Autofiction - Reaching Others, Exposing Ourselves

 I do not think I write autofiction. Yet, there are bits of me and parts of my life in what I write.

Since I am still trying t figure out what I am doing, I read essays like The Autofiction Writer and the Torturer by Marcus Hijko. Which is part an exploration of autofiction and a review of Emmanuel Carrère's Yoga.

But in a 2016 interview, Carrère revealed he was blocked, unable to write—in part because he was troubled by having revealed these intimate details. “What’s difficult,” Carrère said, preferring to speak in impersonal terms, “is that when one writes about oneself, one is obligated to write about other people.” He recalled an interview he had read with Jacques Massu, a former French general accused of torture during the Algerian War. “In the interview, Massu said, of la gégène—torture with electric prods from a generator—‘Listen. Don’t exaggerate. The prods? I tried them on myself. It hurts, but not worse than that.’” Carrère commented: “What’s atrocious about torture is that someone else is afflicting you, and you don’t know when he will stop.”

Carrère condemned the “nonsense” and “moral ugliness” of Gen. Massu’s false equivalence, and then made a striking equivalence himself, once again reaching for an impersonal pronoun: “To write bad things about yourself … it’s like Massu using the generator on himself. You decide yourself when you’re going to stop. When you write about others,” on the other hand, “there’s a huge responsibility.” Finally, Carrère revealed what appeared to be blocking him from writing: “For my part, I have used the generator on people other than myself. And that bothers me.”

I do not think I have written anything intimate about anyone I know, Perhaps, that is a fault in my fiction. What led Stephanie R. to question the depth of my stories. Something for me to think about. What has interested me for the moment is the conflict between economic survival and personal integrity.

While reading, this paragraph made me think of Ernest Hemingway:

But even without the constraints of his divorce settlement, Carrère acknowledges the limits of his ability to tell the whole truth. He suggests that there is an inevitable distortion of experience in the practice of writing (“I can never really experience … because right away I feel the need to put it into words”) and acknowledges his inability to “see things as they are, instead of pasting this vision over with the sort of nonstop, subjective, wordy, one-sided, narrow commentary that we produce all the time without even being aware of it.” This distrust of objectivity is characteristic of works of autofiction, which stake less of a claim to factual or journalistic truth than traditional works of autobiographical writing like memoir.

Hemingway took out the subjectivity, but where in all his words does he say stop talking, because it kills the connection with experience?

But what has me really thinking is this passage: 

Autofiction has often been derided as both overly concerned with a writer’s individual experience—“navel-gazing”—and inconsiderate to those other than the writer whose lives it depicts. But these criticisms betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what draws writers and readers alike to autofiction. The best—most redemptive—autofiction since Proust included more than 400 characters in his rhizomatic lifework has concerned itself with the ways in which individual lives and identities are connected to the lives and identities of others, and sought to represent this interconnectedness to readers who also sense the terror of being “walled-up” inside their own consciousness. Writers may not be deaf, dumb, blind, or paralyzed, but they may be condemned to their beds in cork-lined, windowless rooms, perfectly able to listen, think, see, move—perhaps even form human connections—while faced with the impossible demand to only observe their breathing without modifying it.

I always worried that from point-of-view was too narrow. I still do. Poor KH has read my stuff until he is ready to pull out his hair just because I think there is too much of me. What I consider to be the worse thing is to be boring, and boring means not making a connection with anyone more than myself, Let's see what happens.

sch 5/27

This came into today, from Kill Your Darlings, The Humiliation of Writing Fiction:

This difference is the difference between memory and a dream. Dreams processing things that never happened, drawn from images and situations that did. Reconfiguring them so they are unfamiliar. And in this reconfiguration suggesting an emotional truth. Some sort of truth. Mostly, I don’t know why I put things in the stories I write. Images appear. Patterns emerge as though from vapour. It becomes obvious later—through being attuned to the ways strange resonances impose themselves on a text.

This is what makes fiction embarrassing, for me: it requires inviting someone into a story, letting them into that time of night where the mind is porous, opening into sleep. They can walk in and feel around, reach out and touch objects, wonder why some things are so outsized, see things I did not intend to be seen.

sch 5/28