It is no exaggeration to say that SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku (Ryōma Goes His Way), presented in Japanese as『竜馬がゆく』, caused a social phenomenon in Japan. SHIBA Ryōtarō (1923−96) is a Japanese writer very well-known for his historical novels and essays. Unfortunately, most of his works were not translated into English or any other languages, and thus, he is not widely known outside Japan.

SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku is one of his most popular novels in Japan. Generally, this novel has been read as a historical novel, but it can also be regarded as a biofiction because it centers around SAKAMOTO Ryōma (1836−1867), written down in Japanese as 坂本龍馬, a samurai who lived near the end of the Edo period. It is said that SAKAMOTO Ryōma successfully negotiated the so-called “Satcho Alliance” (i.e., united the two most powerful rival domains, Satsuma and Choshu, to work against the Edo Shogunate) and made happen the “Meiji Restoration” (i.e., a political event that restored practical imperial rule and started the Meiji period in 1868).

What is notable about SAKAMOTO Ryōma is that he became widely recognized and gained popularity after the publication of SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku, first serialized in the daily newspaper Sankei Shimbun from 1962 to 1966, and later published in book form in 1974. TV dramas adapted from this novel were broadcast in 1965 and 1968, attracting a large audience. Most recently, a manga with the same title began serialization in the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun in 2022. Nowadays, SAKAMOTO Ryōma has many enthusiastic fans and is often listed as the first or second most favorite historical figure in Japan.

However, a couple of years ago, news about SAKAMOTO Ryōma made a big uproar in Japan: his name is to be removed from the Japanese history textbooks used at high schools. This is mainly because, from the perspective of historical science, the achievements attributed to SAKAMOTO Ryōma are considered inaccurate or, at the very least, unprovable by evidence. This suggests that Ryōma（竜馬）, the fictional character created by SHIBA Ryōtarō, has surpassed Ryōma（龍馬）, the actual historical person, and the image of the former has come to be regarded as more “real.” It is interesting that SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku, a biofiction, triggered this social phenomenon in Japan.

In this paper, I will elucidate the points briefly outlined above—in short, the impact SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku—and consider how strongly biofiction can influence the establishment of the image of an actual historical person and transform people’s perception of him or her.

My contribution will deal with Konrad Bayer’s text Der Kopf des Vitus Bering ("Vitus Bering’s Head") from 1963 as a special example of biofiction that is set within the specific context of post-war avantgarde experimental poetics.

Bayer, one of the most important authors of the avantgardist "Vienna Group", allegedly sets out to (re-)narrate the biography of a historical seafarer and discoverer who, while not as famous as the likes of Columbus or James Cook, led two large Russian expeditions and had the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, and Bering Island named after himself.

However, what Bayer actually offers is a provocative dismantling and fictionalization of Bering’s actual life-story and a subversive and provocative deconstruction of the classical narrative scheme of a ‘heroic biography’. This deconstruction happens on the level of 'discours' as well as 'histoire': First of all, the text does not present a coherent 'grand récit' of Bering’s life and achievements, but follows a rather complex montage technique that combines fragmentary narrative episodes from Bering’s life with excerpts from a variety of sources that only deal vaguely, if at all, with the protagonist’s concrete biography.

One common denominator of these fragments which I’m going to highlight in my contribution is the idea that Bering’s creativity, and perhaps creativity in general, has to be understood as a product of chance and happenstance instead of individual ‘genius’: The protagonist’s actions are shown as driven by heteronomous circumstances which he can’t (and is not even willing to) control. With regard to the undeniable colonial context of Bering’s story (and the ‘exploration paradigm’ in general), Bayer’s text can be seen as both trivializing as well as at least implicitly criticizing it. Last but not least, I am going to discuss the ways in which "Der Kopf des Vitus Bering" explores the general question as to whether any narrated biography is, in fact, (bio-)fiction.

In his essay “In the Laboratory of the Novel” (1963), literary critic Peter Brooks provides a compelling account of the return of experimental realism as metafiction in the French Nouveau-Roman movement of the 1960s, recalling late nineteenth- and early twentieth century debates on the possible scientific function of literature, particularly concerning writers like Émile Zola and Samuel Butler, for whom the novel would quite literally figure as a laboratory space, fit for substantial experimentation. Brooks highlights a notable remark made by nouveau-novelist Michel Butor (1926-2002), who argues that the novel “the ideal place to study how reality appears to us or can appear to us; this is why the novel is the laboratory of narrative” (transl. mine). What seemingly distinguishes Butor’s approach from Zola’s, is that the author’s rendering and writing of the novel as a laboratory, fit for scientific experiments which could reveal hidden truths and shed light on reality anew, itself becomes the new novel’s problematized subject. If Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series (1871-1893) and Butler’s semi-autobiographical The Way of All Flesh (1903) both employ the novel as a framework through which to incorporate as well as incite verifiable lived experience, Butor’s last novel Degrés (1960) instead questions the extent to which these scientific attempts at life-writing are viable. In Degrés, Butor narrates the attempt of schoolmaster Pierre Vernier to write an absolutely truthful novel about the life of the lycée where he teaches. As the blurb of the English translation reads, for Vernier “the study of reality is the study of things as they are: the surface of objects, the observable behavior of people, words that one hears.” Such an undertaking soon proves more complex than anticipated: realizing that he occupies a privileged position which might influence his observations, Vernier decides to incorporate the notes of his nephew and student Pierre. Failure and triumph paradoxically ensue; the “novel scientist” of Butor’s meta-narrative is at once recognized and ridiculed. Interested in the convergence of experimental aspiration and literary technique, this paper introduces the notion of the “novel laboratory” in the context of Biofiction, in an attempt to explore the possibilities and problems that scientific experimentation poses when considered in or employed as literary form. Taking Butor’s novel as a case-study to think through, this paper grapples with ethical and epistemological complications that emerge when flesh is made word.