Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality (Frontiers of Narrative) 1496234618, 9781496234612

Citation preview

Reading the Contemporary Author

Frontiers of Narrative

Se rie s E ditor

Jesse E. Matz, Kenyon College

Reading the Contemporary Author Narrative, Authority, Fictionality Edited by Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

© 2023 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-­ grant institution with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-­Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the relocated Ho-­Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples. ♾ Names: Gibbons, Alison, editor. | King, Elizabeth, 1990–­, editor. Title: Reading the contemporary author : narrative, authority, fictionality / edited by Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King. Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023. | Series: Frontiers of narrative | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Reading the Contemporary Author brings together leading scholars in cultural theory, literary criticism, stylistics, narratology, comparative literature, and autobiography studies to interrogate how we read the contemporary author in public and cultural life, in life writing, and in literature”—­Provided by publisher. Identifiers: lccn 2023012226 isbn 9781496234612 (hardback) isbn 9781496238146 (epub) isbn 9781496238153 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: Authorship. | Autobiography—­Authorship. | Authors in literature. | bisac: literary criticism / General | lcgft: Essays. Classification: lcc pn149.r43 2023 | ddc 808.02—­dc23/eng/20230802 lc record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov/​ 2023012226v/​2023013590 Set in Minion Pro by Scribe Inc.

Contents

List of Illustrations  vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Authorship in Literary Criticism and Narrative Theory  xiii Elizabeth King and Alison Gibbons Part 1. The Au thor on the World Stage: So cial and Cultural C ontexts

1. The Public Intellectual on Stage: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  3 Odile Heynders



2. The Pseudonymic Author and Elena Ferrante’s Evasions of Gender  23 Jaclyn Partyka



3. The Permissible Author: Cultural Politics and the Market Economy of the Literary Sphere  43 Christopher González Part 2. The Au thor in the Mirror : Au to-­Au thorship, Memoir, and the Narrating “I”



4. Authorship and Autobiography  67 Arnaud Schmitt



5. A Cognitive Approach to Multimodal Autobiographical Elegy  85 Alison Gibbons



6. The Author as a Work of Art: Graphic Memoir, Style, and Authorial Agents  111 Nancy Pedri



7. Radical Realism and Fictionality Modes in Contemporary Auto/Biographical Literature  131 Fiona Doloughan Part 3. The Au thor on the Page: Representations of Au thorship in Fiction



8. Reconstructing the Author through Biofiction’s Anchored Imagination  157 Michael Lackey and Laura Cernat



9. The Anxiety of Authorship: Novelists as Narrators  179 Paul Dawson



10. Dead Authors Tell No Tales: The Ailing Author-­Character in Contemporary Novels about Novelists  199 Elizabeth King C oda Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology  221 Stefan Kjerkegaard List of Contributors  243 Index 247

Illustrations



1. Text World Theory diagram for the cognition of prosopopoeia  92



2. Text World Theory diagram for cover and first pages of Rachel, Monique . . . 97



3. Double spread from Rachel, Monique . . . 98



4. “Mother and daughter” page from Rachel, Monique . . . 101



5. Text World Theory diagram for “Mother and daughter” page  103



6. Sina Grace, Self-­Obsessed 119



7. Georgia Webber, Dumb: Living without a Voice 126



8. Booth’s classical diagram as presented in Dawson  230



9. Dawson’s discursive reformulation of the diagram of narrative communication  230

vii

Acknowledgments

First and foremost our thanks go to the International Society for the Study of Narrative (issn). As editors, we met at the annual issn conference in Montreal in 2018, sponsored by McGill University and coordinated by Lindsay Holmgren, and it was between panels and poutine that this book project was originally conceived. Many of the contributors to this volume are long-­standing members of the issn, and earlier versions of some of the chapters included in the volume began as conference papers. We are also grateful to other organizations—­such as the International Auto/ Biography Association (iaba), the International Association of Literary Semantics (ials), and the Poetics and Linguistics Association (pala)—­ and their members for similarly cordial conversation and critical inquiry. We look forward to more intellectually stimulating conversations about narrative, style, and authorship in the years ahead. Throughout the process of editing this book, we have been grateful for the academic and collegial support of our close colleagues: at Sheffield Hallam University, the Stylistics Research Group—­Alice Bell, Sam Browse, Hugh Escott, Jessica Mason, and David Peplow; and at the University of New South Wales, members of the School of Arts and Media—­Paul Dawson, Helen Groth, and Sean Pryor. All of these colleagues offered their valuable guidance and unswerving support to the project. Finally, we would like to thank our contributors for their collective wisdom, enthusiasm, and scholarship. This book is a collective enterprise and would not exist without their efforts and expertise.

ix

Reading the Contemporary Author

Introduction Authorship in Literary Criticism and Narrative Theory Elizabeth King and Alison Gibbons

The concept of the author, and the figure it designates, has always been central to how we read and interpret texts, particularly in the fields of literary criticism, narratology and stylistics, and autobiography studies. The author as a theoretical and critical category was a topic of fierce debate throughout the twentieth century: from New Criticism’s antibiographical intentional fallacy and M. H. Abrams’s contrary conception of the “expressive” orientation of the literary work as the revelation of its producer’s personality to Wayne Booth’s elegant sidestep around the problem of authorial intention with the “implied author,” Roland Barthes’s proclamation of the author’s death, and Michel Foucault’s conception of the author function. However, relatively few attempts to theorize the author have been ventured since, leaving the concept ripe for new interpretations and approaches. This book investigates contemporary authorship in the context of narrative genres ranging from memoir and autobiographically informed texts to biofiction and novels featuring novelist-­narrators and characters. The relative scholarly neglect of the contemporary author is surprising, since in the twenty-­first century, the question of how we—­both as readers and as critics—­understand the author has arguably become more exigent: the digital revolution has brought with it new challenges and new opportunities for the contemporary author that warrant examination, while politically motivated approaches such as feminism and postcolonialism continue to assert the relevance of authorial identity politics and cultural values to the meaning and reception of literary works. Despite fears that new media forms would spell the death of the novel, the age of e-books has offered readers and writers wider and more immediate access to one another. Services like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing—­as Mark McGurl has noted—­bypass literary gatekeepers to allow “a veritable romp of unrestricted authorship” in which “the customer, not the xiii

writer, is king” (450). This romp is of particular significance for genre fiction, allowing for genres to be fruitful and multiply into increasingly specific subcategories that have found it difficult to gain ground in the world of traditional publishing. As McGurl writes, “Fiction in the Age of Amazon is genre fiction, a highly gendered and age-­differentiated genre system complexly structured by the poles of epic and romance and their characteristic modes of wish fulfillment” (460). From apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction to every variety of fantasy and sci-­fi and a “highly differentiated array of erotic genres” (460), Amazon has opened new doors to genre fiction and has arguably helped it become more profitable and prolific than ever. In fact, genre fiction has come to dominate in the digital sphere to the extent that marketing teams have even dared to package their literary fiction in more commercial covers, as was the case with Elena Ferrante’s now widely acclaimed Neapolitan quartet, the U.S. covers for which have been compared to cheap “gas station” romances and trashy commercial “beach reads” (Hartnett, “Subtle Genius”). In such a climate, where genre “implies an audience ready to be pleased again and again within the terms of an implicit contract” (McGurl 460), authors are arguably both helped and hemmed in by increasingly defined genre categories.1 The digital literary sphere has also amplified the cultural performance of authorship to an unprecedented degree, placing authors under ever-­ increasing scrutiny via social media and streaming platforms. Audits of the literary world, such as the decade-­old vida count and the 2019 Emilia Report, have made plain the fact that—­when it comes to authorship—­gender, sexuality, and race-­based biases continue to plague the Anglophone publishing industry. Literary scandals concerning diversity, representation, and cultural appropriation in fiction have, moreover, raised questions about what kinds of stories are told and what kinds of authors get to tell them: from probes of pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante’s gender identity to accusations over the whitewashing of marketing and publication surrounding Jeanine Cummins’s migrant-­crisis novel American Dirt (2018). The notion of authorial authenticity has also become entwined with debates over what constitutes fiction in the first place: from the debacle over the marketing of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003) as a memoir to the 2006 unmasking of Laura Albert as “JT LeRoy,” the author of the purportedly autobiographical novels xiv  King and Gibbons

of an enigmatic abuse victim. As a symptom, perhaps, of what David Shields has dubbed “reality hunger,” contemporary audiences seem to be seeking an image of the author both within and beyond their writing. As G. Thomas Couser has pointed out, “Memoir now rivals fiction in popularity and critical esteem and exceeds it in cultural currency” (3). Authors, unsurprisingly, are increasingly dedicated to blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, working in genres such as biofiction, autofiction, and memoir—­a ll of which privilege storytellers as part of their storyworlds. Whether viewed as a real and accessible person or as a mere fictional mirage, the author has become an essential yet elusive figure, or—­in Seán Burke’s words—­an “indeterminable haunting, as that unquiet presence which theory can neither explain nor exorcise” (184). It is worth mentioning at this juncture that just as the terms modernist author and Victorian author encompass a vast array of writers working toward different goals and in entirely divergent ways, the term contemporary authorship can only ever be a loose signifier. It is also worth stating that, much in the same way that schools and periods tend only to be tidily defined in the decades after they reach prominence, the contemporary author remains difficult to discuss or delineate in meaningful ways. For this reason, and with the aim of mapping the contours of the vast territory that is contemporary authorship, this interdisciplinary collection evades the impossible task of identifying a single sort of contemporary authorship and instead brings together the perspectives of leading scholars in narratology, cultural theory, literary criticism, stylistics, comparative literature, and autobiography studies. Although this means that the volume takes a necessarily broad view in its inclusion of competing approaches and theories, it has also led to a certain necessary limitation: with a focus on literary studies, the term author is here largely confined to the creators of works of prose fiction and those narrative genres that encroach on its borders. Restricting the volume’s scope in this way is intended not to discount poets, playwrights, and other sorts of authors but rather to focus the collection on how this particular type of contemporary author operates in public and cultural life, in life writing, and in literature. The Author in History and Contemporary Culture Both Andrew Bennett and Seán Burke argue that literary history offers an archival record of changing conceptions of the author and Introduction  xv

authorship—­from godlike and divinely inspired to impersonal and posthumous.2 Yet if there is one consistent thing about the role and position of the author in society, it is that it seems to be constantly evolving. As Alistair Minnis has argued, for much of the medieval period “God was believed to have inspired the human writers of Scripture” (5), and the term for the author of a text—­its auctor—­“denoted someone who was at once a writer and an authority, someone not merely to be read but also be respected and believed” (10). Minnis notes that by the Renaissance, however, the auctor had already become a shade more human and in some works began to take on a role akin to the “reader’s respected friend” (7). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, authors often engaged in something of a disappearing act, hiding behind anonymity or adopting pseudonyms to disguise their identities. Some authors even attributed their own works to their invented characters, borrowing for their fictions the credibility of fact, just as Daniel Defoe succeeded in beguiling some of the readers of his Robinson Crusoe (1719). As Michael McKeon has argued, such tactics were also a way of avoiding prosecution at a time when polemical pamphlets could be viewed as heresy and many works of “fiction” were in fact romans à clef ripe for libel lawsuits. Yet if some fictions were based in fact, the eighteenth-­century novelist also “liberated fictionality,” as Catherine Gallagher has put it, by managing to carve out for fiction a space in-­between fact and lies. In so doing, she contends, such writers founded the emerging genre of the novel as one that could tell a kind of truth about the world through entirely invented characters and scenarios. Eighteenth-­century authors were occasionally at pains to explain this special quality of fiction to their readers, as did Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews (1780 [1742]), when he stated, “I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species” (vol. 2, ch. 1). In the act of insisting on fictionality, however, Fielding also inserts a suggestion of himself into the textual cosmos of his novel. Interest in the person responsible for all this creating and narrating grew during the nineteenth century, as writers began to campaign for their (copy)rights as professionals and to champion the novel’s virtues as a force for social good. While Walter Scott emphasized the novelist’s status as “a productive labourer” whose “works constitute part of the public wealth” (1822), Thomas Carlyle likened the author to a priest, arguing that the author ought to be considered “our most important modern xvi  King and Gibbons

person. . . . What he teaches, the whole world will do and make” (216). Despite persistent concerns over frivolous fictions flooding the market, and particularly those “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) that George Eliot so despised, the author was increasingly accepted in the esteemed role of moral guide and social commentator. The end of the nineteenth century, however, would see fiction writers add another string to their bows as they laid claim to the status of “artist.” In his 1885 essay “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James argued that “fiction is one of the fine arts, deserving in its turn of all the honours and emoluments that have hitherto been reserved for the successful profession of music, poetry, painting, architecture” (56). Modernist writers, according to Brian McHale, “sought to remove the traces of their presence from the surface of their writing” (199), opting instead for stream-­of-­consciousness fictions in which characters’ thoughts seemingly replace authorial exposition. Yet as Benjamin Widiss has noted in relation to twentieth-­century literature, “often an apparent or incomplete authorial evacuation masks a deeper strategy of self-­inscription” (6). The mind of the artist itself became a source of the deepest fascination, as is evident in the slew of novels from the period that took the minds of youths with literary aspirations as their subject matter, such as Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–­27) and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Moreover, as Loren Glass has shown in Authors Inc., even those authors who were most stringently “impersonal” in their writing styles could still become international celebrities, a fact made apparent by the careers of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. The growing cultural capital attached not only to the author but to the novel during this period was marked by the founding of new and prestigious awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1901, the Pulitzer Prize in 1917, and the National Book Award in 1950, as well as by the growth of literature and creative writing as subjects of university study. If literary modernism is still considered by many scholars as the high point of the novel and the novelist’s mutual cultural ascendancy, the postmodernist period arguably marked a decline and fall. Cinema and television had successfully muscled in on literature’s position as the most popular form of fiction, and the author was forced to accept a less prominent, if not necessarily less prestigious, role in the cultural pantheon. Introduction  xvii

However, if literature had been somewhat eclipsed by television and film, the author as a talking head was nevertheless embraced by the media, becoming a regular feature on talk shows. In fiction, too, the author was suddenly everywhere. In postmodernist novels, the appearance of the figure of the writer at a writing desk became so persistent that McHale refers to it as a “postmodernist topos” (198), while Aleid Fokkema dubs the resurrected historical author—­such as Virginia Woolf in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998)—­as “postmodernism’s stock character” (39). The writing of the period was replete with displays of authorial presence and omnipotence—­from the elaborate mise en abymes and metalepses of metafiction to the autobiographical writer-­characters who appeared in the work of Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Alice Munro, Philip Roth, and Kathy Acker, among others. Yet even as the fiction of the postmodernist period “brought the author back to the surface” (McHale 199), that author seemed no longer to be a unified subjective presence but was dead, displaced, or reducible to a function of the text—­just as prominent theorists were then postulating. It is characteristic of the uneasy relationship between authorship and the theories pertaining to it that the writer—­whether as authorial analog, obtrusive narrator, or fictional character—­became a prominent figure in fiction at precisely the time when the imminent demise of literature was most confidently predicted. As such, reading the author has become a continual process of oscillation between the construction of a “somebody” and a “nobody” or, to quote Andrew Bennett, “between naming and anonymity; between the presence and absence or life and death of the author” (2). What has become of the author since the turn of the new millennium? This collection focuses on four distinct characteristics of contemporary authorship and takes these as springboards into new and renewed lines of inquiry concerning the author figure. First, the collection recognizes that the influence of the digital revolution on the contemporary author cannot be overstated: as the chapters in this volume attest, writers are consciously adopting forms that attempt to compete with, or act as an antidote to, the attention-­absorbing Armageddon that the internet threatens to bring down upon the novel. While graphic novels and new interactions between art and autobiography discussed in this volume aim to bring the image to the aid of the author, other works of interest, including xviii  King and Gibbons

Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet and David Markson’s The Last Novel, consist of disorienting snippets that seem to cater to (and comment on) our shortening attention spans in the age of the internet. Yet the internet is not always the contemporary author’s antagonist and competitor: Chimamanda Adichie, for example, not only has taken advantage of the web’s reach with her publicly performed ted talks but has also published the blogposts of her fictional characters online as part of her hypertextual authorial practice. The second key characteristic of contemporary authorship examined in this collection is the fact that who is writing now appears to matter more than ever: questions of identity politics, of who deserves to be heard and on what subjects, remain contentious in the literary and publishing worlds. In other words, who an author is or appears to be in terms of class, race, gender, or politics—­as well as how they choose to represent themselves both on the page and beyond it—­plays a major role in how their work is received and interpreted. Authorial identity has always been of interest to readers and critics alike, but it is currently being put under increasing scrutiny. While there has been greater recognition of the ways in which women, bipoc, and queer writers have been systematically marginalized and pigeonholed by a predominantly white and westernized literary world, new ways of theorizing these ongoing problems—­as well as the forms of resisting them—­are explored and interrogated within this volume. Third, authors seem to be sowing more reality into the open fields of their fiction. Turning toward forms that blend ostensibly factual material with novelistic techniques, the authors discussed in this volume, ranging from Karl Ove Knausgaard to Rachel Cusk, reveal a pronounced desire to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction as well as between novel and autobiography. Others, including artist-­cum-­author Sophie Calle and graphic novelist Lynda Barry, use multimodal means to insert and assert visual evidence of their own realities into their work. Whether we read the recourse to reality as a renewed attempt to co-­opt the authority of “truthiness” for the novel or simply as an acknowledgment of the impossibility of such stark dividing lines in an age of #fakenews, the increasingly complex interpenetration of fact and fiction is clearly on the contemporary author’s radar. Finally, and perhaps relatedly, authors appear to be more concerned than ever with their own artistic process—­t hat is, its history and its Introduction  xix

uncertain future. Self-­reflexivity has proved itself to be much more than a postmodern preoccupation, with the contemporary author employing it as a tool for self-­examination rather than a means of revealing realism’s sleight of hand. While some writers discussed in this volume—­including Julian Barnes and Colm Tóibín—­resurrect historical authors from the past in order to understand their present predicament, others have concocted self-­aware author-­narrators or fictional novelist-­characters in order to explore and explicate the changing role of the writer in the new millennium. The Author in Theory The evolving role of the author is apparent in the many diverse accounts of authorship that have been offered by literary historians, cultural critics, philosophers, narratologists, stylisticians, and Reader Response theorists, among others. In this section we discuss some of the most relevant theories as part of an exploration of the conceptual frames that might aid our understanding of the author figure in the current cultural moment. The first half of the twentieth century was dominated, in various ways, by critical stances that denounced the figure of the author or, at the very least, denied the author meaningful agency in literary and narrative communication. Formalist and structuralist approaches—­such as those represented by Jan Mukařovsky, Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, Yury Tynjanov, and Viktor Vinogradov, among others—­folded their accounts of the author into textual inquiry; since their focus was on a text’s composition and aesthetic techniques, the author figure became merely the sum of a text’s parts and an embodiment of the text’s linguistic structures (see Schmid, “Implied Author”; Stougaard-­Nielsen 273). New Criticism took a more pronounced stance: epitomized by W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), New Criticism dismissed the figure of the author and the relevance of authorial intention outright. As Wimsatt and Beardsley write, “The design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (468). There is, in other words, no place for the author in these anti-­intentionalist positions. In this apparent vacuum, theories about the narrator came to the fore as scholars attempted to further detach the living, breathing author from the textual entity who tells the story. xx  King and Gibbons

The author’s significance was further destabilized by proclamations made during the second half of the twentieth century—­most notably by Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” (1977 [1968]) and Michel Foucault in “What Is an Author?” (1977 [1969])—­regarding the decline of the author’s cultural and critical relevance. Nevertheless, in theory the author persisted as an undeniable source for textual meaning: for Gérard Genette, for instance, narrative discourse is “a story” that is “uttered by someone” (29; emphasis added). Wayne C. Booth’s now famous, yet not uncontroversial, conception of the “implied author”—­developed in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)—­was an attempt to recuperate the author figure in the face of such critical hostility (Kindt and Müller; Kjerkegaard in this volume). The implied author, Booth argues, is the real author’s “second self,” of which readers “inevitably construct a picture” (71). This enabled readers to construe the author’s moral stance from an “intuitive apprehension of the complete artistic whole” (73). Kindt and Müller note, in The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy (2006), that Booth’s writing gives the implied author three simultaneous definitions: an intrinsic feature of the text, the author’s own implied self-­representation, and the reader’s interpretive vision of the writer (51). These co-­occurring characterizations of the implied author have led to ongoing confusion surrounding the concept as well as imprecision when it comes to its varying uses in scholarship. So divisive was the concept of the implied author that two opposing camps of response arose within classical narratology (Kindt and Müller 86–­121). Descriptivists—­among them Mieke Bal, Gérard Genette, and Ansgar Nünning—­reject the implied author on the grounds that it is “an interpretive category and thus has no place in narratology conceived as a descriptive tool” (Kindt and Müller 109). In contrast, interpretists—­such as Seymour Chatman and Shlomith Rimmon-­Kenan—­see the implied author as a reception-­based construct, conceived by the reader. This view, though, still sidesteps the implied author somewhat, since it revises it as a facet of interpretation. Perhaps due to the influence of Reader Response Research, with its insistence that meaning is necessarily formed at the nexus between a text and its readers, stylisticians fall into the interpretist camp and thus tacitly model readerly interpretation by assuming what Iser called an “implied reader,” albeit less explicitly.3 As in Iser’s theory, this creates what Kindt and Müller refer to as “a necessary reception-­ based counterpart to the implied author” (141). Introduction  xxi

An interpretist position is one of hypothetical authorial intentionalism, a logic that underwrites the various related and competing models that have surfaced since Booth’s account of the implied author, including Umberto Eco’s “model author,” Gregory Currie’s “fictional author,” Jorge J. E. Garcia’s “pseudo-­historical author,” François Jost’s “constructed author,” Alexander Nehamas’s “postulated author,” Wolf Schmid’s “abstract author” (Der Texttaufbau) and Kendall Walton’s “apparent artist.”4 Author constructs also arise in actual authorial intentionalism, such as William Irwin’s “urauthor,” where they are used to approximate the intentions of the real, or actual, author (Levinson). Regardless of the nuances in and differences between these models and positions, a problem facing all of the aforementioned author constructs is that they are not accompanied by a method for identification in analysis. This renders them somewhat useless, since they are frameworks that cannot be operationalized (compare Kindt and Müller 58, 121–­48). Debate over the value of author constructs has continued in contemporary and postclassical narratology. For example, a 2011 special issue of Style revisited Booth’s implied author, with the contributors—­in most cases—­arguing forcefully either for or against the concept (Richardson, “Implied Author”). More recently, in what she calls “metahermeneutic narratology”—­a nd aware of the fierce debate surrounding the concept—­Liesbeth Korthals Altes opts to retain the implied author in the interpretist sense of the term (168), though only as one of multiple interpretive strategies/categories, each aimed at a different facet of the author. Indeed, her “multifaceted author” has (at least) six faces: the flesh-­and-­blood author, the author’s social or public identity, the author image constructed from their body of work, the author image construed from peritext and epitexts, the (reader’s) interpretive conception of the author, and the author as narrator (157–­59). This multifaceted model is important for Korthals Altes, as it allows her to “draw attention, heuristically, to the different grounds and argumentation patterns, and the different value regimes, used to establish meaning” (159). The rhetorical approach currently enjoys great popularity among narrative scholars, and thus there appears to be a degree of consensus, with the author deemed an important figure in assessments of fictionality: a work’s fictionality, according to Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh, is determined via “an interpretive assumption about a xxii  King and Gibbons

sender’s communicative act” (66; emphasis added). Even so, it remains unclear within a rhetorical approach what methodological steps should be taken to identify authorial intentionality. Moreover, several scholars approaching fictionality from a cognitive perspective have argued that placing such import on authorial intentionality as a marker of fictionality is problematic, since an author may not be completely in control of or aware of their intentions, which, in any case, are always open to misinterpretation by readers (Browse and Hatavara; Gibbons, “Cognitive Model,” “Dissolving Margins,” “Using Life”; Mason). In turn, Dawson critiques both cognitive and rhetorical perspectives for prioritizing reading and interpretation: the former for collapsing reader responses into “universal shared mental processes” and the latter for making the critic stand in “as a test case for this flesh-­and-­blood reader” (224). Brian Richardson and Paul Dawson both look to extratextual contexts as a practical means of modeling author figures. In Richardson’s narratological study of “unnatural” voice relations, this entails acknowledging that “the historical author is a mediated figure that we construct out of a diverse body of sources” (Unnatural 126) as well as taking into account the fact that readers’ interactions with these sources may provide additional interpretive touch points between the figures of the actual author, the implied author, and the narrator. Dawson revisits the narrative communication model, developing what he calls a discursive narratology. In his account, readers infer the figure of the author from the text as well as from sources—­such as interviews, essays, and readings—­in the epitextual and peritextual network of the author and their work. Across rhetorical, unnatural, and discursive narratology today, forms of actual authorial intentionalism are therefore prevalent. As Dawson claims, the “rationale for positing an implied author is that communication between authors and readers is mediated by the narrative text, and hence there is no direct access to an author’s intentions. But . . . in the actual world of the public sphere, such access is available” (234). Since the cognitive turn in the humanities was driven by a desire to enhance the analysis of reader experience and interpretation, cognitive approaches to narrative, style, and fictionality have only recently directed explicit attention toward the author. In a cognitive framework, the author is now seen as vital, since, as Claasen’s empirical studies evidence, “the author is indeed part of the reading process,” with readers Introduction  xxiii

creating mental models of the author regardless of how much information they possess about the real, actual author (211). Cognitive accounts of the author—­such as those presented by David Herman, Peter Stockwell, and Alison Gibbons—­construct the author from the perspective of readers and, in doing so, explicitly recognize the provisional nature of interpretations of authorial intentionality. Such approaches thus acknowledge that while a reader’s simulation of authorial intentionality is hypothetical precisely because it is conjecture, readers do not experience it as such. David Herman, for instance, writes, “There can be no certainty about those hypothesized reasons: instead, there are only defeasible ascriptions of intentions and other reasons for the use of particular patterns in the text” (60). Herman, Stockwell, and Gibbons all attempt to develop frameworks that capture how readers model authors. For Herman this involves reading for ascriptions of intentions; namely, readers interpret design choices and textual structures, which then “scaffold interpreters’ efforts to build and rebuild narrative worlds” (60). For both Stockwell and Gibbons, authorial intention is approached using the cognitive framework of Text World Theory (Werth; Gavins). In the framework, the author is a discourse-­world participant (as is the reader), while the processing of discourse or other multimodal forms of communication is imagined in a mental representation referred to as a text-­world. Within these parameters, Stockwell argues, readers “mind-­model” authors—­that is, attribute intentions, motivations, and preferences to them—­and this process is inherent in the reading experience. Gibbons focuses on readers’ conceptions of authorial intentionality and fictionality and, in doing so, builds on Stockwell’s account in three ways. First, she explores how readers attempt to model the author, decode their intentions, and determine the fictionality of a work when each of these is obscured by pseudonymic authorship (“Dissolving Margins”). Second, in the context of ethical criticism, Gibbons argues that it is vital to discriminate between the real author and readers’ mental models of the author in order to maintain the distinct ontology between the beliefs and intentions of actual authors and those ascribed to them by readers or, indeed, by prosecutors in legal morality trials (Using Life).5 Third, adapting theories from cognitive science, Gibbons offers up the concept of the “author model” as a knowledge store activated during any encounter with an author, which xxiv  King and Gibbons

readers bring with them to the reading experience and utilize for interpreting the text (“Cognitive Model”). As well as controversies over theoretical accounts of and approaches to the author and implied author, fierce debates rage over the necessity of the “narrator” concept (for summaries of these debates, see Birke and Köppe, Narrator and Author; Köppe and Stühring; Patron, Optional-­ Narrator Theory; and Zipfel). These arguments hinge on the relationship between narrator and author figures. As Birke and Köppe outline, classical narratology has traditionally made an uncompromising distinction between the author and the narrator, and such a division has been lauded as “a kind of First Principle, or dogma, of narrative analysis” (“Author and Narrator” 3). This led to a sense of the universal value of the narrator concept. Scholars who believe in the ubiquity of the narrator—­such as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, and Mieke Bal—­are said to subscribe to Pan Narrator (pn) theories (Köppe and Stühring 59, 75). pn theories are underwritten by the argument that all fictional narratives contain a narrator—­however overt or covert that narrator may be—­who is separate from the author. In contrast, Optional Narrator (on) theories refute the necessity of the narrator, arguing instead that “we can only speak of a fictional narrator in cases where the author creates or constructs this narrator through a process that is assumed to be intentional” and that “outside these cases it is useless and even potentially erroneous to refer to a narrator” (Patron, “Introduction” 1). The reliance on the intentional creation of a narrator thus means that determining the presence of a narrator in a text is fundamentally dependent, once again, on readers’ perceptions of authors. Furthermore, in Optional Narrator theory, fictional third-­person narratives do not have narrators because there does not appear to be a sentient being telling the story within the diegesis; rather, making interpretive inferences about third-­ person narratives—­including the characters in them—­requires that readers do not derive a narrator but instead “have recourse to the author” (Culler 44). As such, on theories view accounts of third-­person narratives that posit a narrator as “conflating author and narrator” and, in doing so, making “a category mistake” (Birke and Köppe, “Author and Narrator” 6). Although the contributors to this volume do not take explicit stances with regards to pn or on theories, their contributions demonstrate the complex relationship between authors and narrators, Introduction  xxv

particularly in autobiographical narratives when first-­person narrators act as textual counterparts of the real-­life author. If theories and representations of authorship (and, relatedly, narratorship) dominated the twentieth century, they have also continued to be proposed and explored within postclassical scholarship, which boasts an array of models of and analytical approaches to the figures of narrators, implied authors, and authors. While these many accounts may complement, contradict, and compete with one another in various ways, what binds them all is the significance they place on authors and their intentions. In this respect, if not in others, the concept of the author is as relevant and as important to literary theory and to narratology as it ever was. Recently, as Berensmeyer et al. note, “authors have returned to the focus of attention not only of readers—­who never relinquished their attachment to authors, real or imagined—­but also of professional critics and scholars” (“Introduction” 3). The contributors to Reading the Contemporary Author mobilize a wide range of theoretical approaches to aid them in analyzing the contemporary author and also propose and polish new approaches of their own. The chapters in this volume thus interrogate the narrative means by which authors construct their persona both inside and outside the text as well as the interrelations those narrative structures generate between readers and their experiences of the author. The Contemporary Author Reading the Contemporary Author offers a multifaceted approach to interpreting authorship in light of recent developments in fiction, autobiography, and criticism. The volume is divided into three sections and a coda, pursuing what might be described as an “outside-­in” logic: in part 1 the author is initially considered as a public figure in the real world; in part 2 as both self and self-­representation in autobiographical works that straddle the fact/fiction divide; in part 3 as a fictional phenomenon represented in literature, whether as a narrator or a character; and in the coda as a theoretical concept. Considering how an author’s interactions with the world around them impact the critical reception and interpretation of their texts is central to part 1 of the book, “The Author on the World Stage: Social and Cultural Contexts,” contains three chapters, by Odile Heynders, Jaclyn Partyka, xxvi  King and Gibbons

and Christopher González. Heynders focuses on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to show how the contemporary novelist can function as a public intellectual. For Heynders, authorship is conceived as a kind of public performance that is staged across a variety of digital platforms, extending and augmenting the cultural and political statements authors make in their literary texts. Similarly concerned with how the author is constructed and received, Partyka uses her study of the pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante to show how the fashioning of contemporary authorial identity takes place through both textual devices (fictional depictions of writing and stories within stories) and paratextual devices (cover design, authorial statements, and the use of pseudonyms). By situating Ferrante within a long lineage of woman writers who have adopted male noms de plume, she posits Ferrante’s female pseudonym as a savvy exploitation of the persistent connections between gender and value within the contemporary literary marketplace. What is marketable is also a concern for González, who studies the recent furor over Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt (2018), using the debacle as an opportunity to ask who benefits and who loses out when privileged writers tell the stories of marginalized groups. In doing so he conceptualizes contemporary authorship as an act with significant ethical ramifications and responsibilities that are too often ignored or subordinated to the capitalist imperatives of the publishing industry. In part 2, “The Author in the Mirror: Auto-­Authorship, Memoir, and the Narrating ‘I,’” the focus is authorial identity—­and how it manifests in the mind of the reader or on the pages of the work. This theme is scrutinized in chapters by Arnaud Schmitt, Alison Gibbons, Nancy Pedri, and Fiona Doloughan, who all turn their attention to overtly autobiographical texts that work, in different ways, around the fact/fiction divide. Schmitt opens with the provocative question “Is an autobiographer an author?” In arguing that authorship is a kind of literary competence that enables a person to conjure a social and cultural aura around themselves, Schmitt makes the case for the autobiographer as an author who has additional responsibilities to the reader. The authorial self also upholds an aura of significance in elegiac texts that are purportedly written about others, as Gibbons shows. She argues that a reader’s mental model of the author is vital to the affective force of a genre like literary elegy, in which the reader is invited to witness an author’s intimate Introduction  xxvii

but public grief. Focusing on the rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia and on multimodal devices such as personal photographs, Gibbons’s analysis shows that authors insert written records and visual evidence of the life lost while simultaneously reinforcing their own role as the narrating elegiac author. Pedri’s chapter on the autobiographical self in graphic memoirs also explores how contemporary authors use visual elements to represent themselves within the fictional world. Arguing that metanarrative strategies complicate both the convergences and incongruities among author, narrator, and represented subject, Pedri reveals how multimodal depictions of the author complicate autobiographical referentiality, while acts of self-­representation remain fundamentally connected to authorial style and narrativization. Doloughan examines the authorial style and hybridity of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s and Rachel Cusk’s autofictions, arguing that they are examples of “radical realism,” a form in which representational strategies reflect an “authorial desire to break through the veil of fiction into the world of reality.” Radical realists, Doloughan argues, interrogate the conventions and the fictional status of the novel in order to create narratives that reflect the individual subjectivity of the author in the world. The next three chapters of the volume, which form part 3, “The Author on the Page: Representations of Authorship in Fiction,” also investigate the author’s textual presence, though not as an autobiographical imprint on the work but rather as a phenomenon in fiction—­namely, as narrators and characters. Michael Lackey and Laura Cernat explore biographical fictions that resurrect and continue conversations with historical authors, bringing their works to bear on the present. They argue that although the vogue for such narratives originated in postmodernism’s self-­reflexive skepticism toward the relationship between truth and fiction, the genre of biofiction has now moved away from postmodern playfulness toward a more modernist focus on human experience and the valuable role that the contemporary author plays in capturing and explicating it. Paul Dawson interrogates the phenomenon of novelist-­narrators—­t hat is, narrators who admit to writing novels in the act of narration yet do not necessarily speak autobiographically as the author whose name appears on the cover. Examining works by Laurent Binet and Jarett Kobek, Dawson argues that novelist-­narrators are able to interrogate the cultural status of the novel self-­reflexively and that in an internet age “dissatisfied xxviii  King and Gibbons

with fiction-­making,” the anxiety of authorship is increasingly aired in the voice of the novelist-­narrator. Authorial anxiety is also the subject of Elizabeth King’s chapter, in which she investigates the contemporary prevalence of novelist-­characters in contemporary fiction who are dead, dying, diseased, depressed, or otherwise ailing. These ailing authors, she argues, do not merely reflect the declining cultural relevance of the novelist but actually attempt to counteract it by remodeling the traditional hierarchical power dynamic between reader and writer into one that is more reciprocal and thus might persist meaningfully even after authority has been eroded. Across its three parts, the volume offers a variety of critical and narratological approaches to the contemporary author as a real-­world performer, as an autobiographical subject, and as a phenomenon in fiction. In the coda, the final chapter by Stefan Kjerkegaard reexamines the treatment of both the author and implied author as concepts within narrative theory exclusively. Kjerkegaard points out that the concept of the implied author is inherently problematic because it constructs the author simultaneously within the literary work and external to it. It is for this reason, he argues, that postclassical narratologists continue to discuss and dispute the idea. He offers instead a “postcritical” approach, and this leads to an understanding of authorship wherein the empirical observations of actual readers—­and the uses to which they put narratives—­take on a pivotal role in producing and refining narratological theories and frameworks. Ultimately this collection refuses to erect a monolith under the name contemporary author or crown a single theoretical model of authorship as king. Instead, Reading the Contemporary Author demonstrates that different approaches serve different heuristic purposes, and thus a variety of interdisciplinary viewpoints and critical stances are necessary in order to capture the multifaceted nature of contemporary authorship. The structural logic of the volume is indicative of this multifaceted nature, since, across the collection, clear distinctions between fictionality and referentiality and between authors, narrators, and characters blur together. Certainly, this book’s authors explore the continued critical need and desire to understand and conceptualize the role that the author plays in narrative communication, in the way texts are interpreted, and in the construction of culture. As this work attests, the only Introduction  xxix

consistent and indisputable aspect of our cultural and critical conceptions of the author is that they are always changing. Notes 1. James Phelan (“Authors, Genres, and Audiences”) provides a discussion of how genre can be seen as a narrative resource that authors can deploy and innovate. 2. Indeed, the essays in part 1 of The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship (Berensmeyer et al.) offer a sense of the changing conceptions of the author throughout history, from cuneiform literature beginning around 3000 bce to digital literature in the twenty-­first century. 3. For a historical overview of stylistics in relation to Reader Response and/or reception studies, see Whiteley and Canning as well as Bell et al. 4. For comparative discussions of some of these terms, see Kindt and Müller; and Schmid, “Implied Author.” 5. As part of her argument, Gibbons maps these authorial roles against Peter Rabinowitz’s and James Phelan’s (Narrative) typologies of audience roles.

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———. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago il: U of Chicago P, 1961. Browse, Sam, and Mari Hatavara. “‘I Can Tell the Difference between Fiction and Reality’: Cross-­fictionality and Mind-­Style in Political Rhetoric.” Narrative Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 2, 2019, pp. 332–­49. Burke, Seán. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. 1992. 3rd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. Carlyle, Thomas. “The Hero as Man of Letters: Johnson, Rousseau, Burns.” 19 May 1840. Thomas Carlyle’s Complete Works. Vol. 12, Heroes and Hero Worship. 30 vols. Library ed. London, 1869, pp. 133–­68. Claassen, Eefji. Author Representations in Literary Reading. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012. Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Culler, Jonathan. “Some Problems concerning Narrators of Novels and Speakers of Poems.” Optional-­Narrator Theory: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals, edited by Sylvie Patron. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021, pp. 37–­52. Currie, Gregory. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Dawson, Paul. The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-­First Century Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” 1856. The Essays of George Eliot, collected and abridged with an introduction by Nathan Sheppard. New York, 1883. Fielding, Henry. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews. 1742. London: Harrison, 1780. Fokkema, Aleid. “The Author: Postmodernism’s Stock Character.” The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature, edited by Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars. London: Associated University Presses, 1999, pp. 39–­51. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” 1969. Language, Counter-­memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca ny: Cornell UP, 1977, pp. 113–­38. Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel, vol. 1, edited by Franco Moretti. Princeton nj: Princeton UP, 2006, pp. 336–­63. Garcia, Jorge J. E. “A Theory of the Author.” 1996. The Death and Resurrection of the Author?, edited by William Irwin. Westport ct: Greenwood, 2002, pp. 161–­89. Introduction  xxxi

Gavins, Joanna. Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980. Gibbons, Alison. “A Cognitive Model of Reading Autofiction.” English Studies, vol. 103, no. 3, 2022, pp. 471–­93. ———. “The ‘Dissolving Margins’ of Elena Ferrante and the Neapolitan Novels: A Cognitive Approach to Fictionality, Authorial Intentionality, and Autofictional Reading Strategies.” Narrative Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 2, 2019, pp. 389–­415. ———. “Using Life and Abusing Life in the Trial of Ahmed Naji: Text World Theory, Adab, and the Ethics of Reading.” Journal of Language and Discrimination, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019, pp. 4–­31. Glass, Loren. Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–­1980. New York: New York UP, 2004. Hartnett, Emily. “The Subtle Genius of Elena Ferrante’s Bad Book Covers.” Atlantic, 3 July 2016, https://​www​.theatlantic​.com/​entertainment/​archive/​ 2016/​07/​elena​-ferrante​-covers​-bad​-no​-good/​488732/. Irwin, William. “Intentionalism and Author Constructs.” The Death and Resurrection of the Author?, edited by William Irwin. Westport ct: Greenwood, 2002, pp. 192–­203. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore md: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” The Art of Fiction, edited by Henry James and Walter Besant. Boston, 1884, pp. 51–­85. Jost, François. “The Authorized Narrative.” The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind, edited by Warren Buckland. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1995, pp. 164–­81. Kindt, Tom, and Hans-­Harald Müller. The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006. Köppe, Tilmann, and Jan Stühring. “Against Pan-­narrator Theories.” Journal of Literary Semantics, vol. 40, 2011, pp. 59–­80. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2014. Levinson, Jerrold. “Defending Hypothetical Intentionalism.” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 50, no. 2, 2010, pp. 139–­50. Mason, Jessica. “Making Fiction Out of Fact: Attention and Belief in the Discourse of Conspiracy.” Narrative Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 2, 2019, pp. 292–­311. xxxii  King and Gibbons

­McGurl, Mark. “Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 3, 2016, pp. 447–­7 1. ­McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987. ­McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity. Baltimore md: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. Minnis, Alastair. Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012. Nehamas, Alexander. “The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, 1981, pp. 133–­39. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, et al. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative, vol. 23, no. 1, 2015, pp. 61–­73. Patron, Sylvie. “Introduction.” Optional-­Narrator Theory: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals, ed. Sylvie Patron. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021, pp. 1–­34. ———. Optional-­Narrator Theory: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. Phelan, James. “Authors, Genres, and Audiences: A Rhetorical Approach.” The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship, edited by Ingo Berensmeyer et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 253–­69. ———. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1996. Rabinowitz, Peter. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1987. Richardson, Brian. “The Implied Author: Back from the Grave or Simply Dead Again?” Style, vol. 45, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–­10. ———. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006. Schmid, Wolf. Der Texttaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs. Amsterdam: Grüner, 1973. ———. “Implied Author.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al., 2013, https://​www​.lhn​.uni​-hamburg​.de/​node/​58​.html. Scott, Walter. “Introductory Epistle.” The Fortunes of Nigel. Edinburgh, 1822, pp. i–­xlviii. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010. Stockwell, Peter. “The Texture of Authorial Invention.” World-­Building: Discourse in the Mind, edited by Joanna Gavins and Ernestine Lahey. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 147–­63. Introduction  xxxiii

Stougaard-­Nielsen, Jackob. “The Author in Literary Theory and Theories of Literature.” The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship, edited by Ingo Berensmeyer et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 270–­87. Walton, Kendall. “Point of View in Narrative and Depictive Representation.” Noûs, vol. 10, 1976, pp. 49–­61. Werth, Paul. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Harlow: Longman, 1999. Whiteley, Sara, and Patricia Canning. “Reader Response Research in Stylistics.” Language and Literature, vol. 26, no. 2, 2017, pp. 71–­87. Widiss, Benjamin. Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-­Century American Literature. Stanford ca: Stanford UP, 2011. Wimsatt, W. K., and M. C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review, vol. 54, no. 3, 1946, pp. 468–­88. Zipfel, Frank. “Narratorless Narration? Some Reflections on the Arguments for and against the Ubiquity of Narrators in Fictional Narration.” Narrator and Author: Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological Debate, edited by Dorothee Birke and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 45–­80.

