Simon Mawer’s Book of Life: Mendel’s Dwarf as Fictional Genetic Life Writing

In this chapter, I argue that Simon Mawer’s novel Mendel’s Dwarf (1997) illustrates how genetics has transformed not only the novel’s aesthetics of the relation of past and present lives but also the very notion of life engaged in life writing. The novel’s fictional autobiographical perspective shows in a particularly striking manner the convergence of biological and biographical dimensions that characterise the twentieth-century molecularisation of life. In the chapter, I identify a new genre: fictional genetic life writing. I draw on critical observations of a recent biological turn in nonfictional life writing, which manifests itself in a significant biological revaluation of the “life” in life writing. My delineation of fictional genetic life writing further relies on the formal similarities between fictional and nonfictional autobiography. Approaching Mendel’s Dwarf as a geneticised form of life writing allows me to show how the novel draws on genetic discourses to rethink notions of identity, kinship and the temporalities of human lives while critically examining assumptions of genetic determinism. The text coordinates socio-cultural and genetic dimensions of life through their embodiment in the protagonist and narrator Benedict Lambert, who is not only afflicted by a genetic condition but also a practising geneticist.