Biofiction as an art of the possible

: Meretoja, Hanna

: Lucia Boldrini, Laura Cernat, Alexandre Gefen, Michael Lackey

Publisher: Routledge

: 2025

: The Routledge Companion to Biofiction

: Routledge Literature Companions

: 167

: 183

: 978-1-03-252617-1

: 978-1-00-340751-5

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003407515-12

: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003407515-12

This chapter discusses how biofiction deals with a life in relation to a space of possibility, that is, on how it gives a sense of what it is like to live in a certain cultural and historical world as a space of possibility in which certain thoughts, affects, and actions are possible and likely, others impossible or unlikely, and how it explores individual agents negotiating these possibilities. While biographical fiction often focuses on the protagonists’ actions and choices that shape their lives and the world around them, especially women’s lives have often been limited by the constraints imposed by their cultural and historical worlds on them. In such cases, it is important to imagine what happened in relation to what could have happened and to develop a sense of how the full potential of a life was never realized. This chapter argues that one of the important affordances of biofiction is to imagine the actual in relation to the possible and to thereby cultivate our “sense of the possible” and our awareness of the cultural narratives that shape individual lives. The chapter develops this theoretical point by analysing Johanna Venho’s metanarrative biofiction The First Lady (Ensimmäinen nainen, 2019), which deals with the life of Sylvi Kekkonen, a writer best known as the wife of the former Finnish President Urho Kekkonen.