Autofiction, Autotheory, and the Neoliberal Contemporary

Abstract

Autofiction, Autotheory, and the Neoliberal Contemporary Marc Farrant (bio) Autofiction, as the name suggests, is a genre that occupies a hybrid space between autobiography and fiction. Any reading that aims to be attentive to this hybridity must necessarily take into account the possibility of oscillation at any moment, the need to make constant adjustments, to process and decipher what is presented as truthful as potentially fiction, and to enjoy the fictional as ostensibly factual. In other words, the reader of autofiction must be attentive to irony. The genre is uniquely suited to framing the broader relationship between literature and neoliberalism. Existing between two poles, one is tempted to suggest that autofiction resembles analogously the chiastic neoliberal imperative of self-fashioning: not only to fictionalize the facts (how we present ourselves online), but to live the fiction (how we exist online). Given the genre’s increasing popularity since the millennium (akin to that of the memoir), this affinity appears more than merely analogous. Is autofiction symptomatic of a creeping neoliberalism in both reading public and wider culture? This neoliberal turn would hinge on the privileging of individualism, on the totalization of the market as the exclusive field of all social relations, and perhaps on a concomitant exculpatory logic that privileges identity at the expense of critique. Indeed, for Walter Benn Michaels, in a 2011 chapter “Model Minorities and the Minority Model,” the neoliberal novel makes “the central problems of American society a matter of identity instead of a matter of money.” The price we have paid for diversity on the surface is the impossibility of redistribution at the foundations. Yet is this symptomatic reading enough to exhaust the ironic potential of autofiction, to see this irony—much as David Foster Wallace viewed television—as yet another capitulation of the avant-garde to the logic of advertising and commodification? This short essay revisits Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel I Love Dick, a seminal text both of our contemporary and its prehistory (in the 1990s), as a way of situating autofiction, and the related subgenre of autotheory, as neither wholly symptomatic nor free but as a way of thinking through the problem of critique in (and of) the contemporary. [End Page 63] One of the genre’s most celebrated practitioners, Ben Lerner, has remarked that the autofictional enterprise is inherently paradoxical: on the one hand, the writer-self can be accused of narcissism by drawing too readily on the resources of one’s own life—in other words, oversharing. On the other hand, this subjective focus rescinds omniscience, the possibility of absolute vision. The contemporary popularity of autofiction feeds on this paradox and is anticipated by Kraus’s autofictional novel, which documents a hunger for subjectivity free from textuality while also anticipating a broader saturation of poststructuralist assertions that emphasize hybridity, irony, and collapsed borders (in this regard, autofiction might be seen as the quintessential genre form of post-truth). Kraus’s avowedly feminist piece, which lays the groundwork for writers like Sheila Heti and Jenny Offill (not to mention the autofictional aesthetics of recent TV shows Fleabag and Girls), is constructed on the fault line between authenticity and deconstruction. A performative manifestation of the feminist credo that the “personal is political,” Kraus’s onomastic narrator-protagonist rails against “serious” fiction: “The ‘serious’ contemporary hetero-male novel is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy.” Forgoing the transcendental imperative to fictionalize, Kraus’s epistolary novel schizophrenically dramatizes the relation of art and life, reveling in a reappropriated sense of female abjection that renders the binary of art/life and, more importantly, fiction/nonfiction, insignificant. “For years I tried to write but the compromises of my life made it impossible to inhabit a position. And ‘who’ ‘am’ ‘I’? Embracing you & failure’s changed all that ’cause now I know I’m no one. And there’s a lot to say . . .” Since 1997, the hunger for authenticity has grown in correspondence with the diminishing efficacy of the avant-garde (see David Shield’s Reality Hunger) and critical or deconstructive theory (see Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique). There is a tendency to equate the defanging of theory with...