![]() ![]() Doubrovsky’s blurb places an emphasis on his status as a common person (as opposed to those who’ve written about their lives because they’re already famous), on the role of style, and on his freedom to operate outside the traditional rules of the novel (whatever those seemed to be in France at the time). So autofiction came to us as part of the language of commercial promotion, a way of marketing as new something almost as old as writing itself: the blending of the real and the invented. Interactions, threads of words, alliterations, assonances, dissonances, writing before or after literature, concrete, as we say, music. ![]() Fiction, of events and facts strictly real autofiction, if you will, to have entrusted the language of an adventure to the adventure of language, outside of the wisdom and the syntax of the novel, traditional or new. As it happens, the term’s coining occurred not in a work of criticism but in a blurb on the back of the French novelist Serge Doubrovsky’s book Fils in the late 1970s:Īutobiography? No, that is a privilege reserved for the important people of this world, at the end of their lives, in a refined style. This definition of autofiction has something in common with the German term Kunstlerroman, which describes books that chronicle an artist’s maturation, a point made by the critic Jonathan Sturgeon in a 2014 essay for Flavorwire, “The Death of the Postmodern Novel and the Rise of Autofiction.”īut that isn’t the only way to use the term, and because the term originated in France, Americans don’t have a firm grasp of its history and probably never will. In the past, I’ve tried to make a distinction in my own use of the term between autobiographical fiction, autobiographical metafiction, and autofiction, arguing that in autofiction there tends to be emphasis on the narrator’s or protagonist’s or authorial alter ego’s status as a writer or artist and that the book’s creation is inscribed in the book itself. The way the term is used tends to be unstable, which makes sense for a genre that blends fiction and what may appear to be fact into an unstable compound. Heti’s and Lerner’s books don’t lack artifice - they are novels, however their readers receive them - but the artifice is in service of creating the sensation that there’s no artifice, which is the whole point. Aubyn wrote about his alter ego Patrick Melrose, because, although he’s acknowledged that he’s drawn directly from his life to create Patrick’s, his books partake conspicuously of the traditions of the English comic novel, with its artificial dialogue and carefully choreographed set pieces. The term would be misapplied to books like the five novels Edward St. But that effect, whatever the truth of it, is an illusion. ![]() These are books that invite readers to imagine they might be reading something like a diary, where the transit from real life to the page has been more or less direct. He has published three novels, including Taipei, two books of poetry, one short story collection, and one novella in print as well as an extensive assortment of online content.The term autofiction has been in vogue for the past decade to describe a wave of very good American novels by the likes of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, Jenny Offill, and Tao Lin, among others, as well as the multivolume epic My Struggle by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard. Tao Lin is an American novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer, and artist.
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