For Writers: Autofiction Anyone?

 I dipped my toe in Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle, and came away thinking it was an interesting experiment without anything to offer me other than a temptation. I keep looking to see if I am, if "Chasing Ashes" should not be autofiction. What follows are my latest explorations and conclusion.

The press gives Rachel Cusk a great deal of attention. I feel ignorant and unread saying I have not read her, for all I find her ideas worth consideration.

Cusk, Experimentalism and the Limits of Autofiction is an essay by Zuhri James from The London Magazine. This is a serious knock against Cusk - and I think autofiction - that the "auto" will reflect the segregation of our lives. Navel-gazing is an accusation I do not want leveled at me - there are so many others with better applicability. No American can rightly ignore race.

If, as Baraka observed in 1963, critics are ‘influenced… deeply by the social and cultural mores of their own society’ and it is, therefore, ‘only natural that their criticism… should be a product of that society’, then all of this is extremely revealing. White, middle-class, privately educated writers are now able to write about forms of marginality that are entirely incommensurate with their own circumstances, without ever showing any solidarity with those whose lives are textured by all manners of injustice. This writing is then hailed by white, middle-class, privately educated critics whose embellishing reviews only further provide the fertile grounds for more writing on marginality from white, middle-class, privately educated writers. The result is a highly distorted and self-perpetuating cycle of normality. The dismal state of affairs that Akomfrah identified almost fifty years ago is alive and well. Avant-garde, experimental art is still a terrain largely reserved for white artists. By this point, it should come as no surprise that Cusk in Parade remains blind to the ways in which Norman Lewis’s career was impeded by the pervasiveness of structural racism across the art world. She herself operates within a genre of literature that is also systematically sealed off to artists of colour.

Processing: How Sam Bett Translated Osamu Dazai (Countercraft) presents an alternative to the modern autofiction.

At the launch party I attended, you made an interesting connection between The Beggar Student and the current autofiction trend. Dazai self-consciously plays around with his identity in the book and the main character is a writer named Dazai. Can you talk a bit about the novella’s relation to the Japanese “I-novel” and autofiction?

If autofiction is a kind of freewheeling autobiography that indulges in fictitious detail, then the “I-novel” is a work of fiction based on real life, where the artifice or the “fake” part is the sense of order imposed by the efficient novelistic structure. While the idea of “autofiction” as we see it today didn’t exist in Dazai’s time, I think The Beggar Student actively resists both of these stylistic conventions.

The most potent example comes midway through the book when the thirty-something narrator, a proxy for Dazai, comes to the funny realization that he’s yet to introduce himself to his new friend, the high school dropout Saeki. He tells the boy his name is Takeo Kimura, while confessing, in what seems to be a genuine aside, that “Dazai is just a pen name.” This second part is true, but the bit about Takeo Kimura is not; Dazai was born Shuji Tsushima. I think he put this here as a reminder for his readers that he wasn’t limiting himself to the facts of lived experience. The references to hairy shins throughout his work, though? Those are real. From what I’ve read, it was apparently common knowledge that he had the hairiest shins around. Sort of like George Clooney and the pig. 

I have problems with the "facts of lived experience" since I started understanding what I could write about. The imagination and memory and the accumulation of ideas constitute my "lived experience". Even such commonplace items as "Blondes have more fun" and the Pledge of Allegiance have places in my experience.

Autofiction Writers of the World, Unite! by Sarah Brouillette (Public Books) left me with several things to think about, even though it does not seem to be the manifesto I thought the title promised. Of the following, I am too far from the creative economy to feel a part of it. Secondly, I have never expected publication, I like what publication I have had but almost all of it has been a surprise, due to my criminal status. That same criminal status I adopted as permission to write as I want since there would be no publication. Lastly, that it seems the English economy is sobad for writers that autofiction may be the best way to describe

The embattled mentality of Patel’s protagonist is a product of power and class in the creative economy. The novel’s style provides further caustic response to these same phenomena, while putting it in the category of texts studied in Anna Kornbluh’s 2024 tour de force monograph, Immediacy, which offers a withering appraisal of dominant modes of contemporary writing that are very much in evidence in Patel’s I’m a Fan. The industrial conditions of writing today, argues Kornbluh, are reproduced in the form of an aesthetics of “immediacy,” which does little more than chart individual experiences. Kornbluh skewers contemporary autofiction and the growing dominance of first-person narration as self-emission that is unable to see its own social constituents, reflecting a growing absence of faith in the power of art to do anything at all of significance. Such immediate fiction, she worries, fails to offer readers the level of abstraction from individual circumstances that can illuminate our social situation, and that can thereby—or so Kornbluh argues—cohere new forms of solidarity grounded in shared experiences and desires.

