Is Autofiction Dangerous?

I have read only one volume of Knausgaard's My Struggle. That pretty much sums up my experience of autofiction. It is not quite for me. Yes, my "Chasing Ashes" is semi-autobiographical - but Captain Ahab is a character which I think takes it out of the autofiction category. Anyway, I read these passages from A World Beyond Our Skin: Jenny Erpenbeck and the Potential of Fiction by Robert Rubsam and did not realize current thinking is that we cannot communicate with one another. 

During a September Zoom conversation promoting Not a Novel, the novelist Neel Mukherjee made an offhand comment to Erpenbeck about “this horrible thing afflicting the Anglophone world: autofiction.” As practiced by writers like Ben Lerner and Lauren Oyler, this genre has risen in popularity in response, partially, to a claim that writers should not imagine outside of their own experiences. Because true communication is impossible, the argument goes, we can only, at best, approximate the experiences of others; at worst, we colonize other lives with our own. Autofiction escapes this trap by transforming the entire fictional world into an antechamber of the writer’s own head. If we can’t understand others, why even bother communicating?

Erpenbeck’s writing strikes me as a thorough rebuke of such myopia. Though the refugees in Go, Went, Gone have often struggled to make themselves understood, they, too, are in search of understanding. In its final scene, the novel brings many of them together at a barbecue, during which the conversation turns to love. The men remember many things: the way one man’s wife used to kiss him on the eyelids, how another’s licked at his ear, a third, “how well the woman he loves always fit in his embrace.”

And I thought, Well, we have to try, don't we and I kept reading and found this:

But rather than shrinking the vastness of European history to the size of her life, Erpenbeck allows her own experiences—of dislocation, chaos, and domesticity—to illuminate the lives of others. And they, in turn, enlighten her own self-understanding, like an image shuttled between mirrors, gaining new facets with every reflection.

In his digressive, melancholy travelogue Danube, the Italian writer and professor Claudio Magris notes that Martin Heidegger’s incredible capacity for believing himself rooted in place and possessed of genuine experience completely eliminated his ability to imagine such a thing for other people. But this is precisely the leap that we have to take, as writers and citizens and humans: to recognize the full humanity of other people in ways that are often divorced from any shared relationship. We begin with ourselves, but we can’t end there.

 I go with Erpenbek rather than Lerner or Knausgaard.

And then I ran into Jonathan Lee and David Goodwillie Rethink the New York Origin Story and these passages: 

LEE: Judging from the submissions that come across my desk, I think many writers are still splashing around in the wake of autofiction—emulating Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti. And I like all of those writers, but I think they have a lot to answer for, because the knockoff versions of their work are often too fragmentary and lacking in substance.

GOODWILLIE: And story.

LEE: Yes, and story. It’s almost like there’s a distrust of imagination and plot in American—and British—fiction at the moment. On the other hand, a few weeks ago I picked up the C Pam Zhang book, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, which I read soon after Inland, by Téa Obreht, and I feel like the two of them are taking some of the better qualities of autofiction and using them in new settings—like the historical western—which leaves me pretty excited about the future of literature.  I’m editing a book right now called The Manning Tree Witches, which is a historical novel about the witch trials in the UK. And it’s anything but fussy. So I’m definitely interested in seeing more work like that out there. And my hope is that we’re going to move away from this feeling that we only want to read novels about stuff that really happened to the author.

GOODWILLIE: The Knausgaard effect.

LEE:  Exactly.

***

GOODWILLIE: Which isn’t to say the writing isn’t still important. I think we all have authors we’ll read no matter what they’re writing about because we love how they write. The one thing most of the writers I love have in common is that they’re not afraid to try something completely different from book to book. They’re real storytellers.

LEE: There’s a line of Zadie Smith’s that I come back to often, from her story, “The Embassy of Cambodia”: “There is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?” And whether accidentally or not, I feel like she’s getting to the heart of not just this whole autofiction question, but also the question facing us as writers. It goes back to that bench in Central Park. Andrew Haswell Green’s story is outside my circle of experience, knowledge, and nationality, but can I relate to it enough that I can bring it within my circle?

And I have plenty to think about, including whether I am to continue lamenting not having read Rachel Cusk.