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Part 1

The Author on the World Stage Social and Cultural Contexts

1

The Public Intellectual on Stage Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Odile Heynders

Many writers take positions as social and political commentators of our time. Think of British author Ali Smith giving voice to detainees by retelling their personal stories as part of the Refugee Tales Project (2016); or French novelist Edouard Louis expressing the angry sentiments of the gilets jaunes in a personal essay on the position of his father as a laborer in the north region of France (Heynders, “Voices”); or the American writer Jonathan Franzen critiquing the internet and the dominance of technology in our society (Lovink). What these writers have in common is that they use their literary work and the status of being an author to engage in public debate by giving a critical perspective on issues of ideational significance. They can be considered the public intellectuals of our time, while taking into account that there are audiences to reach beyond the reading publics. In Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy I demonstrate that public intellectuals intervene in the public sphere to take a committed stance regarding topics of a political, social, or ethical nature. In this process, nonspecialist audiences are addressed on matters of general concern, the idea being that the intellectual functions as a mediator and helps publics gain insight and form an opinion. Public intellectual intervention can have many different forms, ranging from public talks or televised interviews to fiction and documentary writing, manifestos, tweets, blogposts, and so on. Even though the figure of the writing intellectual goes back to the eighteenth century, today’s public intellectuals are challenged by media technologies and platforms to position themselves. They operate in a media society and must be visible in both offline and online circuits in order to reach audiences (Baert 3

and Booth). A new role for the public intellectual is therefore created, one not only founded on the cultural prestige and the relative autonomy of the author but also influenced by an engagement with publics and an awareness of the effectivity and exploitation of various media platforms. Today’s public intellectual must be capable of reaching audiences beyond those connected to a network of expertise or a professional field. This chapter investigates how the contemporary literary author can act as a public intellectual by combining various forms of public engagement on various stages and platforms. As an exemplary case study, it focuses on the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b. 1977). She published her literary debut, Purple Hibiscus (2003), when she was twenty-­six, which was followed by a second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006); a volume of short stories entitled The Thing around Your Neck (2009); the novel Americanah (2013); two essays on feminism, “We Should All Be Feminists” (2014) and “Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions” (2017); and the autobiographical Notes on Grief (2021). By living in both the United States and Nigeria, Adichie manifests herself as a literary author with a hybrid identity, characterized as a postcolonial, Nigerian American, Igbo, feminist, migrant, celebrity author. She manifests her authorship in an output that connects intellectual intervention and popular culture. In addition to being awarded many literary prizes and honorary degrees, Adichie has contributed stories, essays, and interviews on social and human-­interest topics to serious and entertaining newspapers and magazines, such as the Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Financial Times, and the New York Times. Further, her 2012 ted talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” has been sampled by pop star Beyoncé, used by designer house Dior in a series of slogan T-shirts, and distributed in 2015 as a booklet to young people in Sweden. Adichie also maintains a vibrant presence on Instagram, where she promotes the #WearNigerian project—­a social media campaign that promotes Nigerian fashion designers. In this contribution, various stages on which Adichie communicates ideas with different publics will be examined. First, I will consider two of Adichie’s novels in which the narrative voice produces strong opinions regarding political and social topics. The intellectual stance expressed in the novels is continued in activities outside the literary work. Second, I will discuss Adichie’s performance and message in two ted talks and 4  Heynders

examine how statements on feminism are taken over by a pop singer on another stage, when Beyoncé samples Adichie’s words in her lyrics. We can see how opinions are shared and spread on different stages and platforms and how publics get connected but sometimes also confused. In the conclusion I will reflect on (re)staging in the current media context and on the consequences this can have for both the author figure and the publics. The Novelist as Public Intellectual Not every literary author today performs the role of public intellectual. Writers sometimes decide to not appear in public, to not share opinions with a general audience (either online or offline), and to not take a role as mediator in complex societal debates. In the current media-­saturated public spheres, however, not sharing opinions can have a negative effect, since the writer—­literary and academic alike—­is expected to be visible and searchable. The role of the public intellectual involves conscious visibility, searchability, and impact. The analysis of public intellectual activity concentrates on four interrelated aspects: cultural authority, cultural context, mediation of production and reception, and performance (Heynders, Writers as Public Intellectuals 21). Cultural authority implies that the intellectual profile of a writer is based on their prestige, founded on education and artistic or academic achievements, or body of work (Collini). Writers as intellectual authorities take a critical perspective toward an issue, distancing themselves from immediate response and, in doing so, establish an educative view (Collini 61). Adichie’s cultural authority is based on her oeuvre as well as her knowledge of the two nation-­states in which she lives and about which she writes extensively. Her experiences as a Black woman in Africa and in the United States help her understand and gauge various positions in societal debates on identity and postcolonialism. Cultural context concerns the interconnection of private and public worlds, of the writing position and the specific cultural environment in which ideas are formed and transferred. In Adichie’s case, the transnational context is particularly significant, since she articulates cultural diversity from both an African and a North American perspective. She is aware of the cultural differences entailed in thinking about identity, the position of women, and that of migrants. Her own migratory experiences are relevant

The Public Intellectual on Stage  5

to her interactions with her multiple audiences. Mediation of production and reception refers to the fact that the public intellectual is aware of the rhetorical power and the consequences of framing discourses and is able to deliver a critical statement in various genres. Having an impact on a certain public often means identifying with that public. In writing novels, stories, and essays and in delivering public talks, Adichie addresses and connects with various specific audiences. Performance, then, has to do with the fact that intellectuals construct a posture, or a public persona, which is connected to a particular social discourse (Meizoz 15; see also the discussion of Ferrante’s authorial performance using a pseudonym in Partyka’s chapter in this volume) as well as to their own interests, experiences, and competences. The intellectual thus builds a self-­consciousness into their performances, while aesthetic devices or theatrical mechanisms are involved in foregrounding their identifiable characteristics. Performance implies a process of playacting based on visibility, irony, and also opportunism, as I have shown in an examination of the acts of Dutch public intellectual Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Heynders, Writers as Public Intellectuals 97–­120). Baert and Morgan (2017) argue that in the context of researching the performances of public intellectuals, a dramaturgical approach is useful, focusing on staging, positioning, and implementation. They contend that “intellectual interventions can be seen as performative in that they bring something into being—­they do something” (5). Further, they add, “Positioning refers to the process by which individuals ascribe certain characteristics to themselves and to others. . . . These characteristics are often put in terms of dichotomies such as ‘left vs. right,’ ‘high-­brow vs low-­brow,’ ‘white vs black,’ etc.” (Baert and Morgan 5). The intellectual performance is set upon a stage, which both empowers and restricts its presentation: the stage provides a setting against which the intellectual intervention makes sense, but it also imposes a certain meaning on it, closing off others. In the current mediatized and digital society, the interconnection between offline and online stages and platforms (implying a social media site owned by a company [Van Dijck et al.]) offers new opportunities for spreading ideas and opening dialogues with different audiences. On the one hand, this results in a less hierarchical relationship between the intellectual and their audience(s), yet on the other hand, digital spheres seem 6  Heynders

to encourage more distant or ironic performances from public intellectuals. Irony seems to draw attention to the artificiality of performances and to showmanship rather than to knowledge and ideas (Baert and Morgan 18). In this context, another aspect of intellectual performance should be regarded as well: the celebritization of the public intellectual (Heynders, Writers as Public Intellectuals 14–­15). The celebrity intellectual is a blended construction, where authority and status, physical appearance and theatricality, and the meaning and interpretation of the artistic work shift constantly depending on context, topic, and media specifics (Redmond). Today’s public intellectuals gain access to the media-­enhanced public sphere only if they are capable of presenting a visible outspokenness in combination with producing impactful work. As Adichie’s work and presence—­in her literary work, in blogposts inside and outside literature, and in public lectures and an essay on her author website—­demonstrate, there are several stages on which the public intellectual performs, and one stage often leads to the next in a process through which publics exercise their own agency in receiving and resending a message. On each of these stages, Adichie positions herself as a writer engaged with several topics debated in the current democratic public spheres. Stage 1: Literature as Intellectual Stage To be recognized as a public intellectual possessing a relevant voice, it is necessary to publish imaginative, provocative, or courageous work. While engaging with significant social or political issues, public intellectuals must offer counterdiscourses—­that is, a perspective on what could have been otherwise (Habermas 55). Literary work can be considered a stage, in the sense that the author transmits certain political and social messages through it and writers who position themselves as public intellectuals are concerned with public debates and aware that their literary work could evoke discussion on topics in these debates. Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) can be characterized as realist psychological fiction, which questions matters of injustice and violence in the history of Nigeria. It offers a political perspective on the development of the West African state. The novel, as an example of “third generation Nigerian writing” (Akpome 22), is particularly thought-­provoking because of its reconstruction of tribal conflicts.

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Half of a Yellow Sun offers a retrospective view of the twentieth-­century politics of Nigeria, which became independent from the United Kingdom on October 1, 1960, and thereafter saw various ethnic tribes spread across the country. In 1966 a coup took place, after which the state of Biafra was formed and the violent Nigerian-­Biafran civil war began. Half of a Yellow Sun evokes horrific scenes in refugee camps and trenches and depicts such atrocities as air raids, child soldiers, and the starvation of very young children due to malnutrition. Adichie describes the impact of war and politics on the everyday lives of various people in a novel that reconstructs the past, the historical consciousness, and the geopolitical landscape of Nigeria (Marx; Ouma; Thrivikraman Nair). The novel draws out disputes on politics and nationalism and the various ways in which people from different classes and ethnic tribes deal with changes wrought by civil war. The narrator’s main focus switches among three central characters: the houseboy Ugwu, who becomes first a soldier and then a writer; Ollana, a rich, well-­educated woman trying to keep her household running during the war; and Richard, an English journalist who identifies with the Biafran people and aims to write a book about the political events. The novel features many voices giving their (tribal) perspectives on the civil war, putting a particular emphasis on the voices of women who try to survive and somehow preserve the domestic sphere. In doing this, the work fits into a particular tradition of Biafran War fiction, which includes Chinua Achebe’s Girls at War and Other Stories (1973), Flora Nwapa’s Never Again (1975), and Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982). Although evoking the complex ethnic and political situation in the West African country, the main focus in the novel is on the Igbo people and their culture. Adichie herself has an Igbo background, and she lost both her grandfathers in the civil war. Half of a Yellow Sun points at the danger of nationalist ideologies, underlining the idea that ethnic identity is a flexible construct and not a static category. In describing the discussions, stereotyping, and biases with which the various characters engage, the novel comments on class issues, gender, and ethnicity. It also offers insight—­by extensively drawing out conversations among Nsukka intellectuals—­into the ideologies to which many Biafrans subscribed. It is Ugwu, the houseboy, who listens to one of these discussions: 8  Heynders

“Of course we are all alike, we all have white oppression in common,” Miss Adebayo said dryly. “Pan-­Africanism is simply the most sensible response.” “Of course, of course, but my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe,” Master said. “I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.” (Adichie, Half 20) Ugwu follows the intellectuals’ conversations, and the naïveté of this semiliterate village boy helps the reader comprehend the complex positions and subjectivities in such discourses on nationalism (Ouma). Through Ugwu’s focalization it becomes clear that ethnicity is the motor of nationalism in the new state. By contrasting the ideas and perspectives of various characters, Adichie puts psychological and cultural frames around these different convictions and perceptions while also implying that nationalism and secession destroy human relationships. The novel, therefore, is a project of memory, constructing a consciousness of the Nigerian history (Ouma). The novel can be considered a stage on which the author in a public intellectual role makes certain claims encouraging counterdiscourse or an alternative perspective (Habermas 55). The thematic message of Adichie’s work did indeed lead to a discussion among (academic) readers about the characterization of Biafra as a “failed state” (Marx) and the “Biafran (or Igbo) position” the narrator seemingly defends (Akpome). In inviting discussion about Nigeria’s history of the present, the novel functions as a stage on which Adichie transmits various standpoints regarding the everyday and political realities of a relatively young African nation-­state. Her intellectual intervention is performative because it carries a message about contesting tribes in Nigerian history and politics and invites a response. John Marx points out that Adichie portrays life during wartime as both violent and ordinary, arguing that “what goes on in the most unstable of states is never so extreme that it cannot be normed” (597). Marx underlines the idea that while the social sciences privilege quantitative data in regard to the examination of states and institutions, literature counters

The Public Intellectual on Stage  9

with the quality of local color and thus contributes to the body of knowledge concerned with how states work. In Adichie’s novel the place for politics is in the sphere of private life, in the academic discussions held in the house in Nsukka. According to Marx, Half of a Yellow Sun offers “a model for reproducing the feel of the seminar or colloquium when the universities are all closed down” (614). His conclusion is that the novel gives relevant information that can be used in political studies. Adichie as a literary writer provides expert knowledge on events and ideas that fueled the Nigerian-­Biafran civil war. Although Aghogho Akpome takes an opposing stance to Marx in stating that Adichie gives preference to the Igbo perspective over others and thus presents a biased account of what happened in Nigeria, he nevertheless also takes the novel seriously as a political statement. He argues that Half of a Yellow Sun is influenced by conflicting historicist traditions and ideological contestations and ultimately accentuates undertones of ethnonationalism, of a “definitely Igbo perspective on the war” (33). Adichie’s work, Akpome argues, enlivens a growing Biafran counterdiscourse that justifies the continuing demand for a separate nation-­state for Igbo people. In this view, Adichie’s novel can be understood as an apologia for the defunct Biafra. The issue here is not to start an in-­depth discussion on different interpretations of this political novel but rather to point at how the literary work calls for a discussion of ethnic and tribal perspectives, ideologies, and memories and as such puts in perspective the emergence of Nigeria. The novel has an impact on the thinking about the state’s development in the aftermath of colonialization. The author researches, analyzes, and gives insight into the complexity of history and collective memory; she arouses discussion, dialogue, and counterargument and, in doing so, positions herself in a political and intellectual field. In 2006 Adichie wrote a short piece in the Guardian in which she explained that she tried to achieve “emotional truth” in her writing: “The novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-­read, have an empathetic human quality, or ‘emotional truth.’ This quality is difficult to fully define, but I always recognize it when I see it: it is different from honesty and more resilient than fact, something that exists not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind that shows. When I started my second novel Half of a Yellow Sun, set before and during the Nigeria-­Biafra 10  Heynders

war of 1967–­70, I hoped that emotional truth would be its major recognizable trait” (“Truth and Lies”). Successful fiction does not need to be validated by “real life,” Adichie adds, and to write realistic fiction about a war “is to be constantly aware of a responsibility to something larger than art.” Responsibility to something “larger than art” aims at principles that relate to the affective and imaginative power of literature, to its potential to offer various perspectives, and to its invitation to think and debate. The public intellectual is committed and takes a stand on real ongoing issues even in the fictional literary work (Melzer). The novel is not just a representation of historical facts nor simply an autonomous work of sheer imagination. Rather, it is the outcome of vivid inventiveness, intellectual reflection, and the exploration of individual experiences and memories. The author had ideas, so to speak, and she tested these ideas in her novel (Jablonka). The work thus functions as a stage on which the public intellectual takes a position in a certain cultural, historical, or political context. Stage 2: Online Posts Inside and Outside Literature The novel can be considered a stage: ideas and arguments are communicated and readers are invited to contest opinions and interpretations. As Baert and Morgan have conveyed, self-­positioning is made possible through confrontation with others, in this case the characters in the novel. The literary text as the stage opens up to other stages and the interconnectedness of stages has consequences for the public intellectual performance. The focus point in this section is Adichie’s novel Americanah, in which she describes the life of a young woman who decides to leave Nigeria in the 1990s due to the lack of opportunities it offers for young people to work or study. The protagonist, Ifemelu, migrates to the United States, enrolls in college, and later manages to become a successfully self-­employed blogger. Adichie in this novel narrates migratory experiences: starting a new life, picking up new job activities, negotiating a new identity. One of the messages articulated in the novel is that while being Black in Nigeria is the norm, being Black in the United States is an issue of otherness. Only in North America does Ifemelu realize that Blackness is an identity marker, an issue of race. Obinze, Ifemelu’s boyfriend, also leaves Nigeria but is destined for the United Kingdom, where

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he fails to get a residency permit. His story line dwells on the exclusion of migrants from mainstream British culture, showing how they are locked up in detention facilities and are stripped of their identities. While the fate of Ifemelu in the United States is generally positive, her friend in the United Kingdom is prevented from achieving his ambitions. As Nwanyanwu (2017) states, “Americanah focuses on the politics of color. . . . The major task confronting the characters is how to understand and manage difference and multiple identity shifts in time and space” (390). Both Ifemelu and Obinze must use other people’s identity cards in order to work without a permit in the hope of making a decent living. Blacks, and migrants in general, must continually negotiate their presence on a racial, social, and economic level. The novel offers multiple perspectives on the cultural configurations of Black subjectivity and “gives meaning to black cultural identity” (Phiri 131). Adichie as a public intellectual takes a position in a cultural field discussing issues of Blackness and race from both a West African and an American perspective. But it is not only the narrator’s voice that establishes this positioning; the voice of Ifemelu, the protagonist, also contributes to Adichie’s self-­positioning through the metadiscourse of her blogposts. The narrative starts in Princeton, New Jersey, and is framed as a visit to the hairdresser, with flashbacks and flash forwards constituting the main plot. After a traumatic start, Ifemelu has made a success of her life in the United States, but during her visit to the hairdresser, she decides that she is missing something—­a rooted identity—­and that she would like to go back to Nigeria. The narrative’s linearity is then further undermined by the interpolation into the narrative of blogposts written by Ifemelu on a site entitled Raceteenth or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-­American Black. The ironical title of the blog refers to nineteenth-­century African American slave narratives (one of which was read by Ugwu in Half of a Yellow Sun and stimulated him to start writing).1 The blogposts are thus part of the fictional narrative while at the same time being disruptions that open the story to “real” debates in the United States. Ifemelu’s blogposts reveal strong political opinions and a sharp talent for observation, and while they are mostly satirical in tone, they also demonstrate the importance of cultural exchange. 12  Heynders

The particular style and topics of the blogs add a more pointed racial commentary to what is ostensibly a story of migration and mobility. In the blogpost “What Academics Mean by White Privilege, or Yes It Sucks to Be Poor and White but Try Being Poor and Non-­W hite,” Ifemelu writes, So this guy said to Professor Hunk [Ifemelu’s Black American lover, O.H.], “White privilege is nonsense. How can I be privileged? I grew up fucking poor in West Virginia. I’m an Appalachian hick. My family is on welfare.” Right. But privilege is always relative to something else. Now imagine someone like him, as poor and as fucked up, and then make that person black. If both are caught for drug possession, say, the white guy is more likely to be sent to treatment and the black guy is more likely to be sent to jail. Everything else the same except for race. . . . ps—­Professor Hunk just suggested I post this, a test for White Privilege. . . . If you answer mostly no, then congratulations, you have white privilege. . . . When you want to join a prestigious social club, do you wonder if your race will make it difficult for you to join? When you go shopping alone at a nice store, do you worry that you will be followed or harassed? When you turn on mainstream tv or open a mainstream newspaper, do you expect to find mostly people of another race? (346–­47) This post raises typical American debates on race and ideology. The blogger rephrases the words of her Black American partner and reiterates a discussion on white privilege. For Ifemelu, to perform the role of blogger is to play with words and sayings in an American context, which has no immediate relation to her Nigerian self (Phiri 135). Her Nigerian friend Obinze, when reading the posts, does not even recognize Ifemelu’s voice: the “blogposts astonished him, they seemed so American and so alien, the irreverent voice with its slanginess, its mix of high and low language, and he could not imagine her writing them” (374). In due course Ifemelu becomes a leading blogger in the United States who can afford to buy a house with the proceeds of her writing. She, as a former migrant, achieves a middle-­class position and is invited for public talks about race. Ifemelu ultimately becomes aware of her own transformation in front of these

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audiences, recognizing that “she began to say what they wanted to hear, none of which she would ever write on her blog” (305). From a narratological perspective, the blogposts not only function as a divertimento—­an entertaining and different voice—­in the narrative; they also operate as a metacommentary on the fictional story. Adichie uses the posts to make critical political statements on America and on racism voiced by Ifemelu but also to express some of her own thoughts (Magendane). In the novel Ifemelu writes blogposts on race and identity, on Barack Obama and the presidential elections, on the city of Lagos and young returnees—­subjects that have significance for her story of migration. Outside of the novel, on Adichie’s official author’s website, there is a link to a page entitled “Ifemelu’s blog” as well, containing blogposts commenting on life in Nigeria. Additional blogposts entitled “Ifem & Ceiling”—­the latter being the nickname for Obinze—­a lso appear, with all the posts being written after Americanah was published in 2013. A deliberate connection therefore is being drawn by Adichie between the blogposts inside and outside the novel. This brings us back to the consideration of the stages on which public intellectuals position themselves and share their ideas. What we observe here is that one stage leads to another. The novel Americanah incorporates blogposts that voice the ideas and opinions of its female protagonist. Yet by subsequently placing the same and similar blogposts—­purportedly written by the literary character—­on her own official website, Adichie demonstrates that the boundaries between the fictional work and discourses outside of the novel are permeable. The ideas of a specific character get a place (a stage) on the official website. Consequently, the performances of Adichie’s characters appear to link back to her own authorial stances. One stage leads to another stage; positioning in the novel is connected to positioning outside of it. This observation can also be seen in two public lectures that Adichie delivered in 2009 and 2012. Stage 3: Adichie’s ted Talks In July 2009 Adichie gave a ted talk entitled “The Danger of a Single Story,” which, in a period of twelve years, has been viewed more than twenty-­nine million times, leading to its inclusion on the list of the twenty-­five most popular ted talks of all time.2 Adichie is characterized 14  Heynders

on the ted website as a writer whose novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature. Her talk is about growing up in Nigeria and studying in the United States—­themes she also addresses in Americanah—­and how, in both places, single stories flatten our perspectives of other people’s experiences. The message of the talk is unambiguous: a single story creates facile stereotypes that turn one story into the only story. Performance is important in this context; in the ted talk Adichie is eloquent, using humor to give rhythm to her speech as she stands quietly behind the lectern, speaking in a low, calm voice. A quote demonstrates the rhetorical efficacy: “The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar” (“Danger”). While Adichie’s first ted talk underlined an engaging message of humanist connection, her second, which was performed three years later in December 2012, was more combative: “We Should All Be Feminists” is a plea for the reappraisal of gender relations and enclosed cultural patterns. Sketching scenes from her life in Nigeria, Adichie points out how gender remains a cause of injustice, stating, “Gender matters. Men and women experience the world differently. Gender colors the way we experience the world. But we can change that” (“We Should”). This second ted talk has received more than 4.8 million views, far fewer than the first one, which is perhaps surprising given the fact that in this performance Adichie appears even more committed to entertaining her audience, who frequently laugh out loud in response to her humor. Following Baert and Morgan’s contention that a stage both empowers and restricts intellectual presentation, imposing a certain meaning while closing off others, it is interesting to consider the type of stage that ted talks provide. On the website it is explained that ted is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization “devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks.” ted began in 1984 as a conference, where technology, entertainment, and design converged; today it covers a broad range of topics, from scientific research to global issues. The success of the format inheres in its professional production, precise editing, and clever curation (Cadwalladr). What viewers see is a montage rather than a live, improvised, recorded talk, although there is a live audience who applaud, laugh, and respond.

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In this context as well we can observe that one stage leads to another stage, although in this case Adichie is not the only actor. The second ted talk was appropriated and further disseminated by pop star Beyoncé, who quite literally took the words of Adichie out of her mouth and sampled them in her song “Flawless.” In the official music clip, we hear the words spoken by Adichie: “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful. . . . We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. Feminist: the person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.’”3 Beyoncé’s clip has—­at this moment—­over ninety-­ five million views on YouTube, an enormous number in comparison to the public that Adichie reached with her 2012 talk. In a sense, the ted stage has been extended onto the stage offered by the music channel and the process of self-­positioning has been taken out of Adichie’s control, since not all Beyoncé’s listeners will recognize Adichie’s voice as that of the literary author. At the same time, Adichie’s message of feminism and gender equality has arguably reached a far bigger public than it might have otherwise. Beyoncé gives the stage to Adichie: she slows down the singing so that the spoken words can be heard before the beat continues. Although actors may hold particular views about what their intellectual interventions are meant to convey, these do not necessarily correspond to the interpretations made by the audiences (Baert and Morgan). When Adichie was interviewed at the Brainwash Festival in Amsterdam in October 2016, she affirmed this, stating, “Beyoncé is a celebrity of the first order and with this song she has reached many people who would otherwise probably never have heard the word feminism, let alone gone out and buy [sic] my essay” (Kiene). Adichie explained that Beyoncé’s feminism is different from hers, just as the presence of a writer is different from that of a pop star: I was shocked about how many requests for an interview I received when that song was released. Literally every major newspaper in the world wanted to speak with me about Beyoncé. I felt such a resentment (laughs loudly).4 I thought: are books really that unimportant to you? Another thing I hated was that I read everywhere: now people finally know her, thanks to Beyoncé, or: she must be very 16  Heynders

grateful. I found that disappointing. I thought: I am a writer and I have been for some time and I refuse to perform in this charade that is now apparently expected of me: “Thanks to Beyoncé, my life will never be the same again.” (Kiene) In the interview at the festival stage in Amsterdam, Adichie sharpened her own position in response to Beyoncé’s pop song adaptation of her message. This is a salient example of how self-­positioning is made possible and can be obstructed through the positioning of others. The writer makes a public statement, but audiences do not always pick up or contextualize that communicated standpoint. Conclusion Using the concept of staging to differentiate between the performances of the public intellectual illuminates the different roles that the author can have. Functioning as a public intellectual is a responsibility that an author might choose and perform, not a static identity that comes with contemporary authorship. The stage is a useful concept for underlining how the public intellectual addresses various publics by discussing diverse topics in different places and situations. I have shown how the literary work operates as a stage through a discussion of how Half of a Yellow Sun comments on the construction of the state of Nigeria and enables Adichie to take a position in debates on postcolonialism. The novel Americanah is brought up as a stage on which the author expressed a message about Blackness and issues of migration and racism in the United States. Adichie’s ted talks are examples of how the author as public speaker positions herself on yet another stage, one that has allowed her words to reach a greater audience beyond the readers of her books. The first talk defined Adichie as a global author underlining the many stories of the world; in the second talk she positioned herself as a feminist aware of gender and sexual differences. This message was appropriated by pop singer Beyoncé, who reframed Adichie’s standpoint into a more narrow message on the lack of opportunities for girls. Stages, according to Baert and Morgan, help the intellectual position herself and imbue the performance with particular meanings. Self-­positioning is made possible through the position of others, either by showing affinities with them or through juxtaposition to them. Or

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even, as could be demonstrated in a conclusive case, by expressing emotion and resentment for others. The final stage that I would like to bring to the fore is Adichie’s author website, where she in June 2021 published the essay “It Is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts.” This essay immediately went viral and briefly crashed the website, demonstrating that many people were eager to follow what Adichie had to say. Adichie’s words considered the tweets of two of her former students—­ ­she did not mention names, but they appeared to be Nigerian writer and queer activist Olu Timehin Adegbeye and award-­winning author Akwaeke Emezi—­who insulted her for what they considered “transphobic” comments. This related to a 2017 interview with Britain’s Channel 4 in which Adichie had stated that “trans women are trans women” (as such not affirming their status as women without reservation). In the personal essay on her website, Adichie expresses her perspective (“It Is Obscene”) on what happened and shows detailed email conversations with the two writers. The essay is a proclamation regarding personal contacts who decided to “cancel” Adichie in public. The essay not only addresses the insults that the two young writers published on social media; it also delivers a statement about a “generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow” (Adichie, “It Is Obscene”). What is “obscene,” according to Adichie, is that the “assumption of good faith is dead” and that people on social media “flatten all nuance, wish away complexity” (“It Is Obscene”). What we see happening here is significant in the context of public intellectual performance on multiple stages. Adichie uses her own author website, a personal platform, to send out an emotionally loaded message to the general public regarding her being “canceled” (“I knew they were actively campaigning to ‘cancel’ me and tweeting about how I should no longer be invited to speak at events”) and regarding the toxic sphere that is created on social media (Adichie, “It Is Obscene”). The author shares an opinion on a widespread and complex phenomenon—­cancel culture—­and uses pathos as a rhetorical strategy to strongly make her point. On the one hand, this is a courageous step, showing anger about cancel practices as the disruption of public debate. On the other hand, the essay underlines that the author has institutional power: she communicates via the highly visible personal platform established by the 18  Heynders

commercial success of her writing. She is the celebrated author, the public figure with numerous readers following her website. Both the cancelers and Adichie herself shared information with the public without asking for the approval of the person concerned. Where in the 2009 ted talk Adichie’s message was about not accepting a single story because it easily creates stereotypes, here a contrasting message is communicated: “It Is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts” obviously is the opposite of plural stories. Adichie positions herself in an emotional dispute on the openness of the public sphere but not without a dramatic posture with a backlash on her earlier position. Baert and Morgan have argued that the picture of the authoritative public intellectual is transforming, implying that irony is taking on a bigger significance and self-­positioning becomes more clearly a dramaturgical performance. Adichie’s case study nuances this. What we observe is that there are various stages on which the novelist as a public intellectual performs differently in regard to more serious issues (postcolonial, migration, feminist, gender) or playful ones (African fashion design), while the aim is to fight “ideological orthodoxy” in order to demonstrate curiousness and multiple perspectives (Adichie, “It Is Obscene”). In her emotional response on her author website, however, Adichie does not succeed in reaching this aim. There is a tension in the essay that emphasizes the toll that must be paid for being a public figure: “When you are a public figure, people will write and say false things about you. That comes with the territory” (Adichie “It Is Obscene”). This tension about being a public figure is perhaps explained by something she writes in Notes on Grief, a tribute to her father, who died in 2020. Adichie describes how he was kidnapped in 2015 in Nsukka by a group of men forcing him “to ask his famous daughter to pay the ransom” (Adichie, Notes on Grief 54). After three days the money was delivered and the father released. The author has paid for her fame. The various performances on stages and the diverse positions communicated by Adichie demonstrate that her authorship is flexible and strategic: Adichie is outspoken and capable of assessing how audiences will react. The differences in stage and setting, the divergences in cultural context, as well as the modifications in self-­positioning underline the dynamic of authorship in current public spheres. Adichie as a contemporary writer negotiates between publics and positions, between being

The Public Intellectual on Stage  19

cloaked by the work and being visible on platforms and in the media. Being a famous author comes with constraints and responsibilities. Notes 1. The text read by Ugwu is The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself (360). This is a memoir and treatise on abolition from 1845. 2. The most popular ted talks are in a list at https://​www​.ted​.com/​playlists/​ 171/​the​_most​_popular​_talks​_of​_all. 3. See https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​Iyuuwons9by. Adichie’s recorded voice appears at timestamp 1.26–­2.20. 4. While square brackets are usually the convention for representing nonverbal content, this is the presentation in the original publication.

Bibliography Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. London: 4th Estate, 2013. ———. “The Danger of a Single Story.” ted, July 2009, https://​www​.ted​.com/​ talks/​chimamanda​_ngozi​_adichie​_the​_danger​_of​_a​_single​_story. ———. Half of a Yellow Sun. London: 4th Estate, 2006. ———. “It Is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts.” 2021, https://​www​ .chimamanda​.com/​news​_items/​it​-is​-obscene​-a​-true​-reflection​-in​-three​ -parts/. ———. Notes on Grief. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. ———. “Truth and Lies.” The Guardian, 16 September 2006, https://​www​ .theguardian​.com/​books/​2006/​sep/​16/​fiction​.society. ———. “We Should All Be Feminists.” ted, December 2012, https://​www​.ted​ .com/​talks/​chimamanda​_ngozi​_adichie​_we​_should​_all​_be​_feminists. Akpome, Aghogho. “Narrating a New Nationalism: Rehistoricization and Political Apologia in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.” English Academy Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2013, pp. 22–­38. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1080/​10131752​.2013​.783387. Baert, Patrick, and Josh Booth. “Tensions within the Public Intellectual: Political Interventions from Dreyfus to the New Social Media.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 25, 2012, pp. 111–­26. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1007/​s10767​-012​-9123​-6. Baert, Patrick, and Marcus Morgan. “A Performative Framework for the Study of Intellectuals.” European Journal for Social Theory, vol. 21, no. 3, 2017, pp. 1–­18. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​1368431017690737. Collini, Stefan. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 20  Heynders

Cadwalladr, Carole. “My ted Talk: How I Took on the Tech Titans in Their Lair.” The Guardian, 21 April 2019, https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​uk​-news/​2019/​apr/​ 21/​carole​-cadwalladr​-ted​-tech​-google​-facebook​-zuckerberg​-silicon​-valley. Dijck, José van, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal. De platform samenleving, Strijd om publieke waarden in een online wereld. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2016. Habermas, Jürgen. Europe, the Faltering Project. Translated by Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Heynders, Odile. “The Voices of the Gilets Jaunes in Literature: ‘No One Is Talking about Us.’” diggit magazine, 20 December 2018, https://​www​.diggitmagazine​ .com/​column/​voices​-gilets​-jaunes​-literature​-no​-one​-talking​-about​-us. ———. Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Jablonka, Ivan. History Is a Contemporary Literature, Manifesto for the Social Sciences, translated by Nathan J. Bracher. Ithaca ny: Cornell UP, 2014. Kiene, Aimée. “Ngozi Adichie: Beyoncé’s Feminism Isn’t My Feminism.” De Volkskrant, 7 October 2016, https://​www​.volkskrant​.nl/​cultuur​-media/​ ngozi​-adichie​-beyonce​-s​-feminism​-isn​-t​-my​-feminism​~bd0661ea/. Lovink, Geert. Social Media Abyss: Critical Internet Cultures and the Force of Negation. Cambridge: Polity 2016. Magendane, Kiza. “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Is de sterke vrouw van onze generatie.” De Volkskrant, 13 November 2017, https://​www​.volkskrant​.nl/​ nieuws​-achtergrond/​kiza​-magendane​-chimamanda​-ngozi​-adichie​-is​-de​ -sterke​-vrouw​-van​-onze​-generatie​~b54c26b3/. Marx, John. “Failed-­State Fiction.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 49, no. 4, 2008, pp. 597–­633. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1353/​cli​.0​.0044. Meizoz, Jerome. Postures littéraires: Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur. Geneva: Slatkine Erudition, 2007. Melzer, Arthur M., et al., editors. The Public Intellectual: Between Philosophy and Politics. Lanham md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Nwanyanwu, Augustine Uka. “Transculturalism, Otherness, Exile, and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” Matatu, vol. 49, no. 2, 2017, pp. 386–­99. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1163/​18757421​-04902008. Ouma, Christopher E. W. “Composite Consciousness and Memories of War in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.” English Academy Review, vol. 28, no. 2, 2011, pp. 15–­30. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​10131752​.2011​.617991. Phiri, Aretha. “Expanding Black Subjectivities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” Cultural Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 2017, pp. 121–­42. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​09502386​.2016​.1232422.

The Public Intellectual on Stage  21

Redmond, Sean. Celebrity and the Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Thrivikraman Nair, Chitra. “Negotiation of Socio-­ethnic Spaces: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun as a Testomonio of African National and Ethnic Identity.” Tradition and Change in Contemporary West and East African Fiction, edited by Ogaga Okyyade. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014, pp. 203–­32.

22  Heynders

2

The Pseudonymic Author and Elena Ferrante’s Evasions of Gender Jaclyn Partyka

Author of eight novels and a collection of essays and interviews, Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s literary reputation has been rising over the past decade, culminating in the hbo adaptation of her globally successful four-­book series known as the Neapolitan quartet.1 However, much of the critical interest around Ferrante stems from her decision to mask her identity by using a pen name. The use of the pseudonym “Elena Ferrante” is somewhat of an anomaly in a contemporary literary marketplace characterized by the prestige of prizes, the allure of public appearances, and the constant curation of a public brand on social media (see chapter 1 by Heynders in this volume for further discussion of the public staging of authorship). Yet Ferrante, or at least the pseudonym, has become a popular and prestigious figure. Intrigue around the Ferrante pseudonym has subsequently led to a troubled consideration of how the author continues to function as a key interpretive frame when engaging with literary texts. While authorial biography in literary criticism was once out of fashion, recent scholarship by Seán Burke, Paul Dawson, and Max Saunders, among others, has demonstrated how the figure of the author and their position within a literary ecology or network significantly contributes to how readers interpret literary texts. Specifically, Dawson views authors as “not simply . . . producers of a narrative text, but as active participants in the process of reception” (235). However, Ferrante disrupts this model of interpretation by relying on the well-­wrought literary device of the pseudonym. At stake is how Ferrante’s use of a pseudonym has led to a fraught representation of female authorship that appears more performative than sincere. 23

Though she eschews public appearances, as Daphna Erdinast-­Vulcan points out, Ferrante’s interviews, essays, and letters that have been compiled in Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (2016) nevertheless constitute a kind of authorial performance. Ferrante suggests that her aloofness stems from a desire to reorient the reception of her novels away from biographical curiosity about the author so that readers will instead focus on “the life that counts . . . [the one that] remains miraculously alive in the works” (Frantumaglia 179). Consequently, Ferrante seeks to limit her readers’ focus, since “the biographical path does not lead to the genius of a work; it’s only a micro-­story on the side” (179). Ferrante’s attempt to constrict her readers’ access to authorial biography through the use of a pseudonym has paradoxically functioned to entice readers to seek out the missing author. As Benjamin Widiss explains in Obscure Invitations, “The more hidden the author, the more fixated the reader becomes on finding him or her” (6). The problem for Ferrante, however, is that the search for this widely popular and critically acclaimed author has resulted in a frenzy of speculation about the autobiographical nature of the Neapolitan novels. While Karen Bojar’s In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship (2018) attempts a comprehensive exploration into the problem of Ferrante’s authorship, others have used the identity question as a means to inquire into fictional ontology (Gibbons) and the translation of cultural authenticity (Segnini). Perhaps the most unsettling attempts to explain Ferrante’s pseudonym are the computational (Tuzzi and Cortelazzo) and economic investigations (Gatti) into Ferrante’s literary works, which suggest that the figure behind the globally successful female novelist could actually be a man or even a man and a woman in collaboration (Bojar). While these readings of Ferrante offer valuable commentary on how the mystery of Ferrante’s authorship has inspired insightful methodologies and shocking speculations, this chapter offers a more nuanced account of Ferrante’s pseudonymic authorship in relation to gender and the sociological dimension of authorship in the literary marketplace. The quartet, its hidden intertexts, and Ferrante’s pseudonym work together to establish a narrative that both upholds and strategically subverts many long-­standing assumptions about female authorship and literary value. Ferrante’s calculated use of the pseudonym adds a new chapter to the long-­standing historical narrative of women writers’ concealing 24  Partyka

their identities, one that reflects the struggle of Elena Greco—­the narrator of the Neapolitan novels—­to understand her own burgeoning authorial identity. Likewise, the subversive visual marketing of the Neapolitan quartet demonstrates the problem of reading Ferrante and her work paratextually and highlights how questions of both gender and genre continue to complicate definitions of literary value (see also Doloughan’s ­chapter 7 on gender, fictionality, and value in this volume). Finally, though the novels have cultivated strong reactions in many reading communities, recent speculations about the actual identity (or identities) behind the Ferrante persona may indicate the need for more collaborative models for contemporary reading. Female Authorship and the Pseudonym John Mullan, in Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature, notes that while it is difficult to parse out a “grand narrative” about the use of literary pseudonyms from the thousands of individual cases over time, certain historical patterns have emerged (286). In the late eighteenth century, the majority of novels were printed anonymously, since there was, overall, a cultural reticence toward public authorship. This trend of anonymity continued until midway through the nineteenth century (128). However, once “the business of selling authors became inextricable from the business of selling books” during the Victorian age, the use of literary pseudonyms became more strategically tied to marketing (287). Authors tentative about their first books—­Thomas Hardy, for instance—­could wait to announce themselves in subsequent offerings. While strategies of anonymity were employed by both genders during these periods, the consequences of public revelation and authorial performance were much more fraught for women writers, such that women writers taking on a male pseudonym was “far more frequent than the opposite” (128). The fact that women are often subject to more significant personal critique than their male counterparts explains the motivations behind many well-­k nown pseudonymic women writers.2 The Brontë sisters masked their gender explicitly because of what Charlotte described as their collective “vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice” (Ciuraru 8). Marian Evans also adopted a male pen name, “George Eliot,” in order to elicit objective criticism from her contemporaries, since to reveal herself as a woman writer would be to invite a

The Pseudonymic Author  25

critique not only of her novels but of her performance of gender.3 As her partner George Henry Lewes explained, “the object of the anonymity was to get the book judged on its own merits, and not prejudged as the work of a woman, or of a particular woman” (Eliot 283–­84). Since Victorian reviewers often adhered to a “distinctly gendered aesthetics of reception” that reflected patriarchal ideology, male pseudonyms allowed Eliot and the Brontës the freedom to be judged in accordance with the dominant culture (Thompson 10). The irony accompanying these efforts to conceal the female gender is the fact that women writers in the nineteenth century were both “widely published and immensely popular,” as evidenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s now familiar criticism of the “mob of scribbling women” infecting the literary marketplace (Baym 138). However, Nina Baym contends that the anxiety underlying this critique stems from a desire to use patriarchal systems of literary value to overwrite the commercial and cultural success of women writers: “The very success of large numbers of women authors could be read as a sign of the literary inferiority of their product, testimony to the triumph of vulgarity and commercial values over those of high art. The enterprise of ‘major’ literature could thus be made into an undertaking reserved for the stalwart male intellect” (138). Thus, knowledge of an author’s gender gives way to patriarchal judgments about a writer’s merit, character, and inherent talent. These historical precedents reveal the practice of female authors adopting male pseudonyms in an effort to achieve equity in literary critique. Ferrante likewise recognizes the tendency to divide literary criticism unevenly across gender binaries, arguing that the contemporary publishing industry “tend[s] to shut away women who write in a literary gynaeceum” where women writers “must address only certain themes and in certain tones that the male tradition considers suitable for the female gender” (Frantumaglia 334). This description replicates a literary hierarchy in which male tradition dictates the appropriate content and value of writing. However, while the Brontë sisters and Marian Evans adopted male pseudonyms to avoid prejudgment, Ferrante’s pseudonym is employed differently. In contrast to these nineteenth-­century precursors, the Ferrante persona appears to be a purposeful and strategic construction of a singular woman writer, suggesting an acute awareness of an intended audience and marketable product for a contemporary era 26  Partyka

that is perhaps willing to bridge the gendered divide between commercial viability and literary excellence. Ferrante’s choice of a clearly feminine nom de plume reflects how models of female authorship continue to be constructed within the literary marketplace. First, while the culture of fascination around novelists has mostly diminished since its peak in the modernist era, the post-­2000s literary ecology still relies heavily on authorship as a form of marketing. What has changed is that traditional literary criticism and print journalism have been replaced by a fast-­paced environment of critique bolstered by the interactivity inherent to digital platforms and publications. Ferrante has denigrated this cycle of participatory publicity, what she calls the “wars and skirmishes for visibility in the marketplace of culture” (Frantumaglia 179). Comments such as these lead Lili Loofbourow to view Ferrante’s use of the pseudonym as “a principled form of resistance to celebrity authorship, the publishing industry, and the way women are received there.” Loofbourow’s last point reinforces the fact that women authors are still not valued institutionally, though women readers continue to dominate the literary field commercially.4 The problems facing the scribbling woman therefore persist in the contemporary era, considering that a 2017 study out of McGill University found that 66.9 percent of the authors reviewed in the New York Times Review of Books were male, with only 33.1 percent of reviews being about books by female authors (Just Review).5 This critical imbalance in reviewing practices contributes to the lack of gender parity in other systems of literary value—­from prizes to publishing institutions.6 Aware of the institutional ideologies that continue to situate women writers as secondary figures within the literary tradition, Ferrante urges women writers to embrace a revolutionary form of literary creation. In response to the question of how these authors can work to create a new literary tradition supposedly beyond gendered prescriptions of canon or ideology, Ferrante asserts that “writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience” (Frantumaglia 266–­67). Accordingly, Ferrante’s use of a female pseudonym operates within this audacious vision. First, the practice of obscuring authorship has become relatively rare since the end of the nineteenth century, making Ferrante’s choice to use a pseudonym unusual within the context of a contemporary marketplace, where it is both more difficult and

The Pseudonymic Author  27

“less desirable” for an author to live privately (Ciuraru xxii). Second, the adoption of a female authorial persona (as opposed to a male or gender-­ neutral one) reinforces the authenticity of the female voice in an oeuvre of works primarily consisting of female narrators and characters. The effect of this choice takes on new relevance in the Neapolitan novels with the invention of Elena Greco as the protagonist-­narrator. What results is the invitation to read Elena Greco through the Elena Ferrante pseudonym (and vice versa), leading many readers to regard the Neapolitan novels as at least semiautobiographical. The problem, of course, is that the Ferrante persona is not verifiably tethered to a biographical origin. However, I argue that this flouting of the conventional boundaries that exist between gender and genre is exactly the point when it comes to how Ferrante models authorship in the Neapolitan novels. Reading Autobiographically One of the major ways that Ferrante both invites and denies her readers access to supposedly autobiographical interpretation is through the metanarrative elements peppered throughout the Neapolitan quartet. First and foremost is the correlation between Elena Greco’s career as a published writer and Ferrante’s status as an author. However, Ferrante cautions against a too-­exact correlation between her pseudonym and her character, claiming that the Neapolitan novels are not within the roman à clef tradition. Likewise, Alison Gibbons contends that the very nature of the pseudonym “makes the correlation between author and character names irrelevant because readers do not know the real author’s name” (26). Rather, Ferrante explains, “using the name Elena helped only to reinforce the truth of the story I was telling. Even those who write need that ‘willing suspension of disbelief,’ as Coleridge called it. The fictional treatment of biographical material—­a treatment that for me is essential—­is full of traps” (Frantumaglia 360). This evocation of Coleridge echoes Catherine Gallagher’s claim that it is the reader’s ability to willingly control their imaginative play that makes the genre of the novel exceptional in relation to other forms of fictionality (Gallagher 347). According to Gibbons’s explanation of this phenomenon, readers “form impressions of the author through a piecemeal assemblage of individual traits” (28). The difficulty in Ferrante’s case is that the fictionality of the Ferrante persona is reinforced by the fictionality of the novels, creating a feedback 28  Partyka

loop that encourages readers to continually seek out a verified source of truth. Unable to rely on biographical references to verify Ferrante as separate from her narrator-­protagonist, the reader layers an autobiographical reading on top of the novels. Thus, while the door to reading the Neapolitan novels as a fictionalization of Ferrante’s life experiences is cracked open, there are enough strategic omissions to stop the reader from ever truly crossing the threshold. It is this entrapment between generic readings that the figure of what I call the “doppelgänger-­author” negotiates (Partyka 206). This figure operates in the liminal space between fictional and referential material—­much in line with what Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh refer to as fictionality’s “double exposure” of the imagined and the real (Nielsen et al. 68). Thus, as an actant between these states, the forename “Elena” (Ferrante/Greco) functions as a doppelgänger-­author at the threshold between multiple generic categories and fictive states (in this case, the novel and autobiography) in order to both facilitate and challenge the communicative function of the narrative between author and reader.7 In my previous theorization, doppelgänger-­authors often emerge during moments of paratextual prolepsis in which the reader is already aware of the events surrounding an individual writer’s life and authorship ahead of time due to the trappings of fame and canonicity. Ferrante’s veil of anonymity therefore challenges this model. Rather, the glaring absence of biographical context instead propels the reader to construct an autobiographical or referential reading out of the fictional text. This impulse to read Ferrante’s pseudonym autobiographically is a way of co-­ constructing an authorial biography out of a fictional construction. James Phelan explains this tendency within the context of expanded models of fictionality: “Once fictionality achieves cultural legitimacy, its efficacy in nonnovelistic contexts provides the basis for the more expansive canvas of novelistic fictionality. That canvas encourages extended uses of invention, including ones that generate pleasure and establish nuanced relations between readers and characters. But these extended uses remain in the service of the novel’s indirect engagements through its various inventions with the actual world” (Phelan 120). Within this context of expanded novelistic fictionality, the Ferrante pseudonym can be regarded as an intentional invitation for readers to extend this initial act of fictional

