofiction and the proletarian novel in Fernando Alegría's "Como un árbol rojo" (1968), a revised edition of the author's earlier work about the life of Luis Emilio Recabarren, pioneering union leader and founder of Chile’s Communist Party. It also aims to contribute to the renewed historical inquiry on Recabarren’s figure after the 100th anniversary of his death, which was recently commemorated in December 2024.

Utilizing Barbara Foley's criteria, Lorenzo Turrent Rozas' views, and Alegría's own reflections on revolutionary literature, this study argues that the book adheres to the tradition of the proletarian novel while also maintaining its place as biofiction. It further delves into the challenges posed by Georg Lukacs' Marxist critique of the biographical novel and its potential conflict with the proletarian novel's inherent political discourse. Additionally, the article analyses contemporary approaches to biofiction as a viable path to reconcile the content of proletarian content with the biographical format.

The paper also discusses the novel's reception and effectiveness as a revolutionary tool, concluding that although "Como un árbol rojo" faces certain structural limitations, the biographical format can still serve as an efficient vehicle for proletarian literature when executed with greater narrative flexibility.