Celebrating the Self, Remembering the Body: Desire, Identity, and the Confessional Narrative in Autofictional Verse

Abstract

Celebrating the Self, Remembering the Body: Desire, Identity, and the Confessional Narrative in Autofictional Verse Michael Skafidas (bio) Literary self-expression is as old as literature. Autobiographical poetry, which until now has been an underrepresented research area, constitutes an underlying influence rooted in antiquity. As this article will demonstrate, autofiction—a neologism of the modern era—existed long before Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in the 1970s. The first-person narrative prose is not disengaged from the confessional subtleties of the lyric “I” that preceded it. Distinct though the standards of the two traditions are, they both rely on the authority of subjective experience in personal storytelling. Indeed, as argued by current scholars, autofiction is an intergeneric practice that is already ancient. How ancient? We can detect early traces of the weakening of the boundary between the self and the outside world in the works of Hesiod and in The Homeric Hymns. After them, Sappho appears as an example of an archaic poet whose intimate lyrical confessions generated an autofictional testimony driven by secret passions. In addition, as an early case of an autofictional poet, Sappho demonstrated in her poetry some of the generic features ascribed today to autofiction in that she tended to be both the narrator and the central character in her poems, used her real name, described “daily life often [End Page 85] inventing or modifying certain facts,” and did so “in search not only for truth and justice but for the self” (Tuck 1). Most significantly, I will juxtapose two foundational modern voices whose private and emotional verses, in harmony with Sappho’s unfettered lyricism, conveyed homoerotic desire as a legitimate autobiographical literary theme. As I see it, Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy, two poets standing on the two opposite ends of the world, the old and the new, east and west, in the crossroads of modernity, authored autofictional testimonies of the self and the body that anticipated the psychoanalytic inflections of the twentieth century and depicted desire as the kernel of existence, the “afflatus of the body,” in Whitman’s terms, that surges and surges into memory. Both poets rose above and beyond the general and the impersonal to remember the experience of the body and by doing so they ended up poeticizing the history of their personalities. Unlike autobiography, autofiction accepts the malleability and evasiveness of memory, as well as its inability to “provide an accurate representation of the past, even if identity is constructed largely based on our mnemonic capacity” (Ferreira-Meyers 213). Yet, as poets know since the days of Homer, memory is the ark of lost time, and literature is the art of reviving and exteriorizing memory that contains both fantasy and history. Long before the term was coined, the personal writing of Whitman and Cavafy prefigured the essence of autofiction as a “border area” (cited in Ferreira-Meyers 206), where recollections, fantasies, illusions, aspirations, cultural imagery rooted in the writer take form and content. Cavafy in particular came of age with the determination of the early twentieth century modernist artist to turn the imprecision of memory into the most trustworthy revelation about the meaning of a life lived amidst the negations of modernity. In Whitman’s and Cavafy’s autofictional poems the poets’ recollections form a narrative of confession. In Foucault’s analysis, the act of confession is described as a disclosure of knowledge “extracted from the body” (59). The confessional tone of Whitman and Cavafy and the emotional reciprocity their poems elicit activate the sensory channels of the reader. If reading, as Proust contemplated, is the “urging force” (49) that unlocks the gates of spaces we could not otherwise enter, the enterprise of reading Whitman and Cavafy entails a process of illumination in which the reader intuits feelings, sensations, and spaces previously unknown or beyond reach. Reading the two poets is a sensual act itself; the reader is drawn into a reverie that often awakens private notions of desire, and thus reading [End Page 86] triggers a response to an iconic language that involves both thoughts and senses. In the last section of this essay I will consider the intimacy between autofictional poetry and twentieth-century visual...