But while Kornbluh views the style of immediacy as a signal and catalyst of disempowerment, Patel, for her part, uses that same style—autofiction, first-person narration, and confessionalism—as part of her totalizing exposé of the industry of cultural production: Men remain in the top positions, people from backgrounds of cultural wealth and with prestigious university degrees are in control, and becoming a social media influencer is one of the clearest paths to making any money. Starting from nothing usually means indulging in what social media demands: constancy of self-performance, self-branding, drawing upon what is at hand—that is, personal experience: “Pornographic trauma ballads,” the narrator states, “for a little bit of status.” In this light, the immediacy of Patel’s novel is not an unknowing reproduction of existing trends, nor even merely recourse to the self in the absence of other resources. Instead—and despite what Kornbluh argues—the style of I’m a Fan is a deliberately deployed and self-conscious strategy, one responding to and critiquing the classed and racialized work of writing in the UK.

The Midwesterner raised as a Protestant find the following almost repulsive. Selfhood is something to be humble about. Eccentricity is not how I read the need to be praised and adored, but is the willfulness to live as one thinks best for one's self. I almost wrote one's own soul. Living quietly does not always mean living as one with the herd. It means that one's existence is enough affirmation.

Kornbluh sees immediacy aesthetics as, at base, a constant affirmation of selfhood: Every expression wants to be affirmed; the author writes to be praised; the influencer posts to be adored; and so on: “Affirmation is the flat mutuality that immediacy style most often solicits,” she writes, memorably. But I’m a Fan suggests something else. Patel’s work points out a path for creative work not so much wanting to be affirmed, as wanting to be in a whole new situation where one would not need to want to be affirmed.

“I want a hungry press, hungry for me,” Patel’s protagonist states, “rather than jumping for scraps of attention like some rapid dog scrabbling around in the pit of my stomach desperate for someone to listen to what I have to say.” Desperation for attention is an almost inevitable affect for writers now—an industry command. To push back against it is to risk consigning yourself to the oblivion of being unknown. It’s a gravitational pull that exerts its force especially against people who are starting with few resources and working in what can reasonably appear to be intractable conditions.

Pursuing this idea further, I listened to a podcast in which an author explained why she shaded from memoir into autofiction, Is It Memoir or Something Else? (Bleeders Substack).

I am not interested in writing a memoir, other than what appears on this blog. I think, dear, readers, you will agree I live a rather boring life. Which is exactly what I want - there has been enough craziness, and escaping it feels like freedom. Before that was tawdriness and the quotidian work life. Yet, I seem to be bleeding into "Chasing Ashes" more and more. I do not mind my ideas and feelings into the story, but not in the plot. I have always favored giving my protagonist a more imaginative plot.

John Self's Is it a novel? Is it a memoir? Who cares. It’s a damned good book (The Times) is where I ended up, and where I end this post.

When is a novel not a novel? Michelle de Kretser should know. She is one of Australia’s most acclaimed novelists, and twice winner of the Miles Franklin award, aka the Australian Booker. Try her books The Lost Dog or Questions of Travel. Her previous novel, Scary Monsters, which was two back-to-back stories that could be read in either order, showed she was fed up with writing traditional novels. Now with her new one, she has blown the doors off completely.

Theory & Practice begins as a normal narrative in traditional literary fiction shape, about a man reflecting on his past, when suddenly — needle scratch — de Kretser steps in and cuts off his story. “At that point, the novel I was writing stalled.” What happens next? The book becomes a sort of bran tub of everything: memoir, essay, storytelling, all wrapped around one another. A novel sort of novel.

No, offense, but this does not seem too far afield from the novels of Melville, Defoe, or, even Cervantes.

My conclusion: the novel will have bits and pieces of me without being about me. It feels more fun that way.

sch 2/22