"Ok. There has occurred a very important shift in contemporary literature. And there is, as usual, a big battle being fought about it. I think you all know about this thing called autofiction, or the literature of the “I,” the fact that lots of people have stopped writing novels using he, she, and the past tense, to use “I,” “Yo,” and the present tense. It’s not just a matter of style, it means much more than that. It totally changes the ethics of literature, and that’s why it’s so important and that battle is being fought. The thing is, with the he, she, and past tense literature, you are made to be the audience. The narrator tells you what happened, but, basically, it’s all gone and there’s nothing you can do about it. That was ancient literature. The new literature, the literature of the “I” is not about telling about yourself, I mean it’s not just as simple as that. It can be, but it’s not essentially. When you read something which says “I,” you become the hero of the book. It’s you. It hypnotizes you into being the one person who experiences everything that happens."
Several months ago, I returned to the Institut Mémoires d'Édition Contemporaine (IMEC) outside of Caen to consult the archives of Guillaume Dustan and Édouard Levé — two French guys, both born in 1965, both of whom died around 40 years old (Levé by definitive suicide, Dustan a bit murkier), and both having undertaken, alongside other creative endeavors (Levé his photography, Dustan his films), rather unorthodox writing projects that foregrounded their own lives (what's sometimes called écriture de soi, or self-writing).
The IMEC is located at the repurposed Abbaye d'Ardenne, originally established in the 12th century, then more or less continuously inhabited by industrious monks up until the French Revolution, when it was sold off as national property, and eventually winding up in the hands of a wealthy Englishman, who would run a Protestant congregation there. The abbey isn't far from the famed beaches of Normandy that were stormed on D-Day. In the days following the maneuver, twenty Canadian soldiers who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time were killed there by Hitler Youth. It is also said that secretly aborted fetuses are buried on the grounds.
Nevertheless, or perhaps as a result, the old abbey happens to be a fitting location for the major archive of contemporary French literature and thought (you can find partial or complete archives of the likes of all from Duras to Althusser). Dustan describes literature as the "true religion of France," and that sense of veneration truly came through at the long tables down the middle, where the pews once were, among the sleek modern bookshelves, under the vaulted ceilings. It is also fitting in a more ironic sense, specifically for Dustan's archive, considering how squarely he placed the blame for the repressive social attitudes on Christian morality. Though now technically laïque, meaning not religiously affiliated (France strictly enforces the separation of church and state, though of course many of the holidays are holdovers from the Christian calendar), it feels like a small sticking it to the man to leaf through copies of mini gay magazines Dustan helped publish or in which he was written about full of raunchy and graphic ads for gay sex lines on the Minitel.
My last evening there, we had the pleasure of attending a talk by the illustrious François Sureau of the Académie Française, the public institution composed of 36 (mostly old white) successful literary luminaries who are charged with, among other tasks related to the defense of the national intellectual heritage, overseeing and approving any developments to the French language (the anglophone world has nothing of the sort in the public domain, just our beloved privately run dictionaries). By function alone, it is quite a conservative body; this guy was one of the self-avowed "anti-conformist" center-rightists.
The talk (attended almost exclusively by older folks, mostly white) reminded me what the mainstream is like and what they read (the kind of people who put on a button-down for a night out, woohoooo). The crowd was happily regaled with stories of war and passages of Apollinaire recited with due gravity and aplomb. I could really feel the room swoon at this rogue esprit libre, both prestigious (graduate of the École Normale de l'Administration — like Dustan, actually — where most French politicians attend) and scrappy (scruffy beard, fought in Yugoslavia). This was all the more of a jolt due to its stark contrast with the smut and experimentation in which I'm steeped in the archives and in general. It's hard to imagine Dustan being asked to present at an occasion like this, with a crowd like this turning out to hear him.
Sureau made a passing and unsurprising comment about the death of the French novel. One of the downfalls he mentions is autofiction, which, incidentally, or no, is exactly what I was there studying. He wants high symbolism in the third person (Captain Ahab chasing the white whale that is actually a metaphor for man's hubris etc); now, due to flagging imagination and a surfeit of self-absorption, writers are increasingly rewriting their own measly (paraphrasing) lives in slightly fictionalized form.
Autofiction had its heyday in France in the 1990s, but dates back to earlier pioneers such as Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, and Patrick Modiano. The "auto" is understood to come from the tradition of autobiography, while the "fiction" can represent the mere narrativizing of autobiographical material up to the modification or wholesale invention of information that is presented as autobiographical. The main literary tactic involved is a shift from the third person (he, she, they) to first person (I), placing the reader in the mind the narrator-protagonist. For Dustan, the most important work of autofiction is Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991) — if you've seen the movie, the book is 10x more gruesome, and accomplishes something different from the movie, as you really inhabit the twisted psyche of the murderous narratagonist, Wall Street banker Jason Bateman. The idea was in part to turn the mirror on the reader, confront them with their own murderous tendencies.