The Pseudonymic Author  29

invention into the actual world. Effron et al. define this phenomenon of co-­creation as “extrapolation,” where “audiences [or readers] use authors’ communication as a stimulus to explore things related but departing from the original creation” (337). In this way, fictional content—­from Ferrante’s pseudonym, the paratexts contained in Frantumaglia, and the Neapolitan novels themselves—­f unctions collectively to encourage the extrapolation of the missing author figure at the center of the Ferrante phenomenon. And yet this synthesis of fictional content is clouded by the absence of any verifiably nonfictional referential content at the core. What ultimately results from this effort to extrapolate Ferrante is a reading experience that wavers between states of enticement and denial. The push and pull at the macrolevel of Ferrante’s works is replicated at the microlevel of the Neapolitan novels. Elena Greco’s identity as a writer becomes integral to the double plot of Elena and Lila’s relationship early in the quartet. While Lila seems to possess a natural and profound creativity, Elena’s development as a writer is characterized by struggle and self-­doubt. This constant state of comparison between the characters becomes a recurring trope over the quartet, beginning with the framing premise of an older Elena attempting to decipher her friend’s notebooks in an effort to re-­create the narrative of her friend’s life after her mysterious disappearance: “She wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-­six, but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind. I was really angry. We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned on the computer and began to write—­all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory” (Ferrante, Brilliant 22–­23). In this way, the act of reading the novels functions on two levels through the Elena doppelgänger-­author, where the meta­fictional conceit of Elena Greco writing the story of her friend is mirrored in the creation of the Neapolitan novels themselves by Elena Ferrante. In other words, to read Elena Greco’s narrative construction of Lila’s life story is to also view it as an analog for Elena Ferrante’s construction of the quartet as a whole. However, there is an antagonism inherent in Elena’s authorship. Though Elena is the narrator-­character who constructs the storyworld, her writing is motivated by a desire to “win” against Lila, who presumably has gone to great lengths to keep her story untold. Essentially, what Elena perceives as a stark competition between friends here is coupled with her profound dependency on Lila. The underlying competition at 30  Partyka

the heart of Elena and Lila’s relationship echoes the way that women writers are often placed in opposition to each other rather than their male contemporaries. It is within this context that Ferrante’s audacious construction of a female pseudonym extends this conflict paratextually into the contemporary literary marketplace. Reading Paratextually As I’ve already addressed, Ferrante’s choice of a female pen name in conjunction with the female-­centered narratives of the Neapolitan novels constructs the persona of a woman writer in lieu of a verified author. However, as Paul Dawson points out, “Readers construct a sense of this public figure not only from the narrative text, but from extratextual elements” (234), and therefore the way the Neapolitan novels have been visually marketed must also be considered to play a role in the construction of the Ferrante persona. The marketing of Ferrante’s fiction uses feminized and hypercommercialized images to produce a tongue-­in-­cheek commentary on how gender bias is explicitly used by publishers to market works of literature. As Ferrante writes in Frantumaglia, “Women writers are still compared only with one another. You can be better than other well-­k nown women writers but not better than well-­k nown male writers. Just as it’s extremely rare for great male writers to say they’ve taken as a model great women writers” (307). This tendency to use literary works by male authors as a model of value is especially fraught for Ferrante, who admits that in her adolescence, she believed that “the male narrative tradition offered a richness of structure that didn’t seem to exist in fiction written by women” (Frantumaglia 267). This marginalization of women’s writing as separate from a literary tradition still dominated by patriarchal standards is reinforced institutionally, at least in the Anglophone market. By emblazoning the covers of Ferrante’s quartet with signifiers of chick lit—­including the color pink, wedding dresses, and children in fairy wings—­Ferrante’s North American publisher Europa Editions explicitly markets the books to women readers familiar with the hyperfeminine visual codes familiar to the chick-­lit genre. The images also gesture toward the traditional marriage plot and other romance tropes, which does little to adequately represent the political and social nuance of Ferrante’s representation of postwar Italy and the complexities of the friendship between Elena and

The Pseudonymic Author  31

Lila.8 The seemingly misleading nature of this cover art points to a trend in contemporary publishing in which, in response to the monetary success of the chick-­lit boom of the early 2000s, “books aimed at women are becoming increasingly homogenised, girly and bland-­looking” (Shipley). However, rather than veering away from the negative associations of gendered marketing, Ferrante and her publishers deliberately court this strategy. According to Sandra Ozzola, Ferrante’s publisher, the decision to use “kitschy” images is a deliberate attempt to “dres[s] an extremely refined story with a touch of vulgarity” (Krule). Although this decision has offended some of Ferrante’s readers because they believe the feminine coding of the covers detracts from the literariness of the content inside, this assumption—­that overt femininity is unserious—­is exactly the kind of reading Ferrante and her publisher wish to dispel. Emily Harnett points out the key difference between Ferrante’s covers and those of more conventional chick lit, noting, “There’s little about them that’s actually patronizing. There are no flowers or martini glasses or shopping bags . . . no high-­heeled condescension. There are just images of women doing things that women, in fact, occasionally do: standing still, holding children, being on the beach. And yet, the very image of women doing things now strikes even women readers as unliterary.” The false narrative that women’s lives cannot be literary lives is indicative of a literary marketplace that continues to relegate women writers and readers to secondary genre categories. Katherine Bode, in her computational study of this phenomenon, argues that this devaluation of women-­centered literary production to genre fiction results in “a re-­establishment of male novelists at the centre of critical discussion and acclaim” (6). However, Ferrante’s acute awareness of the mechanisms of the marketplace that situate female authors as secondary to their male counterparts is what allows her to blatantly appropriate these feminine signifiers for capitalistic gain. Fictional Intertexts The misdirection built into the marketing campaign of the Ferrante pseudonym correlates with another notable metanarrative element in the Neapolitan quartet: the strategic use of referential and fictional embedded texts at the story level of the novels. These embedded texts both motivate the plot and intentionally obscure the extratextual reader’s 32  Partyka

access to important artifacts of the story. For example, though the key texts anchoring Elena’s identity as a writer—­including her novel and its inspiration—­are available to homodiegetic characters, the external reader has a restricted view. As Nisha Manocha pointedly states in her account of embedded text in Joseph Conrad’s works, these sorts of “documents alter the shape of each narrative and concomitantly generate meaning” (186). However, precisely because the embedded texts in the Neapolitan novels are not relayed to readers, Ferrante limits the reader’s ability to use these documents as fodder for an autobiographical reading in a way that parallels Elena’s anxiety over how her literary creations are used by her critics and friends to challenge her writerly identity. While Mieke Bal has theorized that “embedded texts” like these create framing and levels within narratives (48), I argue that the blended use of both fictional and referential intertexts in the Neapolitan novels troubles the ontological boundary separating these levels. For example, at Lila’s insistence, she and Elena collectively read a copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a text that inspires their idea to cowrite a novel together in the hope of becoming famous and finding their way out of their small Naples village. However, while waiting for Elena to study for her middle school admission test, Lila solely composes the intended work, resulting in the ten-­page graph-­paper novel The Blue Fairy. While Little Women, as an external historical referent, invites readers to align the ontological world of the quartet with the extratextual historical world of Alcott’s work, The Blue Fairy—­as fictional—­is only accessible through the response of homodiegetic readers: Mistress Olivera, for instance, first cruelly ignores Lila’s creation, only for her withheld praise of the work to be revealed decades later. In Carl Malmgren’s differentiation between fictional and factual space, Alcott’s Little Women would be out-­referential, since it can be confirmed through extratextual comparison to the work outside of the boundary of the Neapolitan novels, while The Blue Fairy and other fictional embedded texts within the quartet are in-­referential, since they exist solely within a “self-­contained fictional microcosm” (27). In this way, the ontological boundaries of the text become muddled by the mingling of out-­referential and in-­referential embedded texts that both propel the plot and contribute to the thematic of Elena and Lila’s collaborative authorship. By restricting the reader’s access to The Blue Fairy, the intimacy surrounding the text is preserved between Elena and Lila, which is significant

The Pseudonymic Author  33

in light of how this almost apocryphal narrative later becomes the “invisible thread” running throughout Elena’s first novel (Ferrante, Story 455). One fictional embedded text thus begets another, but the thread of inspiration is intentionally obscured from the reader’s view. Elena’s novel remains unnamed throughout the quartet, meaning that an intertextual or referential reading becomes impossible without a title to function as an embedded text. Though there are multiple references to the scandalous scene of Elena’s protagonist losing her virginity on the beach—­an event Elena recounts as a biographical detail in Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name—­this secondary narration remains inaccessible. Readers are solely presented with the reviews and reactions of various homodiegetic readers, Lila being perhaps the most central. Margaret Drabble, discussing Elena and Ferrante concurrently, notes how “accusations of appropriation, of theft, of exploitation, which appear periodically and damagingly in press reviews of her literary output,” become a painfully recurring trope within the quartet, such that Elena’s desire to be read is conjoined with the fear of being a fraud. Thus, while Elena struggles with the experience of being critically read in relation to Lila throughout the quartet, the external reader’s ability to trace the origins of Elena’s literary career as they would the career of a favorite author is limited by the absence of this fictional embedded text. Books by No One What is compelling about this formulation is that Ferrante’s ideal reader becomes essentially the one who seeks a text that cannot be read. When asked about the strategic decision not to include these fictional embedded texts, Ferrante once again confesses to a desire to constrict the focus of her novels: I almost immediately discarded the idea of deploying passages of Lena’s books as well as of Lila’s notebooks. Their objective quality doesn’t count much for the purposes of the story. What’s important is that Lena, in spite of her success, feels her works as the pale shadow of those which Lila would have written; in fact she perceives herself the same way. A story acquires power not when it imitates in a plausible way persons and events but when it captures the confusion of existences, the making and unmaking of beliefs, the way 34  Partyka

fragments from varying sources collide in the world and in our heads. (Frantumaglia 344) By refusing to represent these fictional intertexts in the narrative, Ferrante instead invites an openness of subjective readerly interpretation. Essentially, the absence of this embedded apocrypha, like the absence of the author at the center of the Ferrante persona, creates a model of reading that embraces a collision of “fragments,” where confusion can lead to a multiplicity of possible “existences.” This openness of subjective readerly interpretation is further developed in Ferrante’s musings in her essay “Books by No One,” wherein she states, “Every reader gets from the book he is reading nothing else but his book. The shelves where we line up the volumes we’ve read are deceptive. We have available there only titles, covers, pages. But the books we’ve truly read are phantoms conjured up by reading with no rules” (Frantumaglia 190). Phantom texts become open acts of interpretation, where the rules of reading—­including genre, authorial signature, and critical apparatus—­become limitations to the project of creating the phantom subjective text. These “books by no one” become liminal interpretive artifacts between genres and beyond the limits of authorial biography or intention: “Between the book that is published and the book that readers buy there is always a third book, a book where beside the written sentences are those which we imagined writing, beside the sentences that readers read are the sentences they have imagined reading. This third book, elusive, changing, is nevertheless a real book. I didn’t actually write it, my readers haven’t actually read it, but it’s there. It’s the book that is created in the relationship between life, writing, and reading” (Ferrante, Frantumaglia 193). This metaphor of the imagined third book represents how the act of engaging with fictional representation can evolve to influence the actual lives of readers. In this way, a reader’s impulse to read the Neapolitan novels autobiographically often involves an act of autobiographical reflection. It is for this reason that even literary criticism of Ferrante takes on an autobiographical quality. Both Karen Bojar and Rachel Donadio weave their own deeply personal affinities for Ferrante into their reviews, as if the act of discussing these novels is in part a kind of confession or revelation about the self.

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This ethos is shared by Post45’s 2014 online book club for the Neapolitan novels, now republished with new commentary as The Ferrante Letters (Chihaya et al.). In her introduction to the virtual reading group, Sarah Chihaya laments that the pace of criticism during the academic year feels incongruous with the leisurely pleasures of reading for enjoyment. Chihaya and her collaborators therefore embark on a “slow-­form criticism” to create a reading experience characterized by an “extended simmering, [to] develop a different richness and depth over time.” The result of this summer-­long project is an archive of evolving readerly interpretation that echoes the authorial collaboration between Elena and Lila. This correlation is intentional, as Chihaya explains: “Just as Ferrante’s novels examine two characters intertwined in a lifelong dialogue (about each other, themselves, and the world they live in), so too will our readings of them emerge out of conversations over time, as we write for and to each other.” What results from this intention is a record of collective reading, autobiographical reflection, and robust analysis that often goes unseen. As many of the project’s collaborators remark, Ferrante’s novels lend themselves well to gestures of collectivity. Jill Richards perhaps describes the experience best: This kind of reading and writing, as one goes along, is happening, of course in conversation with you all, with other women, some whom are dear friends, some whom I haven’t met. . . . I am learning about the meantime of these other lives, in distant and nearby cities, amidst the reading and writing on Ferrante, as I go along. The writing about Ferrante then becomes a gloss for all these other things that I would like to convey but don’t quite have the words. There are shadow narratives, about me and to these other women, underneath the stories that I tell about Lenù and Lila, so that the Neapolitan cycle blurs, a bit, into the background, as a merely enabling fiction. In this way, the shadow narratives that intertwine and connect The Ferrante Letters project may just make up the elusive “third book” Ferrante describes in “Books by No One.” The third book is therefore a book by no one, simply because it is not the product of a singular subjectivity but a collaboration. It is this final point that makes Merve Emre’s assessment of the novels as a “portrait of the artist as not one, but two young women” especially 36  Partyka

relevant in light of recent speculations about the veracity of several theories about Ferrante’s authorship. As I’ve already discussed, Ferrante’s pseudonym, along with the feminine paratextual marketing and the female-­centered focus of the Neapolitan novels, effectively co-­constructs an intentional image of a woman writer. However, after Italian journalist Claudio Gatti used financial records to trace the Ferrante estate to translator Anita Raja, the carefully constructed Ferrante persona began to unravel. Some readers found Gatti’s outing of this potential Ferrante to be unethical and sexist, highlighting the “clash between the world of data-­driven reporting and the emotional truths of fiction” (Donadio and Schuessler). What was more upsetting for some readers was that Raja seemed an inappropriate solution to the Ferrante mystery, since her biography failed to adequately line up with that of the characters created in her novels. Adam Kirsch explains this within the context of cultural appropriation: “It turns out that in telling the story of poor Neapolitan girls like [Lila] and Elena, Ms. Raja was claiming the right to imagine the lives of people quite unlike herself. In doing so, she was able to write books in which millions of people found themselves reflected.” Thus, in many ways, the Raja theory functioned to sully the image Ferrante had systematically built into the paratextual material associated with her literary output. However, some have used the Raja connection as a means to theorize that her husband, novelist Domenico Starnone, is the likely author behind the Ferrante pseudonym.9 This supposition—­that the person behind the Ferrante pseudonym is a man—­was especially upsetting to some readers. Admitting to her own “confirmation bias” in regard to Ferrante’s gender, Karen Bojar at first denied these theories in light of what she perceived as “the authenticity of her rendering of female experience” in the fiction (26). However, in light of the attention to collaboration I have highlighted in Ferrante’s construction of authorship, Bojar and others started to extrapolate an alternative narrative for Ferrante’s origin, claiming that at the center of Ferrante’s pseudonym is no one—­meaning not just one author but two.10 Conclusion Perhaps what the Ferrante case demonstrates is that efforts to apply the act of literary imagination to authorship prove unsustainable as an

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intellectual and creative exercise when the stakes of identity representation are so politically fraught. Ferrante’s pseudonym poses a unique frustration for readers who are perhaps unwilling to allow fiction to exist fully separate from the actual world. This willingness to break the contract of imagination when it comes to literary reading is understandable in a posttruth era of suspicion around anything that intentionally or unintentionally misrepresents the truth. However, these attempts to eke out the reality behind Ferrante’s authorship have ultimately led to a more nuanced consideration of how gender influences contemporary models of reading. As Bojar states, the intrigue around a dual-­gendered collaboration undermines “the notion of a stable female identity” entirely, supporting the work of those in intersectional feminism and queer studies who value gender fluidity (189). Thus, not only would a collaboration between Raja and Starnone call attention to the problematic nature of the “singular genius” narrative so popular in literary history; it would also challenge essentialist ideas about literary writing and gender. Though both Raja and Starnone have denied connections with Ferrante, to engage with Ferrante’s pseudonym is nevertheless to participate in a long-­standing tradition of imaginative construction—­one that hopefully broadens the institutional and literary boundaries placed around gender in the process. Notes 1. While Ferrante’s “real” identity is not entirely known, this chapter will refer to Ferrante with female pronouns throughout, since this is how the author is conventionally discussed. 2. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic (1970) does much to deconstruct how a latent patriarchal approach to literary history often obscured and overlooked the transgressive and creative work of women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This now canonical text suggests that women writers often contend with an “anxiety of authorship” inherited from patriarchal assumptions about the inherent inferiority of female literary output (Gilbert and Gubar 52). 3. For this reason, Eliot’s diary entries at the beginning of her career are intensely focused on whether her gender can be detected by her early readers. She notes with emphasis that Thackeray “spoke highly of [Scenes from Provincial Life] and said they were not written by a woman” but laments that another set of early readers, “Mrs. Owen Jones and her husband—­two 38  Partyka

very different people—­are equally enthusiastic. . . . But both have detected the woman” (Eliot 285; original emphasis). 4. According to a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts survey, 62.1 percent of literary readers are women (nea). 5. For more data on gender representation in literary institutions, see the work of the vida: Women in Literary Arts (vida) program. 6. While these surveys extend a well-­wrought narrative about how women’s writing continues to be framed in opposition to a dominant patriarchal culture, I do not subscribe to an essentialist model of women’s writing, in relation to either biology or sociological status. Rather, I hope the debate over Ferrante’s authorship demonstrates how assumptions about gender and literary value are perhaps more fluid than originally conceived. Likewise, though my particular analysis is focused on the problem of representation and institutional value in regard to gender, it is important to also note that women writers of color and nonbinary writers are even more disenfranchised by systems of power and prestige. For more on this, see Lauren McGrath’s “Comping White” for a computational analysis of race and publishing. 7. This conception of actant deviates slightly from A. J. Griemas’s primary definition of the term in Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1983), as it does not assume a binary relationship between Sender (Author) and Receiver (Reader) but includes a third space between these positions. 8. Alternatively, in her more expansive consideration of Ferrante’s international covers, Elisa Segnini interprets the beach setting on the Europa covers as intentionally signifying the historical specificity of Naples. 9. See Tuzzi and Cortelazzo (2018) for a survey of attempts to attribute Ferrante’s authorship using computational methods. 10. There have been other historical models of collaborative authorship. For example, Marian Evans adopted her pseudonym in partial tribute to her partner, George Henry Lewes. Although the Brontë sisters used male pennames that preserved their initials, in using the same surname—­Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell—­their pseudonyms maintained the family connection, providing a path to their true authorial signatures (Mullan 78). The sisters’ pseudonyms functioned collectively, such that when Charlotte accidentally revealed her authorship to a friend, she quickly redacted the confession for the sake of her sisters, who wished to remain anonymous (Ciuraru 15).



The Pseudonymic Author  39

Bibliography Bal, Mieke. “Notes on Narrative Embedding.” Translated by Eve Tavor. Poetics Today, vol. 2, no. 2, 1981, pp. 41–­59. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​1772189. Baym, Nina. “Rewriting the Scribbling Women.” Legacy, vol. 36, no. 1, 2019, pp. 137–­52. Bode, Katherine. Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field. New York: Anthem Press, 2012. Bojar, Karen. In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018. Chihaya, Sarah. “Slow Burn, Volume 1.” Post45, 22 June 2015, http://​post45​ .research​.yale​.edu/​2015/​06/​the​-slow​-burn​-an​-introduction/. Chihaya, Sarah, et al. The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 2020. Ciuraru, Carmela. Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. New York: Harper, 2011. Dawson, Paul. The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-­First Century Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2015. Donadio, Rachel. “An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante—­Whoever You Are.” Atlantic, December 2018, https://​www​.theatlantic​.com/​magazine/​archive/​ 2018/​12/​elena​-ferrante​-pseudonym/​573952/. Donadio, Rachel, and Jennifer Schuessler. “Who Is Elena Ferrante? Supporters Say noyb.” New York Times, 3 October 2016, https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​ 2016/​10/​05/​books/​who​-is​-elena​-ferrante​-supporters​-say​-noyb​.html. Drabble, Margaret. “Margaret Drabble: What Kind of a Feminist Is Elena Ferrante?” New Statesman, 10 September 2015, https://​www​.newstatesman​ .com/​culture/​books/​2015/​09/​margaret​-drabble​-what​-kind​-feminist​-elena​ -ferrante. Effron, Malcah, et al. “Narrative Co-­construction: A Rhetorical Approach.” Narrative, vol. 27, no. 3, 2019, pp. 332–­52. Eliot, George. The Journals of George Eliot, edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. Emre, Merve. “My Brilliant Friend: Merve, June 25.” Post45, 25 June 2015, http://​ post45​.research​.yale​.edu/​2015/​06/​my​-brilliant​-friend​-merve​-june​-25/. Erdinast-­Vulcan, Daphna. “The Hetero-­biography of Elena Ferrante.” Paper presented at the International Society for the Study of Narrative Conference, U of Navarra, 1 June 2019. Ferrante, Elena. Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions, 2016. ———. My Brilliant Friend. New York: Europa Editions, 2012. 40  Partyka

———. The Story of a New Name. New York: Europa Editions, 2013. Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel, edited by Franco Moretti. Princeton nj: Princeton UP, 2006, pp. 336–­63. Gatti, Claudio. “Elena Ferrante: An Answer?” New York Review of Books, 2 October 2016, http://​www​.nybooks​.com/​daily/​2016/​10/​02/​elena​-ferrante​ -an​-answer/. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Gibbons, Alison. “The ‘Dissolving Margins’ of Elena Ferrante and the Neapolitan Novels: A Cognitive Approach to Fictionality, Authorial Intentionality, and Autofictional Reading Strategies.” Narrative Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 2, 2019, pp. 391–­417. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1075/​ni​.19017​.gib. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Imagination. New Haven ct: Yale UP, 1980. Greimas, A. J. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. Translated by Daniele McDowell et al. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984. Harnett, Emily. “The Subtle Genius of Elena Ferrante’s Bad Book Covers.” Atlantic, 3 July 2016, https://​www​.theatlantic​.com/​entertainment/​archive/​ 2016/​07/​elena​-ferrante​-covers​-bad​-no​-good/​488732/. Just Review Team. Statistical Analysis of Topic Bias in the New York Times Sunday Book Reviews. JustReview.org, 27 March 2017, https://​justreview​.org/​ wp​-content/​uploads/​2017/​03/​website​_writeup​.pdf. Kirsch, Adam. “Elena Ferrante and the Power of Appropriation.” New York Times, 3 October 2016, https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2016/​10/​04/​opinion/​elena​ -ferrante​-and​-the​-power​-of​-appropriation​.html. Krule, Miriam. “‘Dressing a Refined Story with a Touch of Vulgarity’: An Interview with Elena Ferrante’s Art Director.” Slate, 28 August 2015, http://​ www​.slate​.com/​blogs/​browbeat/​2015/​08/​28/​elena​_ferrante​_neapolian​ _novels​_cover​_design​_an​_interview​_with​_the​_publisher​.html. Loofbourow, Lili. “The Outing of Elena Ferrante and the Power of Naming.” The Week, 5 October 2016, http://​theweek​.com/​articles/​652924/​outing​-elena​ -ferrante​-power​-naming. Malmgren, Carl Darryl. Fictional Space in the Modernist and Post-­modernist American Novel. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell UP, 1985. Manocha, Nisha. “Reading Documents: Embedded Texts in ‘The Professor’s House’ and ‘The Shadow-­Line.’” Studies in the Novel, vol. 44, no. 2, 2012, pp. 186–­207. ­McGrath, Laura B. “Comping White.” la Review of Books, 21 January 2019, https://​lareviewofbooks​.org/​article/​comping​-white/.

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Mullan, John. Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature. Princeton nj: Princeton UP, 2007. nea. National Endowment for the Arts Presents Highlights from the 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. 26 September 2013, https://​www​.arts​.gov/​ news/​press​-releases/​2013/​national​-endowment​-arts​-presents​-highlights​ -2012​-survey​-public​-participation​-arts. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, et al. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative, vol. 23, no. 1, 2014, pp. 61–­73. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1353/​nar​.2015​.0005. Partyka, Jaclyn. “Joseph Anton’s Digital Doppelgänger: Salman Rushdie and the Rhetoric of Self-­Fashioning.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 58, no. 2, 2017, pp. 204–­32. https://​doi​.org/​10​.3368/​cl​.58​.2​.204. Phelan, James. “Fictionality, Audiences, and Character: A Rhetorical Alternative to Catherine Gallagher’s ‘Rise of Fictionality.’” Poetics Today, vol. 39, no. 1, 2018, pp. 113–­29. Richards, Jill. “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: Jill, August 27.” Post45, 27 August 2015, http://​post45​.research​.yale​.edu/​2015/​08/​those​-who​-leave​ -and​-those​-who​-stay​-jill​-august​-27/. Saunders, Max. Self Impression: Life-­Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Segnini, Elisa. “Local Flavour vs Global Readerships: The Elena Ferrante Project and Translatability.” Italianist, vol. 37, no. 1, 2017, pp. 100–­118. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1080/​02614340​.2016​.1273649. Shipley, Diane. “The Great Chick Lit Cover-­Up.” The Guardian, 29 July 2008, https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​books/​booksblog/​2008/​jul/​29/​ thegreatchicklitcoverup. Thompson, Nicola Diane. Reviewing Sex: Gender and the Reception of Victorian Novels. New York: New York UP, 1996. Tuzzi, Arjuna, and Michele A. Cortelazzo. “What Is Elena Ferrante? A Comparative Analysis of a Secretive Bestselling Italian Writer.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 33, no. 3, 2018, pp. 685–­702. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1093/​llc/​fqx066. vida: Women in Literary Arts—­an Intersectional Feminist Literary Organization. https://​www​.vidaweb​.org/. Widiss, Benjamin Leigh. Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-­Century American Literature. Stanford ca: Stanford UP, 2011.

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3

The Permissible Author Cultural Politics and the Market Economy of the Literary Sphere Christopher González

Market forces and the conditions of late-­stage capitalism have a direct impact on the narratives that are produced, published, and consumed. The literary culture to which readers and scholars give shape is the product of a very selective process mostly controlled by the publishing and award industries (McGurl). Publishers, however, also participate in an extremely conservative industry in which return on investment is a key determinant in the acceptance of projects for publication and thus a clear antecedent of fame, popularity, and financial success. This state of affairs has a clear effect when it comes to the book projects of authors from historically marginalized communities. In this chapter I expose this dynamic by concentrating on literature published by Latinx authors and literature about Latinx communities in the United States, taking the fallout of the publication of Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt in 2020 as a case study. Cummins’s novel is perhaps one of the most notorious and recent examples of narrative permissibility—­t he idea that not all narratives are deemed permissible or publishable due to factors of marginalization, expectation, identity, and hegemony (González, Permissible Narratives). As a phenomenon, narrative permissibility is difficult to identify because it necessitates observing omissions, extrapolating from a perceived lack, and finally speculating on the reasons behind the absence or underrepresentation of certain kinds of narratives written from specific authorial identity positions. However, by identifying narratives that concern marginalized communities but are written by white writers—­who compose the majority of all published authors in the United States—­it becomes 43

possible to observe how certain impermissible narratives become permissible (i.e., publishable) when they are written through the filter of whiteness. Using such a rubric, we can identify a cadre of novels spanning U.S. literary history that render the impermissible narratives of marginalized communities permissible in this way: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Stephen King’s The Green Mile (1996), William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009), Asa Earl Carter’s The Education of Little Tree (1976), and Don Winslow’s various cartel and border novels, to name a few. White writers have the privilege of representing the experiences of their nonwhite characters as well as those of their white characters, while nonwhite writers only rarely enjoy such literary freedom. When they do, the works of these nonwhite authors often come to fruition via small presses rather than so-­called Big Lit.1 Soon after the publication of Jeanine Cummins’s 2020 novel American Dirt, critical reviews began to surface. Among them, Myriam Gurba’s excoriating blog post “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck” described the novel as “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf.” The floodgates opened: writers, cultural critics, scholars, and readers both Latinx and otherwise came forward to vivisect—­to varying degrees—­Cummins, her novel, and her publisher Flatiron Books (a subsidiary of Macmillan). Also under fire for their gushing endorsement of the novel were Oprah Winfrey (who bestowed her coveted book club seal upon the novel’s cover) and prominent Latinx authors Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez. I initially provided my opinion of American Dirt in an nbc News report (see Aviles), and I give a fuller response in this chapter. The outrage over American Dirt is, I argue, symptomatic of a more systemic and pervasive penchant of mainstream publishing to ignore Latinx storytelling unless it emanates from an author who belongs to a privileged community. In this case, the privilege flows from the headwaters of whiteness. Cummins, among others, has argued that the author has every right to tell any story they please. She claims to have written and researched American Dirt over the course of five years and suggests, in an interview with Maria Hinojosa, that her seven-­figure advance was well earned (Hinojosa). Telling an author that certain types of stories are verboten to them generally elicits a full-­throated diatribe against censorship: freedom of expression is at the heart of literary art and journalistic integrity, 44  González

such authors maintain. Lorraine Devon Wilke’s piece in the Huffington Post is illustrative of such positions (emphasis added): Is an author limited to only writing characters within their race? What about gender? Religion? Age? Ethnicity? Sexual orientation? Where do the boundaries stop? The old adage, “write what you know,” is a thesis that implies a writer should limit their imagination to the parameters of their own life and experience. But does that maxim still hold true today? Certainly in these times of viral accessibility, contact, research, knowledge, and interaction with people, places, and things far outside our own proximity is as every-­day as 24/7 updates from the farthest corners of the globe. Our ability, consequently, to gain perspective sufficient enough to write outside one’s own “house” is not only doable, but, perhaps, universal and insightful, presuming one does it well. Wilke’s position hinges on the idea that an author or publisher can take on a nonwhite persona provided they “do it well.” As such, Wilke equates recommendations to avoid appropriative characters and plots with censorship, as if the entirety of an author’s writing acumen turns on the ability to ventriloquize the experiences of historically marginalized communities to which they do not belong. And yet the problem has less to do with “writing outside one’s own ‘house’” than it does with white authors reaping profit and reward that is sourced from the pain of nonwhite peoples, particularly when that pain is what has greased the wheels of a writer’s imagination. The permissibility of authorship works both ways; while some authors are prevented from publishing certain narratives that fall outside of expectations, other authors are allowed to co-­opt and appropriate for their narratives the very materials that are deemed impermissible for other authors of marginalized communities and narratives. Latinx Authorship Cummins received a significant two-­book deal and the kinds of exposure and marketing machinery that all but a handful of Latinx writers can only dream about. She achieved this by writing a novel set almost entirely in Mexico, populated by gross (albeit familiar) stereotypes, and that appears to have plagiarized the writings of Luis Alberto Urrea. That her book was destined for bestseller status was an affront to the Latinx writing

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community and set off a firestorm. In order to comprehend what created the furor surrounding American Dirt, one must first understand the constraints imposed on Latinx writers. This is a complex issue that is vexed by white hegemony in the United States. The publishing industry has established rigid expectations that narrowly define the kinds of narratives that historically marginalized groups (in this case, Latinxs) can tell. The politics of publishing are also a great piston in the vast publishing engine and are most readily apparent in the conservative nature of the industry that seeks to replicate past success and views narrative potential as a return on investment. In truth, there is not enough space in this chapter to speak comprehensively on these issues. However, a brief (if limited) primer is necessary in order to reach an understanding of how narrative permissibility directly shapes the state of the market, the culture of literature, perceptions of the author, and the works that become a part of the sanctioned literary traditions we study. Latinx authors and the narratives they write provide an intriguing opportunity for exploring the phenomenon of narrative permissibility as it operates in the United States. Besides the late nineteenth-­century works of pioneering Mexican American author María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (who was born Mexican and “became” American thanks to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848), no Latinx-­authored novel was published by a major publishing house until José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho, released by Doubleday in 1959. Only a handful of Latinx-­authored novels and memoirs were published between Pocho and Rudolfo Anaya’s best-­selling Bless Me, Ultima in 1972. More Latinx authors followed Anaya’s success and were published in small numbers over the course of the next half century. If we exclude Ruiz de Burton as a precocious outlier, the history of Latinx letters in the United States is thus just over half a century old; considering the long history of literary narrative, Latinx authors have only just arrived on the scene.2 This situation is the present state of affairs despite the fact that Latinxs are the largest nonwhite demographic in the United States at over 18 percent of the nation’s population. Latinx authors are present but are effectively invisible in the publishing industry. There have been only two Pulitzer Prize winners who are Latinx (Oscar Hijuelos and Junot Díaz), and an author of Mexican descent has never won the award, though Mexican Americans comprise over 46  González

70 percent of all Latinxs in the United States. No Latinx author has ever had their work selected for Oprah’s Book Club. According to Lee & Low Books, the publishing industry overall is overwhelmingly white at 76 percent, while Latinx employees account for only 6 percent of the industry (“Where Is the Diversity”). These figures illustrate that the Latinx community is underrepresented not only among published authors but also in the positions that perform gatekeeping duties in the U.S. literary field. Rarely do Latinx authors receive six-­or seven-­figure advances when auctioning their novels; rarely do they get high-­profile interviews on national morning news shows or on programs such as The Colbert Show and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon; rarely are their novels placed in privileged positions at Barnes & Noble bookstores or featured across the nation in the bookshelves of regional grocery stores. In short, Latinx authors do not receive the kind of promotion that their white peers receive. Take, for instance, Junot Díaz and his Pulitzer Prize–­winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Published in 2007, it was the rare Latinx novel that made the publishing and literary world stop and pay attention. Today, it often ranks as one of the most important and significant novels published in the twenty-­first century, and it undoubtedly took many readers by surprise—­readers accustomed to novels by Latinxs that highlight the plight of the barrio or gang life. Instead, Díaz’s novel is a transhemispheric novel that fuses popular culture, folkloric myth, national and racial histories, misogyny, patriarchal values, and linguistic flare. I have argued elsewhere that the novel’s significance is in its smashing of the narrow expectations regarding what a Latinx novel can do (González, Reading Junot Díaz). Scholars and readers of Latinx fiction, myself included, hoped that the success of Díaz’s novel would herald an opening up of narrative forms and subjects to the Latinx author, that we would begin to see Latinx-­authored novels that had nothing to do with immigration, or undocumented status, or migrant work, or drug use. We anticipated a diversification of the kinds of stories Latinx authors would tell. After Díaz knocked down the locked door with his spectacular novel, it seemed certain that more daring and convention-­breaking authors would follow: the Latinx community in the United States, originating from dozens of Latin American nations, has so many stories to tell. Alas, this vision of the future of Latinx literature has yet to ensue, though there have been superb Latinx authors—­Manuel Muñoz, Cristina

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Henríquez, Manuel Gonzales, Erika L. Sánchez, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Angie Cruz, among others—­who have pushed past the doors that remain locked to so many authors. Jeanine Cummins and the Ethics of Representation Jeanine Cummins is an American author who rose to fame with a memoir that chronicled a brutal murder within her family (A Rip in Heaven, 2004). Because her identity position is salient to this exploration of permissibility, I discuss it here in terms she herself has used. As Aya de Leon has written, Cummins “has a Puerto Rican grandmother. And though she identified herself as white in a 2015 New York Times interview,” the author has recently taken to “identifying as Latinx in recent media appearances—­just in time for the release of her novel, which has come under fire for the way she depicts its Mexican characters.” In her “Author’s Note” in American Dirt, Cummins is clearly uncomfortable about her identity position vis-­à-­vis the subject matter of her novel: “And yet, when I decided to write [American Dirt], I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I’d get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a nonmigrant and non-­Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then, I thought, If you’re a person who can be a bridge, why not be a bridge? So I began” (381; original emphasis). Cummins also mentions her marriage to an “undocumented immigrant,” which she claims gives her personal insight into the plight of those working desperately to enter the United States, as well as permission to write about this topic: I am a US citizen. Like many people in this country, I come from a family of mixed cultures and ethnicities. In 2005, I married an undocumented immigrant. We dated for five years before we got married, and one reason for our prolonged courtship was that he wanted to get his green card before he proposed. My husband is one of the smartest, hardest-­working, most principled people I’ve ever met. He’s a college graduate who owns a successful business, pays taxes, and spends a fortune on health insurance. Yet, after years of trying, we found there was no legal route available for him to get his green card until we got married. All the years we were dating, 48  González

we lived in fear that he could be deported at a moment’s notice. Once, on Route 70 outside Baltimore, a policeman pulled us over for driving with a broken taillight. The minutes that followed while we waited for that officer to return to our vehicle were some of the most excruciating of my life. We held hands in the dark front seat of the car. I thought I would lose him. So you could say I have a dog in the fight. (380) Since the subject matter of American Dirt concerns a Mexican woman and her son who must flee to the United States, readers could be forgiven for assuming that her husband, too, is Latinx. In fact, he is Irish, and though he is undocumented, it would be absurd to argue that his plight is analogous to that of a Mexican woman escaping violence. Instead, this admission in the “Author’s Note”3 reads as a disingenuous stratagem employed by Cummins to give herself bona fides for writing American Dirt. Such finessing of personal identity reveals the precarious nature of writing literature through the filter of marginalized identity. In addition to these questions of identity, there are also claims of plagiarism that are difficult to dismiss. It would appear that Cummins took Luis Alberto Urrea’s lived experience of seeing a child crushed by a garbage truck in Tijuana’s el dompe landfill (Urrea 57) and the horror of having to bury the child and repurposed it in American Dirt (Cummins 267). In an npr podcast, Maria Hinojosa confronted Cummins about the uncanny similarity between these scenes in American Dirt and Urrea’s By the Lake of Sleeping Children (1996). In response, Cummins sighs before claiming that she hadn’t noticed the similarity: “That’s very distressing to hear,” she told Hinojosa. Cummins then mentions sending Urrea a galley copy, seemingly attempting to shift the responsibility for the ethics of American Dirt from herself to Urrea: “It’s confusing to me,” she confesses (Hinojosa). It’s easy to argue that Cummins—­who has admitted to having read everything Urrea had written—­found that moment from Urrea’s life so visceral and compelling that she just had to include it in her novel, or indeed that she incorporated the scene unknowingly. Even at this level, though, it is clear that Cummins has been given permission to appropriate a Latinx writer’s lived experience into her own novel and has suffered little in the way of deleterious consequences as a result.

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As for the novel itself, its plot and structure reveal much about how Latinx culture is often stripped down to enticing stereotypes in the service of titillating the reading public. The novel opens with bullets flying at a quinceañera in Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico: “One of the very first bullets comes in through the open window above the toilet where Luca is standing. He doesn’t immediately understand that it’s a bullet at all, and it’s only luck that it doesn’t strike him between the eyes” (Cummins 1). Independent bookstore owner Lydia Quixano Pérez and her son, Luca, are the only survivors of this massacre. Readers may be surprised to discover that the murder of sixteen members of her family causes Lydia to question the advisability of falling in love with a narco kingpin who reads her his awful poetry: “Oh, the poem was terrible. It was both grave and frivolous, so bad that it made Lydia love him much, much more, because of how vulnerable he was in sharing it with her” (32). Unhappily, this realization comes to her long after she has become captivated by the quivering mustache of Javier Crespo Fuentes, the narcotics kingpin about whom her journalist husband, Sebastián, is writing an article: “It’s all about him, his big debut. The whole Hello, World, I’m a Major Kingpin exposé” (66). Javier’s cartel, Los Jardineros, casts a long shadow, and Lydia sees a sicario in every silhouette that crosses her path (supposedly ubiquitous, these hitmen never really appear in the novel). The convenient murder of Lydia’s entire family means that she has absolutely nowhere to go and must leave Acapulco to cross into Arizona via Nogales. After a night eating room service in a resort hotel, Lydia and Luca—­whose gift for speaking like a droid and spouting esoteric geographical knowledge makes him reminiscent of the young son in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019)—­head to el norte. Except for a few flashbacks, American Dirt is mostly a road novel; Don Winslow prominently blurbed the book as “A Grapes of Wrath for our times.” New characters and obstacles consistently appear throughout the novel, most of which takes place on or near the freight train known as La Bestia. If a lot of this sounds familiar, this is because it is derived from similar stories: the film Sin Nombre (dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2009); Sonia Nazario’s Pulitzer Prize–­winning work of journalism, Enrique’s Journey (2006); and Urrea’s By the Lake of Sleeping Children. In other words, we have seen the narrative decorations of this story before, with one notable exception: Lydia seems to be entirely of Cummins’s making, a 50  González

complete invention who is hardly representative of the community to which she supposedly belongs. Although she is multilingual and has had the benefit of a university education—­unlike the vast majority of migrants she encounters—­Lydia is inexplicably always telling herself not to think. She is also a successful business owner who has over ten thousand dollars in cash at the start of the trip and another ten thousand dollars in her mother’s bank account—­the currency alone signaling an extraordinary level of privilege at odds with the experience of the majority of Mexican migrants. The other characters are largely drawn from stereotypes and used as plot devices. Lydia’s son Luca, who wears his papi’s red New York Yankees hat despite their obvious need to keep a low profile, is often used by Cummins as a focalizer, ostensibly because it helps her create dramatic irony and develop a sense of the mysterious during the journey. Along the way, mother and son encounter and befriend two sisters, Soledad and Rebeca: beautiful, brown Ch’orti’ from Honduras. Soledad has previously been raped, and Rebeca is nearly raped toward the end of the novel, prompting Soledad to gun down her sister’s would-­be rapist, a young man named Lorenzo who is an on-­again, off-­again member of Los Jardineros. Such characters reinforce gross stereotypes, especially among those readers who have precious few encounters with Latinx peoples, and these consistently negative iterations of Latinxs inform all sorts of political and ideological positions. The climax of the novel centers on Lydia learning that Javier—­who goes by the nom de guerre La Lechuza—­murdered Lydia’s family because it was through Sebastián’s exposé that Javier’s daughter, Marta, finally became aware that her father was the head of a prominent cartel, a discovery that prompts her to take her own life. Lydia videocalls Javier to end the relationship, and she and her son cross the border with the help of a coyote—­the Mexican term for a people smuggler—­who calls himself El Chacal, to start a new life in the United States. Life is hard: Luca could win a geography bee if only he weren’t undocumented. Lydia still has access to literature, though, and that makes losing sixteen members of your family somewhat bearable. She reads Amor en los tiempos del cólera in Spanish and in English. Fin. In my recitation of American Dirt’s plot, I have deliberately emphasized my exasperation as an unambiguous signal that I find the novel

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puerile. Even on aesthetic grounds, the novel is derivative. The crux of the issue, though, is a conflict between the independent nature of creativity in narrative and the impossibility of writing in a vacuum. Using the imagination to create narratives does not require overt and authentic connections to the source material, while storytelling, in its purest form, is a highly independent activity. However, it is only up to this point that writing in solitude is possible. For writing to be meaningful, it must be read; if a writer is to subsist solely on the brilliance of language, that writer needs maximum readership. Yet something significant occurs when the number of readers—­and thus the amount of remuneration an author receives for their work—­increases: There is an equal increase in what we might call an ethical coefficient. While it’s certainly acceptable to profit from one’s own pain, making money out of someone else’s grief or victimization puts the author on dangerous ground. Even the best intentions of a temporary literary interloper do not mitigate against the damage done to a community through the co-­option of their agony in narrative form. There is an ethical dimension at work in such instances, and such ethics, I argue, ought to take preeminence over the freedom of creative expression. This has been explored in the field of narrative ethics, with Anna Holmes considering this very conundrum in terms of empathy and exploitation: “Here’s how I see it: Empathy is the ability to respect and maybe even understand another’s point of view, revealing larger truths about ourselves and others. Exploitation is the use of another’s experience for personal gain. Empathy requires self-­awareness. Exploitation is marked by self-­ interest. Empathy is about deepening connections. Exploitation, about filling one’s pockets, literal or figurative.” Holmes gives the usual caveats, echoing Wilke’s sentiments about what is possible—­possible for a writer to conjure characters that belong to a different identity group than their own—­but Holmes’s poles of empathy and exploitation seem to get at the uses of narrative. Although Cummins’s “Author’s Note” suggests she believes her work to be motivated by a desire for empathy, her critics see the book as exploitative in its very dna. This is where the idea of narrative permissibility comes to the fore. Rather than being granted the expansive, near-­limitless approach to storytelling advocated by Wilkes, Latinx authors have—­except in rare cases—­experienced the opposite, thanks to a myopic, unimaginative 52  González

publishing industry. There is a reason so many of their stories are about the barrio, large families, border crossings, narcos, saints and sinners, or prison life. These are the familiar environs in which U.S. culture writ large sees Latinxs, and to place them in narrative situations outside of these permissible contexts is likely to engender disbelief and resistance. Why do we not have stories about Latinx characters in unexpected narratives in which they do not have a history or tradition of appearing, the way we have stories of white culture or white characters? Whiteness is so ubiquitous in U.S. storytelling that unless a character is explicitly given racial or ethnic markers, the average reader will assume that the character is white.4 As Toni Morrison has argued, “Until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white” (152). Whiteness is protean. It can fill the shape of any storytelling container. Narratives and characters that represent Latinx culture, on the other hand, are like the fixed pieces in the game Tetris—­t hey may only be arranged in specific, predetermined ways. To engage them in ways beyond this is apparently too distressing for mainstream publishers and, their thinking goes, the purchasing public. Yet narrative permissibility doesn’t just limit authors from marginalized groups; it also provides excellent affordances for white authors, who are sanctioned to write about anything that strikes their fancy, even when their sense of ethics tells them they probably shouldn’t. The author is the one who arranges the pieces of the narrative in such a way that they might be reconstructed through readers’ cognitive processes. If the instructions are delivered incompetently, or the pieces are flimsy or missing altogether, the reconstructed storyworld that readers create will be less than spectacular at best, an insult at worst. Frederick Luis Aldama calls novels like American Dirt “popcorn fiction,” a kind of cheap snack that isn’t really memorable or particularly nutritious (“Brownface Minstrelsy”). Like other kinds of popcorn fiction, American Dirt is an exemplar of the problematic nature of the mainstream publishing industry. “Slow Violence” and Publishing’s Marketing Machine Setting aside for the moment the ethics of whether or not Cummins should have written this novel, the first irreconcilable criticism against

