Artiste interdisciplinaire et performeuse … sa pratique s’inscrit dans le mouvement de l’autofiction. Elle s’intéresse particulièrement aux déclinaisons du «Je quand il quitte le Je», c’est-à-dire au rapport que l’on entretient avec l’inconscient personnel et collectif et aux liens qui unissent l’Intime à l’Universel. – Nathalie Derome et l’auti-fiction
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L’autofiction s’est imposée comme un des chantiers les plus ouverts, les plus vivants de la littérature actuelle. Notion subtile à définir, liée au refus qu’un auteur manifeste à l’égard de l’autobiographie, du roman à clés, des contraintes ou des leurres de la transparence, elle s’enrichit de ses extensions multiples tout en résistant solidement aux attaques incessantes dont elle fait l’objet. Elle vient en effet poser des questions troublantes à la littérature, faisant vaciller les notions mêmes de réalité, de vérité, de sincérité, de fiction, creusant de galeries inattendues le champ de la mémoire. — Isabelle Grell et Arnaud Genon, autofiction.org website
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The term ‘autofiction’ was coined in the 1970s by Serge Doubrovsky to define his own works, which combine features of fiction and autobiography. Narrated by someone with the same name and outward characteristics as himself, they were nonetheless fictional, he explained, in that other people’s names were changed and he reserved the right to recount whatever he liked without regard to biographical accuracy. The phenomenon itself, of course, predates Doubrovsky, and it is no coincidence that the coiner of the term started out as a Proust scholar. A la recherche du temps perdu is probably the earliest example of autofiction (which is why it was initially criticised for its strange hybrid nature). Céline, Henry Miller, Colette and Jean Genet followed; and autofiction has gained something of a stranglehold on French literature in the decades since Doubrovsky named it.
Over the past decade or two this trend has given rise to many works of remarkable intimacy, at times to great effect (Hervé Guibert’s poignant and disturbing Aids trilogy), at times producing narratives of stupendous banality. Most fall between the two, but even at its best the mode has its dangers. Camille Laurens is one among the hundreds of practitioners of autofiction in France today, and her publisher notes that he bears the scars of several lawsuits to prove it. People have objected to being depicted, even under fictional names, ever since Proust spent his spare time writing letters to Laure Heyman trying in vain to convince her that she was not the model for Odette de Crécy. Laurens herself is such a firm believer in autofiction that she seems to feel literature – at least trauma narrative – should consist in nothing else: one should not write about the death of a child if one has not lost a child, she says, just as there is no reason to write about having Aids when there are writers around who actually suffer from the disease.
Marie Darrieussecq and her publisher have responded with the usual pronouncements about artistic freedom. But Darrieussecq has also signed up to the autofictionalisation of literature to the extent that she defends herself by agreeing that one does not write about such a subject without a personal connection, that all her works have been filled with dead children, and that her own mother lost a child. She might have added that the novel that launched her career, Truismes (1996), a dystopic fable whose narrator spends the book gradually transforming into a sow, was not based on personal experience, nor, presumably, would even Laurens have required it to be.
A journalist for Libération noted that plagiarism in publishing is like incest in families, the direst possible accusation. One prominent autofictionalist, Christine Angot, has founded an entire career on writing about her incestuous relationship with her father. Outraged by the fact that people were upset at finding thinly veiled versions of themselves in her works, she wrote a book, Une partie du coeur (2004), defending herself with reference to Rimbaud’s useful dictum je est un autre, which she maintains is the very essence of literary artistry and, what’s more, can be understood only by those who understand what the incest taboo is about.
- from Shortcuts by Elisabeth Ladenson, London Review of Books
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Autofiction, By Hitomi Kanehara
The Networked Self: Autofiction on MySpace, by Heidi Peeters
