Fact and Fiction in Gosse's Father and son‪.‬

It has often been assumed that autobiographies are non-fictional attempts by authors to tell the "simple truth" about their lives. And while recent theory of autobiography has raised serious questions about such simple non-fictional autobiographical aims, many early autobiographers, at least ostensibly, felt their autobiographies to be non-fictional works. Edmund Gosse's Father and Son announces itself as non-fiction in the Preface: "At the present hour, when fiction takes forms so ingenious and so specious, it is perhaps necessary to say that the following narrative, in all its parts ... is scrupulously true." It is, he argues, "a document ... a record of educational and religious conditions which ... will never return" (5). In Chapter I he reconfirms the historical accuracy of his book by again calling it a "record" of his conflict with his father (9). But one need not read the book for long to see that the desire for rigid factuality often gives way to one of the exigencies of narrative--metaphor. James Olney, a leading scholar of autobiography, argues that autobiographers, like historians, "organize the events of which they write according to, and out of, their own private necessities and the state of their own selves." They "impose ... their own metaphors on the human past" (36). (1) Gosse himself notices the difficulties of recapturing the facts of the past when he observes that "[t]he life of a child is so brief, its impressions are so illusory and fugitive, that it is as difficult to record its history as it would be to design a morning cloud sailing before the wind" (66). (2) Therefore, since autobiographers themselves seem to feel the pulls of both fictional and non-fictional impulses, I would like to propose that we consider placing autobiography somewhere in the middle of a fact-fiction continuum as purely neither, partly both. (3) I would like to look closely at Father and Son as an example of an autobiography that while claiming non-fictional status, actually demonstrates its fictionality through its reliance on metaphor. Part of the reason for the need of autobiography to employ metaphor lies in the complex motivations of (especially) Victorian self-writing. Victorian autobiographers seek to create some sort of definition of themselves at a time when the traditional definitions of the human self no longer seem to explain their lives. The metaphorical structures they use for self-definition are, as we shall see in Father and Son, sometimes extremely complex.