AUTOFICTION’S FUNHOUSE MIRROR

he writer Sheila Heti loves Édouard Manet’s “Sprig of Asparagus,” the sequel to the modernist painter’s “Bundle of Asparagus.” She’s devoted space in two of her three books to the still life. In “Sprig,” the lone asparagus lies on the edge of a table like a limp cigarette. The head of the stalk bends up towards the heavens. Standing before this painting, Mira, the protagonist in Heti’s newest novel Pure Colour, realizes that “humans make art because we were made in God’s image—which doesn’t mean we look like God; it means we like doing the same thing that God likes.” Creation has been God’s hobby for millennia. But Mira, here, is not creating “Sprig.” She’s an observer of the creation. It is as a critic that she feels God’s awesome power.

Pure Colour, Heti’s ambitious third novel, tells an alternative creation myth. It begins with the declaration that this world and all its history is only God’s first draft of creation. God, at the beginning of this draft, split up humanity into three types of critics: the bears, the fish, and the birds. The bird critiques from above, the fish “critiques from the middle,” and the bear approaches humanity from an even plane, with love and warmth. Operating within this framework, humanity works to revise and edit our current draft in hopes of producing a better one, farther down the line. Mira, the birdish protagonist, is an aspiring literary critic who struggles to justify art’s existence in a time just before cell phones. Comprised of aphoristic chapters, Pure Colour scales between the metaphysical and the physical, the mystical and the real. Mira is the glue which binds these pages into coherence. Halfway through the book, though, Mira’s father dies, and her mythology collapses. Skipping decades to her death, it’s clear that by the end of Pure Colour her life is about enduring, not making. Mira “would not go into the world to critique or fix it.” Instead, she would live, and then she would die.

The narrator of Pure Colour is not Mira, nor is it God. I won’t make the critical mistake of assuming it is Heti herself. The narrator instead acts as a middleman between this world and the one above, someone hovering between the creator and the created. One eye looks down onto mortal chaos and the other looks up to perfection. With her attunement to the process of creation and her understanding of public reception, Mira’s occupation as a critic leaves her in the same suspended state.

Pure Colour, like Heti’s other works, could be considered “autofiction,” a subgenre that has only become popular in the last 15 years. In 2014, the critic Jonathan Sturgeon made the first brave attempt at a concrete definition. He argued that autofiction is a work where the artist’s oeuvre “is the soul.” These are books by writers about writers, hence the auto that mocks the genre’s bend towards biography. But, beyond this, autofiction books are books “about their own writing,” as critic Christian Lorentzen puts it. Mira is at once studying criticism and critiquing the world; she is learning about the lives of artists as she contemplates her own artistic life. Autofiction presents itself to the reader with an acute self-consciousness. It blurs the line between author and text, between form and content, and eventually, between the reading subject and the autofiction object before her.

Autofiction allows the tension held within Pure Colour’s narrative structure to explode upon the reader, throwing into question the fundamental form of the novel. These are books about their own writing, so they envelope the reader in the project of her own reading. If the text is suspended precariously between its ambivalence towards a concretized self and an insistence on this self, then the reader is suspended in this dialectic too. To literalize this phenomenon through a less textual medium, take Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms.” The rooms, covered in mirrors and kaleidoscopic sculptures, create a tangible feeling of endlessness. At the same time, the parallel mirrors reflect the viewer infinitely, allowing them to see themselves as the work’s subject. One could imagine Mira stumbling into a Kusama exhibit, looking around for the project’s form. She would only find herself looking back at her, a thousand times over, critic after critic after critic.

What results from Pure Colour’s autofictiveness is a novel rife with muted dictates and maxims directed towards the omnipresent you: “You have love in you, but that part is extra-human, and that part is in the plants, and the animals, and the clouds, and the seas, and everything. What is lovable is not humans, but life.” But life is hard to love without first loving humans, and it is this problematic that traps Mira as she tries to critique a world infested with people. Pure Colour, like other autofiction that tends to focus on a writer in crisis, rejects the human while idolizing her. Mira, at one point, leaves her human form to inhabit a leaf with the soul of her father—whether you take this as metaphor or not, a devalorization of the human is implicit within this shift. Rachel Cusk, another famous autofictionist, wrote the Outline trilogy from the perspective of an academic/writerly figure going through a divorce, a biography similar to her own. The protagonist, though, is most notable in her mysteriousness—the novel is in the first person, but it is almost entirely about other people. These authors, though, only glorify a life beyond the self by using the traditional mechanism of character. What results is an even heavier emphasis on the individual, for it is

now both the thing to be overcome and the tool through which the overcoming can occur. Pure Colour and its contemporary acolytes in the new world of autofiction have thus doubled down on the self: the author’s, the character’s, and most importantly yours.

not tell Mira what to do. It exists, as art does, in-and-for-and-of-itself. Pure Colour, on the other hand, inverts the sprig of asparagus; it splices open the head and peels the stalk down to its meaty base. It is a novel interested in how life should be lived, not just in that life is lived. Heti’s first novel, after all, was titled How Should a Person Be? Though Heti avoids unliterary maxims on quotidian life—take a walk! make your bed! eat salmon!—her work is intimately concerned with the question of, well, how a person should be. Autofiction specifies this question to a sharpened end, for the work becomes entangled in the author’s own identifications. This is a remarkable return to the self, something the “death of the author” and postmodernism had worked to disassemble in the middle of the 20th century.

