Autofiction To Autofictional
Autofiction To Autofictional
Autofiction To Autofictional
A. Effe (*)
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
e-mail: [email protected]
H. Lawlor
Exeter College, Oxford, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
Autofiction has established itself as one of the most open and lively fields in
contemporary literature. It is a complex notion to define, connected to the
author’s defiance with regard to autobiography, romans à clef, the con-
straints or illusions of transparency; a notion that is enhanced by its many
extensions even as it robustly resists the incessant attacks to which it is sub-
jected. (autofiction.org, n.d.; our translation)
media but also demonstrates how the inclusion of these diverse examples
challenges and develops current conceptions of the autofictional. The
Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (2019), edited by Martina
Wagner-Egelhaaf, is pioneering in providing an overview of autobiograph-
ical practices across the globe and in different media. The present volume
instigates a dialogue between several case studies and forms that the hand-
book brings into view, with a specific focus on the autofictional, rather
than on autobiographical life-writing practices more generally. It addresses,
for example, the correspondences between autofiction and the Japanese
tradition of the I-novel, the function of the autofictional in documentary
cinema and that of the diary in the autofictional, and vice versa. The vol-
ume considers the affordance of autofictional techniques in contemporary
South African self-portraiture and the potential role that the incorporation
of the term could play in the reception of life writing in the Arabic tradi-
tion. As well as establishing possible connections between these cultures,
forms, and media, this dialogue also testifies to the very different ways in
which the autofictional functions across different places and times.
To date, few studies on autofiction have attempted to start this kind of
conversation. Dix’s Autofiction in English addresses cultural specificities,
asking whether the concept is applied in the same way in Anglophone
works as it is in the French context, or whether the concept itself changes
and evolves upon entering new cultural contexts (2018, 9). He concludes
that certain characteristics play a more conspicuous role in the British tra-
dition than they do in the French: these include intersubjectivity, seriality,
metafiction, and intertextuality, as well as attention to the therapeutic pos-
sibilities of the act of writing. Karen Ferreira-Meyers notes in addition
that, in the Anglophone world, autofiction is perceived primarily as a
mode rather than as a genre (2018, 41). Laura Marcus’s contribution to
the present volume further develops such comparisons by demonstrating
that French autofictional works exhibit features that are not as prevalent in
British ones, particularly the prominent intersection of photography and
narrative. In this volume, the French tradition remains a crucial part of the
discussion and an important reference point in many of the chapters, but
it is brought into dialogue with a broad range of traditions, with the effect
of reshaping, expanding, and enriching our understanding of the
autofictional.
***
1 INTRODUCTION: FROM AUTOFICTION TO THE AUTOFICTIONAL 7
wide spectrum of forms and contexts of the autofictional that are explored
in the remainder of the volume.
Part II considers the affordances and effects of autofiction as a literary
strategy. Examining the autofictional as both a writing and reading tech-
nique, the chapters focus on what is gained from the application and
extension of the term, and from the adoption of autofictional practices.
Hanna Meretoja shows, under the title of “Metanarrative Autofiction,”
how what she views as a new twenty-first-century subgenre of autofic-
tional texts affords new perspectives on, and has the potential to heighten,
the collective narrative agency of readers and writers. She understands by
“metanarrativity” a kind of self-reflexive storytelling that critically engages
with larger cultural narrative templates and their role in how we make
sense of our lives. Using the examples of Ernaux’s Les Années (The Years)
(2008), Knausgaard’s Min kamp (My Struggle) (2009–2011), and Finnish
singer-songwriter Astrid Swan’s Viimeinen kirjani (2019, My Last Book),
Meretoja illustrates how the texts comment on and offer alternatives to
existing master-narratives about aging, illness, masculinity, or fatherhood.
Autofictional texts, she shows, are particularly well placed to alert us to the
ways in which our lives and our self-understanding are determined by
dominant and normative cultural narrative models. They also help us to
challenge these narratives, and to actively choose the ones we use to inter-
pret our lives and selves because autofiction often pivots on the relation
between what is real and what is imaginary, and on the relation between
our lives and their narrativization.
