Making the Case for Self-narration Against Autofiction

Over the centuries, the dichotomy fictional discourse / referential discourse has spawned many theories of authorship, which, until the second part of the twentieth century, have steadfastly asserted the superiority of the imagining author over the autobiographer, of fiction over facts. To give random examples: Aristotle and his poet, the status of the author created by French copyright laws dating from the French revolution, the Romantic idolatry of the creating self or again the protectionism inaugurated by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley’s The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. They have all contributed—with different politics in mind—to foster the status of the fiction-author as an exceptional being. And, as Donald E. Pease pointed out, “from the fifteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century, the term ‘author’ [fiction writers] enjoyed a more or less constant rise in social prestige” (Burke 266). As a consequence, writers dabbling in facts should have been ceaselessly disparaged. But, and this is also the case with other artistic forms, literature follows the ebb and flow of the zeitgeist. So, even as the status of authors has risen more and more quickly, facts and their rendition have always been valued, maybe because there will always be a certain category of readers who, openly or shamefully, crave real accounts of personal experience. This might explain, for instance, the insecure attitude of eighteenth-century authors who, at a time when first-person narratives were in great demand, made sure—in prefaces for instance—that their readers did not mistake them for their narrators. My purpose here is not to offer a short history of the fiction / facts competition over the years, but to give a background of the genre we are interested in while conjuring up the notion of the prestige of the author.

Everyone who is more or less knowledgeable about the history of literature knows that in order to reconcile or use both trends, some writers have created a hybrid genre in an awareness of the dichotomy aforementioned. Although the hybrid genre dates to Les Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau or even as far back as Les Confessions by Saint Augustine and counts major though controversial milestones such as David Copperfield, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and La Recherche du Temps Perdu, the critical response to such a genre is only fairly recent perhaps because for a long time literary theory remained in denial, either opting for a fictional approach or a referential approach and never considering the remote possibility of a mixed approach. And some of those who studied the corpus seriously, like Käte Hamburger, imperiously declared the blend unnatural. But before we move on to the way literary theorists have recently responded to this blend, we can conclude this brief introduction by offering a tentative interpretation of the reasons why such a genre was ever created and sustained.

Needless to say that it allows, or at least it allowed for a long time, writers to get the best of both worlds without compromising their “artistic integrity.” The generic ambiguity still imparts to their texts a fictional status while the autobiographical content appeals to the basest instincts of readers, i.e. the will not to truth, but to facts. This is not about verisimilitude, about making fiction look real; the technical core of what we can tentatively call autobiographical novels consists in distilling within the text some personal facts that the reader can identify as such, thanks to biographical data available in the paratextual world. My contention here is that originally, autobiographical novels stemmed from the author’s will to enjoy the rising social status of fiction writers that also allowed them to satisfy what Freud called “the defensive will to impersonality” while telling others about oneself, disclosing one’s fascinating personality to the Other (qtd. in Burke xxv). Or, in Maurice Couturier’s words: “Westerners feel the need to talk and build narratives about themselves while, simultaneously, longing to be someone else” (199).¹ To a certain extent, autobiographical novels meet both requirements. But from...