Brief Thoughts on Autofiction

One last dip into Processing: How Martin Riker Wrote The Guest Lecture, an interview from Counter Craft:

There’s been a lot of literary discussion over the last decade or so about the border and blurring of fiction and non-fiction. Most of that has been focused on “autofiction” and having autobiographical elements in fiction. The Guest Lecture has a different kind of fiction / nonfiction blurring, in that much of the novel is devoted to Abby’s economics lecture. As someone who is also a critic, do you have thoughts on the distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Was blurring that boundary something you set out to do?

I really appreciate the distinction you’ve drawn here, and I think you’re right, the book takes up some of the prevailing questions of this literary moment, but takes them up in its own way. Another recent book that is a little like The Guest Lecture in how it navigates this movement between fiction and nonfiction (or nonfiction as fiction) is Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus, and he and I discuss this question in an interview I did with him here, in case that’s of interest.

Another internal discussion I am having with "Chasing Ashes" is if I am pushing into autofiction. I plan on adding some historical stuff to "No Clean Slates", but I wanted to do more with "Chasing Ashes." There is also my plan to include my own experiences while on supervised release. That my characters include Captain Ahab, I think I skirt autofiction, which does not really interest me. Writing about myself as did Karl Ove Knausgård strikes me as both too much work and too dull, too narrow. Maybe if I were younger this might be a useful strategy. I do not see how I can limit my writing to myself when myself as part of the larger country is where I want to go with my writing. Writers writing about the writing life is what I noticed when I read the first volume of Knausgård's My Struggle. That has not been my life.

I followed the link in the quote to The Paris Review's The Covering Cherub: An Interview with Joshua Cohen, and found this relevant to my concerns:

INTERVIEWER

In fact, you’ve invited all sorts of things into this novel. In his review of The Netanyahus for the Guardian, Leo Robson says a lot of laudatory things but also takes the book to task for your inclusion of nonnarrative materials—letters, a whole speech—that advance the book’s intellectual project but do less to drive the drama. We could talk about the long history of novels that include found forms or essayistic material, but the issue for me is simpler than that. I read those parts as neither impressive nor pretentious, but simply wonderful, a real pleasure. As someone who loves this kind of thing, I want to ask why you love this kind of thing.

COHEN

I don’t even know that I consider it a kind of thing. It’s not like I have a switch to flick that turns me intellectual, or emotional, or psychological. People talk about everything, they don’t just say what you want them to say or even what they want to say, and characters should be the same. In the deli today there was talk of UFOs, Biden’s hair, the history of Belarus, and the grill guy’s girlfriend problems. We bring ancient history into present conversation all the time, calling facts opinions and opinions facts, and when it comes to the nonverbal, to reading—isn’t the internet just one big dumb essay? Aren’t most people reading this big dumb essay all the time, knowing they’ll never finish?

There are too many things in my head - books read, music and conversations heard, pictures seen, people known - that are relevant to my life and actions. Why shouldn't the characters in a novel? I no longer think the realistic novel is realistic if it does not include the ideas derived from the characters' histories into the novel. Nice to see I might be on the track of a good idea.

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