Helle Egendal continues the exploration of the affordance of the auto-
fictional for exposing normative social models in “Multilingual Autofiction:
Mobilizing Language(s).” She argues that in post-migrant literature pub-
lished since the 1990s, a new mode, multilingual autofiction, has emerged
that highlights and resists the monocultural assumptions shaping the social
and political context in which the respective texts are published. Her three
case studies, written by German-Turkish, Swedish-Tunisian, and Danish-
Palestinian authors, demonstrate that this mode transverses different
countries and cultures. Egendal considers both the aesthetic scope and the
political potential of this autofictional mode, in which the authors use
polyphony and polyglossia to express and negotiate their multilingual
identities. The flexibility and diversity that the autofictional affords in this
respect is further mobilized in these texts to penetrate political discourses
on migration, transculturality, and racism. By considering the reception of
1 INTRODUCTION: FROM AUTOFICTION TO THE AUTOFICTIONAL 11
these texts and the public engagement of their authors, Egendal directs
our focus to the political and social affordances of the autofictional.
Turning our attention to the autofictional in the visual arts, Ferreira-
Meyers and Bontle Tau continue the discussion of social affordances in
“Visual Autofiction: A Strategy for Cultural Inclusion.” They argue that
the autofictional is being employed in the creative practice of contempo-
rary South African artists to initiate cultural inclusion within a field that
has historically favored European visual narratives and excluded many oth-
ers. Focusing on Tau’s self-portrait photography, they explore the ways in
which the autofictional enables a practice of self-narration which is ever-
changing in terms of the viewpoints adopted and offered. The role-playing
and constant repositioning of selves and stories that autofictional tech-
niques afford offers a means through which artists can figuratively insert
themselves into the Western tradition of portraiture: Tau assumes the clas-
sical postures in which white, Western women have typically been repre-
sented, and in so doing highlights the virtual absence of black protagonists
in the canon. Ferreira-Meyers and Tau consider how autofictional self-
portraiture highlights the skewed nature of representation in this tradi-
tion, and how it might better accommodate the diversity of selves and
stories of creative practitioners.
Dix’s chapter “Autofiction, Post-conflict Narratives, and New Memory
Cultures” demonstrates the affordance of autofictional techniques for cre-
ating new forms of public commemoration. This affordance is utilized in
particular, he argues, by contemporary postcolonial writers in post-conflict
societies. Focusing on Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and
Cartwright’s Up Against the Night (2015), Dix shows how both texts use
autofictional structures and techniques to forge a form of cultural memory
of the Nigerian Biafran War of 1967–1970 and of the massacre of Zulus
by Boers in 1838, respectively. In both cases, this form of cultural memory
is simultaneously individual (albeit concerning events before the authors’
lifetime) and collective, and aspires to post-conflict reconciliation. Dix’s
analysis foregrounds the importance of the context of reception and of the
paratextual and intertextual signals that invite autofictional readings in the
absence of onomastic correspondence. His analysis of Adichie’s and
Cartwright’s works through an autofictional lens enables an enriched
understanding of their effects and of how these are engendered—an
understanding achieved through his extension of the term.
Hala Kamal, Fatma Atef Massoud, and Zainab Magdy subsequently
explore this extension of the term in “Autofiction as a Lens for Reading
12 A. EFFE AND H. LAWLOR
readings. The new insights that autofiction as a critical lens affords are
prominent in Kamal, Massoud, and Magdy’s discussion of Egyptian life
writing. An important insight gained in their application of autofiction
as a concept to Arab literature is that autofiction’s affordances are not
only literary and critical but also political and social, a perspective that
emerges powerfully in Egendal’s study of transcultural autobiographical
literature, in Dix’s discussion of postcolonial texts in post-conflict societ-
ies, and in Forné and López-Gay’s exploration of Argentinian and
Spanish documentary cinema. All three of these chapters illustrate the
potential that Meretoja describes for the autofictional to challenge domi-
nant cultural narrative models. This grounds the practice’s real-world
relevance, which comes to the fore in Wagner-Egelhaaf ’s discussion of
Doubrovsky’s autofictional works. Effe and Gibbons’s holistic and cog-
nitive approach to autofictional texts, and modes of writing and reading,
offers a new way of substantiating our critical hypotheses on such real-
life effects. In the volume’s various extensions and modifications of term
and concept, James’s chapter helps us to differentiate between the kinds
of fictionalization and modes of fictionality we find in different autofic-
tional texts.
