Biofiction as a genre encompassing both documentary and fictional elements represents not only the biographical subject proper but also the author's subjective orientation. The case study of a recent biofiction about Henry James {The Master by the Irish gay writer Cohn Toibin) suggests that silence as an aesthetic practice and cognitive failure plays an important role in this particular example of the numerous biographies of James and functions not to uncover the sites of suppression of an assumingly gay protagonist but acquires a universal, ontological meaning, signifying the fatal solitude of the artist, which is very close to the main credo of James' own writing.