Autofiction: mothers and daughters

 

According to Philippe Gasparini, the term autofiction first popped up in 1977, used by Serge Doubrovsky to describe his novel, Fils:

« Autobiography ? No, that’s a privilege reserved for the world’s notables, in the evening of their lives, and in a pretty style. Fiction, events and facts strictly real : if you want, autofiction, to have confided the language of adventure to the adventure of language, outside of wisdom and the syntax of the novel, whether traditional or new.”

Doubrovsky’s view of autobiography is, of course, meant as a critique of the ever irritating bourgeoisie, but it folds pretty neatly into a bourgeois division between the notables and the rest – thus ignoring the celebrity, and its offspring – the influencer, the gossiped about, etc., etc. However, the term itself fell into all of our laps, and as we learned to take selfies and put up our marriage photographs on Facebook, we began to want a different type of fiction.

Yet how different is it? There’s an interesting relation, here, between two of the most famous French novelists – Colette and Annie Ernaux. Both present their own selves boldly in their novels. Both are rather obsessed with the mother-daughter relationship. Both are photogenic authors, both are able to straddle, as few can, the demands of a referentially high cultural strata and the relentless demands of fandom, self-help, music hall entertainer and activist.  The hierarchies, it must be said, in literature are a game of pick up sticks – high and low is always a rigged up and ephemeral structural principle that falls like a curse on those paper products – texts.

Colette wrote a piece for the October 30, 1937 Figaro entitled My Ideas about the Novel, which begins:

“I am sure that I have never written a novel, a real one, a work of pure imagination, free from all the sludge of memory and egotism, purified of myself, of my worst and my best, of, finally, resemblance. What I call real novels are those that I read, and not those that I write. The latter I write slowly, with care, as I can; the former I read with a passionate rapacity which neglects nothing, which forms itself as a kind of violence.”

Her notions of the novel are at once modernist and counter-modern. In 1937, surrealism was already, for a school, long in the tooth – and the surrealist assault on the novel had passed. But it passed by jimmying loose the subject in the novel. The surrealists, above all, doubted character. But Colette held to the long oral tradition of the hero, which surrounds the hero with a sort of magic – what I would call a soundtrack.

“I know all too well, from experience, that the heroes of novels, patiently and piece by piece accountered with the traits of character, from their faces, their crimes and virtues, only wait on the pleasure of the author, and her decisions, up to a certain point. Past this point, they are big enough to behave on their own. This is the revenge of the phantom on the free thinker, of the automaton on the imprudent magician.”

This I call the oral tradition – a tradition in which the speaker, telling the story, is well aware that it is formed between himself and the listener, or listeners. That moment of surrender is hard to face – one gives oneself away. Much of the Flaubertian theme in the novel is about distancing that apocalyptic embarrassment – the embarrassment of doing the thing at all. Colette, however, knowing all this, comes up with her own strategy of never quite writing the “true” novel. I absolutely believe her. What the author of the book thinks of his or her characters, curiously, can only be taken seriously to a certain point.

This is why male writers writing female characters, white writers writing black characters, straight writers writing gay characters, need the vice versa, the female, black, gay writers to free themselves – and vice versa then comes for the latter. Literature encodes the kind of game Roger Caillois calls ilinx – games of vertigo and disorientation, voices that possess the voice we mistakenly thought was our own, when it was just borrowed ad hoc from social and corporal circumstances. And will have to be given back in the end.

Literature will be revolutionary or it will not be at all.