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American Dirt is that it is holistically deficient from the perspective of narrative design. It makes use of ridiculous plot conveniences and stereotypical situations and characters, and it transforms the actual trauma suffered by Mexican migrants into a kind of cartoon violence. As such, American Dirt is the kind of novel that does not deserve to be on lists of literary must-­reads. Yet despite its glaring deficiencies—­and thanks to Oprah, Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Stephen King—­American Dirt has been prominently promoted and mass marketed. The novel’s extraordinary reach is very much at issue here—­a reach that will no doubt be extended by the movie that will eventually come of it.5 After paying over seven figures as an advance on the novel, Flatiron Books effectively mobilized every effort to justify their return on investment. Getting Cisneros to provide an enthusiastic blurb on the novel’s cover was compounded by Oprah’s endorsement, resulting in a marketing coup. What Flatiron failed to consider, though, was the backlash the novel and its author would generate. Call it a lack of imagination if you like, but there is something else at work here: the vast majority of the mainstream publishing industry is white. Never before has a Latinx author in the United States received the support of such a massive marketing engine as Cummins has. The question, therefore, is why did this novel gain such a lucrative deal when—­as I maintain—­it furthers the stereotypes used by far-­right extremists to dehumanize migrants from south of the U.S.-­Mexico border? One reason is that it followed the literary success of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, which is orders of magnitude better than Cummins’s novel. When the manuscript for American Dirt went to auction, book publishers and presses already had a precedent in Luiselli’s novel. Furthermore, in the context of President Trump’s hostility toward Mexicans, the constant chatter surrounding the presence of migrant caravans at the United States’ southern border, and images circulating of brown children in cages or crying at the feet of border patrol agents, American Dirt must have appeared particularly timely.6 The rollout of American Dirt did not go the way the author, her publisher Flatiron Books, the bookstores that scheduled readings, or Oprah Winfrey and her mighty empire had anticipated. To be sure, Oprah’s Book Club was a major contributor to both the novel’s financial success and the outcry over its content. Once Oprah was on board, other well-­ known writers and celebrities followed; Oprah’s endorsement removed 54  González

any hesitation other authors may have had about throwing the full weight of their name, brand, and reputation behind the book. Salma Hayek made this abundantly clear via an Instagram announcement in which she retracted her support of the novel, grounding her mea culpa on the tenuous claim that she had not actually taken the time to read American Dirt and going on to say that Oprah and her team had virtually sold her a bill of goods, sight unseen (Acevedo). Flatiron Books also engaged in this sort of duplicitous behavior. Omar El Akkad, author of American War (2017), divulged in a tweet thread on January 28, 2020, that his positive review of Cummins’s novel was written because he “got conned by the folks behind” the marketing of the book (@omarelakkad). Admittedly, many novels published in a given year fall short of literary glory. There is nothing remarkable in this. The problem here is that Latinx authors have to be extraordinary in more ways than one. They must be superlative, genius-­level writers in order to have their work picked up by one of the Big Five publishing houses, and even then, there is suspicion of them. Are they really a generational talent? Is what they write really worthy of lavish praise and attention? Should we really invest in this Latinx writer? And so on. Yet as American Dirt shows, whiteness grants mediocrity an undeserved pass and gives incompetence great latitude and room for development. This is the state of affairs that energizes so much of the criticism leveled against Cummins and her novel. Latinx writers of excellence rarely get this sort of attention and support. Meanwhile, the publishing industry hailed Cummins as having written the Great American Novel about migrants from south of the border. For a novel to be granted permissibility, it must also be recognized for its profitability. The publication of Latinx stories hinges on whether the rest of the United States will be willing to spend money to read them. As Luis Alberto Urrea recounted in his interview with Maria Hinojosa, it took him ten years to get his first book published—­ten years of New York agents and publishers telling him no one wanted to hear stories about Mexicans and that even his unfamiliar Hispanic name would be off-­ putting to the book-­buying public (Hinojosa). The mainstream publishing industry did not develop with Latinxs in mind. Is it any wonder that publishers like Flatiron Books do not know how to handle Latinx stories? With the bidding war over American Dirt as proof of its commercial value, concerns and doubts about its content seem to have been

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disregarded, ignored, or even squelched. For example, as Gurba revealed in her blog post, after she panned American Dirt in a review commissioned by feminist publication Ms. Magazine, the magazine’s editors urged her to find “something redeeming” to say in the novel’s favor. When she stood her ground, they declined the article and paid her a kill fee (Hinojosa). The desperation of Flatiron and many others in the publishing industry to see this book as a runaway success blinded them to any real sense that something might be amiss. After Gurba went public with her negative take on the novel—­describing it as “a literary licuado that tastes like its title,” as is characterized by “overly-­ripe Mexican stereotypes,” “wannabe realist prose” tainted by “the white gaze,” and “toxic heteroromanticism”—­Flatiron should have brought in someone with expertise in Latinx storytelling and issues of appropriation to advise them while the situation was still salvageable. Although there was nearly two months’ lead time to the novel’s January 21, 2020, release to prepare, Flatiron whistled past the graveyard, with the readily identifiable seal of Oprah’s Book Club as a protective talisman. Rob Nixon’s theory of “slow violence” applies to this American Dirt situation: “By slow violence [Nixon] mean[s] a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Though Nixon conceived of his idea of slow violence in relation to environmentalism and social justice, it seems to work in this case as well. Indeed, the novel’s publication and the publicity machine at work are themselves a kind of slow violence. The slow violence that American Dirt has instigated will be felt for years to come, and it is hard to take the charge seriously that critics are somehow involved in that most antiwriter and—­dare I say—­most un-­American act of censorship. At least, that is the charge of supporters of Cummins and her book, such as Kathleen Parker, who has argued that critics want to censor Cummins because of her “genetic background.” Supporters of Cummins’s novel, foremost among them Bob Miller—­the president of Flatiron Books—­maintained that Latinxs were so unreasonable, so threateningly violent, that the publisher had no choice but to cancel the public events surrounding the release of American Dirt.7 According to such supporters, it is the fault of the Latinx critics such as those from the Dignidad Literaria network that this well-­intentioned book no longer 56  González

has a promotional tour. Never mind that the effort to raise the profile of this novel and its author was and is, in effect, an act of slow violence performed on migrants and refugees in Mexico (directly) and Latinx people (generally). Nixon’s concept of slow violence comes from an environmental political critique, and it is a credit to his valuable theorization that it is so transportable into other areas that perhaps Nixon did not originally intend. The publishing industry is certainly an ecosystem, if not an environment, that enacts a slow violence on a growing demographic (in this chapter, I focus on Latinxs) that continues to be cast in stereotypical ways or ignored altogether relative to majority-­identified authors. These misrepresentations and lack of representation undeniably have a material consequence on racism, prejudice, and humanity because these narrative artifacts are shapers of culture and solidify notions of peoples, irrespective of whether they are accurate or even well intended. The slow violence of the publishing industry is exactly the point. These things accrete slowly, so subtly that they can seem innocuous. Censorship can be a weapon wielded by the powerful and mighty and intended to keep a privileged class in power and maintain the status quo from which they benefit. Censorship enables others to speak for us despite our desire to let our voices ring out, and it is synonymous with suppression, restriction, restraint. With this in mind, who then is the censor? Who has command of what stories are promoted about the Latinx community? Who has access to the immense power of marketing and promotion? Who has the privilege of whiteness as armor, weapon, and shield? It is disingenuous to suggest that members of the Latinx community who dare to take a stand against American Dirt are censoring a major publisher, a best-­selling author, and a novel approved by Oprah’s Book Club. I invoke Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” once more: “Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). The mainstream publishing industry has developed into a system that, with only occasional exceptions, wreaks a type of slow violence against

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the Latinx community and other historically marginalized communities. American Dirt hurts most acutely at this particular moment, but the slow violence of this fiasco will continue like aftershocks. The worst thing is not that American Dirt was given such a vast platform, along with its author; the worst thing, arguably, is the failure of author, publisher, and promoters to admit to their own complicity in purveying the falsehood that the Latinx community is this mass of undifferentiated stuff, a newly discovered archaeological site of a long-­expired people from which an outsider can piece together a single story. The Latinx community, broadly speaking, is polyvocal and multifaceted. Even if we just look at Mexico for a moment, we find a rich and varied tapestry of stories and cultures and peoples. I am reminded of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s warning of the “danger of a single story” (for a discussion of Adichie’s performance of authorship as a public intellectual, see the chapter by Heynders in this volume). If a nation of readers only encounters a historically marginalized identity position in a single iteration, it makes invisible the complexity and diversity within that very identity group. The single story is a danger, as Adichie suggests, not only because it simplifies but also because it can be weaponized. Viet Thanh Nguyen has outlined a related concept called “narrative plenitude / narrative scarcity.” Nguyen writes, “Narrative plenitude is what makes it possible for Hollywood to make so many Vietnam War movies. Not just Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter but also Platoon and Full Metal Jacket and Rambo. They are all set in Vietnam, and some of them are excellent works of art, but they are all dramas of white American masculinity. The Vietnamese are extras in these movies, who exist only to mutter, grunt, groan, curse and jabber incomprehensibly until they are rescued, raped or killed.” Nguyen underscores the material realities that create narrative plenitude for groups of people like white men and scarcity for other groups, such as Mexican women. In her interview with Maria Hinojosa, Gurba argued that the fact that Flatiron Books had touted the novel in promotional materials as giving “a face to the faceless” was an egregious transgression against a living community of people (rather than, say, the victims entombed in the lava flows of ancient Pompeii; Hinojosa). As Gurba reminded Hinojosa, she has a face, as does her family (Hinojosa). The Latinx community has many faces. What they do not have are more opportunities to show these varied faces to the public. Instead, someone else—­someone white—­is given 58  González

the opportunity to give the Latinx community an inauthentic, caricatured, pasteboard mask of their making. Conclusion I strongly believe that there are many readers out there who want to read about people they know very little about and who, after reading a novel like American Dirt, will feel that they now, finally, understand this group of faceless brown people who speak Spanish, that they need look no further in their pursuit to understand, empathize with, and take substantive steps to engage that specific community. It brings us back to Adichie’s “danger of the single story.” We cannot read Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1994) and claim to finally understand what it is to be a Chicana in the United States any more than we can read Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and claim to finally understand the authentic white American experience. This is why it is important for those who read literature from historically marginalized communities to resist the urge to feel that they now know the said community. I implore these readers to think of their reading experience as contributing only a thimbleful to their knowledge of this group, although even that thimbleful is progress. In light of the absurdity of American Dirt’s success, I would like to invite you as my reader to participate in a thought experiment: Imagine that I have written a novel hailed as “the novel that finally encapsulates the white experience in America!” Critics rejoice in the fact that the voice of white America will finally be heard, thanks to a Latinx man from West Texas, now living in Utah. My novel will finally give a face to the huddled white masses from sea to shining sea. My novel will, at long last, capture the struggle of being white. It will be an unputdownable meditation of the heart of whiteness deep within in the quotidian wilds of North America. Now imagine me on a media blitz explaining how I was moved to tell the story of white Americans, captivated by their exploits as I saw them daily on the news, how I wished someone whiter than I am would have written the book but got tired of waiting for that someone to get around to doing it. I am the hero white America deserves. At the end of my book, I tell you that there are real white people out there who need our attention. Such a novel is laughable, although it might make a good satire were I skilled enough. It is ridiculous to contemplate precisely because we

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cannot reduce white America to a singular narrative experience. We’ve had so many narratives of the white experience that you’d think we might have exhausted them. But no. They keep coming because they have near-­ limitless permissibility. Latinxs, however, across two continents, can be reduced to one novel of four hundred pages by a single woman coded as white. One author, with a few years of reading the stories of other Latinxs, was able to do what no one else could do before—­or rather, was allowed to do before. American Dirt teaches us much about how narrative permissibility functions in the literary marketplace, and it reminds us that the machinery that supports contemporary authorship is set up so as to grant privilege to some while it squelches the voices of those with whom the publishing industry is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Notes 1. Big Lit is often associated with the so-­called Big Five publishing houses (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins). 2. One can, relatedly, see the same sort of recency in visual narrative media such as television and film. Latinx actors and characters are becoming more perceptible, but they still make up less than 4 percent of their respective categories. For a deeper exploration of Latinx representation in television and film, see Aldama and González, Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and tv (Columbus: U of Arizona P, 2019) and Aldama and Nericcio, Talking #browntv: Latinas & Latinos on the Screen (Tucson: Ohio State UP, 2019). 3. Curiously, although this “Author’s Note” originally appeared in these formats, it is now missing in the Kindle version and the Audible audiobook of American Dirt. 4. Marie-­Laure Ryan has articulated what she calls the “principle of minimal departure”: the idea that the reader will assume the narrative world is similar to their own experiential reality unless the text mandates otherwise. In a science fiction narrative, for example, a reader will assume that the character negotiates the same gravity as that experienced on Earth unless specifically told something to the contrary. Similarly, I maintain that an average reader in the United States will assume a character is white and cisgender until contradicted. In Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and tv, I call this the “principle of ubiquitous whiteness” (100). Whiteness, I argue, is a normative state in the United States and has deep and lasting implications for the interpretation of narrative. 60  González

5. Imperative Entertainment has acquired the rights to the novel. 6. The referenced image is a photograph by John Moore that features a young Latinx girl crying as she looks at her mother being cuffed by a border patrol agent. The photo went viral, winning Moore a World Press Photo award, and was widely used in the press to denounce separation policies at the U.S.-­Mexico border (see Selk). The hysteria surrounding so-­called migrant caravans—­generally invoked by President Trump and his allies around election season—­was roundly criticized following the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018, after the shooter blamed Jews for the migrant caravans (see Serwer). 7. Bob Miller’s statement concerning the backlash against American Dirt alleges that “threats of physical violence” necessitated the cancellation of Cummins’s book tour.

Bibliography @omarelakkad. “I don’t know if the writing world needs another American Dirt thread, but I got conned by the folks behind this book’s marketing and I’m mad about it, so for whatever it’s worth, here’s some details about how this thing was presented to the world. . . .” Twitter, 28 January 2020, 5:50 p.m., https://​twitter​.com/​omarelakkad/​status/​1222321076216025088​ ?lang​=​en. Acevedo, Nicole. “Salma Hayek Apologizes for Promoting ‘American Dirt’ without Reading the Book.” nbcNews.com, 25 January 2020, http://​www​ .nbcnews​.com/​news/​latino/​salma​-hayek​-apologizes​-promoting​-american​ -dirt​-without​-reading​-book​-n1123131. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” ted, July 2009, https://​www​.ted​.com/​talks/​chimamanda​_ngozi​_adichie​_the​_danger​_of​_a​ _single​_story. Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Brownface Minstrelsy; or a Defense of Our Freedom in the Art of Latinx Storytelling?” Latinxspaces, 24 January 2020, http://​www​ .latinxspaces​.com/​latinx​-literature/​brownface​-minstrelsy​-or​-a​-defense​-of​ -our​-freedom​-in​-the​-art​-of​-latinx​-storytelling. Aldama, Frederick Luis, and Christopher González. Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and tv. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2019. Aldama, Frederick Luis, and William Nericcio. Talking #browntv: Latinas & Latinos on the Screen. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2019. Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. Berkeley ca: Quinto Sol, 1972. Aviles, Gwen. “Can Young Latinos’ Twitter Takedown of ‘American Dirt’ Help Diversify Publishing?” nbcNews.com, 25 January 2020, http://​www​.nbcnews​

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.com/​news/​latino/​can​-young​-latinos​-twitter​-takedown​-american​-dirt​-help​ -diversify​-publishing​-n1122166. Carter, Asa Earl. The Education of Little Tree. New York: Dell, 1976. Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Knopf, 1994. Cummins, Jeanine. American Dirt. New York: Flatiron Books, 2020. ———. A Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder and Its Aftermath. New York: Berkley, 2019. de Leon, Aya. “What about Your Grandmother, Jeanine?” Guernica, 21 February 2020, https://​www​.guernicamag​.com/​what​-about​-your​ -grandmother​-jeanine/. Accessed 4 January 2021. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Viking, 1985. Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. El Akkad, Omar. American War. New York: Random House, 2018. González, Christopher. Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2017. ———. Reading Junot Díaz. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2015. Gurba, Myriam. “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-­Ass Social Justice Literature.” Tropics of Meta, 4 May 2020, http://​tropicsofmeta​ .com/​2019/​12/​12/​pendeja​-you​-aint​-steinbeck​-my​-bronca​-with​-fake​-ass​ -social​-justice​-literature/. Hinojosa, Maria. “Digging into American Dirt.” 30 January 2020, Latino USA, http://​www​.latinousa​.org/​2020/​01/​29/​americandirt/. Holmes, Anna. “Who Gets to Tell Other People’s Stories?” New York Times, 24 May 2016, http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2016/​05/​29/​books/​review/​who​-gets​-to​ -tell​-other​-peoples​-stories​.html. King, Stephen. The Green Mile. New York: Signet Books, 1996. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1960. Luiselli, Valeria. Lost Children Archive. New York: Vintage, 2019. ­McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge ma: Harvard UP, 2011. Miller, Bob. “Statement from Bob Miller, President and Publisher, Flatiron Books.” Twitter, 30 January 2020, https://​twitter​.com/​Flatironbooks/​status/​ 1222638362894438406. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992. Nazario, Sonia. Enrique’s Journey. New York: Penguin Random House, 2006. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge ma: Harvard UP, 2013. 62  González

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “Asian-­Americans Need More Movies, Even Mediocre Ones.” New York Times, 21 August 2018, http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2018/​08/​ 21/​opinion/​crazy​-rich​-asians​-movie​.html. Parker, Kathleen. “‘American Dirt’ Critics Are Censoring the Author Based on Her Genetic Background.” Washington Post, 1 February 2020, http://​www​ .washingtonpost​.com/​opinions/​american​-dirt​-critics​-are​-censoring​-the​ -author​-based​-on​-her​-genetic​-background/​2020/​01/​31/​3eb85526​-4471​-11ea​ -aa6a​-083d01b3ed18​_story​.html. Ryan, Marie-­Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Selk, Avi. “‘I Wanted to Stop Her Crying’: The Image of a Migrant Child That Broke a Photographer’s Heart.” Washington Post, 28 April 2019, http://​www​ .washingtonpost​.com/​news/​post​-nation/​wp/​2018/​06/​18/​i​-wanted​-to​-stop​ -her​-crying​-the​-image​-of​-a​-migrant​-child​-that​-broke​-a​-photographers​ -heart/. Serwer, Adam. “Trump’s Caravan Hysteria Led to This.” Atlantic, 31 October 2018, http://​www​.theatlantic​.com/​ideas/​archive/​2018/​10/​caravan​-lie​-sparked​ -massacre​-american​-jews/​574213/. Sin Nombre. Dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga. Focus Features, 2009. Stockett, Kathryn. The Help. New York: Penguin, 2009. Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Penguin Random House, 1967. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. New York: Penguin, 1994. Urrea, Luis Alberto. By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. Villarreal, José Antonio. Pocho. New York: Doubleday, 1959. “Where Is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey Results.” Lee & Low Books blog, 10 February 2020, http://​blog​.leeandlow​ .com/​2020/​01/​28/​2019diversitybaselinesurvey/. Wilke, Lorraine Devon. “No, Authors Should Not Be Constrained by Gender or Race in the Characters They Create.” HuffPost, 22 May 2017, http://​www​ .huffpost​.com/​entry/​no​-authors​-should​-not​-be​-constrained​-by​-genderor​_b​ _592281cbe4b0b28a33f62db1​?guc​+counter​=​1.



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Part 2

The Author in the Mirror Auto-­Authorship, Memoir, and the Narrating “I”

4

Authorship and Autobiography Arnaud Schmitt

Is an autobiographer an author? If one doesn’t look too closely into the matter of autobiographical authorship, the intuitive response might lead one to consider this question as unnecessary, even incongruous. However, as this edited collection most certainly demonstrates, the author is an important concept even though agreeing on one flexible yet synthetic definition of what an author is remains a tall order. Indeed, associating an autobiographer with what we usually understand by the term author is far from congruent. Why? Because first and foremost, telling one’s own story is not the same as telling a story. As I have demonstrated at greater length elsewhere (Schmitt, Phenomenology), autobiography should be seen not as a literary genre, a subset of an overarching and superordinate category called literature, but as an altogether different modality (understood here as a form of expression), even ontology, to fiction. Although autobiography and fiction rely on language and its ability to communicate by means of narrative, their source material (reality on one hand; imagination on the other) and their objectives (to tell one’s true life story; to tell a fictional tale) are drastically different. In other words, autobiography’s dependence on the real, on facts, sets it apart from other literary genres and forms. If one is used to equating an author exclusively with a fiction writer, then the matter is closed, but of course, there’s no theoretical ground to make an automatic connection solely between “author” and “fiction writer.” Such an association is certainly not embedded in the etymology or history of the term author: “In the beginning, histories of authorship tell us, there was but one author, and that author was God. For a long time the number of human writers who chose, or more often were chosen, to assume the title auctor was small. Authority, almost by definition, 67

was located in the past, as were most writers who could be considered auctores” (North 1380). In fact, it was in the Middle Ages that the personality of the author started to play a part in the general perception and understanding of authorship in the later Middle Ages: “The auctor remained an authority, someone to be believed and imitated, but his human qualities began to receive more attention” (Minnis 27). The personal increasingly came to define the contours of the concept of author as the Renaissance and Romanticism brought the individual—­and even more so, the artist—­to the fore. Historically, then, the notion of authorship was not in any way linked to the creation of fiction, but it certainly became tied to the idea of personal writing, whether poetic or essayistic, during the neoclassical period, a time when a novelist was still an unstable construct and the term autobiographer did not yet exist. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the twentieth century, it has been difficult to debunk the common belief that, at least in an overwhelming majority of cases, authors are novelists and that there is a hierarchy among authors wherein novelists supersede autobiographers. Automatic Association versus Status and Competence Before looking into the notion of autobiographical authorship and its potential differences from other forms of authorship, it is beneficial to develop at least a minimalist definition of an author. I see two options when it comes to defining authorship: automatic association and status, which includes competence. The first, automatic association, consists in systematically associating the fact of publishing a text with (some form of) authorship. This particular approach is backed up by narratological politics and its multifaceted references to an author (whether implied, empirical, or involved in some form of metalepsis); indeed, in narratology, the writer is the author, or the author is the structural way of referring to the writer of the text. I confess to having previously and systematically used the word author to refer to the creative origin of the text without actually having a precise idea of what really is referenced when I use this word. Surprisingly enough, though, this narratological author does not allow a clear-­cut definition of authorship—­quite the opposite when we see that, several decades after it was first coined by Wayne C. Booth, a simple concept such as the implied author is still debated and misunderstood (for discussion of the changing concept of the author in 68  Schmitt

narratology, see Kjerkegaard in this volume). The main reason that narratology has never produced a satisfactory, or at least widely accepted, understanding of what authorship is might be because authorship is as much sociological, cultural, and economic as it is narratological. Consequently, I see one imperative reason not to accept automatic association as grounds for a definition of the author: the sheer number of publications still dedicated to the issue of authorship—­even beyond the realms of narratology and structural analysis—­is an overwhelming argument against the automatic association of writer and author or any simplistic definition of what an author is. Another very convincing argument against this is the variety of—­sometimes contradictory—­features attributed to authors in critical studies in general. When it comes to autobiography, as will be developed later in this chapter, automatic association is even more problematic, because many autobiographers are not primarily referred to as authors. (To give two random and very different examples, Kristin Newman and Dawn Davies have both written interesting and well-­reviewed memoirs—­What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding and Mothers of Sparta, respectively—­but their status within the literary world remains “unspecified” and they are certainly not regarded as authors.) The alternative seems to entail using status to determine the scope of authorship or, more specifically, as a way of reconciling the writer/author connection and the more sociological construct of status, competence. Competence relates to both the skills of an individual (that allow her to write a text) and the skills that are validated by society at large (that allow her to publish a text). This idea of competence as an essential touchstone of authorship is developed in Daniel Barbiero’s “What Guarantees a Text? Authorship, Competence, and Imitation,” an article that provides an important contribution to the scholarship of authorship. Confirming the unsatisfactory nature of the aforementioned automatic association approach, Barbiero notes that “the critical reevaluation of authorship promulgated a questioning of the very being and function of the designated subjectivity charged with holding the text together” (100), even as he acknowledges that “holding the text together” is a complex idea that should not be underestimated and reduced to a simple onomastic process. Opting for a more pragmatic approach, Barbiero limits himself to answering this no-­nonsense question: “What sort of (implicit) guarantee

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about the text is conveyed by the notion of authorship?” (100). In other terms, his question is not about what authorship is but about what authorship does. His way of answering his own question revolves mostly around “a notion of authorship as a function constrained by ‘competence’ in the production of literary work” (101). And as he underlines quite logically, “authorial intentionality involves nothing if not a certain competence in the administration of literary form” (101). Indeed, “intentionality”—­the intention to write a text—­is not enough. According to Barbiero, if authorship is “still a matter of intentional activity,” it should be seen first and foremost as “a matter of finite intentionality”: “its finitude is the product of its ultimate dependence on a set of recognized or recognizable practices” (108), with these practices again being equated with “competence.” Finally, in his understanding of authorship as competence, the latter is nothing but “the ability to produce the right kinds of objects, with the right kinds of features, out of the right kinds of materials, using the right kinds of methods” (108–­9). Thus, Barbiero interprets authorship as something that is acquired through some form of “practice” and that is validated, or not, by society—­authorship as an acquired societal status, in other words. These are two approaches to defining authorship: an automatic association between publishing and authorship on the one hand and a multicriteria—­but nevertheless status-­based—­process on the other that, paradoxically, leads us back to the idea that an author is someone who has the competence to be published. Both ultimately entail the simple idea that any published writer is an author. It is my contention that this circular logic has a major flaw: not all published writers are regarded as authors, because the competence alluded to by Barbiero cannot be restricted to skills and to the will of the writer. After all—­if, like me, you see a fundamental difference between a writer and an author—­one can argue that many writers are published but never acquire the kind of cultural status attained by the great authors. Instead, I therefore put forward the idea that while an author is someone who has the competence to be an author, this specific competence is only partially in the author’s control. Ultimately, authorship is a form of competence (writing skills) that allows someone to create, intentionally or unintentionally, a social and cultural aura around one’s person. 70  Schmitt

The most appropriate analogy to expound this aura is the auteur/ director dichotomy in film studies. In “Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory,” John Caughie, editor of the oft-­mentioned Theories of Authorship (1981), picks up on the concept of the cinematic auteur, a concept that, he argues, should not be limited to the French Cahiers du Cinéma: “It is a commonplace that auteurism is a romanticism and can be traced to the aesthetic theories of the nineteenth-­century Romantics” (412). In this view, certain uses of the word author in relation to literature, such as describing the great authors of a particular period, can be substituted with auteur, since in both cases one can immediately identify a strong form of cultural aura. What distinguishes those who have this aura and those who do not is, however, less clear: “While it may have been self-­evident that film was an art and that directors were its primary artists, it was not self-­evident which directors were artists, the true auteurs” (Caughie 413). As Caughie argues, critical acclaim is not enough to become an auteur, though it is a prerequisite; once again, the very nature of one’s artistic practice, of one’s competence, is also a major criterion. Caughie underlines two recurring arguments in the various definitions of the auteur’s competence, two “pathways” that came to “determine the direction of authorship theory and mark out routes for film theory more generally” (414). The first one is, of course, “an attention to mise en scène, not simply as a set of techniques for the representation of reality but as a language of creativity” (414). As for the second pathway, it “led towards narrative and the themes which structured narrative” (415). In film studies as well as in literary criticism, there are diverging approaches as far as authorship theories are concerned. Nevertheless, some common denominators can be brought to the fore: a critical much more than a public form of recognition associated with stylistic or thematic patterns that allows easy identification of the overall work of an artist, as complex and multifarious as it can be. These patterns are then tightly linked to the name of the author and the overall work of this author: “The corpus allows for a kind of integration, in that its parts, the individual works of which it is comprised, are both subsumed and conserved at the level of identity signified by the author’s name” (Barbiero 102). The aura already mentioned permits a synthetic integration of all the pieces created by the author while endowing her with a cultural identity, with a powerful social status.

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As the vitality of the auteur concept in film studies shows, the concept of authorship is not entirely dead, at least not in the Barthesian sense. As Caughie writes, “There were always degrees of death, and Hitchcock was always likely to be more dead than Jean-­Luc Godard” (419). He continues, asking, “Raised from the dead, can a single theory of authorship deal with Hitchcock, Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, Sally Potter and Bill Viola?” (419). I argue that there can be a single, or at least minimal, description of authorship: taking from auteur theory the understanding that competence comes in many forms, including stylistic and thematic, such a theory must center on the concept of social and cultural aura. The Autobiographer’s Competence Authorship as a form of almost accidental competence—­you never know what is required to create a cultural aura that will result in an authorial persona—­is to me the most efficient definition of minimal authorship, as long as one agrees that authorship and literary creation are two different stages of what Bernard Lahire has called “the literary condition” (La Condition littéraire: La Double vie des écrivains, 2006). Christy Mag Uidhir has also tried to come up with a formula encapsulating what minimal authorship implies, though from a philosopher’s perspective. In a nutshell, this is where his reflections on single authorship lead: “I propose that authorship-­of-­a-­work-­as-­an-­F minimally entails the following for an agent (A), a work (w), and a work-­description (F): A is an author of w as an F if and only if A is directly responsible, at least in part, for w as an F” (Uidhir 374)1. At first sight, Uidhir’s equation brings us back to the automatic association of author and writer, but the F factor complicates and even contradicts this impression. Standing as the description of the work, F may be understood by how readers perceive this work in terms of content or genre. However, I understand F as having a direct impact not only on the public’s perception of w—­actually, F is the public perception of w—­but also on what the identity (cultural or sociological, not personal) of A really is. Put differently, A is a writer whose work is perceived in such a manner that another status (different from simply a writer) is called for. Are these minimalist definitions of authorship transferable to the autobiographical domain? They should be, and for a majority of theorists 72  Schmitt

they are. To take just one example among many, Barbiero defines autobiography thus: An autobiographical writing is an object within the practical domain of literature—­indeed, it is an object within a subset of literature that constitutes a domain in its own right. Thus, a competent author of an autobiographical writing must, by definition, be able to produce a work that contains certain features, takes certain form (or falls within a more or less restricted range of permissible forms), and has a certain content, as Lejeune has suggested in a number of essays purporting to describe the essential features of the genre. From the evidence of the work, we can infer that the author of an autobiographical writing has or has not mastered the requisite skills and other practices proper to this specialized domain of literature. (109) Competence is this time applied to autobiography, and it’s difficult to deny the fact that there must be an autobiographical competence. What I find problematic in Barbiero’s description is the inclusion of autobiography “within the practical domain of literature,” even if his own approach is far less problematic than the one I have labeled “the school of indeterminacy” (see Schmitt, Phenomenology 30–­43), according to which there is no fundamental difference—­and for some, like David Shields, there should be no difference at all2—­between fiction and factual writing. I claim the opposite: not only are they different, but they constitute two altogether different domains and modalities (see Schmitt, Phenomenology chapters 2 and 3). For this reason, an autobiographer’s competence is drastically different from a fiction writer’s competence. If an autobiographer can be an author, it should not be for the same reasons, and it must give way to a different form of cultural aura and thus a different form of authorship. Autofictional ventures or purposefully ambiguous memoirs might be seen to complicate the distinction between a fiction writer and an autobiographer. For instance, considering scandals such as James Frey’s fabricated memoir, Mary Karr writes, “Disgraced con men have helped to author the dominant notion that a thinking person can’t possibly discern between a probable truth and a hyperembellished swindle. Based on their antics, we’ve begun to abandon all judgment, thinking instead, Oh, who knows, anything’s possible, everybody lies anyway” (88). But one should

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not be fooled by such so-­called hybrid texts. To cut a long theoretical story short, an autobiographer undertakes an additional responsibility, one that changes everything and takes us into a different modality or ontology, entailing different communicational rules (Schmitt, Phenomenology). In a similar vein to Barthes’s description of photography’s privileged link with reality—­“It seems that photography always carries its referent with it”3—­I argue that the primary purpose of life writing is to “carry its referent with it,” to carry reality in other terms; its second, corollary purpose is to convey this reality to a reader. Similar to Orpheus’s quest to release Eurydice from the dead, an autobiographer must retrieve a piece of personal experience, of reality, from the limbo of oblivion by means of a deeply flawed cognitive resource: memory. To do so, she might have to share a common rhetorical tool with authors of fiction, but the source of their narrative inputs is so fundamentally different that, as seminal as it is, this shared narrative tool does not create overlapping fields. Furthermore, some theorists have underlined that even their use of narrative differs radically (Cohn; Lavocat). To refer to Barthes’s quote again, and to apply it more accurately to autobiography, the fact that life writing carries its referent is not innate—­far from it. Many memoirs fail to convey the reality of their source events and even fail to be read as memoirs, although they cannot always be held responsible for this failure, which most of the time stems from contextual or paratextual misinformation or misunderstanding. When they are successful, when the intersubjective communication between autobiographer and reader through the textual object actually functions, then memoirs bring something extra to the table. In Karr’s words, “The deep, mysterious sense of identification with a memoirist who’s confessed her past just doesn’t translate to a novelist I love, however deliciously written the work” (xvii). According to Karr, memoirs provide an enhanced reading experience. Such an enhanced experience also entails an increased responsibility: “In autobiography, the stakes of authorship are high: at issue is not only the subject behind the text, but the subject of the text. . . . With his or her signature, the undersigned guarantees the referentiality of the contents, and the fact that the reference is to the undersigned as author” (Barbiero 101). Indeed, there’s no disjunction (see Cohn’s “disjunctive model,” 31) at the core of the narratological system of the text, 74  Schmitt

only a distance from the experiencing-­I and the narrating-­I. The autobiographer’s main competence is to bring back the former thanks to the latter. This competence comes hand in hand with its reflection, the reader’s perception that this competence is successful in making the narrated piece of reality real (at least to the reader). One could argue that we are back to the basic definition of fiction—­t hat is, as make-­ believe or, in Jean-­Marie Schaeffer’s words, “playful, shared pretense.”4 However, the ultimate aim of autobiography is not to make the reader believe that something happened. Rather, the autobiographer’s competence is in finding the narrative means to make the reader experience a piece of reality that is no longer.5 Autobiographical Authorship Among the great authors of the international canon, how many are autobiographers? Thoreau was, but accidentally or rather indirectly, and he remains first and foremost a transcendentalist philosopher, while Walden—­one of the most impressive pieces of self-­narration (see Schmitt “Making the Case”) ever published—­is mostly classified as a philosophical account. What about Proust? Well, À la recherche du temps perdu has been described countless times as autobiographical but rarely as an autobiography. Symptomatically, Dorrit Cohn dubbed Proust’s masterwork a “hybrid creature” (67), echoing other theorists’ perceptions of the work as quintessentially indeterminate. Of course, some famous authors’ diaries (Mann’s, Gide’s) or memoirs (Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast; Nabokov’s Speak, Memory) have achieved canonical status, but within the larger canonical status of the author’s overall work, which remains in these specific cases, and in general, (mostly) fiction. Mann, Gide, Hemingway, and Nabokov, to stick to these heterogeneous and still very representative examples, were ushered into the literary canon first and foremost as authors of fiction. Primo Levi could be a counterexample, but for the following reasons, he is not: though the autobiographical nature of his accounts has never been called into question, his various texts (depending, of course, on differences in paratext between editions) have never been openly and clearly branded as autobiographies or memoirs but are generally seen as autobiographical accounts, and the shift from noun (autobiography) to adjective (autobiographical) wedges a fundamental distance into the text’s relation to the source events. The former

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undertakes responsibility for the authenticity of the events narrated, or at least claims that the narrative is sincere, whereas the latter acknowledges only a partial form of responsibility, an indirectness that can also be encountered in autobiographical novels. Admittedly, authors do not have complete control of the tagging of their works, and this tagging is often the result of fluctuating editorial policies, with the tagging even changing from the hardcover to the paperback edition. But words matter when it comes to suggesting an autobiographical horizon of expectations for the reader, and according to Cohn, there are only two ways of conjuring up this specific horizon: “One is to give explicit notice, paratextually (by way of title, subtitle, or prefatory statement) or textually. The other is to provide the narrator’s name: its distinction from the author’s name conveys fictional intentionality, its identity with the author’s name autobiographical intentionality” (59). To come back to Primo Levi (who is primarily known for his nonfiction even though he also wrote novels, short stories, and poetry), the fact that his texts are often presented as autobiographical but seldom as autobiographies, as subtle as this nuance can seem, is revelatory of the equivocal status of the autobiographer as author. Levi is certainly regarded as an author, as the author of a work, but only implicitly as an autobiographer, if at all. The main reason stems from the status not of the author but of autobiography. Needless to say, fiction has been the powerhouse of literature for centuries, and some novelists of the twentieth century rose to stardom. Thus, presenting Levi, whose work is seminal, as the author of autobiographical accounts rather than as an autobiographer per se is to give him a chance, at least more of a chance, to exist as an author. Gasparini underlines the novel’s historical reversal of fortune. After having been considered a “shameful genre”6 for centuries, the novel has come “to symbolize literature par excellence.”7 As a consequence, every form of writing that is not a novel has been seen as minor. Suffice it to look at the long list of Nobel Prize laureates. Furthermore, because it is not recognized as a creative and artistic act of imagination, to tell one’s life is supposedly a more limited competence than to invent one and is doomed to remain within the rational boundaries of “boring reality.” Autobiography was thus arguably perceived throughout the twentieth century as a weak form of literature—­with some exceptions, of course, including instances where the author’s experience was too dramatic to 76  Schmitt

be ignored, as in Levi’s case. Why was autofiction invented? Why have authors constantly resorted to autofiction and autobiographical novels instead of genuine memoirs when it comes to confiding in the reader? Using autobiographical elements in fiction obviously allows authors more flexibility and fewer risks from allegations of misrepresentation, but also—­more importantly in the context of this chapter’s argument—­fiction is seen as artistically, and commercially, “sexier” and is therefore more likely than autobiography to generate authorial status. Thus, autofiction is a way to write about one’s life without foreswearing the privileges inherent in fiction writing. For authors who want to focus only on the autobiographical content without resorting to fiction, other ploys are available: changing a name with a poor brand image and switching from the old “autobiography” to the more attractive “life writing.” Philippe Lejeune ridiculed this marketing evolution: “There are some offensive words that one balks at using at University and even more in literary circles. ‘Autobiography’ and ‘Testimony’ are more or less banned. . . . Autobiography is not good. Morally, it’s a vice (narcissism etc.). Psychologically, it’s a mistake (impossibility to know oneself). Aesthetically, it’s easy, it’s not art. Whereas ‘life writing,’ it sounds good.”8 Life writing is nothing but autobiography (and biography), but apparently more palatable, as Lejeune ironically points out: it does not renew its practice but only its name, giving the impression of novelty, and an impression is sometimes all it takes to give a new cultural aura to a field that previously had none. Because “being an author . . . requires a constant assertion of one’s own cultural significance” (Braun 138), the genre one practices is an essential element of one’s status. When studying autobiographical authorship, autobiography’s own status and the impact it has on those who openly and unambiguously claim to be autobiographers should be at the forefront of our minds. However, autobiography’s fate seems to have taken a new turn recently, one that should modify the public’s perception of autobiographers. There is arguably a new memoir boom, but what distinguishes the current boom (from those previous) is its qualitative features: memoirs nowadays are not only the works of celebrities, or ghostwriters, or even aging novelists who at long last yield to the autobiographical temptation. Memoirists have at last achieved a form of recognition in their own right—­that is to say, readers and critics have started focusing

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on the artistic merits of their texts and not only on the (often dramatic) nature of the source events narrated, or on other even less valid criteria such as sales or scandals. One of the reasons for such a paradigmatic shift might be the willingness of contemporary autobiographers to face as honestly as possible the limits of the “genre”: “That’s partly why memoir is in its ascendancy—­not because it’s not corrupt, but because the best ones openly confess the nature of their corruption. . . . Their books don’t masquerade as fact. They let you in on how their own prejudices mold memory’s sifter” (Karr 16). These writers have learned their lessons—­mostly from the autofiction era (which I see as being from 1977, when Serge Doubrovsky first coined the term with reference to his novel Fils, to the end of the first decade of the twenty-­first century, when, at least in France, critics and readers started to lose interest in it), tapping into its aesthetic plasticity and leaving out the posture and fake ambiguity, and from recent cognitive studies emphasizing the unreliability of our memory (Siri Hustvedt is a perfect example of a writer integrating scientific data into her nonfictional work)—­but have nevertheless decided to pick up the autobiographical gauntlet and attempt to renew or expand the perimeter of life writing. This new consciousness and approach might account for the recent notoriety of memoirists who are not novelists, one of the most famous examples being Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes. Indeed, the latter is not a novelist. He has only written personal nonfiction—­McCourt has also published the memoirs ’Tis (2000) and Teacher Man (2005)—­and has received prestigious prizes often associated with novelists: a Pulitzer (for biography, as there is no category entitled “autobiography”) and the National Book Critics Circle award. Other memoirs have been critically acclaimed, such as Joan Didion’s diptych The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011). Didion is another perfect example of an occasional autobiographer. She might be identified as a nonfiction author but is primarily an essayist, not a self-­narrator; what’s more, she is also a novelist. She’s perceived as an author, even an author, but assuredly not a self-­proclaimed autobiographer, nor one tagged as such by readers and critics. Despite McCourt’s international success, then, autobiographers as authors are a new—­and above all, a rare—­phenomenon. Even McCourt, the author of three memoirs, is not an undisputed example, as he is associated essentially with one text, not one work. Still today, 78  Schmitt

memoirists rarely make the cut when it comes to end-­of-­the-­year top-­ ten lists, which are sometimes as influential as a prize, especially when it comes to major publications such as the New York Times. As an example, among a total of nine winners and thirty-­six shortlisted books for the National Book Award prize—­a key indicator of status and recognition by literary institutions—­for nonfiction between 2010 to 2018, only two memoirs won the prize (Just Kids by Patti Smith, who is primarily a singer and composer, in 2010 and Between the World and Me by Ta-­Nehisi Coates in 2015) and only six were shortlisted (among them one graphic memoir: Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast in 2014). The rest of the works were either history books, biographies, or essays about the contemporary world. This tally is far from insignificant: It reveals how, even in a category that is not regarded as highly as fiction in terms of artistic achievements, autobiography remains of secondary cultural importance. We have established so far that autobiographical authorship is possible, when authorship is defined as competence giving way to status, and that it has been embodied in the last decades by a few writers who have restricted themselves to personal nonfiction. Although it remains a minor phenomenon, examples such as Maggie Nelson suggest that it is now possible to build an autobiographical body of work and be considered a major author. The fate of such a trend depends, of course, on external factors such as genre predilection among an evolving readership, the digitization of society, the growth of social media, and simply the uncertain future of reading as a cultural practice.9 Nevertheless, if we only focus on the present and the current state of autobiographical authorship, it is necessary to introduce some distinctions and nuances between several levels of autobiographical authorships. Autobiographical Authorships The first essential distinction one must take into account when considering autobiographical authorship is the one between singularity and plurality and the corollary one between context-­dependent and context-­ independent memoirs. David Shields wrote in Reality Hunger that “autobiography is ruled by chronology and is date-­driven. It’s a line running through time, punctuated by incident”—­a “life over time,” in other words (41). On the other hand, he idiosyncratically sees a memoir as inherently

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incomplete, facing the same “dilemmas and adventures as poetry and fiction” and presenting looser ties to facts and reality. Eventually, Shields concludes, “You would write only one autobiography. You can write multiple memoirs, though, coming at your life from different angles” (41). There is a fuzziness to Shield’s distinctions and concepts, which cannot take into account texts such as H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014), a memoir that focuses on one specific time frame or “angle” while switching several times to essayistic mode and being “adventurous” in terms of prose without having any ties to fiction and certainly without reading like a novel. Yet Shields’s autobiography/memoir dichotomy can be useful if we consider that some writers indeed write only one autobiography, whereas others produce several memoirs, thus spawning an actual plural work (with work here being used as in Uidhir’s equation discussed earlier). Of course, this factor has a considerable impact on our perception of an autobiographer as an author. This does not mean that by the sheer force of a single text, one cannot achieve the status of author. For instance, if you read Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It and Other Stories (1976) as a thinly disguised memoir, though it’s often presented as a semiautobiographical collection of three stories, you might regard Maclean as an author based on the strength (reception) and impact (readership) of his one book.10 However, this is an exception that does not confirm any rule, and having published several texts certainly bolsters the identity of the corpus, which “allows for a kind of integration, in that its parts, the individual works of which it is comprised, are both subsumed and conserved at the level of identity signified by the author’s name” (Barbiero 102). In that sense, as far as the “mystique” of the author’s name is concerned, autobiography does not really differ from fiction, and bodies of work comprising a single or very limited number of texts can achieve cult status, though for different reasons than plural works (when they do), and are often more dependent on extraneous factors such as special events in the life of the author or the editorial fate of the novel. A corpus adds weight to a work, both literally and figuratively, and—­when studying autobiographical authorship or simply considering one particular author—­singularity/plurality should be the first criterion taken into consideration. The second criterion or distinction is the relation of a work to a particular context—­that is, context-­dependent versus context-­independent texts. 80  Schmitt

To illustrate such a differentiation, there’s no better example than the Diary of Anne Frank. Although this is arguably one of the most famous pieces of nonfiction ever published, making the case for its author’s authorial status remains a difficult task. I think the main reluctance stems from what is perceived as the limited literary value of this text (although some have argued otherwise; see, for instance, Prose); its value remains essentially dependent on its context, not on the means of expression used to give life to it. In some way, the text is overshadowed by its historical context, and this might be a positive feature, judging by its timeless appeal. Another good reason why Anne Frank is not really considered an author is that she wrote her personal diary at such a young age and is only seen as the writer of one published book (singularity). Authorship implies some form of profession, or at least a prolonged use of specific skills. This is why a body of work comprising a single text, or of several texts circumscribed to the same source events, is a serious barrier to the development of a sense of authorship. The competence of an autobiographer consists in creating a form that makes readers feel as though they can experience, one way or another, the source event while also conveying the gap between the experiencing-­I and the narrating-­I without undermining the autobiographical pact (based on sincerity). So is Anne Frank an author? Probably not (one of the reasons being that she was, tragically, never given the chance to be one), and the nature of the source events is probably the main reason. Why then is Primo Levi perceived as an author? First, as mentioned earlier, Levi is still today far from being classified as one of the torch-­bearers of twentieth-­century autobiography, even though he had all the required competence, but his authorial status is not to be called into question, because he managed to create a specific and original form despite the ineffable nature of what he went through. We’ve already noted how Caughie considers the “language of creativity with which an auteur transformed material” (414) as a key element in determining authorship. To some extent, autobiographical authorship is also largely determined by the writer’s ability to devise a “language of creativity,” not in order to “transform material,” but to pay a realistic tribute to it by allowing a creative distance between source events and the act of writing and building an artifact out of this fundamental distance. Finally, the last aspect to examine when assessing the authorial potential and range of an autobiographer is the nature of her work. Our third

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and final distinction concerns bodies of work comprising several genres versus works devoted exclusively to one genre. As far as the latter is concerned, because there is always a balance of power between the different genres within a single work, fiction will presumably always prevail for two related reasons: as mentioned earlier, autobiographical authorship in the sense I have described is still a recent phenomenon, and fiction is hierarchically higher than autobiography on the literary ladder if judged by readership, sales, prizes, and academic syllabi. For instance, American author James Salter is biographically presented as a novelist even though he also wrote a scintillating memoir, Burning the Days (1997). We have already taken Hemingway and Nabokov as examples, but of course there are a host of others; to mention a different and more recent one, British novelist Sara Moss also published a memoir, Names for the Sea (2012), that, beyond its many strengths, offers an illuminating thematic counterpoint to her work of fiction. As different as these examples are, these authors are all primarily thought of as novelists, and their autobiographical texts are at best seen as isolated nuggets in a field of fiction. Autobiographical authorship is almost an impossibility for an author whose work includes fiction: because of fiction’s prestige, her competence and status will always be linked back to the fiction in her body of work. On the other hand, in recent years, some authors have been patiently building bodies of work principally devoted to autobiography, even though—­in the cases of Maggie Nelson and Sarah Manguso, for instance—­their oeuvres may include poetry and essays. Whereas the faction school of the 1970s was mostly about journalistic texts, Nelson and Manguso spearhead a trend that doesn’t balk at being—­sometimes deeply—­personal. Conclusion This chapter represents an attempt to define autobiographical authorship considering status and competence and resting on two criteria: sociological and literary. This is a new and original line of intellectual inquiry: prior studies exploring authorship, such as Maurice Couturier’s La figure de l’auteur (1995) or Seán Burke’s Authorship (1995), almost exclusively focus on novelists. The three distinctions I outline herein—­singularity versus plurality, context dependent versus context independent, and multiple-­genre oeuvre versus single-­genre oeuvre—­provide tools to 82  Schmitt

assess the potential authorial persona of an autobiographer, their social and cultural aura, which is based both on the nature of her work and on her interaction with readers, since, ultimately, “the author is not a construction of the origin of the text, but a construction stemming from our interpretative interaction with the text” (Buch-­Jepsen 62).11 Notes 1. One must keep in mind that Uidhir doesn’t make any particular claim as to the identity of A, the latter ranging from a construct to an empirical presence, or the nature of F (genre, mode of cultural response, etc.) and only tries to offer the most minimalist account of what authorship is (375). 2. Shields explicitly states this on several occasions. For instance, “There’s no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative” (Reality Hunger 110). 3. “Il semble que la photographie porte toujours son référent” (1112; translations from French texts are my own). 4. “feintise partagée ludique” (102) 5. Elsewhere, I have explored this readerly dimension of autobiography, arguing that the tone of a memoir is a key vector for a successful autobiographical experience (see Schmitt, Phenomenology 134–­60). 6. “genre honteux” (70). 7. “symbolizer la littérature par excellence” (70). 8. “Il y a des mots malsonnants, qu’on hésite à employer à l’Université et encore plus dans les milieux littéraires. ‘Autobiographie’ et ‘témoignage’ sont plus ou moins à l’index. [. . .] L’autobiographie, c’est pas bien. Moralement, c’est un vice (narcissisme, etc.). Psychologiquement, c’est une erreur (impossible de se connaître). Esthétiquement, c’est une facilité, ce n’est pas de l’art. Tandis que ‘écriture de soi,’ ça a une autre allure” (170). 9. Digital autobiography (blogs, vlogs, social media, etc.) would require another chapter, but again this will certainly alter the collective vision of what constitutes an author of autobiography. 10. After more than two decades in the field of autobiography and autofiction, I still have to figure out what this really means. 11. “L’auteur n’est donc pas une construction de l’origine du texte, mais une construction qui provient de notre interaction interprétative avec le texte.”

