Autofiction is a term first used by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky in his (1977) novel Fils to distinguish his work from other forms of creative writing, on the one hand, and from straightforward forms of autobiography on the other. In the forty years that followed he continued to develop his implementation of an autofictive practice, while an increasing number of other French scholars and writers helped to refine and complicate their theoretical understanding of it. By contrast, the entry of the concept of autofiction into the literary and critical lexicon in English is very much more recent. One of the purposes of this volume is to gather together leading Anglophone researchers from the fields of contemporary literature, life writing and the representation of the self for the first time to discuss the theoretical components of autofiction from a critical perspective. In doing so, it will also consider whether or not there is a body of creative work in the English language that can be considered autofictive. Arguing that there is such a field as autofiction in English, it will proceed to identify some of the major works and practitioners in that field, while simultaneously subjecting them to rigorous analysis and critique.
One of the necessary starting points for such a project is the recognition that there is no single definition of autofiction either in English or in French. According to Arnaud Genon, the significant variety of perspectives from which the genre is currently discussed in French-language scholarship is evidence of the vitality of the discipline itself and its success in becoming established within the domain of literary research more generally (191). This success, however, was not achieved immediately. On the contrary, it is the result of an extended engagement between existing literary conventions and emerging practices that in many cases lasted for whole careers and whole lifetimes. No doubt, therefore, one reason for the relative lateness in recognition of the concept of autofiction in English is the fact that such recognition took a considerable time to occur even in the genre’s ‘home’ country. Isabelle Grell points out that it was variously labelled an ‘unserious’, ‘litigious’ and even plain ‘bad’ genre—though the last was consciously ironic. 1 It is therefore against the backdrop of a gradually unfolding and expanding discipline within the French academy that the establishment of autofiction must be understood. In turn, this sense of autofiction as an evolving and emerging genre bears directly on the question of how to define it, since Doubrovsky himself constantly updated and amended his understanding of the term in the light of theoretical contributions made by colleagues who had taken up the baton that he initially set out carrying.
In fact, there are at least three different ways in which Doubrovsky defined autofiction at various stages in his career. His initial description on the back cover of Fils, ‘fiction of strictly real events’ (quoted by Cusset, 1), is not a strict definition of the field even if it is a useful general indication of the scope and range of different kinds of writing potentially included in the term. Perhaps owing to the absence of any strict demarcation between autobiography, autobiographical novel, fictional biography and autofiction, it was therefore on a stylistic basis that he first attempted to define the latter. Though on the one hand he was insistent on the designation of each of his works as novels, and on the other, was committed to narrating events that he considered strictly real, a key element that he associates with the practice of writing autofiction is the ‘reconfiguration’ of narrative time (Gasparini, 209). His departure from a linear, sequential, chronological time frame and his interest in temporal experimentation are important because they result in the expression of verifiable, empirical experience in narratives that mobilize such literary techniques as stream of consciousness, radical shifts in narrative perspective, a loose or open-ended causality and an open-ended symbolism that renders meaning opaque and elusive. Since these techniques are not normally considered appropriate for non-fictional genres such as (auto)biography they have the effect of combining the factual with the fictive through aesthetic and stylistic means. 2
If this were the whole story, however, there would be little or no distinction between autofiction and the autobiographical novel. As Doubrovsky’s work gathered momentum and attracted a greater degree of critical scrutiny, he was therefore prompted to attempt a second and more precise definition of autofiction, this time on a sociological rather than stylistic basis. Using the work of Rousseau as an example of classical autobiographical writing that was very unlike his own practice, he reasoned that he was neither sufficiently well known to the general public nor of a sufficiently high standing even within the more limited sphere of the reading public to warrant writing his autobiography. He was, he says, a ‘nobody’, whereas only ‘somebodies’ are sociologically justified in committing their autobiographies to print. 3 Autofiction then becomes a form of autobiographical writing that offers to fill the gap created when more traditional forms of autobiography are rendered sociologically unavailable by the status of the writer (which may of course be ‘real’ or perceived). It is, moreover, a form of autobiographical writing that permits a degree of experimentation with the definition and limits of the self, rather than the slavish recapitulation of known biographical facts.
Arising both out of his humble—as opposed to luminary—status and out of his commitment to experimenting with different ways of representing the subjectivity of the self, Doubrovsky in effect is most alive as a writer when he appears as a protagonist in his own writing: ‘I hardly exist, I am a fictive being.’ 4 This assertion reveals an underlying sense of humility, a sense that is evinced by much of Doubrovsky’s work as well as by that of several other French practitioners of autofiction including Philippe Forest, Catherine Cusset and Nina Bouraoui. 5 But it also bespeaks a wider and more significant point about how Doubrovsky defined the genre and situated it within the spectrum of literary ‘genres’ overall. Sociologically speaking, one difference between autofiction in Doubrovsky’s sense and classical autobiography is that the latter presupposes a large potential audience equipped with an a priori knowledge of and interest in the subject, from whose perceived high intellectual, cultural and/or political status those things are derived, whereas the writer of autofiction lacks such a perceived standing among the audience.
