Literature
Can I Believe Her? //
A Piece on Autofiction Autofiction is having its moment and if you haven’t noticed you’ve been reading on autopilot. Described as the
collision of autobiography and fiction, autofiction has been criticized as lazy, self-indulgent and downright solipsistic. Reading autofiction can feel like being pranked on (see Chris Kraus’, I Love Dick) or being given access to a new best friend who has chosen to give all of themselves to you, the reader (Elena Ferrante, Neapolitan trilogy). This is of course an illusion of intimacy and one can expect the author to falsify important details or characters. Memory, truth, and recollection are toyed with in the genre, as fiction is used in service of a search of self. Autofiction has gone from a cult classic in the 90s to a bestseller mainstay. Fiction with the authors’ persona stalking the pages includes Rob Doyle's Threshold, Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous. My personal favourites are Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You and the experimentalist Chris Kraus’ Aliens and Anorexia. However, the author as a central character of fiction has long been used as a popular device. See Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or James Baldwin’s John Grime in Go Tell it to the Mountain. ‘How much of this is a true story?’ and ‘Is this real?’ are questions that have been on readers' minds since the dawn of literary fiction. In autofiction, our impulse for speculative gossip is addressed directly. As personal identity became increasingly public through time, we have been given unsatisfactory answers to these questions. The 17th century saw the author’s name as a social construct attached to a book. In the 20th century, with the advent of TV and radio, the status of the author was promoted and became a heightened public presence. Fast forward to 2021: the author is a constant media presence. Their image is a shadow that is inescapable in their work. The internet gives us a false solution to the ‘truth’ of a novel. How much of the story is derived from the author’s lived experience is a Wikipedia search away. I find autofiction to be the most contemporary form. It is the only mode that can consistently incorporate the internet. Autofiction counteracts the cultural urge to flaunt our success and instead often centres around narratives that end in failure. Self-representation and narrativization of identity are second nature to millennials and Gen Z. Autofiction takes the fleeting rapid-fire observations of social media, co-opts them, and makes them slow. The traditional novel’s intricate plotting of events is waived for a looser narrative of experience. Interestingly, the dated letter and email form is a common narrative device. The epistolary novel, favoring subjective experience and slow communication, is vogue in autofiction. Exemplified in Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick and Rob Doyle’s Threshold, the technique is also popular in fiction, ala Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. There is a sense in this new trend that audiences and writers are yearning for a deeper connection and intimacy. The subjectivity of letter writing and the performance of putting one’s thoughts on show for another is, to my mind, emblematic of how our way of relating to one another has been changed by the internet. Radically, the form is self-aware of the celebrity culture that governs our media consumption and purchases. The author and character’s persona become blurry in autofiction, similar to Instagram profiles and “real” life. In autofiction, confessional and vulnerable voices are prized in our cultural moment fixated on individualism. 26