Bibliography Barbiero, Daniel. “What Guarantees a Text? Authorship, Competence, and Imitation.” SubStance, vol. 23, no. 3, 1994, pp. 100–­116.

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Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago il: U of Chicago P, 1961. Braun, Rebecca. “Embodying Achievement: Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, and Authorship as a Competitive Sport.” Austrian Studies 22, 2014, pp. 121–­38. Buch-­Jepsen, Niels. “Le nom propre et le propre auteur.” Une histoire de la «fonction-­auteur» est-­elle possible?, edited by Nicole Jacques-­Lefèvre. Saint-­ Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-­Etienne, 2001, pp. 49–­64. Burke, Seán, editor. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern; A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995. Caughie, John. “Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory.” The sage Handbook of Film Studies, edited by James Donald and Michael Renov. London: SAGE, 2007, pp. 408–­23. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore md: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Couturier, Maurice. La figure de l’auteur. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995. Gasparini, Philippe, Est-­il je? Roman autobiographique et autofiction. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004. Karr, Mary. The Art of Memoir. New York: Harper Collins, 2015. Lahire, Bernard. La Condition littéraire: La Double vie des écrivains. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2006. Lavocat, Françoise. Fait et fiction: Pour une frontière. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2016. Lejeune, Philippe. Signes de Vie: Le Pacte autobiographique 2. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005. Minnis, Alastair. “The Significance of the Medieval Theory of Authorship.” Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern; A Reader, edited by Seán Burke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995, pp. 23–­30. North, Michael. “Authorship and Autography.” pmla, vol. 116, no. 5, 2001, pp. 1377–­85. Prose, Francine. Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. New York: Harper, 2009. Schaeffer, Jean-­Marie. Pourquoi la fiction? Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999. Schmitt, Arnaud. “Making the Case for Self-­Narration against Autofiction.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2010, pp. 122–­37. ———. The Phenomenology of Autobiography. New York: Routledge, 2017. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010. Uidhir, Christy Mag. “Minimal Authorship (of Sorts).” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, vol. 154, no. 3, 2011, pp. 373–­87.

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5

A Cognitive Approach to Multimodal Autobiographical Elegy Alison Gibbons

Elegy entails the expression of grief and loss, usually following the death of a loved one. Scholarship on literary elegy often focuses on the form’s poetic roots—­for instance, exploring its connection to Greek poetics (West), the pastoral (Schenck), and the love epistle (Scollen)—­while the subsequent assimilation of elegy into prose is predominantly considered a trope of modern and late modern fiction (Engelberg; Smythe; Vickery). Furthermore, in discussions of literary elegy from the modern to the postmodern period, the function is seen to have shifted: rather than a real person lamenting the death of a specific loved one, the fictional characters in postmodernist writing lament something more abstract, such as youth or (loss of) confidence in historical truths (Engelberg 3; Ganteau 69–­99; Vickery 2). As such, studies of autobiographical elegy in contemporary literary prose appear to have been neglected. This is particularly surprising, since contemporary literature is experiencing a renaissance in autobiographical forms of writing (as, indeed, this volume attests) and elegy itself is “especially suited for the portrayal of autobiographical negotiations with the ego” (Möller 695). In this chapter, I redress that critical neglect by exploring the autobiographical dimension of contemporary elegy as well as its manifestation in multimodal literature. Furthermore, I take a cognitive approach, applying analytical frameworks informed by cognitive science and psychology in order to explicate readers’ experience of literary elegy. Since existing scholarship has not previously explored how readers engage with literary elegy and conceptualize the grieving elegist, my approach uniquely uncovers how readers imagine the elegiac author, their experience of loss, and the deceased loved one. In the next section, I consider the historical 85

development of elegy into a contemporary literary genre in relation to fictionality. Afterward, I outline the poetic tropes and stylistic devices associated with literary elegy, capturing them within a cognitive analytical framework founded on cognitive deixis and Text World Theory. My ensuing analysis explores how readers engage with the autobiographical author in mourning, focusing on Sophie Calle’s Rachel, Monique . . . (2012), a multimodal book in memoriam of the artist’s mother. Ultimately, then, the chapter offers a dual critical enhancement: mapping the stylistic tropes of literary elegy and explicating the cognitive dynamics of the elegiac reading experience. For autobiographical elegy, the reader’s imagined engagement with the narrator-­elegist as a textual counterpart of the referential author is vital to the literary encounter. Contemporary Literary Elegy and Fictionality Contemporary literary elegy has a surprisingly unsettled historical relationship with fictionality. Elegy emerged chiefly as an oratory form in ancient Greece (Sutur; Kennedy) around the seventh century bc, when a poet delivered verse in elegiac couplets and “in his own person, usually to a specific addressee and in the context of a particular occasion or state of affairs” (West 2; cf. Kennedy 11–­12). The use of this form in funereal contexts meant that elegy came to be associated with the personal grief of lamentation, and as David Kennedy explains, after its first appearance in English poetry in the sixteenth century (3), elegy increasingly performed the act of mourning and, from the nineteenth-­century Romantic period onward, represented “the authority and authenticity of individual feeling” (4). Even so, Karl Enenkel suggests that while the “authors [of elegy] created a certain persona of the poet which surely contained some fictional elements,” readers were “inclined to perceive elegy basically as an autobiographical genre” (728). In some ways, therefore, elegy might be seen as an inherently hybrid genre akin to autofiction, wherein, prototypically, the central narrating character is a textual counterpart of the author (for a discussion of autofiction, see the chapter by Doloughan in this volume). Karen E. Smythe—­in her study of what she calls “fiction-­elegy” in modern literature—­speaks of “a literary genre that has become increasingly marked by blurred boundaries” (4). Although Smythe is predominantly thinking in terms of genre forms (pastoral poem, lyrical ode, 86  Gibbons

nineteenth-­century realism, the modernist novel), her conception also involves blurring the boundary between autobiography and fiction, chiefly through a metatextual self-­consciousness about the act of writing and the inclusion of autobiographical material in the narrator-­elegist’s account. In Smythe’s conception of fiction-­elegy, however, this autobiographical material is itself invented as part of the fiction. As she clarifies in a footnote, “The autobiographical is used as a trope and is a rhetorical device used by the narrator-­elegist; it does not involve an incorporation of the author’s (or even implied author’s) autobiography into fiction-­ elegy” (174; original emphasis).1 Smythe sees this blurring of autobiography and fiction as essential to the effect of fiction-­elegy. Both in early forms of elegy and in twentieth-­century fiction-­elegy, then, the genre is infused with a malleable fictionality that is primarily dependent on the extent to which the narrator-­elegist is perceived as an autobiographical counterpart of the author. The fictionality of contemporary literary elegy can—­I suggest—­be seen as scalar. Stefan Iversen’s mapping of the various forms of autofiction offers a complementary framework for categorizing literary elegy. He identifies a matrix of four positions based on the extent of the work’s fictionality and the degree to which the author’s selfhood is promoted (561–­62): (1) pro-­fiction, pro-­self texts like Ben Lerner’s 10:04 use fiction to produce insights into and about the authorial self; (2) pro-­fiction, anti-­ self texts are fictional, with an author figure who is invented even if the real author’s name is used, as in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph”; (3) anti-­ fiction, pro-­self texts, exemplified by Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series,2 offer an autobiographical account of the real author’s life while also using novelistic techniques or paratextual labels such as “novel”; and (4) anti-­fiction, anti-­self texts are the least common but most experimental, including forms of “authorless biography” (Iversen 562), such as Claus Beck-­Nielsen (1963–­2001): En biograpfi (2003), in which the artist documents his real attempt to erase his own identity.3 Applied to contemporary literary elegy, fiction-­elegies (such as those in Smythe’s corpus4) are pro-­fiction, anti-­self texts, while autobiographical works like Calle’s Rachel, Monique . . . are instances of anti-­fiction, pro-­ self elegy. Consequently, in Rachel, Monique . . . , the autobiographical does not serve to give the effect of reality (as in fiction-­elegy) but is rather perceived as a fundamental part of the circumstances of the author’s

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personal loss. Philippe Lejeune, in fact, makes exactly this claim in comparing biography and autobiography to fiction: “They [(auto)biographies] claim to provide information about a ‘reality’ exterior to the text, and so to submit to a test of verification. Their aim is not simple verisimilitude, but resemblance to the truth. Not ‘the effect of the real,’ but the image of the real” (22; original emphasis). The image of the author figure is therefore fundamental to readers’ literary experiences of autobiographical—­or anti-­ fiction, pro-­self—­elegy, with readers’ perceptions of the author’s referential existence at the heart of the emotional response such works may induce. Elegiac Style Of those scholars who have studied literary manifestations of elegy, Smythe has chiefly examined “the formal and linguistic characteristics of fiction written within an elegiac framework” (5). She defines elegy as “a verbal presentation or staging of emotion, wherein the detached speaker engages the audience with the intent of achieving some form of cathartic consolation” (3). Smythe’s description suggests that authors of literary elegies—­irrespective of their work’s fictionality—­are acutely aware of their rhetorical performance, since mourning becomes a public rather than a solely personal act. Her emphasis on the verbal demonstrates the primacy of the linguistic mode, both in the genre and in related critical accounts. While this may have held true for modern elegies and their predecessors, contemporary literary elegies often make use of multimodal presentations (for a related discussion of multimodal autographics, see the chapter by Pedri in this volume). Like Rachel, Monique . . . , Anne Carson’s nox and Anders Nilsen’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow are multimodal anti-­fiction, pro-­self elegies, and all three lament the loss of a specific loved one: Sophie Calle’s mother, Anne Carson’s brother, and Anders Nilsen’s fiancée, respectively. In order to explicate the experience of reading literary elegy (including multimodal literary elegy), in this section of the chapter I sketch the stylistic features of the genre within a cognitive framework, underwritten by cognitive deixis and Text World Theory.5 Deictic language is context dependent, requiring that readers shift their imaginative and psychological positions as they process and reconstruct the described situation (Duchan et al.; Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics 49–­69). Deictic items, in turn, construct the parameters of text-­worlds, which are mental representations 88  Gibbons

or models formed and imagined by readers during discourse processing (Gavins; Werth). Text-­worlds are ontologically discrete, so when the parameters of discourse change (for instance, through spatiotemporal shifts, changes in speech presentation, or epistemological alterations brought about by negation, modality, or hypotheticality), readers imaginatively relocate to a newly constructed text-­world. Consequently, even short texts can generate multiple text-­worlds. According to Text World Theory, real readers and real authors are participants in the discourse-­ world, which is a mental model of the real-­world communicative situation (e.g., in the case of reading a book, a conceptualization of the circumstances of writing and reading as well as of the writer as producer of the discourse and oneself as reader). The discourse-­world is often “split” (Gavins 6) because the writer and reader(s) can occupy different spatiotemporal coordinates. Readers build mental representations of authors both to represent them as participants in the discourse-­world communication and to imagine versions of them if they are represented in the text, as is the case in autobiographical works (Gibbons, “Cognitive Model”). Both types of mental model of authors may be built using discourse-­world knowledge, but they are nevertheless cognitive constructs (cf. Gibbons, “Using Life”; “Dissolving Margins”; Stockwell, “Texture”). My application of Text World Theory reveals how readers construct the imagined worlds of literary elegy. Additionally, attention to deixis shows the stylistic composition of literary elegy as well as how readers position its imagined worlds, along with the narrating elegist, ontologically in terms of the fictionality/referentiality divide. Drawing from previous scholarship and from her own examples of modern fiction, Smythe outlines the features of elegy (3–­21, 153–­71), which I have organized below according to deictic dimensions:6 Perceptual Deixis Emphasis on the act of mourning as well as on the self of the mourning subject; prosopopoeia (specifically, voicing the deceased). Discourse Deixis (Encompassing Compositional Deixis and Textual Deixis) Multiple levels of storytelling, often using a story-­within-­story, mise-­en-­abyme structure;

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transgeneric borrowings, incorporating another (often elegiac) genre into prose writing (e.g., using the pastoral mode in fiction); self-­reflexivity in the form or structure of the work and/or in digressions relating to the process of writing; self-­consciousness of the narrator-­elegist expressed through the self-­reflexivity discussed above and the incorporation of autobiographical material (regardless of whether that material is fictionalized or not). Temporal Deixis Temporal disruption evoked by mise-­en-­abyme structures; manipulation of sequential time. The following three subsections provide details of how I analyze these characteristic features in a cognitive Text World Theory approach. Perceptual Deixis: Think-­Acts and Prosopopoeia Perceptual deixis encodes subjectivities, perspectives, and participants in language. Personal pronouns are central, as are words or phrases pertaining to mental states and emotions. In elegy, Smythe claims, “The role of the subject that perceives and thinks is emphasized” (18). One way of achieving this is through what Smythe calls “think-­acts”—­exemplified by phrases such as “I mourn” or “I remember”—­which function as “performative parts of a narrative that are thought by a narrator or character and produce an effect (usually revelatory and/or consoling) on the thinker and the reader” (18; original emphasis). Considering Siegfried Sassoon’s writings as autofiction, Marcello Giovanelli similarly argues for the importance of expressions that function as “markers of narration” (his examples are “My only recollection is,” “I imagine,” “I record”) in giving “prominence to the acts of remembering and writing through which the present remembering self is construed objectively” (123). Such expressions consequently create a sense of communicative proximity whereby the narrating subject appears “more aligned to the reader as a co-­participant” (Giovanelli 123). Further support can be found in Peter Stockwell’s Text World Theory analyses of lamentation poetry (“Authenticity”; Texture). Stockwell highlights how the textual presence of the lamenting poetic voice often prompts readers to imagine a text-­world that resembles the 90  Gibbons

discourse-­world communication between author and reader. In other words, a counterpart of that poetic voice—­based on the author-­poet who appears to directly address the reader—­is imagined in the text-­world (Stockwell, “Authenticity” 209). The narrator-­elegist also gives voice to the deceased through prosopopoeia (Ganteau 71; Smythe 8), the rhetorical act in which an imagined or absent subject is given voice. This has a significant effect on readers’ experience in terms of perceptual deictic composition. As Smythe writes, “The prosopopoetic ‘voice’ is a double voice in elegy: the voice of the absent as well as the voice of the survivor is figured in the performed and the performative text” (8; original emphasis). This can be explained through recourse to how Text World Theory treats different styles of speech and thought presentation. Joanna Gavins expounds that direct speech or thought automatically involves a shift to a new text-­world (e.g., from a text-­world focalized by the narrator to a text-­world imagined from the speaking/thinking character’s perspective). This is due to the change in perceptual deictic parameters whereby the egocentric-­I represents a different subjectivity (Gavins 50). A similar shift can occur with indirect speech, but as I have argued elsewhere in relation to first-­person autofiction (“Dissolving Margins”), the narrator’s perspective remains the primary route of world-­creation. Stockwell’s account of lamentation does not discuss prosopopoeia, but he does consider direct address to the deceased, which also necessitates a shift that results in a corresponding deictic displacement: precisely because the addressee is dead and, therefore, not physically copresent with the poetic voice, the deceased loved one is imagined by the reader in another ontologically distinct text-­world (“Authenticity” 209–­10). Prosopopoeia typically manifests in direct and free direct forms, both entailing the expression of the exact words of the deceased with freeness signifying the degree to which these words are anchored in narration (reporting clauses and quotation marks are absent in the freest form). The perceptual shift involved in direct speech/thought presentation (e.g., from narration to a character’s/enactor’s point of view) means that the revoicing of the words of the deceased will necessarily trigger a new text-­ world, emerging from the text-­world of the narrator-­elegist. Building on Smythe’s observations above about the double voice of prosopopoeia, I therefore argue that the prosopopoetic voice manifests as doubly deictic

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Fig. 1. Text World Theory diagram for the cognition of prosopopoeia.

(Herman 2002) because the deceased’s words seem to be simultaneously voiced by the once-­living-­now-­dead loved one as well as recollected and presented by the narrator-­elegist. The prosopopoetic voice is therefore subject to perceptual dynamics comparable to those that Stockwell argues occur with free indirect discourse and that he calls a “mind-­cast”: two subjectivities are involved but “arranged in layers or in proximity to the reader” (“Re-­cognizing” 23). Relating this to elegy, irrespective of whether the stylistic composition profiles the deceased through (free) direct forms, readers remain cognizant—­as in free indirect discourse—­of the narrator-­elegist and the deceased in their respective proximal text-­ world and across a text-­world boundary (cf. Stockwell, “Re-­cognizing” 27). I am consequently arguing that reading prosopopoeia similarly involves recognizing that “one mind is accessed via another” (Stockwell, “Re-­ cognizing” 23), with the significance of the deceased’s words resting in the potential meaning they may hold for the narrator-­elegist. This is modeled in figure 1, as is the trans-­world mapping by which readers interpret the narrator-­elegist to be a counterpart of the author. Shading represents readers’ felt sense of the proximity and/or remoteness of text-­worlds (with darker shading indicating greater felt distance). Discourse Deixis: Embeddings and Self-­Reflexivity Discourse deixis encompasses both compositional deixis—­which focuses on the literary conventions, register, and genre of a work—­and textual 92  Gibbons

deixis, which draws attention to a work’s textuality through metatextual devices. As Andrea Macrae claims, “Discourse deictic references can be exploited to disrupt the reader’s immersion in the story, and draw her attention to the act of processing the material text, thereby highlighting the fictionality and constructedness of the story” (55). In elegy, multiple levels of storytelling are the consequence of remembrance and the use of prosopopoeia, both of which emphasize the embedded narrative structure. Multiple narrative layers can also arise from transgeneric borrowings. These can be signaled by the language and register of the text, as when prior elegiac genres such as poetic forms are incorporated. They can also be presented multimodally through re-­registration, a term that signals the use of other documents or text types (such as newspaper clippings, letters, or photographs) being (re-­)presented visually. This draws attention to the physical substance of the elegiac text, promotes referentiality, and denotes the prior reality for which the narrator-­elegist mourns.7 Smythe claims that self-­reflexivity and self-­consciousness can, in elegy, serve to revise the aesthetic work of mourning “from the idea of a work (an object) to that of work as a narrative act” (153). This, in turn, implicates the reader as audience for the elegist’s performative act: the “presence of a story-­teller within the fiction self-­consciously points to the elegiac convention of communal commiseration” (Smythe 10). Readers therefore have an important role to play because “it is in the distance between the reader and the elegy that the literary work of mourning is enacted” (3). Temporal Deixis: Displacements and Manipulations of Time Tense forms and time references are the bedrock of temporal deixis. Since an “elegy is a gesture toward the past” (Schenck 7), it is unsurprising that temporal deixis is a significant aspect of elegiac style. However, as Smythe highlights, the embedded world of the past in which the elegized subject is invoked creates a temporal disruption, “since the reader’s experience . . . is contingent upon the (mournful) experience of the narrator, who writes in the present or recent past from the more distant past of memory” (10). This means that elegy, as Jonathan Culler asserts, “replaces an irreversible temporal disjunction, the move from life to death, with a dialectical alternation between attitudes of mourning and consolation, evocations of absence and presence” (67). Rather than a relatively linear structure, then, elegy “displaces the temporal pattern of actual loss” and instead

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enacts “a play of presence and absence governed not by time but by poetic power” (Culler 67). Consequently, the narrator-­elegist appears responsible for the manipulation of sequential time, with acts of remembering facilitating cognitive shifts to temporally past text-­worlds. Rachel, Monique . . . by Sophie Calle Rachel, Monique  .  .  . (2012)8 is Calle’s multimodal autobiographical elegy to her mother—­whom I refer to in this chapter as Monique9—­and involves many of the prototypical features of literary elegy. It has, however, received limited academic attention, tending instead to be discussed alongside Calle’s related exhibitions (Masschelein; Wilson). My analysis is thus original in focusing on Rachel, Monique . . . as a book in its own right and in explicating the reading experience it generates. The book is divided into three sections, though I concentrate on the first and longest section—­which takes the form of a diary—­as well as on how its cover design and initial pages shape a reader’s encounter with the book. Embedded Text-­Worlds and Prosopopoeia The premise of Rachel, Monique . . . as a narrative act of elegy is established even before readers open the book: it has a white textile cover on which golden embroidered words appear. According to Wilson, the “book’s ornateness, its heft and solidity, evokes those books that are also objects of piety—­communion missals and prayer books” (81). Thus, the design aesthetics immediately signal the reverence of memorial. The embroidery reads, “She was called successively Rachel, Monique, Szyndler, Calle, Pagliero, Gonthier, Sindler. My mother did not appear in my work, and that annoyed her.” On the one hand, Calle’s mother is foregrounded: she is the grammatical subject of both sentences, and this focus is sustained through the protracted list of names and the vivifying nature of the emotional verb (“annoyed”) describing her feelings. On the other hand, the use of past tense coupled with the mother’s various names denotes the narrator’s personal efforts to understand her mother in the event of her death. Additionally, the reference to the narrator’s own “work” audaciously asserts her status as a living artist and surviving daughter. Typically for literary elegy, then, the cover text involves “emphasis on the act of mourning as well as on the mourner—­the artist and survivor” (Smythe 6; original emphasis). At this point in the reading 94  Gibbons

experience, readers may not be certain that the book is autobiographical. Nevertheless, the paratextual positioning of these opening words on the book’s cover intimates that the narrator represents an extratextual presence. Because the narrative act of elegy begins outside of the text proper, it thus encourages an interpretation of the narrator as Calle, the author. The text-­world structure of these paratextual lines fits the prototype of elegy. The act of narration generates an initial text-­world (t-­w 1) that is relatively empty in imaginative terms (because minimal information is provided about the narrative situation), and as mentioned, the paratextual discourse encourages readers to construe the narrator as the author. Thus, this initial text-­world appears to closely align with the discourse-­ world, since it contains an imagined version of Calle. The experience of Rachel, Monique . . . as a narrative communication between author and reader is thus heightened. The description of Calle’s mother is conceptualized in a second, subsequent text-­world (t-­w 2). The syntactic negation in “My mother did not appear in my work” successively generates a third text-­world (t-­w 3): to cognitively process “not,” readers conceptualize the opposing affirmative—­that Monique did appear in the work—­in order to comprehend the nonappearance in the second text-­world. Since negation involves precisely this additional cognitive effort, it tends to be interpreted as marking something as noteworthy. Consequently, this negative text-­world emphasizes the relationship between artistic object and mother; in doing so, it reinforces trans-­world relations between discourse-­ world author and text-­world narrator by implying that Monique might finally appear in the narrator’s oeuvre—­now, in this book that the reader holds in their hands. Instead of generic black type, the initial pages of Rachel, Monique . . . feature embossed writing that punctuates the texture of its matte white pages. In a large font, covering two recto pages, the text reads, “She liked to be the object of discussion. When I set up my camera at the foot of the bed where she was dying—­I wanted to be present to hear her last words, and was afraid that she would pass away in my absence—­she exclaimed: ‘Finally!’” As shown in figure 2, the first embossed sentence adds detail to text-­world 2, while the temporal adverb “When” in the second sentence signals a shift to a specific past memory that is constructed by readers in text-­world 4. The modality (“wanted,” “would”) of the narrator’s parenthetical admission of their own feelings triggers ontologically discrete

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modal worlds (t-­w 5 and 6) as well as a negative text-­world caused by the semantic negation of “absence” (t-­w 7). Furthermore, as lexemes of cognition, the verb “wanted” and adjective “afraid” represent “think-­acts,” highlighting the narrator-­elegist’s perceptions and emotions. Prosopopoeia first occurs in Rachel, Monique . . . with the direct speech “Finally!” This triggers text-­world 8, the deictic coordinates of which represent Monique’s perspective. Crucially, as the text-­world structure modeled in figure 2 shows, the narrator-­elegist (in t-w1) performs the rhetorical act and appears in control of the discourse. As such, the reader experiences Monique’s words through the prosopopoetic mind-­cast and is simultaneously cognizant of both text-­world 1 (narration) and text-­ world 8 (mother’s words). It is this doubly deictic voicing of “Finally!” that allows readers to understand the poignant significance attached to the exclamation by/for both the narrator and her mother. Consequently, the opening to Rachel, Monique . . . enacts the tension that runs through all elegiac works with a focus torn between, and placed simultaneously on, the life lost and the life still being lived. A Joint Creative Endeavor Following these opening pages, the diary section—­functioning as an elegiac mise-­en-­abyme structure—­begins with a black-­and-­white photograph of Monique sitting on a headstone inscribed “mother,”10 which visually introduces readers to the image of Monique. Overleaf, readers encounter a double-­page spread, shown in figure 3. On the recto page is the black front cover of a book embossed with the year 1981; on the verso page is a photograph of a young Monique at the top left with typed text at the bottom that reads, A few days before she lost consciousness, my mother asked me to take a box full of her photo albums and personal diaries home with me. Sixteen notebooks, dated 1981, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, and 2000. She had chosen not to destroy them. She wasn’t naïve about what might happen to them if she left them in my hands. Otherwise I wouldn’t have allowed myself. “A few days before . . .” sites the first text-­world of this passage in the narrator-­elegist’s remembered past, while her mother’s request (“my 96  Gibbons

Fig. 2. Text World Theory diagram for cover and first pages of Rachel, Monique . . . .

mother asked me to . . .”) is presented using indirect speech, maintaining the reader’s focus on the narrator. However, the mother’s subsequent decisions and assumptions (“she had chosen . . .”; “she wasn’t naïve . . .”) can be conceived by readers either as the narrator’s interpretation of her mother’s thought or as free indirect discourse. For readers who process it in the latter way, the experience generates the dual text-­world structure identified by Stockwell (“Re-­cognizing”), representing concurrently the discourse perspectives of the narrator-­elegist and her mother as well as additional text-­worlds for syntactic negation and epistemic modality. The following four double-­page spreads feature facsimiles of handwritten diary pages, after which Rachel, Monique . . . includes typed diary entries and photographs prefaced by the phrase “Selected excerpts.” Consequently, readers interpret the diary entries and photographs present in Rachel, Monique . . . as having been extracted from the mother’s collection. Moreover, as an interpretive corollary of the potential free indirect discourse, Rachel, Monique . . . appears, to some extent, to be

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Fig. 3. Double spread from Rachel, Monique . . . . Reproduced with permission from Sophie Calle and Éditions Xavier Barral (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2012) © Sophie Calle/Atelier exb.

a joint endeavor—­an aesthetic project intersubjectively envisaged at the moment in which the diaries were passed by the mother to the narrator. The semiotic composition of the photograph enhances this interpretation. In the first instance, the image creates for readers a sense of “biographical authenticity” (Nørgaard 190) verifying Monique’s existence. The photo is realized in black and white with a glossy texture; this multimodal presentation re-­registrates an actual photograph. This is the case for all the photographs from this diary section of Rachel, Monique . . . , with the effect enhanced when the accompanying captions, written by Monique, appear to overlay the photo but are not finished with gloss. In Text World Theory terms, I therefore argue that this discourse deictic photographic re-­registration creates another dual structure: readers generate a text-­world representing the world depicted in the photograph—­of the young Monique—­and a more proximal text-­world in which the image is experienced as a photograph by the narrator-­elegist.11 In the photo, Monique is framed in a close-­up, shown in side profile from her shoulders upward. Her left hand shields her eyes as she looks out to the right, at something beyond the frame of the captured image. The combination of Monique’s body language, the positioning of the photo 98  Gibbons

on the verso page with the diary on the recto page, and the dual text-­ world structure metaphorically revise the vanishing point of Monique’s gaze. In this context, a young Monique seems to look toward a metaphysical future: of her life as represented by the diary entries and after her death, in which the diaries are re-­registrated by Calle in this shared creative project. Multimodal Prosopopoeia Photographs, facsimiles, and handwriting have both memorial and authenticity functions in multimodal elegy. Multimodal re-­registration thus reifies the life of the deceased, elegized subject. In Rachel, Monique  .  .  .  , readers must necessarily construct text-­worlds from Monique’s handwritten words.12 These text-­worlds represent the situations described in the diary from Monique’s deictic center. The diary pages—­as with the photograph discussed above—­a lso generate a framing text-­world in which the narrator-­elegist has experienced the diary as a material object. This framing text-­world is emphasized by the narrator’s editorial presence.13 In the four facsimile images of the diary pages, several gray boxes are used to censor small portions of the text while an italicized comment under one of the images reads, “Since my mother is not here to decide what can or cannot be published, I chose to remove the names of certain people when the opinions expressed about them were hurtful, or when their name didn’t convey any necessary information” (original emphasis). In essence, the re-­registration of Monique’s diaries is a form of multimodal prosopopoeia, or as Masschelein writes, “In making Monique write, Calle writes and speaks Monique like a ventriloquist” (128). The first image of the open diary is positioned to align with the cover from the previous page, which, as Wilson claims, “creates the fleeting illusion that to turn the pages of the photo book is to turn the pages of the diary” (75). Consequently, in the context of contemporary elegy, this positions the reader with the narrator-­elegist as though they exist together in a shared space. As such, re-­registration of the diary enhances the experience of the elegiac text as a rhetorical performance. As well as interpreting the narrator as a counterpart of the author, readers project their own counterpart into the proximal text-­ world of the narration: a communicative intimacy is opened up between

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narrator and reader, with the reader seemingly being shown the diary by, and alongside, the narrator-­elegist. Elegiac Time and Multiple Worlds on a Single Page The diary entries are presented in chronological order, as are, for the most part, the photographs. Wilson claims that the photos offer “visible signs of Monique’s ageing,” which are “matched by the signs of technological development that mark the progression of the history of photography” (74), since some of the later photographs are presented in color.14 Although this section could therefore appear to present a “linear trajectory of the passage of time” (Wilson 74) and the journey from life to death, it instead enacts the dialectical, elegiac time identified by Culler. This is because the temporality of the diary entries and photographs do not accord: first, the photographs span Monique’s life—­she is seen as a child and as an older woman—­whereas the excerpted diary entries cover a fifteen-­year period; second, although the captions do not always date the photos, when they do, they do not match the diary entries (for example, on one double-­page spread, a diary entry is dated 1988, while the accompanying photo is dated 1958). Reading the diary entries and the photographs in the order presented in the book, therefore, entails frequent temporal deictic shifts to new text-­worlds, in the process symbolizing the role of the narrator’s memory both in editing Monique’s diaries and albums and in the elegiac act. There are three striking exceptions to the chronology of the photographs that show the narrator-­elegist’s orchestration of narrative temporality. The first appears on a page of four photographs captioned “Mother and daughter” (shown in figure 4). The first black-­and-­white photo depicts a pregnant Monique, while the second and third photographs—­also black and white—­show her holding a young child, presumably Calle. A fourth photo in color shows the mother-­daughter pair again, but with Calle as an adult. This fourth photo confirms that the narrative voice belongs to Calle (by visually depicting her in the book), while its temporal disjunction raises uncertainty over who selected the photo for inclusion here. Although Monique presumably originally curated the first three in her album, the color photo could perhaps be Calle’s own addition. In Text World Theory terms (modeled in figure 5), each of the four photographs is a depiction of an individual, ontologically discrete text-­world 100  Gibbons

Fig. 4. “Mother and daughter” page from Rachel, Monique . . . . Reproduced with permission from Sophie Calle and Éditions Xavier Barral (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2012) © Sophie Calle/Atelier exb.

(cf. Gibbons, “Fictionality”), while the handwritten caption, which appears on a sticky label, creates a framing text-­world in which Monique curated the first three photographs. The presence of the color photograph leads to a sixth text-­world in which, depending on a reader’s interpretation, the photo was added by Monique at a later date or by Calle when creating Rachel, Monique . . . The multimodality of the page thus evokes not only the alternating temporal worlds of literary elegy but multiple distinct text-­worlds—­memories and curatorial acts of poetic remembrance. The second exception to chronology occurs just a few pages later. On the verso page of a double spread appears a black-­and-­white photograph. It is a medium long shot showing Monique in a dark keyhole dress, embellished with embroidery on the left shoulder, dancing with an older man in a suit. A sticky label captions the photo “My Inimitable style!” On the recto page, another photograph appears, in color. It is a close-­up of a much older Monique with a plastic bag tied around her face and more plastic sheeting over her clothes, as though to protect from the rain. This double spread thus also possesses multiplicity in text-­world structure. The temporal interjection of the color photo (the next photo returns to black and white, is dated “1958,” and returns to showing Monique as a young woman) again foregrounds Calle’s authorship of the book: the implication is that Monique’s caption reminded Calle of this more recent photo of her mother. The juxtaposition of the images here creates not only humor (Monique looks anything but stylish in the color image) but also a sense of inferred tenderness precisely because it is more suggestive of Calle’s own recollections of her mother. The Last Moments The third temporally disjunctive photograph is the final glossy photo in the diary section of Rachel, Monique . . . On the preceding page, the last diary entry in the book reads (ellipsis in original): 1996 —­ December 10 Dear Diary (possibly the last volume thereof), good-­bye. I didn’t give you much, and you returned the compliment . . . This final entry from Monique features linguistically explicit discourse deixis with address to the diary itself, which is therefore represented 102  Gibbons

Fig. 5. Text World Theory diagram for “Mother and daughter” page from Rachel, Monique . . . .

alongside Monique and her act of writing in a text-­world imagined by the reader. Overleaf, the final glossy photo appears on the verso page and shows a young to-­middle-­aged Monique being swept into the beach on the sea’s tide. It is in black and white, and Monique—­arms outstretched—­looks happy. The recto page features white embossed text: “Monique wanted to see the sea one last time. On Tuesday, January 31, we went to Cabourg. The last journey.”15 The photograph depicts an earlier scene from Monique’s life rather than the linguistically described final pilgrimage to the seaside. This double spread thus inspires multiple text-­worlds: the depicted scene of the photograph; Calle’s editing of Rachel, Monique . . . ; a modal text-­world—­from the linguistic text—­representing Monique’s wish; and a text-­world pertaining to this January trip. The poignancy of this moment in the book arises from the knowledge that Monique’s death is imminent as well as from the perceived significance of the beach for Monique: readers not only are told that Monique “wanted to see the sea” but are shown, in the photograph, the joy that the beach has held for her in her

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lifetime. This creates what Smythe calls elegiac “mimpathy”: a combination of mimesis and empathy whereby readers “interpret the suffering of a literary character” (23). Here in Rachel, Monique . . . , although Calle does not describe her feelings, readers nevertheless imagine the emotional intensity of the trip to the beach, and what it would have meant for Calle, through trans-­world inferences between the multiple copresent text-­worlds and their mental model of the artist in the discourse-­world. The next two double-­page spreads are filled with matte photographic images of an empty beach. These provide visual detail for the text-­world of the trip. No human figures are shown, but the second double spread shows footprints in the sand, indexical evidence of Calle and her mother’s presence. The diary section ends with four white pages of embossed text followed by three matte photo pages that show images from Calle’s 2010 installation Rachel, Monique. The embossed text details Monique’s last days and wishes, ending (original emphasis), “Her last request: for us not to worry. ‘Ne vous faites pas de souci.’ Souci was her last word. She didn’t want to die. She said this was the first time in her life she didn’t mind waiting. She shed her last tears. On March 15, 2006, at 3 p.m., the last smile. The last breath, somewhere between 3:02 and 3:13. Impossible to capture.” The succeeding images show the same exhibition view, featuring a video screen, but each image captures a different still of the video. In the first, an aged Monique lies in bed, eyes closed, with flowers in the foreground; the second is identical except for the intrusion of a woman’s arm, the hand pressed toward Monique’s neck as though checking her pulse; in the third, the hand has moved in front of Monique’s mouth to feel if she is still breathing. The unidentifiable figure is, in fact, Sophie Calle (Wilson 72–­73). Consequently, these final three images in the diary section of Rachel, Monique . . . return readers to the opening of the book (specifically t-w4, shown in figure 2) when Calle set up her camera beside her mother’s deathbed. Calle filmed her mother’s dying moments; she got her wish, or as Wilson writes, “Sophie was in the end present when her mother died” (73). Conclusion The fictionality of contemporary literary elegy is complex and should be seen as scalar in a manner akin to autofiction. Nevertheless, there are consistent stylistic features of elegy: those identified by Smythe for fiction-­ elegy (or pro-­fiction, anti-­self forms) also apply to autobiographical elegy 104  Gibbons

(or anti-­fiction, pro-­self forms), as my analysis of Rachel, Monique . . . demonstrates. A defining feature of literary elegy is prosopopoeia, which, I have shown, can occur both in traditional linguistic mode and through multimodal forms of re-­registration. In this latter sense, Sophie Calle’s Rachel, Monique . . . is not unique: both Anne Carson’s nox and Anders Nilsen’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow also include facsimile images of personal photographs and correspondence (for a more detailed discussion of nox, see Gibbons, “Multimodal Metaphors” 182–­86). The multimodal design of many works of contemporary elegy functions to provide documentary evidence that asserts the reality of the author-­narrator-­ elegist’s loss and their strategies of mourning. In doing so, multimodality can enhance the poignant and mimpathic reading experience of elegy. Prosopopoeia, I have argued, is cognized by readers in a manner akin to free indirect discourse. Peter Stockwell argues that a cognitive approach must “preserve a sense of the ontological layers between reader/author, narrator, and different instances of characters, whilst also recognizing the effects that arise when one mind is accessed via another” (“Re-­cognizing” 23). My account of prosopopoeia as possessing a doubly deictic mind-­ cast structure does exactly this and so reveals the cognitive dynamics that enable readers to understand prosopopoeia’s significance for both subjectivities in the mind-­cast—­in the case of elegy, the narrator-­elegist and their deceased loved one. While my discussion of prosopopoeia has explored its use in elegy, the same cognitive mechanics will necessarily be at work across the range of its uses. For instance, in his autofictional novel 10:04, Ben Lerner makes frequent use of prosopopoeia, with his author-­character revoicing the words of Walt Whitman and Ronald Reagan, among others. Dual text-­world structures enable readers to track the meaningful potential of the double-­voiced words in both their original and new contexts. The rhetorical act of elegy is frequently foregrounded through think-­ acts, prosopopoeia, multimodal re-­registration, and manipulations of narrative time that fluctuate between the narrator-­elegist’s present experiences, their memories, and the life of the deceased. These features repeatedly foreground the narrator-­elegist. In her study of fiction-­elegy, Smythe argues that the reader “creates a mental model of mourning, thereby transforming the text into a parallel plausible text through an effort of mimpathic engagement” (154). Smythe, however, cannot track this

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mental model precisely because she does not take a cognitive approach. Using the cognitive framework of Text World Theory, my analysis can and does explicitly model the imaginative constructions of readers. In the case of autobiographical elegy, this means that readers imagine the narrator-­elegist as the author with whom, through the narrative act of communicating loss, readers feel aligned. Ultimately, then, in contemporary multimodal autobiographical elegy, just as the deceased loved one is a felt absence, the grieving author is an overwhelmingly felt presence. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Sophie Calle and Éditions Xavier Barral for permission to reproduce page spreads from Rachel, Monique . . . (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2012) © Sophie Calle/Atelier exb. Thanks also to my coeditor, Elizabeth King, as well as to Marcello Giovanelli and Peter Stockwell for their perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Notes 1. Fiction-­elegy in these terms consequently incorporates elements of another hybrid genre, fictional autobiography (Smythe 5), understood here as a work of fiction that is written as though it were the autobiography of a fictional character. 2. Given its focus on the loss of the author’s father, the first volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle (A Death in the Family) could be seen as both autofiction and literary elegy. The fact that critical discussions focus on the former rather than the latter, however, demonstrates the relative neglect in contemporary criticism of elegy as a form. Additionally, the dual genre of A Death in the Family shows the value of Iversen’s matrix model, which enables a sense of a text’s degrees of fictionality and selfhood presentation at a superordinate level above genre. 3. Iversen provided the examples of Borges, Knausgaard, and Beck-­Nielsen, so I have added Lerner to illustrate the first category. 4. In Figuring Grief, Smythe discusses Virginia Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room, James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mavis Gallant’s Linnet Muir stories, and Alice Munro’s The Moons of Jupiter. 5. Text World Theory has a number of unique typographical conventions: references to the framework itself are represented in title case (e.g., Text World Theory), while the various world types are hyphenated (e.g., text-­world). 106  Gibbons

6. While the details may differ somewhat, the prominent deictic planes of elegy are similar to those I identified previously for autofiction (Gibbons, “Autonarration” 84; cf. Giovanelli). I explicitly highlighted perceptual deixis and the two modes of discourse deixis but did not include temporal deixis, since in this regard a consistent pattern was not observable across autofictional texts. Nevertheless, reconfigurations of or digressions from linear temporality are often also seen as a key technique of autofiction (Dyx 2; Ferreira-­Meyers 25–­26). As such, the style of contemporary literary elegy—­irrespective of fictionality—­appears to share compositional characteristics with autofiction. 7. As I have argued elsewhere (Multimodality, “Reading S.,” “Interpreting Fictionality”), multimodal presentations often emphasize embedded narrative layers. 8. There are no page numbers in Rachel, Monique . . . . 9. As a book stamp in Rachel, Monique . . . suggests, Calle’s mother generally went by the name Monique Sindler, although she purportedly changed her forename from “Rachel” during World War II (Allen). 10. Masschelein incorrectly interprets this photo as showing Sophie Calle (rather than Monique Sindler). 11. For further discussions of the complex ontologies and multilayered text-­ world structure of photographs in multimodal literature, see Gibbons (“Interpreting Fictionality”; “Fictionality and Multimodal Anthropocene Narratives”). 12. The facsimiles of the diary pages show the original French. The same is true of the captions to photographs. In the English edition of the book, translations are often (though not always) provided. 13. Interestingly, Calle apparently did not select the diary extracts herself but asked one of Monique’s close friends to do so (Wilson 77). However, there is no evidence of this in Rachel, Monique . . . and thus, unless they have extratextual knowledge, readers are unlikely to be aware of this. 14. Nørgaard has also noted that black-­and-­white photography can signify “remoteness in time” (172). 15. The embossed text in fact appears in the original French with this English translation printed at the bottom of the page.

Bibliography Allen, Emma. “Memento Mori.” New Yorker, 16 June 2014, https://​www​ .newyorker​.com/​magazine/​2014/​06/​23/​memento​-mori​-4. Calle, Sophie. Rachel, Monique . . . Paris: Éditions Xavier Barral, 2012. Carson, Anne. nox. New York: New Directions, 2010.

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Culler, Jonathan. “Apostrophe.” Diacritics, vol. 7, no. 4, 1977, pp. 59–­69. Duchan, J. F., et al., editors. Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Stance Perspective. Hillsdale nj: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. Dyx, Hywel. “Introduction: Autofiction in English: The Story So Far.” Autofiction in English, edited by Hywel Dyx. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 1–­23. Enenkel, Karl. “Early Modern Times.” Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction. Vol. 2, History of Autobiography/Autofiction, edited by Martina Wagner-­ Egelhaaf. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019, pp. 724–­31. Engelberg, Edward. Elegiac Fictions: The Motif of the Unlived Life. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989. Ferreira-­Meyers, Karen. “Historical Overview of a New Literary Genre: Autofiction.” Autofiction 1.1, 2013, pp. 15–­35. Ganteau, Jean-­Michel. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. London: Routledge, 2015. Gavins, Joanna. Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Gibbons, Alison. “Autonarration, I, and Odd Address in Ben Lerner’s Autofictional Novel 10:04.” Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives in Language. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 75–­96. ———. “A Cognitive Model of Reading Autofiction.” English Studies, vol. 103, no. 3, 2022, pp. 471–­93. ———. “The ‘Dissolving Margins’ of Elena Ferrante and the Neapolitan Novels: A Cognitive Approach to Fictionality, Authorial Intentionality, and Autofictional Reading Strategies.” Narrative Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 2, 2019, pp. 389–­415. ———. “Fictionality and Multimodal Anthropocene Narratives.” Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives, edited by Torsa Ghosal and Alison Gibbons. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2023, pp. 81–­110. ———. “Interpreting Fictionality and Ontological Blurrings in and between Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting and There’s No Place like Time.” Style, vol. 55, no. 2, 2021, pp. 406–­29. ———. Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. London: Routledge, 2012. ———. “Multimodal Metaphor in Contemporary Experimental Literature.” Metaphor and the Social World, vol. 3, no. 2, 2013, pp. 180–­98. ———. “Reading S. across Media: Transmedia Storyworlds, Multimodal Fiction, and Real Readers.” Narrative, vol. 25, no. 3, 2017, pp. 321–­41. 108  Gibbons

———. “Using Life and Abusing Life in the Trial of Ahmed Naji: Text World Theory, Adab, and the Ethics of Reading.” Journal of Language and Discrimination, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019, pp. 4–­31. Giovanelli, Marcello. “Siegfried Sassoon, Autofiction and Style: Retelling the Experience of War.” Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches, edited by Marina Lambrou. London: Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 113–­27. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. Iversen, Stefan. “Transgressive Narration: The Case of Autofiction.” Narrative Factuality: A Handbook, edited by Monika Fludernik and Marie-­Laure Ryan. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020, pp. 555–­63. Kennedy, David. Elegy. London: Routledge, 2007. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography, translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. ­Macrae, Andrea. Discourse Deixis in Metafiction: The Language of Metanarration, Metalepsis, and Disnarration. London: Routledge, 2019. Masschelein, Anneleen. “Capturing the Last Moments: Recording the Dying Body at the Turn of the 21st Century.” Image & Narrative, vol. 14, no. 3, 2013, pp. 122–­40. Möller, Melanie. “Antiquity.” Translated by Emily Baragwanath et al. Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction. Vol. 2, History of Autobiography/Autofiction, edited by Martina Wagner-­Egelhaaf. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019, pp. 691–­709. Nilsen, Anders. Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2012. Nørgaard, Nina. Multimodal Stylistics of the Novel: More Than Words. London: Routledge, 2019. Schenck, Celeste Marguerite. Mourning and Panegyric: The Poetics of Pastoral Ceremony. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1988. Scollen, Christine M. The Birth of Elegy in France, 1500–­1550. 1967. U of London, Bedford College, UK, PhD dissertation. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 10097294. Smythe, Karen E. Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy. Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s UP, 1992. Stockwell, Peter. “Authenticity and Creativity in Reading Lamentation.” Creativity in Language and Literature: The State of the Art, edited by Joan Swann et al. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 203–­16. ———. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2020.