The devastation of WWII, the collapse of the integrated Fordist model, and the emergence of a global network of communication all worked to bury the idea of a substantiated self in the decades following 1945. Before Pearl Harbor, characters like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway rejected any sort of coherence or totality. Woolf’s style is a testament to this emphasis on fragmentation, but she still prized the self as a space of creation and possibility. Following the end of the war, the trend was to undermine or overwrite character. Any claim to the self could only prove to be a testament of the self’s falsity in the post-Fordist economy. While nations championed individualism, fiction devoured the individual. As the famous scholar of postmodernism Frederic Jameson argues: “The liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.” Humans, though, do have feelings. And in the years following the turn towards postmodernism, it seemed as though the American populace wanted more direction about what to do with these feelings than ever before.

The self-help share of the publishing market more than doubled between 1974 and 2000 from 1.1% to 2.4%, the exact years The Author—as a theoretical concept—was dying. According to Micki McGee, scholar and author of Self-Help Inc., between 1991 and 1996 alone, self-help book sales rose more than 96%. Today, approximately 150 new self-help titles are released every week. Readers have become interested in the self again, but this time, the self is an actual, breathing person. Tony Robbins defeated Mrs. Dalloway; Deepak Chopra crushed Leopold Bloom. Americans today prefer people to characters. Why bother with characters when you could have the real thing?

Autofictionists will implore that their genre is not self-help, and, for the sake of the genre’s artistic integrity, I mostly agree. But it’s impossible to read Heti and not wonder, for even a short moment, if she might be trying to tell you how a person should be: “Sitting opposite Annie, Mira now wondered if this was also true of herself and Annie, that sometimes a person is meant to move forward in the world with the one they love at a distance, and that the distance is there to make it more beautiful.”

But, of course, Heti does not read like Robbins or Chopra. Her prose is much more delicate, “cobweb”-like as critic Parul Sehgal put it. And there are characters and metaphor and narrative, all things that cannot be found in the business-speak didacticism of current self-help manuals. Her novel is fiction—and a good fiction at that. But to ignore the concurrent booms in the past two decades between autofiction—which has skyrocketed writers like Heti, Ben Lerner, and Tao Lin to literary success—and self-help would be to imagine that art operates without attention to the external world surrounding it.

“Sprig” appears twice in Pure Colour, at the beginning and at the end. You must always look twice, God seems to say.

The brush strokes all rush towards each other horizontally, like waves threatening a ship[love this -sj]. The sprig stands undisturbed; its root remains taut as it hangs over the table. Just as the asparagus’s inanity threatens to overtake the painting, the vegetable reasserts itself as a serious subject. The painting unfolds from the ridges of the stalk. It invents itself: an asparagic style. Mira describes it as “the perfect balance between carefulness and carelessness,” the thin line Manet tows between specificity and freedom, between the single and the bunch.

Criticism as an activity requires action from the viewer: a peeling back, an excavation, a discovery. It is a “desire to undo things,” to use Heti’s description, an attempt to grab at the root of the thing, even if all you’re left with is the wilted stem of a spring vegetable.

Pure Colour leaves room for criticism, but it simultaneously gestures towards a trap door. Autofiction offers an out, an opportunity to side-step all that critical meandering. You can read the book like critic Nora Caplan-Bricker, who works out its “antic cosmology” to reveal the fables of Heti’s works. Or you can read the book, learn a little bit about criticism and love, and walk away with a thin cloak of having-beenchanged.

Heti’s approach is analogous to the work of Jenny Holzer, the famous conceptual artist from the 1980s known for her public installations. Her work Truisms is a running list of maxims—“ambivalence can ruin your life,” “a little knowledge can go a long way,” etc.—that she plastered along the streets of New York City. There’s a lot to be said about Holzer’s work, but there’s also a lot that it just says. Yayoi Kusama’s installations contain the same shortcut. The long wait times and the 900,000 Instagram posts in the rooms under #yayoikusama suggest people prefer the mirrors as much as, if not more than, any commentary the rooms offer on infinitude.

“Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form,” Heti writes in Pure Colour. It’s unsurprising, then, that we find art’s spirit in our life, and we happen upon life’s spirit in our art. But a purposeful intermixing of the two is no longer taboo. The only appropriate reaction to a Manet in Mira’s time was a silent marveling. Now, the viewer approaches the frame and asks what Manet can do for her.

There are still revisions to be made in this draft, but God’s creations seem a bit stalled on the grander critical project. Surrounded by screens and reflections, personal optimization has become the mechanism by which individuals enact change—something that was true in the postmodern era and remains today. The world is too big, too wide a project. Let’s start small, autofiction seems to say. The self—as fictively contained as it may be—is a much tinier form, more apt for a concise critique. If the subject becomes the object, the work of art becomes a spellbinding ouroboros, rife with meaning without ever having to look outside of itself. And it is only a testament to Pure Colour’s strength as a novel that instead of prospering, Mira’s critical project fails. Caught up in her own world, trapped in her own leaf, birdish Mira can’t tell the forest from the trees. She retreats from her original critical undertaking, and she dies alone.

Pure Colour does not deem Mira a failure, and the problems it raises are not inherent criticisms of autofiction as a whole. Rather, Heti’s novel splices open the belly of the genre by positing the narrator not only as a writer but as a critic herself. The mechanisms and contraptions by which autofiction swallows you, the reader, into its circular form are revealed through Mira’s incisive, and fruitless, attempt to escape the whirlpool herself. The subject becomes the object, in a mirroring that would take the physical form of a Kusama room. You’re caught in the middle, looking at yourself, then the art, then yourself, over and over again. You become one with the object, as the author becomes one with the protagonist, as the critic (this review might show) necessarily becomes one with the work. The art becomes a projection of you, and thus a projection of your world. In that tiny, familiar universe, you become God. What an awesome power to behold.

CECILIA BARRON B’24 is considering a thesis on “Asparagic Style.”