Reminiscing on the Lived Life: Fictional Biography and the Reconstruction of Gendered Identity in Liza Dalby’s The Tale of Murasaki

Abstract

This article explores the fictional biography The Tale of Murasaki by Liza Dalby as a reconstruction of gendered identity through Roland Barthes’ Five Codes of Narrative and Gerard Genette’s Structuralist Narratology. As fictional biography is written on a framework of historical and cultural research but uses imagination to fill out the gaps in the life of a historical person, the records of whose personal life cannot be adequately found to render a full biography, their fictive elements resemble those of novels and they can raise certain thematic ideas. The Structuralist analysis of Liza Dalby’s The Tale of Murasaki as a fictional biography reveals how it combines the pre-existing literary genre of poetic memoir (uta nikki) in its protagonist’s era and historical facts with the author’s imagination to create codes of narrative that lead to its thematic ideas – especially the semic codes and the symbolic codes. The fictional biography also employs Narratological techniques that give it the illusion of authenticity as Murasaki’s own writing, while at the same time it is structured and presented as three narratives in a sequence that alerts readers to its thematic ideas: female literary inheritance, construction of gendered identity, and spiritual maturation of its female protagonists.