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———. “Re-­cognizing Free Indirect Discourse.” New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style, edited by Marcello Giovanelli et al. London: Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 17–­34. ———. Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. ———. “The Texture of Authorial Invention.” World-­Building: Discourse in the Mind, edited by Joanna Gavins and Ernestine Lahey. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 147–­63. Sutur, Ann. “Introduction.” Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond, edited by Ann Sutur. New York: Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 3–­17. Vickery, John B. The Prose Elegy: An Exploration of Modern and British Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009. Werth, Paul. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Harlow: Longman, 1999. West, Martin L. Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974. Wilson, Sonia. “Coming to One’s Senses: Diaries and the Materiality of Mourning in Sophie Calle’s Rachel, Monique.” European Journal of Life Writing, vol. 6, 2017, pp. 62–­86.

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6

The Author as a Work of Art Graphic Memoir, Style, and Authorial Agents Nancy Pedri

Although the convergence of author and narrator roles functions as a signpost of factual narrative, it is generally accepted in autobiography studies (and in narratology) that—­even in autodiegetic narration—­the author, narrator, and subject are explicitly different. That author, narrator, and subject are not identical is particularly evident in graphic memoir, a genre that because of its hand-­drawn quality continuously reminds readers that narrator and subject (and, at times, even author) are never outside the universe of discourse. In graphic memoir, “the split between autographer and subject is etched on every page, and the hand-­crafted nature of the images and the ‘autobifictional’ nature of the narrative are undeniable” (Gardner 12).1 Through its hand-­drawn images and careful visual-­verbal arrangements, graphic memoir inevitably draws attention to itself as self-­evidently representing an autobiographical subject that is distinct from its real-­life counterpart. Graphic memoirs often prompt readers to consider the incongruences between author, narrator, and subject by employing a range of metanarrative strategies that draw attention to the impossibility of establishing coincidence between a self in the real world and its representation. The introduction of an inquisitive storyworld author who questions what it means to write an autobiographical text and to represent oneself within it is a popular strategy adopted by graphic memoirists to address the gap between representation and reality.2 Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, for example, opens with a two-­panel page showing Barry’s avatar—­who very closely resembles the photographic images of the real-­ world author at work on One! Hundred! Demons! reproduced at the end of the graphic memoir—­at her drawing board. Presenting herself as the 111

storyteller of her own story, Barry’s avatar is pictured having just sketched a small mise-­en-­abyme version of the page’s self-­portrait panel. While looking at her rendition of the page that readers are reading, she contemplates the role of truth in both autobiography and fiction: “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? / Is it fiction if parts of it are?” (7). Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner’s graphic memoir about their cancer experience, Our Cancer Year, also explicitly addresses the “indeterminate mixture of truth and fiction” that characterizes autobiographical writing (Renza 1). In it, an ill Harvey looks at a reflection of himself in the mirror while asking his wife, Joyce, “Tell me the truth. Am I some guy who writes about himself in a comic book called American Splendor? . . . or am I just a character in that book?” (1994).3 In this instance, Our Cancer Year’s autobiographical character, Harvey, announces his status as author and troubles the ontological boundaries separating the real world and the storyworlds (of Our Cancer Year and of American Splendor) that he inhabits by questioning if he is the real-­life author who wrote American Splendor or if he is merely a character in Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic book American Splendor. These and similar self-­reflexive instances whereby storyworld authors reflect on “the truthfulness of knowledge about the self . . . as it arises in relation to self-­representation” (Gilmore 144) raise for critical consideration the link between creator and creation that informs graphic memoir. In her examination of performed authenticity in graphic memoir, Elisabeth El Refaie notes how “the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one’s self necessarily involves an intense engagement with embodied aspects of identity, as well as with the sociocultural models underpinning body image” (Autobiographical Comics 4). As graphic memoirists engage in a deliberate performance of authorship, they also refuse to lay claims “to the ‘having-­been-­ there’ truth, even (or especially) on the part of those who really were” (Gardner 131). In several graphic memoirs, self-­conscious storyworld authors critically engage with the act of self-­narration, raising questions of representation and interpretation for explicit consideration. They openly address and question their role as authors and the agency associated with that role, at times exerting or exposing their aesthetic control over the representation of self, at other times challenging or relinquishing it altogether. 112  Pedri

Raising authorial identity and its relation to discourse for careful consideration—­indeed, making it a thematic concern for the autobiographical self—­several graphic memoirs probe the limits of self-­ representation and ultimately dismantle the view that the real-­world autobiographical author generates a narrative that necessarily (or even inevitably) and truthfully corresponds to his or her self. In the scission between autobiography and autobiographical subject arises a storyworld construct of an authorial self that challenges, and ultimately dissolves, the understanding of authorship that was often advanced in early autobiographical criticism—­namely, that authors of autobiography have full authority over their works and that autobiographies should thus be read as providing a truthful and direct account of their real-­world self (see, for instance, Olney 332; Pascal 60). For instance, Linda Haverty Rugg emphasizes, “Autobiography is itself an exertion of control over self-­image, for in writing an account of one’s own life, one authorizes the life, claiming a kind of privilege for one’s own account. . . . Every autobiography is an authorized account” (4). In contrast, because the self-­conscious textual storyworld authors that abound in graphic memoir confront the intellectual, affective, and expressive openness and creativity inherent in the authorial work of interpretation, they relinquish their positions as guarantors of the narrative’s truthfulness, complicating autobiographical authorial identity and the objectivity aligned with it. Truth, Self-­Representation, and Embodiment The impossibility of generating a truthful autobiographical narrative in which real-­world author and storyworld self correspond is a central theme running through Art Spiegelman’s Maus, in which Artie is repeatedly pictured engaging in the act of recording, transcribing, and drawing his father’s oral account of his Holocaust experience. Chapter 1 of the second volume of Maus, titled “Mauschwitz,” opens with a drawn rendition of Artie’s sketchpad, across which several illustrations of Françoise, his wife, have been penciled. A framed panel that overlaps the bottom left corner of the sketchpad shows Artie in his role as storyworld author sitting against a tree, the sketchpad supported by his knees as he draws, telling Françoise—­who is rendered as a mouse—­that he is trying “to figure out how to draw [her]” (Maus ii 11). Artie’s final decision to draw Françoise as a mouse indicates to readers that our storyworld author

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has discarded the other possibilities drawn on his sketchpad—­a moose, frog, bunny, or sheep—­because he has deemed them not quite as accurate at capturing her present identity as a Jewish woman. In the conversation that unfolds between Artie and Françoise in the two rows below the sketchpad, Artie makes it clear that capturing Françoise’s identity is a matter of deciding how he thinks she should be drawn in his graphic memoir. When she responds, “Huh? A mouse, of course!” he answers, “But you’re French!” (Maus ii 11). This exchange strongly suggests that autobiographical truth in graphic memoir is closely linked to questions of embodiment or the visual representation of self that, in turn, are bound up with the author’s creative choices. As Susanna Egan reminds us, with the advent of modernism, “artists in all media began to replace realism with experiments in perception, apprehension, and process [ensuring that] serious questions arise about the manner of representing the autobiographical subject in the text” (Mirror Talk 29). The matter of representing the autobiographical subject is particularly complex in graphic memoir, a multimodal genre that narrates across both a verbal and a visual track (for another discussion of multimodal representation and authorship, see the chapter by Alison Gibbons in this volume), and can thus create a tension between the two narrative tracks, playing out and testing authorial decisions for readers to read and see. Indeed, when presented with a storyworld author who exposes and critically examines their own creative process and, more importantly, reveals the inadequacy of their final creative decisions (all the while engaging in the creative act that is being questioned)—­as is the case in One! Hundred! Demons!, Our Cancer Year, and Maus—­readers are prompted to consider what type of truth, if any, a real-­world author of autobiography can achieve through the act of self-­representation. In a central chapter of Maus, Artie wears a mouse mask and admits to his psychiatrist, “My book? Hah! What book?? Some part of me doesn’t want to draw or think about Auschwitz. I can’t visualize it clearly, and I can’t begin to imagine what it felt like” (46). Here, as in the examples above, the autobiographical author is given a visual presence within the storyworld; this storyworld author engages in the crafting of the graphic memoir readers are reading and confronts the particular demands for truthful representation that this process entails. By reflecting on their own role as creators of an autobiographical text and drawing the issue 114  Pedri

of autobiographical authorship to the forefront, several graphic memoirs firmly position the author within the storyworld and, in doing so, evoke a dissonance between authorship and authority. By figuring authors that are uncertain how to truthfully represent themselves and the other characters that inhabit the autobiographical storyworld, these books bring into focus the inability of an autobiographical author to be in full command of the story and its representation. In graphic memoir, the pictorial embodiment of the authorial self on the page and across the book challenges notions of autobiographical truth and objectivity, but it also challenges the idea of the autobiographical self as being intrinsically linked to an extradiegetic author. Because graphic memoir presents multiple drawn versions of the autobiographical self, readers are incessantly prompted to engage with the depicted physicality of that self. The subject of graphic memoir is thus not simply a character within its own story; rather, it presents as an embodied performance of self that figures throughout the text, exposing the activity of interpretation in which the reader is compelled to join. Several graphic memoirs highlight this embodied performance and prompt readers to become interpretative subjects by presenting the autobiographical self as embodying several quite distinct corporeal configurations. In Brick’s Depresso, narrator-­protagonist Tom, who usually presents as a middle-­aged white male who wears square glasses, also figures in a number of recognizable but nonetheless drastically different configurations of self, including a round, sausage-­shaped entity (19), a sheepish dog (21), a large island (23), and even a version of Charlie Brown (203). Across these different configurations of self, readers gain insight into the protagonist’s changing mental states as he experiences emotions of fear, alienation, worry, confusion, hopelessness, and frustration, among others. Ken Dahl also presents readers with multiple renditions of his autobiographical self that, like those in Brick’s Depresso, inscribe the changing emotional responses to and realities of illness across the body. Dahl’s graphic memoir, Monsters, is about contracting herpes and depicts the autobiographical protagonist morphing into a huge, oozing, blistering sore (54); a man wrapped in a spiny, transparent cloak (64); a dog-­faced man (70); a man with a caved-­in face (99); a serpentine monster (104); a big, round-­headed being (177); and an elfish creature (181) before he ultimately returns to the body readers are familiar with at the end of the book when he discovers that

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he only has a canker sore. Presented with contrasting self-­portraits of the autobiographical self, readers cannot ignore graphic memoir’s concrete crafting of the self across a variety of (at times, incongruent) physical forms. In this way, pictorial embodiment inevitably highlights “the artist’s craft and vision” (Hatfield 124). Yet while this pictorial embodiment draws attention to the act of creation by exposing the artifice of the autobiographical self, it also asks readers to engage with the various renditions of the autobiographical self and determine meaning across them so as to reach a tentative, but nonetheless more nuanced, understanding of that self. When the autobiographical self in graphic memoir is presented in multiple guises designed to convey different aspects of that self, readers are encouraged to unite these aspects in their efforts to reach coherence. Throughout this interpretative process, their attention is drawn to the author’s presence within the comic book. In her study of serialized memoir, Nicole Stamant notes that the proliferation of self-­representation “makes the process of self-­production transparent” and, at the same time, presents “a discursive mode that embraces multiplicity, relationality, and historicity” (4). The multiple and oftentimes incongruous versions of the autobiographical self that are presented in the visual track of graphic memoirs certainly address the ambiguity, fluctuation, and multiplication of self. When, however, a storyworld author actively shapes and discards several pictorial embodiments of self, multiplicity functions to demonstrate the impossibility of reaching reliable self-­k nowledge. In Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me—­Ellen Forney’s graphic memoir about her bipolar disorder—­Ellen, the autobiographical protagonist, figures as the graphic memoir’s artist who carries her sketchbook with her because it offers her a place “where [she] could face [her] emotional demons in a wholly personal way” (92). Several of these emotionally charged and highly self-­reflexive sketches are reproduced throughout Marbles. Whereas some are realistic portraits of Ellen (100, 101), most are highly suggestive, semantically overdetermined renditions of how she perceives her self and her experience with illness. From a genie rising out of her dead body (109) to a bat roosting upside down (196), from a twisted body in a nest (97) to a face with multiple conjoined heads (138), and from a series of squiggly balloon faces (173) to a face and torso from which intersecting tubes jut out in all directions (154), our autobiographical protagonist is at once all and none of these 116  Pedri

renditions. The fact that all the sketchbook pages figuring these different Ellens stand on equal footing—­none are privileged over others—­and yet are all rendered in Marbles’s distinctive style reveals that both Forney (Marbles’s real-­world author) and Ellen (Marbles’s storyworld author), in their roles of author, are unable to be a (or, better, the) source of reliable knowledge. Our storyworld author admits as much when, toward the end of the graphic memoir, she is pictured working at her drafting table, thinking, “I wish I could reach back from this vantage point to my younger self in those first years post-­diagnosis, so I could reassure myself that everything was going to work out” (233). Ellen’s sustained acts of self-­representation within the graphic memoir draw attention to her different and possibly changing perceptions of self and to the mediated and fabricated quality of that very self. They also accentuate the impossibility of either the real or the storyworld author serving as the crucial point of reference for the writing of her self. Ultimately, her overt fashioning of self as author of and within Marbles acts against illusions of autobiographical referentiality. Drawing Style and Authorial Self In an echo of Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short’s mind style, Uri Margolin proposes the notion of “cognitive style” when theorizing how a narrative’s shape and mode of presentation relate aspects of a character’s mind and inner life. Just as Leech and Short propose the concept of mind style to account for how discourse structures communicate the worldview—­the conceptualization and apprehension of a world—­of storyworld authors, narrators, or characters, Margolin examines the fictional presentation of cognition and personality, emphasizing that the real-­world author creates a personalized mode of presentation to impact readers and provide “them with a certain ‘vision’” (276). Considerations of style in the comics medium also tend to emphasize how style serves to communicate authorial perception. As Douglas Wolk observes, “The fact that drawing style is the most immediate aspect of comics means that what you see when you look at a comic book is a particular, personal version of its artist’s vision—­not what the artist’s eye sees, but the way the artist’s mind interprets sight” (125). Whereas some comics critics argue that drawing style serves as an author’s “signature, a sign of the hand of the artist” (Carney 195), others emphasize that it is “the visual result of an

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individual artist’s use of the entire arsenal of graphic devices available, including the tools of the craft” (Harvey 152). For graphic memoir, this means that “the cartoon self-­image, then, seems to offer a unique way for the artist to recognize and externalize his or her subjectivity” (Hatfield 115). Critics who adopt a narratological methodology have linked drawing style to focalization—­“the filtering of a story through a consciousness prior to and/or embedded within its narratorial mediation” (Horstkotte and Pedri 330)—­citing choices in panel shapes, framing, and page layout (Kukkonen 50) or the use of metaphoric images and the articulation of space (Mikkonen 86–­87) as common stylistic techniques used in comics to provide readers with access to the minds of characters. As Pascal Lefèvre notes, “A graphic style creates a fictive world, giving a certain perspective on the diegesis” (16). Although the style of comics allows readers to feel as though they have “establish[ed] at least a vague connection to the person who authored the comics,” it is also associated “with a specific character’s subjective perspective” (Etter 93). That style in graphic memoir at once relates to the subjectivity of real-­world authors and to the subjectivity of characters raises important questions for the understanding of authorship: What shape does the autobiographical author take when style functions as a narrative choice that challenges the reader’s understanding of the authorial self but also draws attention to the author as a discursive instance? When the subject of graphic memoir figures prominently as a storyworld author within the book, where is that unique subjectivity situated, and how is it managed? That “style signifies in comics” (Postema 122) is particularly evident when graphic memoirs present readers with a storyworld author who critically questions how stylistic choices stand in relation to personal configurations of self while engaging in the autobiographical act of self-­ representation. Such works highlight the discursive quality of the narrative representation—­that is, of the autobiographical self or the supposed locus of authorship. Six self-­portraits in various styles as reflected in a handheld mirror are scattered across a comics page toward the middle of Self-­Obsessed, Sina Grace’s graphic memoir about personal growth and self-­discovery. The page (shown in figure 6) opens with a long panel in which our narrator-­protagonist takes up his role as author; staring into the first of the six mirrors, he self-­reflexively wonders, “How best to represent myself. . . . Do I go full-­on Tintin and make it so all can posit 118  Pedri

Fig. 6. Sina Grace, Self-­Obsessed. Philadelphia: Image Comics Inc., 2015. Reproduced with permission from the author.

themselves onto me? Or do I opt for detail?”4 Sina, our storyworld author, is portrayed in several different styles and, noting his authorial role in the construction of his autobiographical self, contemplates how best to represent himself. The combination of Sina’s verbal reflections with the multiple stylistic renditions of the drawn self rendered in different stylistic mirror reflections of self emphasizes that it is through visual style that readers of graphic memoir “see how the cartoonist envisions him or herself; the inward vision takes on an outward form” (Hatfield 114). Grappling with how a particular stylistic rendition of self may impact the way readers perceive that self—­and, by extension, understand storyworld knowledge—­Sina’s open questions betray his anxiety over authorial self-­portraiture and autobiographical writing. However, when examined alongside the storyworld author’s consideration of how to engage readers in self-­reflection through his self-­representation, the stylistic variation among the mirror portraits confirms that the self-­representation (the mirror image) does not so much reflect the self; rather, it constructs it. The storyworld author’s performance of authorial identity across a range of mirror images highlights the autobiographical process as “a more or less deliberate, rhetorical construction of a ‘self’ for public, not private purposes” and reveals the autobiographical self to be “a strategically fabricated performance, one which stages a useful identity, an identity which can be put to work” (Ang 3).5 In his role as storyworld author, Sina resists reaching a conclusion about his self-­representation, opting instead for an ironic ambivalence in which each visual, stylistically distinct possibility and each voice or perspective is equally valid. In doing so, he turns the responsibility of truth and authenticity away from his authorial self to the reader, who is asked to participate in the making of the “real” self that the graphic memoir supposedly reflects. Although Sina highlights that he is at the center of the creation of his graphic memoir, he also recognizes and embraces the transference that occurs between his authorial self and readers. The storyworld author acknowledges the reader as implicated in the discourse, openly confronting the impossibility of having authority over his represented self by activating its dispersion across readers. It is thus strongly suggested that, even in autobiographical writing, authorship cannot be concentrated in a privileged source of meaning. Through the complex interplay of words and images, Self-­Obsessed provocatively underscores that “the authorship of autobiography is tacitly plural” (Gunn 143). 120  Pedri

By randomly arranging six stylistically different self-­portraits as mirror reflections of himself, the storyworld author in Self-­Obsessed also playfully engages in what Michael A. Chaney calls the “dualities of revelation and fictionalization” (23). Although the mirror affords him the opportunity to expose and explore his self, it also draws attention to the textual construction of that self, to its status as a work of art. Sina’s anxiety over authoring the self is thus lightened in the visual track with the presentation of six possible embodiments and performances of self that playfully address the “artificiality of portraiture as a method of packaging individuals in neat containers of personhood” (Brilliant 83). In his attempt to make himself the subject of understanding, Sina sees and draws his face not as it is but rather as he calls it, or could call it, into being. As with the sketchpad drawings in Forney’s Marbles, these six specular images of Sina’s autobiographical self stand on equal footing alongside one another despite presenting what appear to be different subjects portrayed through significantly differing styles. The unwillingness on the part of the storyworld author to choose a definite, final version of self—­despite its potential shortcomings—­points to autobiographical discourse as simultaneously asserting and masking authorial voice and expression. By drawing his authorial self into the story and engaging with different styles while self-­reflexively exploring various possible renditions of self through a series of mirror reflections, our real-­world author acknowledges his authorial self as at once preceding and exceeding discourse. Ultimately, he exposes it as an encoded subject position emerging from but also multiplied through the process of self-­representation. Whereas a single mirror self-­portrait may address the autobiographical foundational concern for truthful self-­representation, their multiplication across the page grants the opportunity for depicting alternative, multiple versions of authorial presence that resist a single, final meaning. In Self-­Obsessed, the storyworld author self-­reflexively engages with mirror images of self to underscore the impossibility of reaching a cohesive reflection of self that he imagines as real. Elisabeth El Refaie specifies that representations of the mirror in graphic memoir “can form a potent visual metaphor for the ambiguity involved in seeing something that both is and is not ‘me,’ as well as for our inability to pin down our fluctuating sense of self” (“Looking on the Dark and Bright Side” 165). Graphic memoir can put in place many strategies to communicate the

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multiplicity and fluidity that characterizes identity. Among them, the representation of a storyworld author that reflects on a series of discordant, stylistically distinct self-­portraits or embodiments prominently “reveals autobiographical authority as mask or prosopon” (Chaney 53). Autobiographical authorship and authority are further put under pressure on the following page with a head-­and-­shoulder portrait of Sina staring out at readers, half of his face drawn in the ligne claire cartoon style of The Adventures of Tintin and the other half in a realistic style. The narrative caption placed above this full-­page portrait explains, “So long as the reader doesn’t see me the way I do, any version will do!” Addressing “the relationship between identity and representation through a focus on embodiment” is a quality that marks several graphic memoirs (Køhlert 12), and Sina brazenly admits to his lack of concern not only with the real-­world self behind the writing but also with that self’s unique individuality or subjective experience of self (with what autobiographical critics theorize as authenticity). Counterintuitively, in the very process of authoring his self-­representation, he gives up his stance on who he feels himself to be or on how he wants his self to be known or seen by readers. In his role as the storyworld author, who orchestrates both the representation and the treatment of his autobiographical self, Sina openly withholds his knowledge of self from readers and thus relinquishes authority over his self-­representation. As an autobiographical author within his graphic memoir, Sina critically ponders the figure of the autobiographical author, which is reflected in the autobiographical self, as a subject that is produced entirely through discourse. His verbal and visual reflections on autobiographical authorship reach the conclusion that because discourse necessarily implicates readers—­because it exists for readers to consume—­it has no authoritative (and thus significant) connection to its creator. Ultimately, by surrendering authorship over his own representation, Sina undermines his identity as the author of his autobiography. He gives up his word, so to speak, and in so doing, he also surrenders his authority over the representation of his self. The Impossibility of Self-­Representation Relinquishing authority over the representation of self—­as we have seen performed by storyworld authors, such as Sina, who actively engage in self-­representation and consider its implications—­comes with grave risks 122  Pedri

to the autobiographical subject. When authors in autobiography undermine their special status as the speaking “I” of their own self, not only is the artificiality of the autobiographical self foregrounded, but so too is its precarious existence. If “authors are by nature—­that is, ancient tradition—­not only originary, but sincere, that is, authentic” (Randall 28) and if “the autobiographer ‘invents’ and narrates the self—­perhaps even in some deeply neurophysiological way” (Egan, Burdens of Proof 15), then a storyworld autobiographer who forgoes his responsibility to stand behind the telling of his self is ultimately unable or, at the very least, unwilling to produce his self. Georgia Webber’s graphic memoir Dumb: Living without a Voice visually thematizes the impossibility of self-­representation and the consequent disappearance of the subject when the autobiographer loses her voice and is thus unable to pronounce her self into being. Dumb relates Georgia’s everyday struggles following a vocal injury that left her without a voice for several months. Although Georgia is often pictured writing her thoughts on scraps of paper in order to facilitate communication with others, in a chapter entitled “Paperwork,” she presents as the author of the graphic memoir we are reading. The chapter title page shows Georgia at her desk, across which a comics page and various stacks of blank paper are scattered. Sitting at her desk, she concentrates on drawing what appear to be faces on a blank sheet of paper (77). The depiction of the storyworld author at her desk engrossed in the act of creation is put into focus in the following three pages as well. The first of the three full-­bleed images opens with a central question—­“What does it feel like?”—­scribbled in gray lettering in the top left-­hand corner of the page (78). This is positioned close to Georgia, who sits at her desk, in turn drawing an image of herself seated at the desk sketching. She is surrounded by multiple sketches of her face rendered in different shades of gray and with her neck accentuated through the use of red lines, red stars, and other red markers of pain. Presented at various stages of completion, these sketches suggest that our storyworld author is struggling to answer her own crucial question: “What does it feel like?” Indeed, whereas one image has been abandoned at a very early stage, another is crossed out with a gray X. Her frustration with being unable to give shape to her feeling is visualized on the following page: the storyworld author sits at her desk, one set of arms fully rendered and another sketched out over them to communicate

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several repeated attempts at drawing. Again, possible renditions of her face surround her, one of which is merely a series of red blotches and strokes. The final of the three full-­bleed images is of Georgia with a smile on her face as she leaves her desk, which is covered with discarded comics pages that resemble the ones readers have just read. Although she is engaged in the act of creation, she accentuates her position, forced on her by illness, as a nonspeaking (and, oftentimes, not-­k nowing) author. The inability to speak has grave implications for the act of authoring the self into being. When Georgia’s role as the author of her graphic memoir is once again thematically addressed, she figures in a long panel at the top of a visually chaotic page, where partial images, writing utensils, blacked-­out text and images, red lines and marks, and tailless speech balloons vie for attention. Her loss of voice manifests visually as a loss of “aesthetic control” (Phelan 104); the storyworld author cannot achieve the desired expressive or affective narrative result. In the panel, Georgia is pictured lying down on her side, her hands tucked firmly underneath a pillow, over which narrative text reads, “Nothing. Oh it’s so simple?! Don’t feel it. Feel nothing. Like that” (144). Above the long panel of Georgia, the text reads, “Trust? Trust . . .” (144). Below it, an extensive storyboard extends across the middle of the page featuring small panels at various stages of completion. A large number of the panels have been colored over in dark black, literally scratched out, presumably with one of the three drawing pens pictured in the bottom part of the page. As suggested by the partially rendered fingerprints stamped in black ink on the page, the storyworld author is responsible for blacking out what she drew, supposedly using the same tools she used to draw the page in the first place. Here, the act of marking over what is drawn communicates not so much a sense of immediacy, as Andrew J. Kunka claims in relation to Jeffrey Brown’s use of a similar blacking-­out technique in his graphic memoirs (100). Instead, because the storyworld author features prominently within the graphic memoir, the blacked-­out images and words communicate a sense of authorial inadequacy and frustration that comes with not being able to reach a suitable representation of self. In this fashion, Dumb addresses how in self-­portraiture, “emotional interpretation often exceeds and even sabotages literal description” (Hatfield 116) but also how voice—­that is, agency and authority—­is absolutely essential for self-­representation. 124  Pedri

The text in speech balloons that accompanies the visuals narrates Georgia’s discussion with her friend about what losing her voice feels like, but it also simultaneously addresses the frustration of our storyworld author, who is not able to reach a satisfactory self-­representation: “I just want an idea, a range, even” (144). The implication that she cannot speak her self in the graphic memoir she is creating is accentuated visually, not only on this page with its use of dark black scribbles, but throughout the book when similar black scribbles cover her face in her self-­portraits (84, 127, 136), completely black out the panel image (92, 104, 139), or block out part of her verbal narrative captions (142). Losing her voice triggers a literal obliteration of authorial visibility but also of authorial self in scenes where Georgia’s face or body is physically scratched over. In a wordless panel toward the end of Dumb, Georgia is figured in a long middle panel hunched over a blank page, trying to draw; a thought balloon over her head presents a series of page layouts that have not been rendered on the page positioned in front of her (158). The panel also presents no fewer than five partial images of Georgia engaged in other activities, such as reading, eating, and working at her computer. Parts of this panel and the two panels above it—­which also show Georgia as a storyworld author working on Dumb—­are blacked out with thick scribbles in a manner that risks effacing Georgia altogether. Erasure of Georgia’s self is further addressed in the page’s final row, where she is pictured in the bottom of a panel, hunched over her folded arms against a black background, her body marked over with tight crosshatching. A much more dramatic erasure of the autobiographical subject by the storyworld author is presented two pages later. Once again, Georgia’s difficulty with visually representing her self is addressed; while drawing, Georgia thinks, “I remember a time in my life when drawing was relaxing / what the fuck—­how. . . . / shit, I need this to be easy to do over and over” (160). The visuals that show Georgia drawing are scattered across the page (shown in figure 7), interspersed with sketches of noses and eyes but also hands that hold pencils and are engaged in the act of drawing. Thick black lines obscure two sections of the page. Readers understand that the storyworld author is responsible for blacking out her self-­representations when they realize that the thick lines concealing part of Georgia’s face trail off into lines being drawn by one of her disembodied drawing hands. These instances of Georgia drawing and blacking out her self-­portraits

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Fig. 7. Georgia Webber, Dumb: Living without a Voice. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2018. Page 160. Reproduced with permission from the author.

do not simply communicate her feelings of authorial inadequacy. They also strongly suggest that having lost her voice, Georgia is unable to uphold, much less shape and articulate, her own sense of identity. Her authorial acts of self-­erasure, which manifest a loss of aesthetic control, thus accentuate the extent to which voice impacts one’s sense of self and one’s ability to represent that self: “What am I without it? I’m the same, I think?” Georgia reflects (143). 126  Pedri

Conclusion Paul John Eakin points out that we are, every one of us, constantly making ourselves by constructing stories that present our current understanding of who we are (How Our Lives Become Stories 99–­141). In his view, “narrative is not merely an appropriate form for the expression of identity; it is an identity content” (100).6 Questions of self-­representation and expression thus tightly intertwine with questions of how the self understands itself through the act of narration. In graphic memoir, storyworld authors who render conspicuous the narrativization of self announce their authorial role in the building of their own self and, in doing so, signal the workings of their subjective minds and creative efforts in the knowing, telling, and showing of that storyworld authorial self. The conflation of authorial self-­presentation and authorial self-­reflection in graphic memoirs thus works toward confirming that the textual storyworld author, rather than real or empirical author, is the initial point of reference for understanding the autobiographical subject. In graphic memoir, experimentation with self-­fabrication and its central role in communicating subjectivity necessarily become caught up in questions of style. In this rapidly growing comics genre, style encourages a particularly dynamic understanding of the constructed nature of the author that explicitly raises questions about the nature of self-­ knowledge and self-­representation that are so central to autobiography. Style thus functions as a set of instructions to readers about the workings of the minds of storyworld authors and not those of real authors as so many theorists have proposed. That said, performances of autobiographical authorship in graphic memoir also inevitably interrogate constructions of real authorial identity and authority; they complicate theorizations of authorial intervention and narrative address, as well as objectivity and reference. The mise-­en-­scène of authorial selves within the autobiographical storyworld accentuates that authors, like characters, are produced in and created by acts of self-­representation. In this sense, critical, engaged, hands-­on acts of self-­representation, such as the ones discussed throughout this chapter, establish not only the autobiographical self but also the authorial self as products of imagination that are carefully shaped through artistic manipulation. Ultimately, representations of storyworld authors who relinquish control over self-­representation

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work toward repositioning autobiographical authors in relation to knowledge and creativity. In these graphic memoirs, even the author cannot access or fully know the self that he or she pens into existence. Simply put, these authors within the storyworld and outside of it acknowledge and, at times, embrace their status as works of art. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King, for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Notes 1. Several comics scholars address graphic memoir’s self-­reflexive emphasis on the highly subjective nature of life writing. See, for instance, Køhlert 59. 2. In this chapter, the term storyworld author refers to the author represented in the graphic memoir’s storyworld. 3. Our Cancer Year does not have page numbers. 4. Self-­Obsessed does not have page numbers. 5. Critics who have examined the creation of the autobiographical subject through the very act of representation include Bruss; Eakin, Touching the World; Smith; and Smith and Watson. 6. For a similar argument, see Bruner.

Bibliography Ang, Ien. “To Be or Not to Be Chinese: Diaspora, Culture, and Postmodern Ethnicity.” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, vol. 21, no. 1, 1993, pp. 1–­17. Barry, Lynda. One! Hundred! Demons! Seattle wa: Sasquatch Books, 2002. Brick. Depresso; Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Being Bonkers! London: Knockabout, 2010. Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. 1991. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. Bruner, Jerome. “Self-­Making and World-­Making.” Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self, and Culture, edited by Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001, pp. 25–­37. Bruss, Elizabeth. Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre. Baltimore md: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Carney, Sean. “The Ear of the Eye, or, Do Drawings Make Sounds?” English Language Notes, vol. 46, no. 2, 2008, pp. 193–­209. 128  Pedri

Chaney, Michael A. Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. Dahl, Ken. Monsters. New York: Secret Acres, 2009. Eakin, John Paul. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca ny: Cornell UP, 1999. ———. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton nj: Princeton UP, 1992. Egan, Susanna. Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2011. ———. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999. El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. ———. “Looking on the Dark and Bright Side: Creative Metaphors of Depression in Two Graphic Memoirs.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 2014, pp. 149–­74. Etter, Lukas. “Visible Hand? Subjectivity and Its Stylistic Markers in Graphic Narratives.” Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives, edited by Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-­Noël Thon. New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 92–­110. Forney, Ellen. Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me. New York: Gotham Books, 2012. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-­First-­Century Storytelling. Palo Alto ca: Stanford UP, 2012. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca ny: Cornell UP, 2001. Grace, Sina. Self-­Obsessed. Portland: Image Comics Inc., 2015. Gunn, Janet Varner. Autobiography: Towards a Poetics of Experience. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982. Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005. Horstkotte, Silke, and Nancy Pedri. “Focalization in Graphic Narrative.” Narrative, vol. 13, no. 3, 2011, pp. 330–­57. Køhlert, Frederik Byrn. Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics. New Brunswick nj: Rutgers, 2019. Kukkonen, Karin. Contemporary Comics Storytelling: Frontiers of Narrative. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2013.

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Kunka, Andrew J. Autobiographical Comics. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Lefèvre, Pascal. “Some Medium-­Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences.” SubStance, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 14–­33. Margolin, Uri. “Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary Narrative.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, edited by David Herman. Stanford ca: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003, pp. 271–­94. Mikkonen, Kai. The Narratology of Comic Art. New York: Routledge, 2017. Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton nj: Princeton UP, 1972. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge ma: Harvard UP, 1960. Pekar, Harvey, and Joyce Brabner. Our Cancer Year. Philadelphia: Running Press, 1994. Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca ny: Cornell UP, 2005. Postema, Barbara. Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments. Rochester ny: rit Press, 2013. Randall, Marilyn. Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Renza, Louis J. “The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography.” New Literary History, vol. 9, no. 1, 1977, pp. 1–­26. Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago il: U of Chicago P, 1997. Smith, Sidonie. “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 1995, pp. 17–­33. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale; My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986. ———. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale; And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Stamant, Nicole. Serial Memoir: Archiving American Lives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Webber, Georgia. Dumb: Living without a Voice. Seattle wa: Fantagraphics Books, 2018. Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics and What They Mean. Boston ma: De Capo P, 2007.

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7

Radical Realism and Fictionality Modes in Contemporary Auto/Biographical Literature Fiona Doloughan

Against the backdrop of an apparent loss of faith in works of fiction perceived as consisting of invented characters and focused on story and plot, many contemporary writers have turned their backs on the conventionalized novel form and have sought alternative forms and pathways that they feel do justice to their authorial desire to break through the veil of fiction into the world of reality, or at the very least to complicate the relationship between represented and “real” worlds. While the history of the evolution of the novel form can be seen as negotiating precisely these questions of the relationship between “reality” and its representation, the manner in which some authors today are posing questions—­both within their work and speaking to the motivations and aims behind their projects—­suggests a reconsideration of the affordances of the novel and a kind of crisis of fictionality. Moreover, conceptions of both “reality” and “authorship” are being challenged anew in the wake of a rejection by many writers of what might be termed ludic postmodernism1 as they search for forms better able to present aspects of lived, rather than imagined, experience in ways that appear to their creators more truthful and more authentic than the fabricated realities of “purely” fictional worlds (for a related discussion on the rejection of aspects of postmodernism, see the chapter by Lackey and Cernat in this volume). In reviewing and comparing the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard, focusing on the My Struggle series, and that of Rachel Cusk, with a particular emphasis on her Outline trilogy, I wish to show the extent to which Knausgaard and Cusk can be seen to represent more general tendencies evident among writers of contemporary literature, albeit in slightly different ways. These tendencies include a distrust of fabrication and invention 131

and a desire to see literature engage more meaningfully with aspects of “reality” as experienced by the writers themselves and/or their authorial personas. It is in this sense that there is a reality hunger (see Shields) expressed differentially by writers according to their aims and ambitions. What they have in common, however, is a move away from conventional fictional and novelistic protocols and an engagement with the “stuff” of reality, as it shapes perception and surfaces modes of consciousness. It is bound up in, but not necessarily continuous with, narratives of self and a focus on autobiography. Where there is a focus on self and selfhood, it is in a kind of ethnographic mode whereby the “real” author treats him-­ or herself as an object of study and/or as an exemplar whose behaviors and psychology may reflect or refract more general tendencies. What I am calling “radical realism”2 relates to the ways in which authorial consciousness is directed at the “matter,” both physical and psychological/emotional, subtending perceptions of self and the position of self in the world. It relates more to an “attentive inhabiting of a bygone present” than the “resurrection of a forgotten past” (Pierce 2015, part 2), thereby differentiating it from the historical novel, for example. The term realism is in and of itself a complex one with a long history, which I do not intend to rehearse here. What is relevant for present purposes is the fact that many writers today are rejecting the prevalence of “story” in favor of “truth,” whatever that might mean. These writers are searching for new (novelistic) methods that at one level represent a return to a kind of literary realism and at another level (and at the same time) consist of critical and philosophical reflections on the nature of reality and their relationship to it. The kind of works produced by such writers who query fabrication and invention and hunger for a closer depiction and interrogation of what we understand to constitute reality are often autobiographical and/or autofictional.3 Radical realism, then, is a term I am using to characterize a commitment by many writers today (and I take Knausgaard and Cusk to be preeminent exemplars) to reality, to truth, and above all, to the pursuit of meaning. The addition of radical to realism is intended to reflect the degree of attention, or radical attentiveness, such writers give to conveying their perceptions and understanding of the world around them and to point to their investment in a writerly struggle or quest for meaning. Furthermore, consideration of the work of such writers connects to 132  Doloughan

questions of “voice” (in relation to genre) and to the thorny issue of who speaks and in what capacity (as character and/or narrative persona; as authorial narrator or “real-­life” author). As will be seen, Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Cusk’s Outline trilogy—­consisting of Outline, Transit, and Kudos—­come up with slightly different answers to the questions of voice and the exact terms of a commitment to reality. In reviewing the reception of their work and pointing to selected passages, I wish to bring to the fore points of both similarity and difference in Knausgaard and Cusk, as they respond differentially to a perceived crisis in the novel form and employ auto/ biographical techniques to push the novelistic envelope. Ultimately, it is the status of the “I,” the first-­person pronoun, that they are interrogating: one (Knausgaard) encourages in the reader a high degree of attachment4 to the authorial persona; the other (Cusk) maintains a degree of detachment in relation to the type of links to be made between narrator-­ protagonist Faye and (implied) author Cusk. Both writers, however, are equally concerned with drawing on aspects of their lived experiences rather than creating characters with little in common with their own stage in life. In what follows, I argue that whereas in Knausgaard’s My Struggle, the focus is squarely on the thoughts, perceptions, emotions, recollections, and behaviors of authorial narrator Karl Ove, who seeks to produce in writing a seemingly unfiltered, detailed account of his life in a spontaneous, exhaustive and thickly descriptive manner, Cusk’s Outline trilogy is more focused on the “realities” pertaining to systems, laws, structures, and institutions (e.g., marriage, divorce, male-­female interactions) that seem to regulate society and construct gender (and genre) norms that constrain rather than liberate female writers. Thus, the structure of Cusk’s novel—­w ith its first-­person narrator who “transcribes” stretches of dialogue and “reports” what she hears, sees, thinks, and to a certain extent, feels—­creates a measure of distance between narrator Faye and the people she meets in the course of the trilogy. While the stages of Faye’s life course (or part thereof) mirror those of Cusk, it is as if author Cusk is taking a step back from the autobiographical “I” prominent in her series of memoirs and is exploring through Faye (who is not Cusk but shares aspects of Cusk’s biography) the laws and prohibitions of gender and genre that seem to apply to female writers.

