Je réel/je fictif: au-delà d’une confusion postmoderne by Arnaud Schmitt (review)

In his Je réel/je fictif Arnaud Schmitt offers a highly erudite theoretical intervention into the field of French life/writing studies. He presents a forceful challenge to much recent French scholarship by developing a multifaceted critique of the concept of autofiction, an increasingly common term used to denote certain forms of postmodern autobiographical writing. Originally coined by Serge Doubrovsky, the term describes self-writing that unsettles traditional expectations by consciously injecting fictional elements into an otherwise apparently autobiographical work. Different definitions and theorizations of autofiction have been advanced, but Schmitt’s principal target is the now hegemonic Doubrovskyan model of autofiction, which insists on the undecidable referential status of the account given in autofictional self-writing. In a densely argued, wide-ranging, and highly ambitious essay operating within an essentially Lacanian framework, Schmitt brings refreshing new perspectives from Anglo-American philosophy and literary theory to bear on the problem of autofiction. He seeks to expose deficiencies in how autofiction is often conceived, and to offer an explanation of their origins. Additionally, and perhaps most interestingly, he calls for a new (and, as far as he is concerned, more ethical) form of autobiographical expression that would, while not denying the fractured relationship postmodern autobiographers have to their own subjectivity and knowledge, nonetheless reinstate something of the Lejeunian contrat de lecture that autofiction had thrown out when it made an attempt on the life of autobiography. Schmitt objects to the critical consensus that deems autofiction a new, hybrid genre occupying an indeterminate space between autobiography and fiction. For him, such conclusions lead only to sterile inquiries into the ultimately unanswerable question of whether the writing ‘I’ encountered in the text corresponds to a ‘je réel’ or a ‘je fictif’. He also diagnoses an elementary confusion among critics over the nature of the orders of reality and fiction (for which he blames postmodernism). Schmitt argues that this misunderstanding leads to the misattribution of instability to autofiction itself as a genre, whereas its true source lies in the author-figure — not the living author, Schmitt insists. In autofiction readers encounter only an author-figure that they themselves ultimately construct. This creates a catalyst for antagonistic relations between reader and author, which Schmitt theorizes through Lacan’s model of analyst–analysand dynamics. This is all set against the backdrop of what Schmitt argues is a shift in authority over centuries from author to reader (an argument elaborated via a rapid and not entirely convincing account of vicissitudes in authorship from medieval to postmodern times). The present reader, as the author of an earlier monograph that reads reader relations in French autobiography through a broadly Lacanian framework, can only endorse Schmitt’s conclusions about the power struggle underlying autofiction. His ethical appraisal is particularly welcome and important, even if it is hard to see how founding another new genre could cut through the fundamental antagonisms and instability that would, if we follow Schmitt’s Lacanian logic on authorship to its endpoint (and I would not, finding Lacan insufficient here), logically underpin any literary genre.