This point could be pushed even further to suggest that a work of autobiography is a narrative that reinforces a life story that the audience already understands to a greater or lesser degree, so that the audience’s prior experience of the subject is a formative element of autobiography. By contrast, not only would autofiction then be a matter of introducing an unknown subject to the audience, but the important constitutive experience would be the author’s rather than the reader’s. Cusset even says, ‘I was not sure that I was writing anything that could be read by other people but it didn’t matter’ (6). In this sense, autofiction is a project of self-exploration and self-experimentation on the part of the author. This in turn is partly because many works of autofiction have been written in the aftermath of some kind of traumatic experience—real or imagined—so that the process of writing in response to trauma can be seen as a means of situating the self in a new context when other relational constructs have been removed or jeopardized. Arnaud Genon uses the term ‘faille fondatrice’—a founding fault—to refer to the traumatic experiences that have often driven writers to autofiction (58). 6
The sociological definition of autofiction is thus made partly on the basis of the perceived social status of the writer, and through extrapolation by invoking different kinds of experience on the part of the reader and writer. Yet the distinction between autobiography and autofiction remains problematic for a number of reasons. Though it may be true that classical autobiographies tend to have been written by recognized figures who are of high literary standing in historical terms, there is no generic reason why the writing of autobiography should be limited to those leading figures, especially given that the status itself is sociologically conferred rather than in any definitive sense essential to the person in question. Indeed, one of the major developments in research into life writing in English, which took place during the same period that theories of autofiction were developing in France, has been the (re)discovery of nineteenth-century autobiographical works by ‘ordinary’ people, such as Somerville’s Autobiography of a Working Man (1848). Raymond Williams, whose own novel Border Country (1960) could be considered a work of autofiction before the word, includes Somerville’s autobiography in his discussion of the emergence of working-class autobiography (Country and City, 189). It is a work that dates from the ‘classical’ period of autobiographical writing, but is not written by a ‘somebody’ (in Doubrovsky’s sense). It thus appears to disrupt the distinction between autobiography and autofiction on a sociological basis. As is addressed below, one of the key questions to be explored throughout this volume is whether the definition, components, characteristics and theories of autofiction remain the same when transplanted from French into English, or whether the components themselves undergo modification when the context changes. Before getting to that question, however, it is necessary to identify the third definition Doubrovsky himself provided for autofiction, a definition that is neither stylistic nor sociological, but fully historical in scope.
The intellectual background for the development of Doubrovsky’s notion of autofiction was Philippe Lejeune’s research in the 1970s into different forms of autobiographical writing. In Le Pacte autobiographique (1975) Lejeune argued that writing an autobiography entails the writer entering into a metaphorical contract with his or her reader. That contract takes the form of a referential pact whereby the author and the narrating ‘I’ of the text share a name and manifest identity with the central protagonist of the narrative. According to the referential pact, readers of autobiography are entitled to think that what they read constitutes an accurate representation of one or more prior events or experiences unless clearly told otherwise. This assumption of truthfulness incorporates the right of the reader to assume the correlation of narrator with author, and in fact these forms of agreement between author and reader together make up the autobiographical pact as Lejeune defines it (‘Contract’, 193).
According to Doubrovsky, however, it is no longer possible today to write the kinds of autobiography that Rousseau wrote. This is not simply because he is a ‘nobody’ (as he put it), but because historical conditions have changed since the days of classical autobiography such as that of Rousseau. Isabelle Grell points out that such diverse twentieth-century cultural developments as psychoanalysis, surrealism, modernism and post-structuralism have all intervened since the period of classical autobiography (10–12). Since each in diverse ways has tended to question the ability of a human subject unproblematically to narrate and represent his or her life story, the premise that classical autobiography straightforwardly refers to a specified verifiable subject has come into doubt.
For example, French theorists of autofiction such as Marie Darrieussecq and Jacques Lecarme have questioned both the assumption that author, narrator and protagonist can be identified with each other so straightforwardly, and the related assumption that autobiography can faithfully transcribe historical events or experiences in a wholly unmediated way. Pointing out that to write is necessarily to mediate what is written about, Lecarme opposes Lejeune’s autobiographical pact with an ‘autofictional pact’, where those assumptions are rendered mutually contradictory (242). To Lecarme, the relationship between autofiction and autobiography is dialectical, suggesting an unresolved tension between the impulse to truth understood in a factual sense, and the revelation of symbolic truths through fictive narrative in the first person. Lecarme also distinguishes between autofiction in the strictest sense of the term and its subsequent application in a more general sense (cited in Grell, 18). The strict sense refers to a narrative of strictly real facts and events, where the fictional element is introduced through careful construction of the way of telling, so that this is again primarily a stylistic definition. In the more general sense, the lived experience is itself subject to the distortions of the imagination and the act of fictionalizing affects the content of the memories.
Arising from this distinction between the strict and the general, whereas Lejeune associated autofiction with the classical autobiographical novel, Lecarme joins Doubrovsky in understanding autofiction as a form that is new and specific to the cultural conditions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It departs from the autobiographical pact by placing in question the assumption that a first-person autobiographical narrative uncomplicatedly refers to a stable, factual object. Autofiction raises the possibility of a non-referential, non-object-orientated form of autobiographical writing. As such it may be considered as autobiographical fiction written in the subjunctive mood. That is to say, it is less concerned with faithfully reporting what its protagonist did, or even how that person thought and felt, and is more concerned with the speculative question of how that subject might respond to new and often imagined environments. One of the insights of autofiction is that a person’s sense of selfhood is partly constituted through interaction with a social landscape, which can change. In other words the point of autofiction is not to portray a person’s existing subjectivity for all time, but to recognize that subjectivity is elusive and hence to place the subject of narrative endlessly in question. Vincent Colonna even proposes a dist...