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Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Reception and Critical Engagement The six volumes of My Struggle focus on aspects of the authorial narrator’s boyhood, adolescence, and manhood.5 However, while some volumes focus on a particular period or topic—­volume 2 (A Man in Love), for example, focuses on Knausgaard’s life in Stockholm with Linda Bostrom and his children, while volume 5 (Some Rain Must Fall) treats Knausgaard’s years as a student in Bergen—­the narrative cannot be said to be chronological or linear but contains a high degree of recursivity across the series, with a return to topics of central concern. These include Knausgaard’s relationship with his father and the impact of his father’s death on his sense of self and Knausgaard’s struggle to become a writer and to find a form capable of holding together the dynamics of a life, both experienced and refracted in the pages of a book, in a meaningful way. The whole question of meaning—­how meaning is made and what gives meaning to the world and the objects, people, and relationships within it—­is central to Knausgaard’s quest. In this sense, Knausgaard’s absorption with the specifics of his daily life is both constitutive of the text before us and a pretext for thinking through the meaning of a life; he is both subject and object of narrative focus. In volume 6 (The End), Knausgaard revisits his work in light of both public reception and the nature of his commitment to writing. What is of interest in the present context is his differentiation between a commitment to the novel, a commitment he had exercised in previous work prior to beginning My Struggle, and a commitment to reality. Knausgaard sees volumes 1 and 2 of My Struggle (vol. 1, A Death in the Family; vol. 2, A Man in Love) as expressing this commitment to reality, since having “broken down the barrier between my ‘I’ and my author’s ‘I,’ the barrier was down for good” (The End 978). In volume 3 (Boyhood Island), this commitment continues, though with the effect of distance between his childhood and the present. Volume 4 (Dancing in the Dark), he suggests, is different: “I feared I might have started something that had got out of hand” (The End 978). Consequently, he began to alter details and change names—­partly as a result of advice from his publisher following concern over privacy issues and partly because the commitment to reality was taking its toll. As an author, including in the sense of the author as a brand (The End 978; for another discussion of the author as brand/status, 134  Doloughan

see Schmitt’s chapter in this volume), Knausgaard indicates that he feels volume 4 is weaker than the rest because it fulfills a commitment neither to the novel nor to reality, that even the passages that feel authentic because they are raw are “a kind of masquerade” (978). In short, Knausgaard’s project is shown in his own words to have been partially constrained by, or perhaps to have evolved in response to, public reaction, potential legal challenges, and publicity and marketing strategies. Knausgaard’s commitment either to the novel or to reality is worth exploring further in relation to notions of truth. For the novelist too runs risks: to write a novel, Knausgaard suggests, is to permit “wishes, desires, possibilities and impossibilities [to] crystallise in one point, an image, an act, where everything that is immanent, hidden and veiled, reveals itself” (The End 976). The novelist’s truth, then, is one that is enacted within the pages of a novel, “a simple act that never took place” (977), a thought given extension and bodily flesh. Knausgaard is talking about his depiction of a character’s sexual relationship with a thirteen-­year-­ old girl in his earlier novel Out of the World.6 The novel’s pact, he continues, precludes identification between author and, in this case, Henrik Vankel, a twenty-­six-­year-­old schoolteacher, even when the reader attributes to the author the feelings and urges explored. The implication is that in turning to the My Struggle project and to a commitment to reality, at least in the initial phase, Knausgaard’s pact with his reader was to write from life, to nullify the private space (977), and to write about “what had really happened” (977). If we consider the My Struggle series in its entirety, then, it can be seen as an attempt to create a kind of radical realism that conveys something of the “truth” of Knausgaard’s inquiry into his own life and his creation of an interrogative, reflexive narrative self as it unfolds through discourse over time. This narrative self is the product of the writer’s will and discipline as much as it is of contingency and chance; the sheer length of the work, alongside its serial publication, also impacts the kind of work produced and the emergence of a particular type of narrative self, one that both coincides with and departs from Knausgaard the man. Knausgaard the writer is well aware of the impossibility of closing the gap between living and writing about life, even where the pages produced relate closely to events and reflections happening in the present of writing, such as descriptions of what he sees from his office in Stockholm or the imminent

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birth of his first child. He is also aware that in the act of writing, things become other. Indeed, this is what he seeks, a permissive space, a space of freedom in writing. In this multivolume work—­“marketed as fiction, but obviously memoir” (Faber), yet described by the author as a “non-­ fictional novel” (Knausgaard, “Karl Ove Knausgaard”)—­K nausgaard draws on images and connective and associative links. The beginning and end of volume 1, A Death in the Family, are an example of how the authorial narrator creates these associations. The opening section, concerning what happens when the heart stops and death sets in, is linked with a final section outlining his realization that his father, who had occupied such an enormous place in his life, simply is no more. By connecting more abstract ideas about death and dying to the now lifeless body of his father, Knausgaard shows the reality of death and emphasizes the fact that his father no longer holds sway over him. Knausgaard recognizes at the end of volume 1 that death, which he had “always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor” (Death in the Family 490). In other words, the inexorability and gravity of death that, for Knausgaard, have marked life have been replaced by a sense of its contingency and chance. The layered accretions of descriptive detail of everyday life and of its routines in My Struggle sit alongside essayistic asides and philosophical speculations to form its backbone. The work’s length (about 3,500 pages in English translation) meant that Knausgaard was producing further volumes while earlier volumes were being read and responded to by the public. The publishing schedule, therefore, permitted Knausgaard to incorporate reflections on the production and reception of the series into the volumes in progress. In addition, the (somewhat controversial) choice of title, My Struggle, prompted Knausgaard to include an essay on Hitler’s Mein Kampf in volume 6. In this sense, both the nature of the project and the way in which it was delivered to the public—­first in Norway, then elsewhere—­ensured maximum reflexivity and recursivity. Yet Knausgaard’s designation of his work as a novel, albeit a nonfictional one, might be said to paper over the difference between his prior novelistic work and the My Struggle series. Using the maximalist form of his “nonfictional novel” sequence in My Struggle, he pushes the boundaries of the possible and interrogates assumptions about genre—­what 136  Doloughan

it entails and what it precludes. In other words, Knausgaard was aware of having used his fiction to “act out” representations of characters informed by the dynamics of his own family situation, yet he never felt satisfied with the result. Keeping “life” at a distance through fiction in this sense appeared inauthentic and “made up”: “Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows” (Death in the Family 212–­13). While “Karl Ove,” the narrative persona in My Struggle, is not identical to “Karl Ove” the human being, an attempt is made to lessen the gap between them. The question of reality is pertinent to Knausgaard’s earlier novel A Time for Everything, but such a reality is treated through fictionalization.7 For example, an episode in A Time for Everything (Knausgaard 472–­83) in which brothers Klaus and Henrik go out crab fishing with their strict, uncommunicative father can be seen as an earlier sketch of events depicted in the course of My Struggle (e.g., Death in the Family 422; Boyhood Island 408–­9)—­and that Ley refers to as “the genesis of Knausgaard’s autobiographical project.” A concern with the functioning of the body and its biological mechanisms (485–­87) is also integral to both works, as is a concern with pain and death: Henrik in A Time for Everything cuts his chest and face in the same way that Karl Ove slashes his face in volume 2 (Knausgaard, Man in Love 222–­24). In general, thoughts of mortality and eternity suffuse both A Time for Everything and My Struggle. In other words, Knausgaard’s themes and obsessions are visible in an earlier work that is more clearly demarcated as taking place in a fictional universe: Henrik Vankel is not Karl Ove Knausgaard, or so readers might safely assume, while the fact that Karl Ove in My Struggle shares a name with the author might lead readers to instead perceive a greater kinship between author and narrator-­character. The extent to which the autobiographical pact is in place (cf. Lejeune8) and the extent to which Karl Ove is (or is not) simply a narrative persona who shares the author’s name are two legitimate questions to pose here, particularly in light of the fact that autofiction is a form that permits a blending of fact and fiction or can be seen as a kind of fictionalized autobiography. Arnaud Schmitt and Stefan Kjerkegaard talk about Knausgaard’s commitment “not to the novel or to the autobiography, but to reality” (576). While allowing for the fact that My Struggle can be read in different ways,

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they argue that “to read My Struggle as fiction is to strip it of its originality, but to read it as a memoir of some sort is to see, to read a life as it has rarely been presented before” (567–­68). In my view, Knausgaard’s own description of My Struggle as “a non-­fictional novel” is more than just a fashionable hybrid label seeking to evade generic restrictions or legal conundrums. It is an attempt to recognize the inevitable impulse of autobiography, which involves a fashioning of self from the narration of scenes and events remembered subjectively and selectively. One cannot remember accurately things that happened decades ago nor presume neutrality in their relation. It is not just that the older narrator must recall and invariably evaluate or pass comment on the experiences of his younger self; it is also the case that this temporal gap, which may lead to a coloring and reordering of events, is as much a characteristic of fictional narratives as it is of those presumed to refer to a world of actuality. For the reader who interprets the text as either fictional or factual, there may be a different degree of identification with and/or separation from the narrator, with the former producing a sense of vicarious living likely to lead to a reflection on one’s own position in the world. For the author, mining his own experience rather than projecting aspects of it onto a distinct character, this paradoxically increases the fictional stakes insofar as the narrative persona and author come to be closely identified. Given that part of the appeal of Knausgaard’s work has been his uncompromising attitude toward rendering in prose a narrative account of his life, his evolving sense of self, and his sometimes conflicted relations with others, this suggests that readers too are looking for writing that takes risks and calls into question what we think we know. That My Struggle seems “to offer a direct line into the Norwegian’s troubled and attentive mind” (Adams) is an interesting formulation insofar as it calls attention to what appears to be the case and what is, suggesting that it is the immersive detail and the feeling of proximity the reader has to the consciousness of Karl Ove that gives the reader the impression of direct, rather than mediated, access to Karl Ove’s world. Reflecting on his own connection to his series years after it had been written, Knausgaard indicates, “It is more a novel now than when I wrote it. There are things in it I can’t relate to any more” (Adams). Such a sentiment suggests that the passage of time has emptied the work, to an extent, of its close connection 138  Doloughan

to the writer’s reality at the time and created more distance between writer and autobiographically oriented text. Yet at the time of the series’ writing, Knausgaard’s project was to be as honest as possible—­even at the expense of his family—­in conveying his sense of how things were, how they felt to him at particular moments, even though he understands the fact that life as lived and experienced is not the same as life invoked through prose and discourse. His desire to circumvent the strictures of style, while in effect constructing a new, raw, close-­to-­reality style, meant that he, unlike Cusk, was less concerned with structure and a seamless blend of form and content. Rather, his aim was to get as close to raw reality as possible through a massive effort of will, attention, and uncompromising honesty. At the same time, he was aware of needing to create an immersive experience whereby the “truth” value of individual details was less important than the overall “feel” of the world portrayed. It is this contradiction that fellow writer Sheila Heti picks up on in an early review of the Knausgaardian project. At first, she is disappointed to learn from talking to Knausgaard that a passage that she had taken to relate to a specific instance—­his mother peeling potatoes at the sink—­was in fact, according to Knausgaard, invented. However, she later determines that perhaps it doesn’t matter “if the scrubbing of the potatoes was made up” (Heti), since Knausgaard will have known that, in general, his mother washed potatoes in the sink and has managed through the details to create a meaningful and immersive scene. Far from being disappointed, she begins to appreciate the effect produced by Knausgaard’s descriptive detail and the readerly feeling of sharing a space and a reality with him. In Some Rain Must Fall, which relates to Karl Ove’s year in Bergen at the writing academy, there is a description of the “curtainless bedsit” (39) into which he has just moved. The way he describes his activities (bending over his record collection, hanging up his poster of John Lennon, assembling the coffee machine), all the while being distracted by the gazes of passersby who look into the bedsit, creates a sense of dynamic temporality, as if the reader is there with Karl Ove, looking over his shoulder at that exact moment. After he has used a bedsheet and tablecloth to cover the windows, he settles down to listen to music and read a few pages of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger: “Outside, it was beginning to rain. In the short pauses between the lp tracks I heard rain drops pitter-­pattering against the window just behind my head. Now

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and then I heard noises from the floor above as dusk fell and the room slowly darkened. The stairs creaked, loud voices came from above, music was turned on, it was a pre-­loading session” (Some Rain Must Fall 39). Despite the fact that the volume has opened with the authorial narrator admitting that of the fourteen years he lived in Bergen, “no traces of them are left other than as incidents a few people might remember, a flash of recollection here, a flash of recollection there, and of course whatever exists in my own memory of that time” (Some Rain Must Fall 1), the volume feels for readers as if they are right there in the bedsit with Karl Ove listening to the rain, to the voices and music from upstairs, and to the creaking stairs. The detailed and multisensory creation of a moment in the past (both visual and auditory) seems to outweigh the authorial narrator’s deliberate caveat at the beginning of the volume. Of course, the author is, in many ways, always at the center of this universe. As a result, Knausgaard’s work can be divisive: for some (e.g., William Deresiewicz) he is simply a narcissist and his writing rather banal; for others (e.g., Jeffrey Eugenides, Zadie Smith, Ruth Franklin), his close and unremitting examination of a life speaks more broadly to questions relevant to the lives of others, thereby creating an intersubjective space. It is perhaps paradoxical that a work that seems to revolve so fixedly around the reflections, behavior, and obsessions of one man can speak to countless others. Perhaps it is the very generic indeterminacy that serves to create tension in a work that blends autobiography, fiction, and lyrical essay—­what Eugenides (cited in Schillinger) sees as a mix of autofiction and rumination. Knausgaard mines his memories and biography to create a layered and richly textured work, the uneven serial publication of which has framed its differential reception (Schmitt and Kjerkegaard). It may also be the case that Knausgaard’s project of seeming to break through the walls of fiction to create a kind of ethnography of self is in tune with a zeitgeist hungry for reality (Shields). It is clear from the accounts of writers, critics, and readers that My Struggle caused a great deal of excitement. William Pierce’s three-­part account of the Knausgaard phenomenon for the la Review of Books is just one of many examples of this: “In its parts, and in the whole they form, this massive canvas has a meaning beyond its themes of childhood and childrearing, losing a parent and falling in love. With My Struggle, Knausgaard makes a bid—­a huge, quixotic one—­to restore the possibility 140  Doloughan

of awe, which stems less from the length of the book or its focus on his life than in its colossal ambitions for what a novel can achieve” (part 1). Two features of this short extract from Pierce are worthy of comment: the first is the expression “the possibility of awe”; the second relates to Knausgaard’s ambition for the novel. For, unlike Schmitt and Kjerkegaard, Pierce sees My Struggle as a series of novels (that is, works of fiction), notwithstanding the coincidence in name between narrator, protagonist, and author. Knausgaard’s My Struggle is, for Pierce, evidence of the novel’s ability to reinvent itself. Yet while these critics read My Struggle through different generic lenses, they are nevertheless conscious of Knausgaard’s attentiveness or radical attention: Pierce talks about “the feeling of lifelikeness” Knausgaard creates “by making every detail seem not remembered but lived—­not the resurrection of a (forgotten) past but the attentive inhabiting of a (bygone) present” (part 2; emphasis added); Schmitt and Kjerkegaard point to his ability to “reconstruct the past as present based on a level of attention that he most certainly was not able to produce or to hold” (572). For Pierce, it is this very “semblance of completeness” (part 2) that permits adjudication of the work not as an autobiography or memoir but as a novel: “Knausgaard,” he writes, “has constructed a deeply convincing simulacrum of days, which can fool us into thinking he lived those days and in that order” (part 2). The implication is that the work is not a reconstruction of a real life lived but a singularly authentic and deeply engaging account of a life that has been narratively imagined and narratively reconstructed. Pierce also characterizes the contemporary period as “an era of Based on a True Story,” suggesting a cultural preference for a form of narrative engagement that allows the reader to “view” close up the everyday lives of others. What we long for, he continues, is the kind of immersive experience that Knausgaard’s My Struggle seems to offer. Yet “My Struggle,” he continues, “is not a confessional space—­it is performative, a space where memory and imagination give rise to something new” (part 3). Pierce sees the Knausgaardian project as a kind of reinvention of the space of the novel for a generation that can appreciate the epic in the everyday and for whom the skill of the writer resides in his or her ability to “curate,” rather than represent, aspects of reality. In short, what is radical about Knausgaard’s project is the sustained attention he gives to creating not simply a simulacrum of reality but a kind of narrative substructure able

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to support a detailed examination of a life made visible through its literary and philosophical treatment. Cusk’s Novelistic Trilogy: Gender and Genre Cusk’s Outline trilogy—­composed of Outline (2014), Transit (2016), and Kudos (2018)—­conveys episodes in the life of Faye, a divorced writer and teacher of creative writing with two children. Outline focuses on a trip Faye makes to Athens to teach creative writing to a group of Greek students, Transit centers on her purchase of a house and its renovation, and Kudos again speaks to the writing life as Faye attends a literary conference, meets fellow writers, and is interviewed about her work. While the parallels between Faye and Cusk herself in terms of age, profession, and marital status are worth noting, as is the fact that Cusk taught creative writing for the British Council in Athens in 2013, what is important in relation to the manner in which the books are structured and narrated is the fact that the reader learns about Faye through her reporting of conversations with others. While it is a first-­person narrative, there is a distancing effect produced by the reporting structure that deflects to a certain extent the reader’s attention from Faye at the same time the reader is aware of the narrator’s role in the selection and organizational process. The insistent use of reported speech tags (e.g., “he said,” “my neighbour said”) and a focus on “telling” rather than “showing” (recorded and summarized conversations, many of them one-­sided) serve to emphasize communicational processes, realized in speech and writing, and the manner in which they are framed and mediated in relation to power dynamics and conventionalized generic interactions (e.g., conversations between men and women, interviewer and interviewee, teacher and student). Cusk presents a world of discourse rather than of action, a world in which the main character Faye’s thoughts, reflections, speech, and actions are transmitted through her reporting of the speech and stories of others. Yet the strong parallels between this world of discourse and events and interactions in the world of reality are such that a reader aware of author Cusk’s biography, career trajectory, and the reception of her work—­particularly her memoirs preceding the publication of the Outline trilogy—­is likely to read her new novelistic trilogy as the embodiment of a critique of literary norms and the “business” of literature. 142  Doloughan

For example, Cusk charted her divorce in her memoir Aftermath (2012). Given that Cusk’s circumstances are tantalizingly similar to those experienced by her character Faye, it is difficult not to consider what such biographical resonances mean. As Athens-­based writer Sofka Zinovieff, writing for The Spectator, puts it, “It was with curiosity and some trepidation that I began Outline, fearing that her [Cusk’s] version of events in Athens might be unflattering to the people I have lived among and admired for many years.” Yet what Zinovieff finds in Outline is a writer “fully engaged with her subject and her edgily observant, eloquent writing pulls the reader straight in.” It is as if, after having opened aspects of her life to public scrutiny in her nonfiction, Cusk decided to withdraw from a representation of self that brought criticism from the British parenting forum Mumsnet and from some reviewers and to return to novel-­writing and the protections seemingly afforded by fiction. Yet by inventing a form that appears to obliterate the narrator-­protagonist’s self9 while creating a structure that privileges a recounting of the stories of others, Cusk appears less to be making a retreat from the hostile reactions to the biographical revelations of her memoir and more to be engaging in an artful attempt to find a form to suit the demands of both the subject and the need to “overhaul” and interrogate narrative conventions (Smee). In this sense, then, Cusk’s return to the novel form with a strong autofictional edge is a way of reinvesting in the novel, assumed to be fictional, while bringing it closer to her concerns as a female writer at a certain stage of life. What is radical in Cusk’s case is her commitment to the “real” presence of gender and genre circumscribing expectations of the female writer (i.e., her territory is domestic, familiar, confessional) while pointing to the extent to which, in reality, those who live beyond the protections of the law in a patriarchal society expose themselves to sanction and to punishment. At both the level of content and that of form, Cusk projects a world, not unlike that of which Cusk herself has experience, in which the fate of women like Faye is determined by the degree of their adherence to the laws of gender and of genre. While in Outline and Transit, Faye gives little away about herself except via the selection and narrative-­shaping process and a kind of refraction, in Kudos the reader has a clearer sense of her values and who she is. In the restaurant with her translator Felícia and her editor, Paola, Faye listens to

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and records their stories of the calculated cruelty of men. In response to Paola’s question about why she has married again, knowing what she knows, Faye responds, “I hoped to get the better of those laws . . . by living within them” (Kudos 225). Unconvinced, Felícia and Paola indicate that they prefer to live as outlaws. This scene, coming as it does before the final act of calculated cruelty experienced by Faye as she swims while a hulking man urinates into the sea—­all the while meeting her eye—­seems to undermine Faye’s view expressed at the restaurant, with the final volume ending with the sentence “I looked into his cruel, merry eyes, and I waited for him to stop” (Cusk, Kudos 232). This raises the question of whether Faye will ever get the better of those laws. As Scholes, writing about Kudos, puts it, “Widely praised for breaking new fictional ground, it is a blazing experiment in auto-­fiction that seamlessly amalgamates form and substance.” Cusk’s trilogy has not, however, received universal approval. While Kate Clanchy found the first two volumes powerful because Faye listens but says very little, she finds volume 3 disappointing, precisely because “she’s talking back. Talking back at length, too, the way she so rarely did in the other books.” This talking back, in Clanchy’s view, undermines Cusk’s experimental use of an “annihilated perspective”—­as Cusk describes it in an interview (Kellaway)—­in volumes 1 and 2. Clanchy thus reads Kudos as a work that brings back the voice of author Cusk and speaks of “Cusk-­style problems of disclosure.” It is certainly true that Faye’s presence increases across the trilogy. She does indeed have more to say for herself, and those with whom she engages are less of a mirror and more of a foil. It is also the case that throughout the trilogy, there is a concern with the nature and effect of stories and their relationship to truth. When the reader first meets Faye in Outline as she travels to Greece by plane, her interactions with those around her—­mainly men—­appear muted, and her interlocutors give her little opportunity to speak. The monologic nature of these “conversations”—­which usually entail Faye lending her ear to stories of failed marriages and infidelity related by men used to being in control—­is such that she appears subdued, if not powerless. Yet it must be remembered that while it is the author who ultimately selects the material and shapes the narrative, in the case of a first-­person character-­narrator, everything is filtered through the narrator’s perspective. The way in which Faye’s interlocutors’ talk is, for Zinovieff, evidence of the fact that “words 144  Doloughan

have surely been placed in their mouths.” In Transit, we see Faye navigating the world of house-­buying and renovation as a divorced woman with children and tentatively embarking on a new relationship. By the time Kudos is published, Cusk’s alter ego Faye appears more self-­possessed, even as she continues to find herself a receptacle for other people’s stories; her interventions and interactions, however, now assume more of an evaluative quality. As a writer by profession, Faye is of course also a creator of narratives, and so the stories related by others provide, in a sense, raw material that she can shape alongside the descriptions of her environment. Speaking in an interview in 2011, at a time when she was already planning the Outline trilogy, Cusk describes the book as “a kind of fictionalized memoir about writing and talking. It’s about a writer listening to a lot of people talking” (D’hoker 257). Her description is interesting in several respects. First, she connects it to memoir, or the story of a portion of a life, having indicated in the same interview that as a writer, she tries to capture a phase of life that corresponds to the one she is in the process of experiencing. Second, she explicitly qualifies the memoir as having undergone a process of fictionalization, thereby separating her actual existence from the representation of a life in novel form and distancing herself—­as a real author—­from the persona, the fictional character about whom she writes. Cusk continues: “There is only talking, because if there is no shared culture, there is only self-­explanation: people telling who they are and trying to find out who you are from what you tell them: you’re really constructing relationships out of words rather than deeds. So that’s the world that I try to capture: a world of drifting adults, with many stories of success and failure behind them, but who’s to know how real these things are? All you have in the moment is the person who is telling you what has happened to them” (in D’hoker 257; emphasis added). The construction of relationships out of words rather than deeds is of course true of all literature in an absolute sense, but what Cusk appears to be getting at is the fact that without a shared culture—­whether that be a family unit or, more broadly, a social unit—­it becomes difficult to interpret events in light of cultural and behavioral norms. In the same interview, Cusk asserts, “Everyone has a narrative of their life, but writing a book is a completely different thing” (D’hoker 255). She says this in connection with the production of her memoir Aftermath, the

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suggestion being that in order to write, writers require not the ability to immerse themselves in reality but rather a degree of self-­consciousness and an ability to separate themselves from the business of life and living. In a different context, Cusk indicates that “the writer writes books in part to be liberated from herself—­to create an external version of herself from which she can disappear” (“Preface” 873), a remark suggestive of the ability of the author to remove herself from the work by externalizing her vision through the creation of a narrative persona. As Prose, speaking of the role of Cusk’s character Faye, puts it, “It’s not so much that Faye’s a cipher; more accurately, the stories she hears are more like an environment in which she dwells, her novelist’s natural habitat—­the very air she breathes or water in which she swims” (521). In short, then, Cusk’s trilogy is both a reaction against and an extension of her series of memoirs insofar as she has distanced herself from a clear identification between author, narrator, and protagonist and has created a narrative persona with a different name who, nevertheless, shares much of Cusk’s biographical trajectory. The Cost of Writing: Knausgaard and Cusk in Dialogue While there is much to distinguish Cusk’s work from Knausgaard’s, there are nevertheless points of contact between their writerly projects. Both are concerned with finding a form of writing that permits them to move beyond the superficial impression of realism and toward a more radical realism—­a kind of writing that grants access to the world of singular subjects and seemingly to the truth behind the story. Knausgaard has attempted this by putting himself (and ultimately his family) on the line. It is less a narcissistic move than an attempt to break through the veil of fiction to what underpins it. In documenting the everyday, the routine and trivial, and creating a material base from which to perceive and evaluate aspects of experience, narrator Karl Ove attempts to make sense of his existence. The Karl Ove who appears in My Struggle both is and is not the “real” Knausgaard: he is, of necessity, a projection and persona, as the author mines his past and tries to re-­create it, thereby also transforming it. In addition, the serial publication of My Struggle meant that later volumes were produced as the writer, who had been relatively unknown outside of Scandinavia, was in the process of becoming a global literary phenomenon. Such a transformation impacted the 146  Doloughan

design and publication of the work, with later volumes incorporating into their textual fabric an awareness of public reaction to earlier volumes. Knausgaard’s self-­styled nonfictional novel is capacious enough to include both lengthy digressions and drawn-­out descriptions of relatively insignificant events as well as a strong current of critical, metafictional, and evaluative discourse throughout the work. For example, having presented and commented on his wife Linda’s failure to take responsibility for the cabin and allotment that she insists they buy, leaving Karl Ove to eventually clear it out and sell it, Knausgaard writes, “The story of last summer, which I have just told, looks different now, I know, from the way it really was. Why? Because Linda is a human being, and her unique essence is indescribable, her own distinctive presence, her nature and her soul, which were always there beside me, which I saw and felt quite irrespective of whatever else was going on. It didn’t reside in what she did, it didn’t reside in what she said, it resided in what she was” (The End 1153). Coming, as it does, on the final page of his six-­volume enterprise, this summary statement—­drawing attention to the gap that remains between “story” and its presentation and the failure of narrative discourse to encapsulate the “reality” of what was—­would seem to undercut the Knausgaardian project and prepare the ground for his concluding sentence, in which he claims, “I will revel in, truly revel in the thought that I am no longer a writer” (1153). Given that Knausgaard has continued to publish since “signing off” from My Struggle, the ending reads rather like a search for closure following an intense and costly period of writing. The struggle to write “truthfully” about human existence from a singular, subjective perspective is ultimately an enterprise that takes its toll on the writer whose lived experience it shapes, even as a desire to understand the vicissitudes of experience and the nature of the world in which they occur is the driver or motivating force behind the writing. Beginning with fiction, then turning to memoir, before her return to experimenting further with the novel form, Cusk’s trajectory is continuous with her desire to produce work that encapsulates the struggles and successes of the lives of her protagonists and to create in words a portrait consistent with, yet not limited to, a particular time and place. By this, I mean to suggest that across Cusk’s oeuvre, she has been conscious of style and of shaping the work, whether fiction or nonfiction. While the nonfiction work Aftermath garnered much criticism for its

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substance and apparent point-­scoring regarding the representation of Cusk’s soon-­to-­be ex-­husband,10 this seems to me to be a misreading of a carefully crafted story with throughlines and a coda that relate the dissolution of the marriage from a different point of view, that of the Polish au pair hired to help out with the children. In other words, the memoir itself is fashioned in an almost novelistic way, with a focus on metaphor and the transformation of descriptive detail and reflections. Such a degree of writerly control and self-­consciousness suggests a desire on the part of the writer to understand her experience and to generalize from it some lessons in life. It is almost as if the dissolution of a marriage and Cusk’s reaction to it is an object of study, a dramatic situation that can be domesticated and brought under control through writing. Cusk is in many ways a persona in Aftermath, just as Faye in the novelistic trilogy is a projection of much of what interests and concerns Cusk: existential questions, relations of power and gender, reflections on notions of the real and what constitutes the reality of experience. In this sense, Genette’s notion of the “criteria of truthfulness” (763) is as relevant to fictional as to factual narratives insofar as it is precisely a search for the grounds of truth that concerns Cusk. Knausgaard’s focus in My Struggle on Karl Ove’s experience and interior life seems, paradoxically perhaps, to create an intersubjective space in which readers can recognize aspects of themselves in his otherwise singular world, while Cusk’s reporting of the stories of others in her trilogy ultimately serves to highlight themes and issues of deep interest to the author herself and to bring to the fore the gendered nature of societal structures. It is important to see Cusk’s novelistic trilogy as a continuation of and response to her previous memoirs, where writing a (portion of a) life cost her dearly. Under the cover of fiction, she subverts expectations even as she appears to adhere to them, using character-­narrator Faye as both mirror and foil; the structural device of listening to and reporting the stories of others serves to create space for the reconstruction of an obliterated self. In so doing, she quietly and effectively overturns the law of genre, thereby confirming “the centrality of the relationship with the other in narrating the self” (Jones 6). Conclusion Both Knausgaard and Cusk have striven in their writing, through what I am terming radical realism, to interrogate novelistic conventions and 148  Doloughan

to break through the artificiality of fiction to a sense of the real. While they have done this in different ways and using different narrative strategies—­Knausgaard through the pages of his monumental, multivolume My Struggle series and Cusk in her slim and carefully crafted Outline trilogy—­what they share is their commitment to a form of writing in which what matters is the creation of a narrative structure and perspective from which to evaluate the world represented. Where perhaps their work stands in contrast is in the extent to which the notion of an autofictional self is constituted. Whereas in Knausgaard’s case, the authorial narrator seems to be a proxy for the author himself, Cusk’s work moves in the opposite direction—­that is to say, it pursues an effacement and distancing of the authorial self in the act of creating an autofictional other. Despite their differences, Knausgaard and Cusk are emblematic of a contemporary trend in writing whereby the novel is realigned with a radical realism and/or the biographical is infused with an intellectual and metaphysical charge that seeks in the “merely” personal a connection to wider questions of representational power and the impact of social structures on human modes of behavior. Notes 1. For further discussion of the term ludic postmodernism, see Teresa Ebert’s article “Writing in the Political: Resistance (Post)modernism.” 2. I cannot claim to be the first person to use the term radical realism. It has already been used in a variety of contexts, including art historical, literary, and philosophical contexts. However, my use is novel. In art historical criticism, it has been used to characterize the work of Millet and Courbet (Boime) in the context of the development of realisms in France in the mid-­ nineteenth century with a view to taking account of the social and political contexts against which realism was read and interpreted. In literature, it has been applied, for example, to the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Foster Wallace—­in the case of the latter, extending the notion of the real to what had previously been excluded from art. It has also been applied to the work of B. S. Johnson and his investigation in Unfortunates “into universal truths despite its emphasis on subjectivity” (Tew). Tew’s view of Johnson as producing narratives that posit “a radicalised notion of the real” is certainly relevant but does not directly underpin my discussion of radical realism in Knausgaard and Cusk, which is informed rather by notions of radical attention or attentiveness to things in the world alongside a

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desire to produce writing that gets closer to the subject’s experience of the world by “breaking through” the walls of fiction and interrogating novelistic convention. 3. For an overview of the autofictional as a mode rather than a genre, see The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms, edited by Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor. 4. My understandings of “attachment” and “detachment” are informed by Susan Lanser’s chapter “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of Structuralist Narratology.” 5. For a useful summary of the content of each volume, see “Knausgaard’s My Struggle: A Reading Guide”: https://​www​.penguin​.co​.uk/​articles/​2018/​ knausgaards​-my​-struggle​-reading​-guide/. 6. Out of the World was published in a new English translation by Martin Aitkin in 2023. It was originally published in Norwegian, as Ute av verden, in 1998. Knausgaard discusses the book in an interview with Dan Piepenbring. 7. Much of what appears in the novel’s coda (470–­518) is a condensed form of what Knausgaard elaborates on in the various volumes of My Struggle. 8. It is important to note that Lejeune regularly revisited his notion of “le pacte autobiographique” from its first publication in Poétique in 1973 to discussion of the concept twenty-­five years later. In a Festschrift for Philippe Lejeune, Carole Allamand charts these changes in her article “The Autobiographical Pact, Forty-­Five Years Later.” 9. Kellaway speaks of “authorial invisibility” in Outline. 10. Zoe Williams, writing in The Guardian, refers to “elements that are really indefensible from the husband’s point of view” in an article on contemporary feminism, while Frances Stonor Saunders characterizes a negative statement in Aftermath about Cusk’s husband’s beliefs about their situation as “vertiginously condescending.”

Bibliography Adams, Tim. “Interview: Karl Ove Knausgaard: ‘I Don’t Know Why More People Don’t Read Mein Kampf.’” The Guardian, 16 September 2018, https://​ www​.theguardian​.com/​food/​2018/​sep/​16/​karl​-ove​-knausgaard​-i​-dont​-know​ -why​-more​-people​-do​-not​-read​-mein​-kampf. Allamand, Carole. “The Autobiographical Pact, Forty-­Five Years Later.” European Journal of Life Writing, vol. 7, 2018, pp. 51–­56. Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–­1871. Chicago il: U of Chicago P, 2008. 150  Doloughan

Clanchy, Kate. “Kudos by Rachel Cusk—­a Daringly Truthful Trilogy Concludes; Faye, the Artful Listening Presence in Outline and Transit, Is Back—­But This Time There’s a Self-­Consciousness to the Narrative Voice.” The Guardian, 4 May 2018, http://​www​.theguardian​.com/​books/​2018/​may/​ 04/​kudos​-rachel​-cusk​-review. Cusk, Rachel. Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. ———. Kudos. London: Faber and Faber, 2018. ———. Outline. London: Vintage, 2014. ———. “Preface.” Literature Compass, vol. 8, no. 12, 2011, pp. 873–­74. ———. Transit. London: Jonathan Cape, 2016. Ebert, Teresa L. “Writing in the Political: Resistance (Post)modernism.” Legal Studies Forum, vol. 15, no. 4, 1991, pp. 291–­303. Effe, Alexandra, and Hannie Lawlor. The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms. Cham: Springer International, 2022. Faber, Michel. “A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard—­Review.” The Guardian, 25 April 2012, http://​www​.theguardian​.com/​books/​2012/​apr/​25/​ death​-in​-family​-karl​-ove​-knausgaard​-review. Heti, Sheila. “So Frank.” London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 1, 9 January 2014, https://​pugpig​.lrb​.co​.uk/​the​-paper/​v36/​n01/​sheila​-heti/​so​-frank. D’hoker, Elke. “Painterly Stories: An Interview with Rachel Cusk.” Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, vol. 3, no. 2, 2013, pp. 253–­59. Ingenta Connect, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1386/​fict​.3​.2​.253​_7. Genette, Gérard. “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative.” Poetics Today, vol. 11, no. 4, 1990, pp. 755–­74. jstor, https://​www​.jstor​.org/​stable/​1773076. Jones, Elizabeth H. “Serge Doubrovsky: Life, Writing, Legacy.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 49, no. 3, 2009, pp. 1–­7. Project muse, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1353/​ esp​.0​.0182. Kellaway, Kate. “Rachel Cusk: ‘Aftermath Was Creative Death. I Was Heading into Total Silence.’” Observer, 24 August 2014, http://​www​.theguardian​.com/​ books/​2014/​aug/​24/​rachel​-cusk​-interview​-aftermath​-outline. Knausgaard, Karl Ove. Boyhood Island. My Struggle, vol. 3. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. London: Vintage, 2014. ———. Dancing in the Dark. My Struggle, vol. 4. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. London: Vintage, 2015. ———. A Death in the Family. My Struggle, vol. 1. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. London: Vintage, 2014. ———. The End. My Struggle, vol. 6. Translated by Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett. London: Harvill Secker, 2018.

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———. “Karl Ove Knausgaard: The Shame of Writing about Myself.” The Guardian, 26 February 2016, http://​www​.theguardian​.com/​books/​2016/​feb/​ 26/​karl​-ove​-knausgaard​-the​-shame​-of​-writing​-about​-myself. ———. A Man in Love. My Struggle, vol. 2. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. London: Vintage, 2014. ———. Some Rain Must Fall. My Struggle, vol. 5. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. London: Harvill Secker, 2016. ———. A Time for Everything. Translated by James Anderson. London: Portobello, 2015. Lanser, Susan S. “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of Structuralist Narratology.” A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 206–­19. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Poétique, vol. 14, 1973, pp. 137–­63. Ley, James. “Notes on ‘Kamp’: My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard.” Sydney Review of Books, 20 December 2013, https://​sydneyreviewofbooks​.com/​ review/​karl​-ove​-knausgaard​-my​-struggle​-review/. Accessed 4 March 2020. Penguin Books UK. “Knausgaard’s My Struggle: A Reading Guide.” https://​ www​.penguin​.co​.uk/​articles/​2018/​knausgaards​-my​-struggle​-reading​-guide/. Accessed 4 September 2023. Pierce, William. “Reality Hunger: The Six Books of Karl Ove Knausgaard: Part 1.” la Review of Books, 22 April 2015, http://​v2​.lareviewofbooks​.org/​article/​ reality​-hunger​-the​-six​-books​-of​-karl​-ove​-knausgaard/. ———. “Reality Hunger: The Six Books of Karl Ove Knausgaard: Part 2.” la Review of Books, 23 April 2015, http://​v2​.lareviewofbooks​.org/​article/​reality​ -hunger​-the​-six​-books​-of​-karl​-ove​-knausgaard​-part​-ii/. ———. “Reality Hunger: The Six Books of Karl Ove Knausgaard: Part 3.” la Review of Books, 24 April 2015, http://​v2​.lareviewofbooks​.org/​article/​reality​ -hunger​-the​-six​-books​-of​-karl​-ove​-knausgaard​-part​-iii/. Piepenbring, Dan. “Karl Ove Knausgaard on Out of the World.” Paris Review, 17 November, 2016. https://​www​.theparisreview​.org/​blog/​2016/​11/​17/​karl​-ove​ -knausgaard​-world/. Prose, Francine. “Real Talk: Rachel Cusk’s ‘Kudos.’” Sewanee Review, vol. 126, Fall 2018, pp. 520–­34. ProQuest, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1353/​sew​.2018​.0051. Saunders, Frances Stonor. “‘I, Not You’: Infuriating and Narcissistic? Yes, but Also Brave and Brilliant.” The Guardian, 3 March 2012, https://​www​ .theguardian​.com/​books/​2012/​mar/​02/​aftermath​-rachel​-cusk​-review, p. 6. Schillinger, Liesl. “His Peers’ Views Are in the Details.” New York Times, 22 May 2014, p. c1(L). Gale OneFile: News, https://​link​-gale​-com​.libezproxy​.open​.ac​ .uk/​apps/​doc/​a368900229/​stnd​?u​=​tou​&​sid​=​stnd​&​xid​=​7a227025. 152  Doloughan

Schmitt, Arnaud, and Stefan Kjerkegaard. “Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: A Real Life in a Novel.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2016, pp. 553–­79. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​08989575​.2016​.1184543. Scholes, Lucy. “A Life Less Ordinary: The Finale of Rachel Cusk’s Trilogy of Experimental Novels Offers a Thrilling Conclusion to a New Kind of Bildungsroman.” Financial Times, 28 April 2018, p. 10. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. London: Penguin, 2011. Smee, Sebastian. “Book World: With ‘Kudos,’ Rachel Cusk Completes a Literary Masterpiece.” Washington Post, 29 May 2018. Tew, Philip. “(Re)-­Acknowledging B. S. Johnson’s Radical Realism, or Re-­ publishing ‘The Unfortunates.’” Critical Survey, vol. 13, no. 1, 2001, p. 37+. Williams, Zoe. “Feminism in the 21st Century.” The Guardian, 24 June 2011, http://​www​.theguardian​.com/​books/​2011/​jun/​24/​feminism​-21st​-century​-zoe​ -williams. Zinovieff, Sofka. “When Rachel Cusk Went to Greece: Would She Be Nice or Nasty?” The Spectator, 13 September 2014, https://​www​.spectator​.co​.uk/​ article/​when​-rachel​-cusk​-went​-to​-greece​-would​-she​-be​-nice​-or​-nasty/.



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Part 3

The Author on the Page Representations of Authorship in Fiction

8

Reconstructing the Author through Biofiction’s Anchored Imagination Michael Lackey and Laura Cernat

Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, and it has become a dominant aesthetic form over the last thirty years. Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood, Mario Vargas Llosa, Olga Tokarczuk, and Hilary Mantel are just a few global luminaries who have published spectacular biographical novels. But why and how has this form of fiction come to dominate? How does it relate to developments within contemporary literary theory, and how does the inclusion of real-­life elements and persons in the fictional narratives of this genre influence the poetic strategies that it uses? To answer these questions, this chapter examines biofictions about celebrated authors. But before examining specific biographical novels, we want to briefly discuss developments in Woody Allen’s career in order to suggest some of the intellectual forces that gave rise to the relatively recent surge in biofiction. Throughout his career, Allen has engaged in extended conversations with famous writers. Manhattan (1979) is in conversation with Vladimir Nabokov, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Shadows and Fog (1991) with Franz Kafka, and Wonder Wheel (2017) with Eugene O’Neill. Allen clearly admires these writers, and he believes that they have important and relevant things to say to us today. But he has some serious concerns about the way certain popular approaches to literary criticism have rendered the great ideas in classical texts of marginal or even negligible significance. Modernist Masters in Woody Allen’s Works In his 1997 film Deconstructing Harry, Allen portrays the tumultuous life of the (fictional) celebrated author Harry Block (played by Allen). 157

Given his stellar career as a writer, Harry’s almost alma mater (he did not complete his degree because he was asked to leave) invites him to campus to honor him. There he meets a literature professor and his students, who appear to Block later in the film in a waking dream. As Block imagines being honored for all his work, one of the students tells him, “Your books all seem a little sad on the surface, which is why I like deconstructing them, because underneath they’re really happy. It’s just that you don’t know it.” There are two noteworthy ideas in this imagined student’s remarks. First, the student disregards the author’s work. Throughout the film, Harry has been building toward his despairing idea, which is that “all people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.” Allen has established this depressing theme through clever parallels between Harry’s life experiences and his fictional rendition of those experiences. Within the student’s deconstructionist framework, whatever Harry formulates in and through his fiction would be of little or no value in relation to her truth, which is that the opposite of what he says is true, thus subordinating the author’s specific truth to her larger countertruth. The second noteworthy idea relates to authority. The literary critic has a better grasp of the author’s real “truth,” which is why the student says to Harry that she is in possession of a “truth” of which he is unaware (“It’s just that you don’t know it”). In other words, the text is of ultimate importance, and what Harry has to say matters not an intentional jot, because he, as an author, is ultimately dead when it comes to the meaning of his work. This is, of course, classic Allen: caricaturing a deconstructionist for comic effect. And yet there is something worth noting in this casual dismissal of a particular literary theory, especially in relation to the contemporary rise and legitimization of biofiction. After the 1967 publication of Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” there was among many theorists a shift in emphasis from the author to the text. We can go to texts like Mrs. Dalloway for insight into human living, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we are getting some useful knowledge from Virginia Woolf herself, because the death of the author has rendered such musings untenable and even incoherent. Whether Allen has a deep or accurate understanding of deconstruction is not important or relevant to our argument in this essay. What interests us is the logic that has led so many contemporary artists to fictionalize the lives of beings that are 158  Lackey and Cernat

seemingly forever dead and irretrievably lost, and it is our contention that the dramatic surge in biofictions over the last forty years has been, in part, a response to some of theory’s overstated claims, specifically about the death of the author. This is not to say that authors of biofiction are antitheory. Rather, their works exemplify the tendency in contemporary literature to “urge us . . . to think theory through and identify parts of it that need to be adjusted, overhauled, or outright abandoned” (Ryan 4).1 As Bethany Layne has recently observed, authors of biofiction do not simply and plainly react “against” the death of the author but propose “an argument within rather than with contemporary theory or postmodernity” (Henry James in Contemporary Fiction 7). In line with his earlier work, in 2011 Allen found a way to expand his theoretically informed move away from the death-­of-­the-­author approach by prioritizing and reestablishing the primacy of authors and their visions. In Midnight in Paris, Gil Pender is engaged to Inez—­a beautiful but unthinking woman from a wealthy business family—­and works as a writer producing mindless scripts for the movie industry. However, he yearns for a more substantive and meaningful life, so throughout the film, we see him working on a novel. The zany plot twist is that Gil is nightly transported back to the 1920s, where he meets famous writers and artists, including Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Ernest Hemingway, and Salvador Dalí. These figures from the past appear to have something valuable to teach us in the present because—­in the film—­when Gil returns to his present, he uses these writers’ insights to better understand his life and experience. The best example of this occurs when Gil learns from Hemingway that his fiancée is cheating on him. When Gil shares his autobiographical novel with Hemingway, the older author detects one implausible detail in the work: the fact that the main character fails to notice that his fiancée is having an affair strains credulity. In this moment, Gil realizes that Inez is being unfaithful to him. This leads him to confront her in a scene that brilliantly makes the case for reading modernist literature and for attending to the distinctive insights of individual authors. When Inez asks Gil what led him to conclude that she is having an affair, Gil says, “Hemingway.” In response, Inez says that Gil must have a “brain tumor” because the author is dead. Gil retorts, “The past is not dead. Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he

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was right.” For Gil, what great writers have communicated in the past through their works continues to have value and meaning for readers in the present: “There’s nothing crazy about Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, or Gertrude Stein, or Salvador Dalí.” There is nothing crazy about them because they are still very much alive. As the conversation becomes more intense, Gil uses an idea from Fitzgerald to diagnose himself: “I’m jealous and I’m trusting. It’s cognitive dissonance. Scott Fitzgerald talked about it.” The conversation culminates with Gil telling Inez, “You can fool me, but you cannot fool Hemingway.” It is at this point that Inez confesses to the affair, thus confirming that Hemingway was right. Through the insights of these modernist writers, Gil realizes that his relationship with Inez is a mistake and ends it. Using Gil, Allen demonstrates that modernists have provided us with an insightful vocabulary for illuminating our own lives. This pattern in Allen’s oeuvre, we contend, can also be seen in the works of some first-­rate authors of biofiction. Biographical Novelists’ Response to Death of the Author Laurent Binet, who has authored impressive biographical novels about Reinhard Heydrich and Roland Barthes, makes a critical observation about contemporary theory, specifically postmodernism: “I think that contending that ‘truth does not exist, everything is fiction’ is literary dandyism. I do understand that this constitutes a critical trend in literature, but I believe that postmodernism is deeper and more thought provoking than this” (39). Binet clearly thinks that there is something valuable in postmodernism, but he also realizes that it can result in superficial posturing. Stephanus Muller, who has authored a biographical novel about the composer Arnold van Wyk, explains how postcolonialism added a needed layer of gravitas to his postmodernist approach to fiction: “I am transformed by the postcolonial condition into this existential form of self-­reflection. And literature and the sensibility of postmodern fiction responds to this transformation which . . . pushes beyond mere play, mere intellectualism, mere narcissism. Ever since my ‘discovery’ of various strands of postcolonial discourse in the nineties, I was struck by the political direction it added to the postmodern sensibility” (175). Is there a logical connection between these authors’ reflections on theory and their usage of real-­life figures in their works? We think there is. In 2009, Susan Sellers published Vanessa & Virginia, a biographical 160  Lackey and Cernat

novel about Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. In an interview about the work, Sellers notes that the “proliferation of biographical fiction has its roots in postmodernism” (207), and consistent with the pattern found in Allen’s works, Sellers suggests that modernists have something valuable and substantive to communicate to their audiences about human living. That value comes not exclusively or even primarily from Bell’s paintings or Woolf’s writings. Much of it is derived from their lives. Specifically, what interests Sellers is sibling rivalry. With that idea in mind, she mined the life stories of Bell and Woolf and then analyzed and interpreted the women’s works accordingly as she crafted her own vision of their relationship. Sellers wanted to know, “What must it have been like for Vanessa living in the shadow of this successful younger sibling?” (82). To answer this question, she read a biography about Bell and then studied her paintings. These two sources went into the making of her character. But it would be a mistake to think that readers will find biography in the pages of Vanessa & Virginia. Sellers is clear about her work: “Fiction is not biography” (83). So what readers get in the novel is “metaphor, not fact” (83). And it is this metaphor that is of central importance to her “vision” (84). But more importantly, that vision, steeped as it is in biography-­and work-­derived metaphor, has considerable value in illuminating “early relationships with brothers and sisters [that] have at least as much impact on who we are as anything our fathers or mothers said or did” (81). In essence, while artists like Allen, Binet, Muller, and Sellers would certainly concede Barthes’s point that we cannot have unbridled access to the author’s intentions, thoughts, or lives, they would not accept the view that those figures are dead to us. In fact, all these artists unapologetically mine the lives of those from the past in order to create a sense-­making fiction for us in the present. Another instance of a biofiction author privileging modernist insight over the paradoxes of theory is Maggie Gee’s use of the figure of Woolf in Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. Much like Allen’s implausible but meaningful plot in Midnight in Paris, Gee’s narrative features a confrontation between contemporary mindsets and modernist worldviews, this time by resurrecting Woolf in the 2010s and transporting her to a conference about herself. Angela, the other protagonist, who is a contemporary writer and academic, warns her that at the conference, “they won’t believe what you say about your work . . . because—­some modern scholars

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think authors don’t know anything about their work” (Gee 317). To counter Woolf’s indignation at such a thought, Angela parodically explains, “Sense is considered to be old hat. Rather a dull, Anglo-­Saxon idea. This is a . . . critical concept. . . . You can’t expect to understand it. . . . It’s ‘The Death of the Author.’ It’s—­well, it’s French” (317). Angela’s difficulty in outlining the reasons why Woolf would not grasp these theoretical developments suggests that she herself has a limited understanding of why they might be useful. Gee’s Woolf, of course, finds these speculations “ridiculous” (317) but at the same time sees “the influence of Dr Freud” (318), which suggests that she is able to identify the logic and origin of these trends and is thus less confused by them than Angela had expected. Humorously alluding to the novel’s unrealistic plot design, Woolf exclaims about Barthes’s theory, “But I’m the living embodiment of that. I’m a dead author” (317). Pushing the paradox to the extreme, like Gee does, brings the reader to a similar insight as the one instilled by Allen in his viewers: that modernists have more understanding of our world (despite all the social, technological, and conceptual changes) than we would expect them to. Gee’s figure is obviously not the biographical Woolf, just like Allen’s Hemingway is not the biographical Hemingway. But there are crucial elements of Hemingway and Woolf that have gone into the making of Allen’s film and Gee’s novel. Colm Tóibín provides us with a useful language for thinking about the way authors continue to live and thereby become relevant subjects and symbols in biofiction. As the author of a biographical novel about Henry James, Tóibín claims that he lives “in an imaginative country which is defined by the concrete.” According to this aesthetic approach, “facts” are something that authors of biofiction “have to deal with,” but these facts are “nourishing as well as restricting.” With biofiction, Tóibín suggests, the author gets “an anchor from certain facts, and that anchor is not merely factual but emotional, and it brings a great deal with it, it carries you. And because it carries you, you can get a great deal of energy from it” (“Anchored Imagination” 231). The biofictional symbol is anchored in facts, including the facts of the actual life of the biographical subject. Tóibín sheds additional light on this anchoring idea in an older reflection piece about The Master. The anchor he speaks of here attaches bio­ fiction not only to the facts of a writer’s biography (as it clearly does in the “Anchored Imagination” piece) but also to the fictions that the particular 162  Lackey and Cernat

author created. Discussing a passage in his biographical novel in which the young Henry James is in Boulogne with his father and has a set of experiences that are actually borrowed from James’s own novel What Maisie Knew, Tóibín articulates this notion of anchoring in a way that suggests that, in the case of biofictions that deal with literary authors, the anchoring is always double2: using What Maisie Knew “was a way of anchoring my images and phrases in those of James, by riffing on them, referring to them, stealing them” (“Henry James for Venice” 200). As a result of the combination between biographical elements and literary elements taken from an author’s works, the alert readers of this subtype of biofiction face a double challenge: on one hand, they are called to discern which details are documented and which are made up, and on the other hand, they are called to recognize, among the made-­up elements, which ones originally belonged to the fictional universe created by the biographical subject and have been integrated into the biographical subject’s fictionalized existence by the biofiction writer. This double anchoring complicates and enriches the reverberations between fact and fiction specific to biofiction more broadly by bringing in an extra fold of intertextual and metafictional resonances. In the case of the episode from What Maisie Knew, the attribution of a fictional experience (Maisie’s) to the real Henry James not only blurs the lines between fiction and fact but helps us reflect on how much of James’s fiction was in turn rooted in auto/biographical fact. As Tóibín further notes, “James’s novels are peppered with such raids on the real as a way of anchoring them in time” (200). Although it does not engage explicitly with theory, through this act of superimposing the fictional and the biographical, Tóibín’s novel does stage a critical response to the effacement of author figures, suggesting that the constant refashioning of the work makes the artist’s image return to life. Two novels that foreground biofiction’s anchoring symbols and bring to the fore the double fold of fiction and biography’s mutual reverberations are Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986). Written while postmodernism was still in its heyday, these two novels make use of a provisional and less dogmatic conception of truth. We turn first to Flaubert’s Parrot.