***
Across the chapters, we see autofictional practice and criticism take many
different shapes, and it is on these differences as much as on the intersec-
tions between chapters and approaches that this volume’s contribution is
based. The volume sets out to expand the concept with a view to creating
a heterogeneous, malleable, and ongoing discourse on the autofictional.
Our hope is that, in the reading of this volume, many more connections
and comparisons will be made, and many more conversations on the auto-
fictional will take place. Overall, the volume offers the kind of “reconsid-
ered, critical response” that Attlee calls for in her recent article on
autofiction. Perhaps, as the conversation develops, we will turn more
toward the pragmatics of autofiction, and adopt a holistic and cognitive
perspective, focusing on how, why, and in which contexts authors write
texts that readers perceive as autofictional. Perhaps we will pay more atten-
tion to autofictional strategies and structures as they emerge across an
author’s oeuvre, or in intertextual relations between parts of a series.
Perhaps we will be more open to recognizing autofictional moments in
1 INTRODUCTION: FROM AUTOFICTION TO THE AUTOFICTIONAL 17
works that do not seem to fit the generic category, as well as in media
other than literature: visual art, photography, painting, and film, to name
but a few. Perhaps, in adopting this more encompassing approach, we will
be receptive to the ways in which our understanding of texts from coun-
tries and literary traditions where autofiction does not (yet) exist as a con-
cept changes if we approach them through an autofictional lens, and to
how such texts can, in turn, enrich and transform our understanding of
autofiction and the autofictional.
Works Cited
Alberca, Manuel. 2007. El pacto ambiguo: De la novela autobiográfica a la autofic-
ción. Colección Estudios Críticos de Literatura 30. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva.
Attlee, Alice. 2019. Fiction of Facts. Times Literary Supplement, May 9, 2019.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/autofiction-fiction-of-facts/. Accessed
5 Apr 2021.
autofiction.org. n.d. Présentation. https://www.autofiction.org/index.
php?category/Accueil. Accessed 5 Apr 2021.
Boldrini, Lucia, and Julia Novak, eds. 2017. Experiments in Life-Writing:
Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cusk, Rachel. 2019. “The Case of Yiyun Li.” Review of Dear Friend, from My
Life I Write to You in your Life and When Reasons End. New York Review of
Books, July 18, 2019.
Dix, Hywel. 2018. Introduction: Autofiction in English: The Story So Far. In
Autofiction in English, ed. Hywel Dix, 1–23. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ferreira-Meyers, Karen. 2018. Does Autofiction Belong to French or Francophone
Authors and Readers Only? In Autofiction in English, ed. Hywel Dix, 27–48.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Heti, Sheila. 2007. “Interview with David Hickey.” Interview by Sheila Heti. The
Believer, November 1, 2007. https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-
dave-hickey/. Accessed 5 Apr 2021.
Ioannidou, Stavrini. 2013. Autofiction à la grecque: Greek Autobiographical
Fiction (1971–1995), PhD diss., King’s College, University of London.
https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/12691039/Studentthesis-Stavrini_
Ioannidou_2013.pdf. Accessed 7 Apr 2021.
Jones, Elizabeth H. 2010. Autofiction: A Brief History of a Neologism. In Life
Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature, ed. Richard
Bradford, 174–184. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Missinne, Lut. 2013. Oprecht gelogen: Autobiografische romans en autofictie in de
Nederlandse literatuur na 1985. Vantilt: Nijmegen.
18 A. EFFE AND H. LAWLOR
Missinne, Lut. 2019. “Jeroen Brouwers: Bezonken Rood (1981) [Sunken Red].”
In Autobiography/Autofiction: An International and Interdisciplinary
Handbook, edited by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, 1930–1945. Berlin:
De Gruyter.
Mortimer, Armine Kotin. 2009. Autofiction as Allofiction: Doubrovsky’s ‘L’Après-
vivre.’. L‘Esprit Créateur 49 (3): 22–35.
Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina, ed. 2019. Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction.
Vol. 3. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to
the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence
and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the
permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
right holder.