The term ‘autofiction’ was first used on the backcover of Fils, a 1977 novel by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky. In defining the book as ‘a fiction of strictly real events’, he felt the need to improvise with a neologism as his new work didn’t adhere to the expectations of classic autobiography. In particular, his work treated time experimentally, with radical shifts and skips of beat – which were inappropriate to the strict ‘truth’ purport of autobiography. LeJeune has termed this the ‘autobiographical contract’ or assumption that the reader makes of the narrating ‘I’ sharing a name and manifest identity with the author – a requirement not necessarily met by autofictional works. Later still, with the growing momentum of the 

term – being picked up by various French authors – Doubrovsky provided a more detailed definition of ‘autofiction’ and reflected that the creation of this new category had been necessary for he had been a ‘nobody’ and autobiographies were works written by ‘somebodies’. The abjection of this reflection was aided by Doubrovsky’s own self-comparison to the figures of the French historical tradition of Autobiography – a line he drew from Augustine’s Confessions, to The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to Montaigne’s essais-philosophiques.

 

So, if autofiction is distinct from autobiography, how does it differ from autobiographical fiction? The historical context is a determining factor. Autofiction, originated at the date of 1977, is a child of postmodernism, and critics agree that it carries with it ‘po-mo’s’ self-reflexive genetic makeup. Silbergleid writes that autofiction remains “insistent on its functionality, demonstrating a level of self-awareness that sets it apart from autobiographical fiction in a traditional sense” (Silbergleid, 2009, 137). Likewise, in a similar timeframe and context, the term is first known to appear in the Anglophone context (having been confined previously to the French academy) in Linda Hutcheson’s 1987 article ‘Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism’ in the Routledge published journal Textual Practice. Similarly, Grell suggests that the term has a precise contemporary significance, because it is no longer possible to write from the position of a verifiable subject narrator of the self – the twentieth century’s cultural agenda of psychoanalysis, surrealism, modernism and post-structuralism has taken this option off the map – in other words ‘autofictions’ are, and have to be self-aware.

 

 

Marjorie Worthington feels that the term implies less of a genre of writing, but specifically refers to a kind of writing that is ‘of’ the present moment. In 2014, she noted the emergence of a large group of recent novels mostly, if not solely written by white men that “feature characterized versions of their authors and highlight the anxieties of determining the place of the author in the construction, reception and interpretation of the text” (Ferreira-Meyers, 2014, 32). She presents the autofiction trend, in its particular adoption by the white male community as a reaction to the previous decades’ of a broadening of types of authors – The Published, now including more writers whose subjectivities actively engage questions of intersectionality notably in regard to race and gender. She argues that autofiction has a long tradition, but that the visible ‘burgeoning’ today articulates a response to the depreciating value of ‘white male cultural currency’. For illustration, she signposts David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, published in 2011. Likewise, though without a gendered determination, Jonathan Sturgeon wrote that many of the best novels of 2014 were ‘autofictions’ which “vigorously reasserted the self […] [and] jettison the logic of postmodernism in favour of a new relation between the self and fiction” (ibid, 33).

 

One example of how this new affair between the self and fiction is being utilised, comes from Feminist writing. Yanbing Er describes women’s autofictions as a ready critique of post-feminism – a term coined by Angela McRobbie to describe what she saw as a takeover of collectively-oriented Second-wave Feminism by a pernicious strain of individualism and self-improvement: “the post-feminist subject […] is far more concerned with the apolitical ambition of personal development both at home and in the workplace [than…] Feminism’s historic quest for the end of patriarchal domination.” (Er, 2018, 318). To many, women’s autofiction, and its implied positioning of female lived experience as its subject, revives the Second-Wave Feminist dictum that ‘the personal is political’. While the roots of women’s autofiction are often cited as being in the 1990s first-person narratives by queer and feminist writers from the then New York literary scene – namely composed of Eileen Myles, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. Er, in her proscription that female autofiction today, is a strategy against post-feminism, has chosen to focus her scholarship on writers of a different identity – “white, highly educated, middle class women who display these dominant traits of the archetypal postfeminist subject”  so that readers who are likely permeable to the post-feminist discourse, may have their conscious’ raised.  

 

Autofiction, whether a timeless genre in the making, or a response to current conditions, is the writing of the self. Its lines say ‘this happened to me’. To utter such, is to confess. Confession cannot happen without another to bear witness. Foucault, in his 1979 History of Sexuality alerted the reader to the relationship between confession and power – that only some people get to confess. In reading autofictions, we should ask who we are hearing confess, and who else might like to get the chance.

 

Holly Moore writes a blog at thecrop.co