The tradition of critiquing this type of potentially navel-gazing self-writing goes back a ways. On the one hand, there is the question of the "legitimacy" of the banal in art, which for a long time only featured the stories of the gods and their chosen greats. Then there is the Marxist critique of self-writing as a narcissistic detour away from the collective. Beginning in 1975 with Discipliner et Punir and continuing in 1976 with Histoire de la sexualité vol. 1: la volonté de savoir, Michel Foucault will mount a critique of the liberal subject—the notion of a coherent self in control of their thoughts and agency who acts in the world based on their desires that reigned since the beginning of the Enlightenment. For Foucault, any adherence to an identity traps you in an illusion of fixity and durability, when the self is actually in constant flux and is largely constructed and controlled by outside factors, such as the discursive world in which you are enmeshed. In other words, we produce our selves out of the available means and modes of conceiving of selves in our social environment. He traces l'ecriture de soi (writing of the self) from Saint Augustine's early Christian Confessions (397 AD) through Montaigne and Rousseau's modern self-exegeses. The stakes are high: l'écriture de soi was sometimes seen as a means of self-liberation, but it actually risked reinscribing the writer — and vicariously the reader — deeper into the illusion of their own autonomous subjectivity. Other post-structuralists like Roland Barthes, who announced the "death of the author" in his call for reading texts as pure signs absent any intention of an author, along with Lacan's structural psychoanalysis and Derrida's deconstruction, permeated the French—and soon North American — academic space with a generalized suspicion of any knowing, intentional, coherent subject.
It was in this context that the term autofiction first appeared on "the scene," as far as we know. In 1977, Serge Doubrovsky wrote Fils in response to Philippe Lejeune's 1975 Le pacte autobiographique, which amounted to a last-ditch modernist effort to preserve some sense of a coherent subject. Doubrovsky, in part doing the bidding of theory, sought to undermine the trust that Lejeune declared essential and on display between the autobiographer's triple position as narrator-protagonist-author and the reader, demonstrating that even the genre which might claim to be the last bastion of the possibility of fidelity to some sort of subjective truth was itself suspect.
For his part, Foucault preferred more imaginative and antisubjective literature that demonstrated aesthetically the discursive games out of which subjectivation arises. Raymond Roussel, whose machine-like writing rules produced uncanny narratives of subjects seemingly devoid of agency, which influenced the surrealists and the constraint approach of the Oulipo, was his primary example. More recently, Édouard Levé, also into Roussel, employed this approach in autofiction: his 2005 Autoportrait comprises around 120 pages of memories, predilections, and convictions one following the next in apparently random order in one long paragraph. As a post-modernist literary machine, it contributes to the post-structuralist posthuman portrayal of the subject as nothing more than a collection of synchronic memory-associations, less a personal history than a snapshot of the jumble of images that occupy our vague and disordered repository of memories.
Dustan, on the other hand, is a modernist-humanist: if he doesn't quite stick to a coherent narrative, he certainly doesn't follow rigorous rules, and what emerges isn't the deconstructed subject but rather the subject in its disordered wholeness. He's largely following in the footsteps of Marguerite Duras, who for Dustan "gave working people permission to write novels," crediting her with the nearly single-handed democratization of writing and self-narration in the French language (GD, 175). I think there's something to this evolution or surpassing of the bourgeois novel, a movement that Duras opened up — as Thomas Clerc puts it in the preface to Dustan's Œuvres II, "the novel is the heterosexual of literature" (45). At the same time, he is a post-post-modernist: rather than putting the theory into the self, as Doubrovsky does, Dustan follows Monique Wittig's feminist call to bring the self into theory.
And while Dustan's writing is "literary," in that it operates as a text and slots into a literary tradition, it is also doing something else: his subject performs an auto-psychoanalysis in a return to the self, picking up the pieces after total deconstruction. In this sense, writing isn't merely a literary practice of responding to and referencing your favorite authors or works, but rather a practice of creating, becoming, and caring for oneself (Foucault will term this application of "healthy" writing of the self a "technique of the self," referencing specifically the journaling practice of the Stoics, contra Plato's fixation on the word spoken in public as rhetoric). In the literary realm, Duras' democratization of the writing of the self is key to the emergence of autofiction, but we see that it is a literary form that emerges not purely out of the literary realm, cut off from the world (no form purely emerges in this sense): it emerges also out of a shift taking place in the culture regarding the relationship to the self, the further coming-into-agency of the modern "subject." He says it best himself:
There, what I mean is, it’s that what we took to be moments in history since 1960, since the lid started to rattle and whistle incessantly, since 1965, were actually constitutive of a code (of looks, key phrases, attitudes, rhythms, dances, gentle habits) that can be employed . To live the adventure. The magical-mystical road-movie of our lives (because we all get high, obviously). That’s it. What I mean is that the people born in 1960, and even more in 1965, have been through that: a fun world. A world where there was always, in the margins, of course, but not as much as you’d think and actually, even in the center (because of the uncontrolled mass media and their marvelous, if pedagogico-liberal and liberatory taste for scandal): artists-of-their-own-lives. Dandies, really (democratization of bohemia), and so what is autofiction: the liberty to make yourself. Autofaction. Auto-da-sé. That’s it. Be a hero, ok, even if it’s in your room, and then I’m going out tonight and it’s stronger than me. It’s the major ideological break between us-the-youth (in the head) and the sixtyeighters. Or those who stole ’68 from those who made it, as we were helpfully reminded this year by I forget who. And who for historical reasons grew up in a boring world. So there you go, that’s all they knew. (Génie divin, 226-7, my translation)
At his best, I think Dustan is championing and modeling this technique of the self for the rest of us.
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This is long enough and I'm now just rambling. Now that I'm getting into Heidegger (uh oh), I'll have to tackle the ways in which the subjectivity Dustan constructs in his early books may be locked within Nietzschean subjectivism, but may also be a way to transcend it — a glimpse of what might come after this subject-object morass of our modern metaphysics (dissolution of the self molecularly, through drugs, and molar-ly, in the dance-floor throng). And also, in a literary theory mode, the difference between the truth in a novel (symbolic), in philosophy (rhetorical), and in autobiography (historical). Alsoalso the emergence of autotheory with Barthes' Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes in 1975, and its parallel development with autofiction.
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