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Between Life and Art in Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot Barnes’s novel—­a concise and multifaceted Flaubert encyclopedia with a loose detective narrative thread—­revolves around the question of authenticity and the link between life and art.3 The narrator’s attempt to identify the original stuffed bird that served as a model for the French writer’s fictional parrot Loulou (from the short story “A Simple Heart”) leads him to a dense reflection on the nature of literary representation. Even before introducing the symbol of the stuffed parrot, Barnes formulates a question that sets the stage for understanding the workings of the anchored imagination: “Do we think the leavings of a life contain some ancillary truth?” (12). Instead of a wholesale rejection of truth, Barnes invites readers to consider the kind of truth available to us in the postmodern age. This suggests that although the postmodern provisionalization of truth is rationally accepted, it is no longer desirable or even possible to disregard the human impulse to seek some sort of grounding in fact. This yearning for the concrete is taken to the extreme when the novel’s protagonist, Geoffrey Braithwaite, is moved even by potential fakes: “I gazed at the bird, and to my surprise I felt ardently in touch with this writer who disdainfully forbade posterity to take any personal interest in him” (16). Barnes’s narrator shows that the real or concrete has a significant impact on human emotions and as such cannot be disregarded by art. This nostalgia for the reality of the author is still strongly imbued with postmodernism’s distrust of metanarratives. The ambivalence of the parrot parable indicates a transformation in the postmodern rhetoric of disbelief. Postmodern doubt remains, but Braithwaite nevertheless conducts a search for clues about the real parrot, which leads him to the home of real-­world Flaubert scholar Lucien Andrieu, who makes a noteworthy observation: “Flaubert was an artist. He was a writer of the imagination. And he would alter a fact for the sake of a cadence.” Andrieu clearly sides with Flaubert: “Just because he borrowed a parrot, why should he describe it as it was? Why shouldn’t he change the colours round if it sounded better?” (Barnes 188). Writers are free to invent all they want, but they are also free to use facts or models from reality. In retrieving these elements of reality, the best strategy is to keep in mind that they were transformed by the artistic process. When a biographer bases their description of a writer’s life 164  Lackey and Cernat

on the way people and places appear in a novel, this can lead to confusion or oversimplification. Biofiction, on the other hand, casts the people, places, or situations that inspired literary oeuvres in a new symbolic role. It thus creates rich associations between life and art, whose point is not to capture the actual process of transforming a real-­life model into a literary symbol but to shed light on the mutual echoing between life and art. This effect of resonance or echoing rather than parallelism is emphasized in Flaubert’s Parrot when Braithwaite overcomes his thirst for the concrete and accepts that the quest for the real prototype of Loulou is not that relevant. Flaubert’s short story led Barnes’s narrator (and Barnes himself) to seek a point of contact with the writer through the objects that supposedly bear the trace of Flaubert’s life, but in the end these objects bring the amateur scholar back to Flaubert’s fiction. We have gone full circle, and the impulse to find the meaning of literature outside of it has brought us back to literature. Nonetheless, in the process of this detour through facts, the value of literary symbology becomes clearer. The simple assertion that literature has something personal to teach us acquires an anchoring in the concrete through the symbolic retrieval of the relics of a writer’s life. The parrot parable is just one example of the echoing effect between life and art. Another one of Barnes’s strategies is to emphasize the mutual infiltration between the real and the fictional (rather than one’s being mapped onto the other), as becomes clear in his comparison of the protagonist’s adulterous wife and Flaubert’s character Emma Bovary. Braithwaite thinks he can demonstrate that his wife is unlike Emma: “She wasn’t corrupted; her spirit didn’t coarsen; she never ran up bills” (Barnes 164). But these things are only generic terms of comparison, and the detail-­obsessed Braithwaite knows it, which is why he wonders, “Did she, like Emma Bovary, ‘rediscover in adultery all the platitudes of marriage?’” Using the insight of another prominent novelist, Braithwaite entertains a different discomforting possibility: “Did she find, in Nabokov’s phrase, that adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional?” (Barnes 164) Braithwaite gives a negative answer, yet the reader is insistently made aware of the unreliability of his first-­person account, especially regarding his decision to switch off his wife’s ventilator after her barely failed suicide attempt. Although Braithwaite’s account of Ellen’s life is interspersed with quotes from Flaubert,4 he apparently fails to notice

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(or accept) that Flaubert has something very personal to communicate to him, just as Hemingway and Faulkner have a very personal message for Allen’s Gil. In Braithwaite’s case, however, it’s not the fact of the adultery but the potential misery of his wife and the richness of her personality. Barnes’s protagonist makes observations that draw his wife close to Emma’s psychological profile: “She rushed at things. . . . There was a suddenness in these actions which argued more than desire” (164–­65). His obsession with Flaubertian marginalia and details, however, prevents him from seeing the central issue, which is Emma’s and Ellen’s suffering and disillusionment with life. Braithwaite himself acknowledges this blind spot when he speaks of his wife as someone he “understand[s] less than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years” (Barnes 168), but he cannot overcome his lack of empathy. Of course, this strategy is chosen deliberately by Barnes to remind his audience that what matters is not how much you read or know but how you read it. Take the case of Enid Starkie, the Flaubert scholar in chapter 6 of Flaubert’s Parrot who misinterprets Flaubert’s psychologically relevant descriptions of changes in Emma’s eye color as forgetfulness on Flaubert’s part. Braithwaite’s narrative moves from a point where he uses his interest in Flaubert as a pretext to mask or downplay his own personal life to a point where Flaubert’s fictions become a means of trying to shed light on the painful aspects of his personal history and sense of the present. With a brilliant spin on the argument, Barnes’s narrator contrasts life and books5 only to continue expressing his grief over his wife in Flaubertian metaphors.6 The privilege of life over books can only be expressed in a book, Barnes implicitly argues. In Flaubert’s Parrot, the encyclopedic ambition characteristic of both high modernism and high postmodernism is present. However, the way the encyclopedic illusion is used is akin neither to modernism’s attempts to create an imago mundi through the accumulation of meaningful fragments nor to the perpetual sliding of signifiers that destabilizes truth without proposing alternatives, which is characteristic of more frivolous versions of postmodernism. In biofiction, the facts are assembled and rearranged in order to illuminate the workings of a life and personality (in this case, Flaubert’s) and to provide a version of truth (or several versions) that, without claiming to be absolute, can still serve as a guide to understanding human emotions. Biofiction is thus using insights about truth 166  Lackey and Cernat

brought about by postmodernist thought, but adding gravitas to them by emphasizing the human dimension that connects past and present. Writing the Crisis of Authorship: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe If the questions at the center of Flaubert’s Parrot are to do with a shift within postmodernism—­specifically,7 a move away from perpetual play and an endless deferral of meaning to an acknowledgment of our indebtedness to the past and a creative repurposing of its relics—­then in Foe, Coetzee addresses and refashions the central component of the postmodern understanding of fiction: the collapsibility and porosity of ontological layers.8 To explain the difference in attitude between the two novelists, consider their treatment of Emma’s symbolic value. For Barnes, as we have seen, both history and literature model reality, but they are still in watertight compartments: Ellen Braithwaite is a potential double for Emma Bovary, but ontologically speaking, she belongs to a different layer of the story, and only their implicit similarity, as perceived by the reader, can link them. The relationship between the two characters (the one borrowed from Flaubert and the one invented by Barnes) remains one of echoing. In Youth (2003), however, Coetzee’s character John treats the same question, of the resemblance of real women to the fictional Emma, very differently. Although John accepts that Emma “is a fictional creation,” he goes on to claim that “even if no woman in the real world is quite like Emma, there must be many women so deeply affected by their reading of Madame Bovary that they fall under Emma’s spell and are transformed into versions of her. . . . They are her living embodiment” (Coetzee, Youth 25). The question of the impact of life and art on one another, which in Barnes’s novel is staged only metaphorically (Ellen resembling Emma), gains metaleptic qualities in Coetzee (female readers of Flaubert embodying Emma in the real world). Taking her cue from this brief example of ontological transgression, Alexandra Effe notes in the opening of her book on metalepsis and ethics in the works of Coetzee that slanted reasoning such as John’s propels a “circular understanding of life and art” (x), with important ethical implications. Tracing Coetzee’s use of metalepsis in several works, including Foe, Effe reaches the conclusion that this author’s works involve not just a “tension between storyworlds and world” (157), which is typical of this technical artifice, but also a “tension between rhetorical control and a

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renouncing of authority” (158). This renunciation of authority and the opening up of the text to the reader represents one literary response to Barthes’s idea about the “death of the author.” Taking responsibility for his writing without imposing interpretations, engaging the reader in the open structures of the fictional universe, and especially acknowledging the fallibility of author figures and of writing itself are Coetzee’s reactions to poststructuralism’s dismantling of univocal readings. However, continuing to use the biographical and the autobiographical, even when their projections are deceiving or askew, constitutes Coetzee’s way of signaling that the author’s withdrawal is not a death or a disappearance but rather a strategic blurring of their presence. The impressive theoretical density of this writer’s works9 functions as a counterbalance to critical theory’s glib affirmation of the author’s effacement. Coetzee is an author who acknowledges the crisis of authorship in the postmodern paradigm and who decided to write from within this crisis. Without either rejecting it as a false problem or embracing it as a premise for irresponsible play, Coetzee confronts the “death of the author” with the tools of metaleptic ambiguity, bringing characters and author figures onto the same fictional stage. In the case of Foe, writing from within the crisis of authorship takes the form of revisiting the beginnings of the English novel and rewriting this moment as a negotiation between different candidates for authorship with different truth claims. Susan Barton, the female castaway who in the storyworld is the only articulate carrier of Cruso’s10 story after the latter’s death and Friday’s mutilation, hesitates to hand it over to a professional author: “I would rather be the author of my own story than have lies told about me,” she says. This is a case in which ownership of one’s narrative gives it value: “If I cannot come forward, as an author, and swear to the truth of my tale, what will be the worth of it?” (Coetzee, Foe 40). However, as she had already confessed, because of Cruso’s duplicity, even she does not possess the complete truth: “I did not know what was truth, what lies, and what mere rambling” (12). Foe is, to a large extent, the history of Susan’s realization of the perils of language and authorship and of writing’s ambivalent relationship with truth (as her dispute with the Daniel Foe character over whether to include the episodes about her daughter shows, what is not relevant is not necessarily untrue). Foe is also the imaginary history of the writing of The 168  Lackey and Cernat

Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and it is in relation to this hypotext that we access Coetzee’s fictional universe. By refashioning such a canonical work, Coetzee opens his work to multiple interpretations. These depend on whether we think of the novel about to be written by Foe as Robinson Crusoe itself or an alternative version of it. If we do assume that Foe will end up writing Robinson Crusoe word for word, then we see why he was asking Susan questions about not bringing muskets from the wreck (Coetzee, Foe 53–­54) and why Susan insinuates that Foe might have preferred a story that does not include her (“‘Better had there been only Cruso and Friday,’ you will murmur to yourself: ‘Better without the woman’”; 71–­72). However, we might surmise that the novel the fictional Foe is about to write is Roxana, or a version of it, or perhaps a form of Robinson Crusoe very different from what we know. Defoe’s definitive text might in this alternative universe be a simple dismissed scenario among many, as we are not given the final version of Foe’s text. By embedding another fictional text (Robinson Crusoe) into his fiction of real-­life author Daniel Defoe, and by bringing fictional Susan—­loosely based on fictional Roxana—­into the same narrative layer that Foe inhabits, Coetzee renounces absolute authority over the storyworld, offering readers of Robinson Crusoe, of Roxana, or of Defoe’s biographies possibilities to complement his narrative or speculate over its connections. Through this strategy, as Effe notes, “metalepsis in Foe functions to challenge the tradition of the novel, to acknowledge Foe’s own limitations and failures, and to encourage the reader to challenge its exclusions, appropriations, and silences” (31). Metalepsis in itself is not by any means new: Defoe himself used it in his pamphlets, where he attributes one of his writings to a fictional character (Richetti 179–­80), as well as in the sequel of Robinson Crusoe, where characters are confronted with readers of the first volume, in the style of Cervantes (Richetti 214). However, combining metalepsis with postmodern intertextuality and with the biofictional technique of using real historical persons as characters promotes this device from a form of glib textual play to a reflection on the porosity of literary language to processes of fact-­fiction hybridization. Given how little we know of the fictional Foe and how little of this coincides with the life of the actual Defoe, we could place Coetzee’s novel on the threshold between historiographic metafiction—­which articulates the impossibility of accessing the past (Hutcheon 92–­93) and tries

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to recover marginalized versions of it through parallel tunnels in the plot (113–­14)—­and biofiction, which offers a fictional reconstruction of the past in full awareness that it is a provisional version but dwells on the literary veracity of the narrative rather than on the deconstructive paradoxes entailed by the distortion of language. In comparison to more recent biofictional transpositions of author figures, Coetzee’s author-­character is deliberately insubstantial and self-­contradictory. Built like a Kafkian burrow or like a Deleuzian rhizome,11 the narrative of Foe offers no real exits, no accessible symbols. In this, Coetzee is closer to that strand of postmodernism that exposes the impossibility of truth rather than creating functional but provisional truths. However, Coetzee’s work, precisely through its rhizomatic construction, is an acknowledgment that revealing this impossibility is not enough. Although it neither offers exits nor finds definitive anchors, Foe reveals the need for anchoring, specifically in light of the postmodern realization about the provisionality of truth. In the last chapter of Foe, the reality of Friday’s body is contrasted with the constant unreliability of fictional narrators and with the writer-­ characters’ (Susan’s and Foe’s) fears of insubstantiality. Friday, who has no voice in the novel because he has been mutilated and who resists Susan’s attempts to teach him standard alphabetical writing by inventing his own code, becomes the node of the novel’s tangled network of signifiers. Although he cannot speak, he is the only one who has witnessed the entire story of Cruso and who has carried it to England and to Foe. He is also the only point of convergence between the hypotext (Defoe’s own novel), the rewriting of this hypotext in the form of Susan’s narrative, and the next level of the storyworld, where the narrative is being discussed. His physical presence, his body (or the relics of it), attest to the failure of any author’s dominance over this character. For Coetzee, the strategic withdrawal of the author starts with empowering not just the readers but the characters as well. The final setting of the novel, the underwater double of the fictional ship of Cruso/Crusoe, “a place where bodies are their own signs” (Coetzee, Foe 157), gestures toward an extratextual reality that, once seized, could give substance to the competing storyworlds. Unlike pure postmodern play with ontology, the functioning of Coetzee’s text relies on a certain degree of anchoring in the real, yet the narrator of the last chapter acknowledges his own inability to capture this reality. All that can be done within this form of writing 170  Lackey and Cernat

(what we have above called “writing from within the crisis of authorship”) is to use bodies as anchors and silences as symbols for what cannot be said because it is too well known. Coetzee, at this stage, refuses to do more; there is a deliberate hollowness at the core of Foe’s multilayered and open-­ended construction. Its logic is much like a two-­dimensional drawing of a Klein bottle: approximate but suggestive. Foe is a masterpiece of recursive textuality, which “tasks the reader to engage in new metaleptic dives into the narrative” (Effe 31). This creates the illusion of potentially going on forever, which is at once a triumph and a dead end. Writing from this uncomfortable position generated by the crisis of authorship was nevertheless unsustainable: it has given way to a new stage in the evolution of literary symbology. Instead of being explicit and turning upon itself, the ontological question has become implicit, and the tension between history and literature is now played out not in the realm of pure invention but in that of biofiction, where literature’s infinite possibilities of world-­shaping and layering are given a structure and limits. From the readers’ perspective, this was needed in order to restore literature’s personal value and revive the emotional implications that are often drowned in the existential tensions of Coetzee or the erudite irony of Barnes. Thus, the works we have been discussing paved the way for biofiction’s recent evolution beyond perpetual postmodern play. By casting historical figures into literary parts in a more veridical universe,12 recent biofiction still addresses ontological questions about the status of literature in relation to history, but it does so while also constructing narrative plots whose internal coherence is independent of these questions. This new approach provides different answers to the old question of the death and return of the author. New Ways of Constructing Authors We could say that the current popularity of the biographical novel, which has been surging dramatically since the 1990s, is in part a response to the death of the author, but not in the way that Barthes would have imagined. For Barthes, the “explanation of a [literary] work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it” (143). But because, according to Barthes, it is impossible to locate or define the author and his or her intent after a work has been completed, all we are left with is the text in which language rather than the author speaks. Thus, the author and his or her

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biography are of negligible significance when we engage a literary work. Biofiction is fiction and not criticism, so the explanation of a literary text is not its objective—­readers do not go to Michael Cunningham’s The Hours for an authoritative interpretation of Mrs. Dalloway. What they are likely to get from such texts is an understanding of the way an author’s biography can be used to illuminate life more generally. The Spanish novelist Rosa Montero specifies what readers should expect from a biographical novel when she praises Camilo Sánchez’s La vedova Van Gogh (The Widow of the Van Goghs) as “exemplary” in “that the author uses the life of Van Gogh, the character, to tell a greater story about the nature of existence” (158). This is also what Montero gives her own readers in The Ridiculous Idea (2013), her biofiction about Marie Curie. According to Montero, people learn how to live either through their “own experience and rigorous introspection or self-­analysis” or through “knowledge about other people” (167). Within this framework, Montero suggests, the biographical novel can provide “an existential map” for possible forms of productive human living and can function “as an enormous screen on which to project these possibilities” (167). When writers choose a historical author as their protagonist, they tend to use not just the life but also the writings of the author in order to create such an existential map for readers, as we have already argued. How this functions in Tóibín’s The Master is instructive. According to Tóibín, Henry James “began to fall in love with young men” (“Roaming” 28) in the mid-­1890s. Why did this happen? How did this personal development impact his writings? And how do his writings enable us to understand his tumultuous and complex sexual identity and human sexuality more generally? Tóibín offers some answers to these questions in The Master, and yet it would be a mistake to take any of these answers as authoritative interpretations of James’s life or work, because The Master is fiction, not biography. As such, what readers get in the novel is James’s life and work converted into a literary symbol that provides them with an existential map for living in the present, a process that is itself enacted in the novel. The Master begins with the failure of James’s play Guy Domville. To settle his fraying nerves on his play’s opening night, James attends a performance of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, and according to Tóibín’s James, Wilde’s play is the polar opposite of his own: James’s “drama was about renunciation, he thought, and these people [who had 172  Lackey and Cernat

seen Wilde’s play] had renounced nothing. At the end, as they called the actors back for further bows, he saw from their flushed and happy faces that they did not appear to have any immediate plans to amend their ways” (Master 16). The literary work provides a model for human living, but Wilde has inspired his audience with the wrong one. Within the context of The Master, James’s belief in renunciation dominates his thinking from the publication of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to Guy Domville (1895), but renunciation is not just a theme in his literary works. It is a governing principle in his life, which is why Tóibín pictures him renouncing his personal sexual desire for two separate men early in the novel. However, after learning of Wilde’s trial for committing homosexual acts, Tóibín’s James becomes obsessed with his literary rival (the “story of Wilde filled Henry’s days” [Master 68]), and this ultimately results in a life-­and fiction-­changing transformation that leads him to renounce renunciation and to embrace a worldview similar to Wilde’s. In short, the combination of Wilde’s life and work provides James with the necessary template for changing his life. Just as Wilde’s life and work provide a symbolic existential map for James, James’s life and work provide one for readers of The Master. Early in the novel, James comes to understand the uncanny power of literature to show readers meaningful and productive ways of living through his reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who “had not observed life, Henry thought, as much as imagined it, found a set of symbols and images which would set life in motion” (Master 163). If Wilde’s life and work are the symbols that set James’s life into motion in The Master, then James’s life and work may have the same effect on readers of Tóibín’s novel. Near the end of the novel, James falls in love with the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, but instead of renouncing this desire, he makes an effort to cultivate the relationship. This personal change results in a different approach to fiction. Instead of encouraging “renunciation,” as he did in Guy Domville, or “duty and resignation” (Master 324), as he did in The Portrait of a Lady, the Wilde-­influenced James of the late 1890s embraces daring adventure and life-­enhancing change. Thus, submission to seemingly established cultural morals is replaced by a view of life as an unsystematizable mystery that humans should embrace, which is why the post-­1895 James is committed to making the world “come alive” (Master 334). Specifically, in writing what is represented in the novel as

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his current work in progress (The Ambassadors), Tóibín’s James plans to portray a man “with much intelligence and a sensuous nature which has remained hidden throughout his life” (Master 334). This man, like James, undergoes a transformation, which is one of the primary themes of the projected work: “The moral is the most pragmatic we can imagine, that life is a mystery and that only sentences are beautiful, and that we must be ready for change, especially when we go to Paris” (Master 334). What makes James’s life and work so attractive to a writer like Tóibín is that it beautifully and powerfully provides readers with a compelling framework for becoming productive agential beings in a society designed to squelch nonconformist originality and individual autonomy. Of the biographical novels that use historical authors to draw an existential map, one that is extremely illuminating is Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Ned Kelly’s family is from Ireland, and since the English try to establish in Australia the same kind of master-­ servant relationship between the English and Irish that was then operational in Europe, the rebellious and incorrigible Ned finds himself in constant conflict with Australian authorities, who are mostly English or supporters of the English and their political agenda. After his family has been strategically coerced into poverty and unjustly arrested by compromised policemen, Ned fights back, which eventually leads to the deaths of three officers of the law. From this point forward, law enforcement relentlessly pursues Kelly and his gang, and their deaths seem to be the primary goal. To defend himself, his family, the Irish, and the impoverished, Ned authors The Jerilderie Letter, which Carey refers to in an interview as an “extraordinary document, the passionate voice of a man who is writing to explain his life, save his life, his reputation” (“Reawakening”). But Kelly’s focus is not just on himself. As Carey says, Kelly “wants us to see the injustice suffered by the poor farmers of North-­ Eastern Victoria” (“Reawakening”). In other words, Kelly’s story, as communicated through The Jerilderie Letter, is a clarion call on behalf of an oppressed and downtrodden community, and as such, it has a transspatial as well as a transtemporal significance. Carey indicates this when he suggests that his own upbringing confirms some of the ideas found in Kelly’s document: “What I finally wrote grew not just from The Jerilderie Letter but my first 10 years of life which I spent in the very small country town of Bacchus Marsh” (“Reawakening”). What readers get in True 174  Lackey and Cernat

History is not a provincial story of a single abused Irishman in a small region of nineteenth-­century Australia; rather, Carey fictionalizes the story of Kelly to give readers a vivid and poignant picture of the downtrodden, the poor, and the oppressed in a wide range of places and times. In essence, Carey uses Kelly’s life to do exactly what a fiction writer like Virginia Woolf does, which is “to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense” (Woolf 248). In an interview with Nathanael O’Reilly, Carey claims that the “notion of creating a sort of poetry from an uneducated voice, like Faulkner does in As I Lay Dying (1930), was attractive to me then and still is now” (“Voice” 164). In his interview with Robert McCrum, Carey specifies that giving “rich voices to the poor” (“Reawakening”) is what he has taken from Faulkner. In As I Lay Dying, obscene poverty crushes the wickedly brilliant Addie, the sensitive seer Darl, the pregnant adolescent Dewey Dell, the good-­hearted but unimaginative Cash, and others from the Bundren clan. Faulkner’s novel offers a funny, sensitive, perverted, and poignant picture of life in the irredeemable abyss of soul-­debilitating poverty, and the fact that Carey considers it a model for his own work certainly makes sense. However, noting the differences between the two is revealing: between the publication of these two novels, postmodernism flourished, mandating the rise of a new way of literary signifying, one that was more anchored in the historical and the empirical. In Carey’s case, his novel is doubly anchored in the life and writings of Kelly. The novels are similar in that the symbolism is designed to criticize the social system that makes poverty possible, but Carey’s choice to use an actual historical figure differentiates his work from Faulkner’s, a literary move that gives more conceptual credence and emotional weight to Carey’s portrayal of the living conditions of the persecuted, the oppressed, the downtrodden, and the poor. Conclusion Claiming that an author’s biography is not the unique key to their works, as Barthes does, does not mean that the life of a real person has no influence on the fiction written by or about them. This chapter has illustrated that while many authors of biofiction are aware of contemporary theory’s erasure of the author, they not only reject the idea that it is a total erasure but have also resurrected a version of the writer that is an amalgamation of fact (the biography of the author) and fiction (derived, in part, from

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the author’s works) in order to provide readers in the present with an existential map for meaningful living for the future. Celebrated authors from the past are very much alive today in new and powerful ways in part because of the resurrectional work of contemporary biofictionalists. Acknowledgments Laura Cernat would like to thank the Research Foundation, Flanders (fwo) for its generous support of her project about contemporary biofiction (fwo Project 1240823N), which made her contribution to this chapter possible. Notes 1. All ellipses in this chapter are ours. 2. Laura Cernat has discussed the idea of “double anchoring” in more detail in a subsection of her PhD thesis, The Living On of Authors: Canonical Writers of Modernity Represented in Recent Biographical Novels (introduction, pp. 27–­31). 3. An extended version of this section has been incorporated in Cernat’s PhD thesis (chapter 3, pp. 65–­76). 4. “Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously? (1855)” (Barnes 163); “Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with those one doesn’t love. (1847)” (Barnes 164). 5. “Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. [. . .] Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are [. . .] never your own” (Barnes 168). 6. “I am allowed to [. . .] dream about her a little. I think of a hailstorm in 1853. [. . .] The function of the sun is not to help the cabbages along” (Barnes 170). 7. This section has been complemented with additional material and expanded into chapter 4 of Cernat’s PhD dissertation, pp. 77–­91. 8. See Brian McHale’s famous observation about the ontological dominant of postmodernist fiction as opposed to the epistemological dominant of modernism (10). 9. Effe speaks of Coetzee’s novels as “performative narrative theory” (159). 10. Coetzee spells the name of his character “Cruso” rather than “Crusoe,” presumably to differentiate his version from Defoe’s and potentially also to de-­anglicize the spelling. 11. See Deleuze and Guattari: “Never has so complete an oeuvre been made from movements that are always aborted, yet always in communication 176  Lackey and Cernat

with each other. [. . .] Each time writing crosses a threshold; and there is no higher or lower threshold. These are thresholds of intensities that are not higher or lower than the sound that runs through them. That’s why it’s so awful [. . .] to oppose life and writing in Kafka, to suppose that he took refuge in writing out of some sort of lack. [. . .] A rhizome, a burrow, yes—­but not an ivory tower. A line of escape, yes—­but not a refuge” (41). With some contextual adaptations, this could be applied to Coetzee. His work dwells in the uncomfortable, rhizomatic situation of working with inconsistencies but taking them seriously, of not being cut off from the world and yet not having a simple referential relationship with it. 12. See Michaela Bronstein’s remark about contemporary biofiction authors (particularly Cynthia Ozick) being “more in keeping with neorealist authors like Franzen than pyrotechnic collage artists like Pynchon” (212). Recent biofiction has not left behind the revelations of postmodernism’s heyday, but its style is very different from the standard technique of historiographic metafiction. We are no longer caught up in the loop of sliding universes, since new biofictions propose a vision of the past that has an impact on our understanding of the real world and the future.

Bibliography Allen, Woody, director. Deconstructing Harry. Sweetland Films, 1997. ———, director. Midnight in Paris. Mediapro, 2011. Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. London: Vintage, 2009. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image-­Music-­Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, pp. 142–­48. Binet, Laurent. “Reflections on Truth, Veracity, Fictionalization, and Falsification.” Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, by Michael Lackey. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 33–­48. Bronstein, Michaela. Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang. New York: Vintage International, 2000. Carey, Peter, and Robert McCrum. “Reawakening Ned: Robert McCrum Talks to Peter Carey about Wrestling with a National Myth.” The Guardian, 6 January 2001, https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​books/​2001/​jan/​07/​fiction​ .petercarey. Carey, Peter, and Nathanael O’Reilly. “The Voice of the Teller: A Conversation with Peter Carey.” Antipodes, vol. 16, no. 2, 2002, pp. 164–­67.

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Cernat, Laura. The Living On of Authors: Canonical Writers of Modernity Represented in Recent Biographical Novels. 2022. ku Leuven, PhD dissertation. Coetzee, J. M. Foe. London: Penguin, 2010. ———. Youth. London: Vintage, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Effe, Alexandra. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression: A Reconsideration of Metalepsis. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Ellison, Ralph. “The Uses of History in Fiction.” Biographical Fiction: A Reader, edited by Michael Lackey. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 131–­60. Gee, Maggie. Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. London: Telegram, 2015 [2014]. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. 1988. New York: Routledge, 2004. Kelly, Ned. The Jerilderie Letter. Melbourne: Text, 2001. Layne, Bethany. Henry James in Contemporary Fiction: The Real Thing. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ­McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. 1987. London: Routledge, 2004. Montero, Rosa. “Speculative Subjectivities and the Biofictional Surge.” Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, by Michael Lackey. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 157–­68. Muller, Stephanus. “Stitching up the Auto/Biographical Seam.” Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, by Michael Lackey. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 169–­79. Richetti, John. The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography. Malden ma: Blackwell, 2005. Ryan, Judith. The Novel after Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Sellers, Susan. “Postmodernism and the Biographical Novel.” Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, by Michael Lackey. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 207–­21. Tóibín, Colm. “The Anchored Imagination of the Biographical Novel.” Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, by Michael Lackey. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 223–­34. ———. “Henry James for Venice.” Henry James Review, vol. 27, no. 3 (Fall 2006), pp. 192–­201. ———. The Master. New York: Scribner, 2004. ———. “Roaming the Greenwood.” Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar. London: Picador, 2010, pp. 5–­34. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2, edited by Annie Oliver Bell and Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1980.

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9

The Anxiety of Authorship Novelists as Narrators Paul Dawson

Individual novelists may or may not suffer from any number of situational and clinical forms of anxiety, but the collective figure of the contemporary author, I suggest, can be culturally diagnosed as suffering from a particular anxiety concerning the relevance of the very genre they write in. This anxiety takes the form of a rhetorical lament for the declining cultural status of fiction that has accompanied persistent claims of the death of the novel since the mid-­twentieth century (for another discussion of the fictional representation of authorial anxiety in the novel, see the chapter by King in this volume). In his turn-­of-­the-­millennium Harper’s essay, “Why Bother?” Jonathan Franzen provides a very public display of such posturing, describing his own writer’s block as occasioned by acute anxiety over the status of the novel: Why bother writing if no one reads anymore? This lament is also dramatized in novels themselves by self-­reflexive narrators who elaborate their struggle to compose the words we are reading and stage agonistic interrogations of their relationship to their own fictional characters. In this chapter, I historicize the self-­reflexive construction of authorship in an age associated with the death of the novel by looking at authorial commentary that refers to the work itself: its progress, its aims, its various formal features, its generic status. In particular, I examine third-­ person narrators who tell us they are writing a novel, or that we are reading a novel, and therefore invite us to see them as novelists, if not quite as the authors themselves. In addressing self-­reflexive commentary, I am concerned with how the narrator’s relationship to the fictional world becomes conflated with the novelist’s relationship to the written text. Based on the premise that metafictional commentary in postmodern 179

novels—­such as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971), and B. S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-­Entry (1973)—­reveals an uncertainty about authorial creativity that differs from earlier self-­reflexive parades of omnipotence from Henry Fielding to Denis Diderot, I address the legacy of this anxiety in contemporary fiction. From Laurent Binet’s agonized running commentary on the limitations of the historical novel in HHhH (2009) to Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet (2016)—­in which the narrator claims to be writing a deliberately bad novel that mimics the fragmented structure of digital communication—­the novelist-­narrator’s discussion of form will provide the basis for addressing the author’s relationship to the labor of composition and the model of authorship that this labor invokes. Authors as Puppet Masters Throughout literary history, an author’s treatment of their characters has been posed as an ethical test of their responsibilities as creators, as highlighted in the recurring metaphor of the author as puppet master, most prominently deployed in Thackeray’s preface to Vanity Fair, which presents the authorial narrator as “the Manager of the Performance” manipulating his “Becky Puppet” (2). Formally speaking, this metaphor invokes the narratological category that Gérard Genette calls metalepsis, or the transgression of levels between story and discourse. In Narrative Discourse, Genette tells us that an author invents the story and the narrator reports it, which is why author and narrator can never be the same, even if the narrator espouses the known views of the author. Of course, the self-­reflexive trope of the puppet master presents narrators as simultaneously inventing and reporting and commenting upon their inventions. Narrator-­novelists are not just authorial narrators—­that is, heterodiegetic storytelling proxies for the author—­but extradiegetic characters who are novelists. Their narrative acts are fundamentally metaleptic because they draw attention not only to story as a product of discourse but to discourse as the product of authorial invention. For Genette, narrators pausing to digress while a character carries out an action or inviting us to leave a character and shift to another scene is “an ordinary and innocent” form of metalepsis, a rhetorical feature that plays “on the double temporality of the story and the narrating” (235). However, when narrator-­novelists 180  Dawson

playfully discuss how they could manipulate the fate of their characters, they are demonstrating a more extreme form of metalepsis, a transgression of narrative levels in which the extradiegetic narrator intrudes into the diegetic universe of the characters. The transgression here, for Genette, would be one that disregards the separation of powers between author and narrator. In this context he invokes Sterne and Diderot as canonical examples, along with the classical figure of speech that attributes the cause of events to the author, “as when we say that Virgil ‘has Dido die’” (234). Why would an author introduce into a narrative the knowledge that he or she could have a character die or, more generally, tell us that everything has been made up? We could say that it is to expose the inherent fictionality of a work, but that would be, I think, to interpret an effect as the cause. If we listen to narrators, such claims tend to be made in order to discuss their labor of composition, the aesthetic and ethical choices informing their creative process, with the aim of promoting a certain figure of authorship. Given the centripetal force of the trope of the death of the novel in various iterations since the mid-­twentieth century—­a trope that has become a source of artistic inspiration as much as it is expressive of a general cultural anxiety about the status of literary fiction—­I want to situate my analysis of contemporary intrusive narrative voices in the context of the mutually reinforcing critical trope of the rise of the novel. What idea of novelistic creativity have we inherited from the genre’s “rise” in the eighteenth century, and does its changing nature manifest in what narrator-­novelists tell us about their own characters? Toward the end of Tom Jones (1749), Henry Fielding dilates on the difference between comic and tragic writing, arguing that because his novel is of the former variety, the resolution of its plot will be a difficult task given the precarious situation of his protagonist. When the eponymous character finds himself on the verge of execution, the narrator tells us, “We almost despair of bringing him to any Good; and if our Reader delights in seeing Executions, I think he ought not to lose any Time in taking a first row at Tyburn” (776). In this metaleptic passage, Fielding approaches his characters less as occupying an autonomous fictional world over which he has no control and upon which he must simply report than as a world of his invention, modeled on his own observations of human nature. Yet he refuses to lend Tom Jones his authorial

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aid, or “that supernatural Assistance with which we are trusted” (777). What prevents him from deciding the fate of his characters as he sees fit is both a moral adherence to a concept of verisimilitude and a particular view of the nature of the creative process. While Fielding acknowledges the omnipotence that derives from his role as a creator of fictional characters, he cannot indulge this fancy for fear of stretching the measure of fictional truth that defines the realist novel: probability. In the opening chapter of Henry (1795), entitled “The High Dignity, Powers, and Prerogatives of the Novel Writer,” Richard Cumberland’s novelist-­narrator observes that, unlike the historian, he possesses “despotic power” over the hero of his novel (3). This is because the novel is the only genre that owns and advertises its fictionality. At the same time, he is at pains to emphasize the responsibility of the novelist to ensure this inventive power cleaves to the natural and the probable, ostentatiously acknowledging the need to avoid abusing the liberty afforded by such power: “I know that I could play my puppets after my own fancy, for the wires are in my hand . . . but I have lived long enough to see wonderful revolutions effected by an intemperate abuse of power, and shall be cautious how I risque privileges so precious upon experiments so trivial” (5). As I will demonstrate, this figure of the author as puppeteer recurs throughout history, but there is a difference between novelists such as Fielding and Cumberland, who sought to stake out the conventions of realist fiction, and more contemporary novelists whose sensibilities are shaped by the trope of the death of the novel. The key point is that while commentary by narrator-­novelists in the period of postmodernism centers around and interrogates the relationship between authors and their fictional characters, this relationship is understood less in terms of the probability of a plot that we find in the realist novel’s eighteenth-­century emergence than in terms of the ethical integrity of the author’s own creative freedom. Consider this passage from the famous chapter 13 of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)—­a canonical work of postmodern metafiction that also mimics the structure of Tom Jones—­in which the novelist-­narrator addresses readers directly to dilate on inherited assumptions about novel-­writing: “Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right strings and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner; and produce on request a thorough analysis of their motives and 182  Dawson

intentions. Certainly I intended at this stage (Chap. Thirteen—­unfolding of Sarah’s true state of mind) to tell all—­or all that matters” (85; original emphasis). Despite this expectation, Fowles hesitates to do so, and he goes on to point out the many different motivations for writing that novelists have before claiming that “only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. That is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator” (86; original emphasis). That is, we can’t just have Dido die. However, the reason for this is not to do with a moral obligation to adhere to the principles of probability in order to distinguish the novel from the incredible inventions of the romance. The reason has to do with the ethical principle of aesthetic freedom: “There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition” (86). This principle is not necessarily theological, for it accords with what Dorothy Hale calls the aesthetics of alterity, a tradition of novel theory from Henry James to the contemporary moral philosophy of Martha Nussbaum that holds that “the ethical value of literature lies in the felt encounter with alterity that it brings to its reader” (899). For the affective experience of alterity to function, a vital feature is the autonomy of characters. In this context, postmodern authors seem to perpetuate the idea of an ethical responsibility to the freedom of their characters while recognizing the artificiality of form associated with this aesthetic, especially the dogmatic requirement to efface authorial presence. Why tell us we are reading a novel, though? I mean, we know that already. Fowles here is building the anxiety of authorship into the novel and making it part of the plot, a story of composition on the extradiegetic level with its own form of duration, and which ultimately influences the plot with the final series of alternative endings. I say “anxiety” because unlike the displays of omnipotence in the eighteenth century that are designed to highlight how the new species of composition differs from the romance by virtue of cleaving to probability, these intrusions are designed to reflect on the conventions of realism inherited from the classic novel. If the author has the power to freely invent nonreferential characters but is not necessarily beholden to probability, the measure

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of verisimilitude is internal to the fictional world—­to an ethical obligation to respect the autonomy of characters—­rather than external to it, and this autonomy must be guided by the integrity of the creative process instead of a pressure to rein in creativity by adhering to empirically based norms of observation. To demonstrate this, then, novelist-­ narrators must share their creative decisions, which leads to metafictional reflection on the formal features of fiction itself, such as thought representation, description, and dialogue. Fowles is not Robinson Crusoe in this regard, with self-­reflexive explorations of authorial creativity visible in metaleptic encounters between inventing narrator and invented character throughout the latter part of the twentieth century. These encounters are often informed by anxiety about the state of the novel. For instance, in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters (1957), the sound of typing echoing around her reveals to the protagonist that she—­a literary critic struggling with the chapter on realism for the book she is writing on twentieth-­century novelistic form—­is trapped inside a novel. In B. S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-­Entry (1973), the eponymous character asks his creator, “Why spend all your spare time for a month reading a thousand-­page novel when you can have a comparable aesthetic experience in the theatre or cinema in only one evening?” (165). If metafictional novels parade their own fictionality in the service of self-­reflexively interrogating the stale and ostensibly exhausted assumptions about realist fiction, this interrogation stems from the stake that novelists have in the genre, and their authorial commentary tells us not only about the state of the novel in this period but about the status of novelists themselves. The image they promote is that of the contemporary novelist sitting at his or her desk wrangling with the fate of their characters and pondering what structural and stylistic choices to make in representing them and narrating the events of the story. These metafictional dialogues with the tradition of realist fiction may be characterized as postmodern, but they do not necessarily share the antihumanist critique of essentialized subjectivity that underpins the broader linguistic turn and informs the theoretical and ideological critique of authorship in this period. An equally compelling context for these metafictional voices is the very humanist interest in the creative process of authors. 184  Dawson

The figure of authorship modeled by these novelist-­narrators is not that of original geniuses wielding godlike authority over their own creations but writers struggling with the act of writing itself and taking readers into their confidence as they do so. At the same time, this becomes a valorization of their own creativity. At the end of Christie Malry’s Own Double-­Entry, the narrator-­novelist visits his dying character in his hospital bed. After an exchange with Christie, the narrator tells us, “The nurses then suggested I leave, not knowing who I was, that he could not die without me” (180). The use of the preterite tense in this sentence indicates that the narrator has undergone a metaleptic transition into the fictional world of his protagonist, but as he has persistently noted throughout the novel, this world is a product of his own invention, and hence only he can have Dido die. Drawing attention to the act of writing also becomes an authorial defense of their craft and of the medium in which they work. While reference to the pseudotime of narrative discourse is a recurrent feature throughout the history of the novel, the emphasis of metafictional novels on the materiality of the text in which the story unfolds as it is being invented has an additional function of highlighting the print form of codex (for another discussion of materiality and multimodality, see the chapter by Gibbons in this volume). “The reader will see,” writes the narrator of Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, “that what I’m driving at is that these words that he is reading—­are words” (37). By foregrounding the author as the source of the words on the page and invoking the tactile experience of reading with recurring references to pages numbers and chapters, these narrator-­novelists may stymie our immersion in their fictional worlds, but they seek to immerse us instead in their own creative minds in order to address the challenge of the novel’s apparent decline in relevance. For Sorrentino and Johnson, new media forms such as cinema and television lurk in the background as the novel’s competitors—­forms that have a greater claim to verisimilitude. I turn now to the legacy of these postmodern novelist-­narrators in twenty-­first-­century fiction as authors grapple with both the increased literary capital of nonfiction writing and the cultural changes wrought by the digital revolution.



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Writing a Metafictional Novel about Real People Published in French in 2009 and translated into English in 2012, Laurent Binet’s HHhH shares all the metafictional features of the postmodern novels addressed in the previous section: intrusive running commentary on the action of the novel as it is being written, direct addresses to the reader, and self-­reflexive discussions about formal elements of the novel such as dialogue, description, and scene setting. Binet also inherits the self-­reflexive tendency to discuss characters with readers, with the crucial difference that the characters in question have real-­world referents. As a result, while he shares a postmodern anxiety about the value of the novel and builds the process of composition into the plot structure of the novel itself, the anxiety of authorship that drives this novelist-­narrator is an ethical responsibility not to the freedom of invented characters in a fictional world (and hence to the integrity of his own creative process rather than some external measure of verisimilitude) but to the true experience of real historical figures. In this historical novel, Binet has two parallel narratives: the story of the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 by a Slovak and a Czech agent working for the British-­organized Operation Anthropoid and the story of the narrator’s attempts to write this history in novelistic form in such a way that he can honor these two agents, Josef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. With the opening line of the novel, Binet introduces us to the problem of his relationship to his characters: “Gabčík—­t hat’s his name—­really did exist” (3). He recalls Milan Kundera’s discomfort with devising invented names for invented characters in the name of verisimilitude before asserting that “in my opinion, Kundera could have gone further: what could be more vulgar than an invented character?” (3). He goes on to explain his long-­held desire to tell Gabčík’s story, stoked by a recurring image in his mind of Gabčík sitting in his room the night before the assassination attempt: “But if I put this image on paper, as I’m sneakily doing now, that won’t necessarily pay tribute to him. I am reducing this man to the ranks of a vulgar character and his actions to literature: an ignominious transformation, but what else can I do?” (4). In acknowledging that writing a novel about Gabčík essentially reduces him to the same ontological status as that of an invented character, Binet is also acknowledging that he has no choice if he wants to employ the genre to pay tribute to Gabčík’s experience and 186  Dawson

his role in history. In this sense, the author’s struggle with his own creative power is constrained neither by the measure of probability nor by the autonomy of invention but by some conflation of both in the name of history. In musing over how Gabčík first met Kubiš, he later writes, “That’s what I would love to know. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to ‘visualize’ (that is, invent!) this meeting or not. If I do, it will be the clinching proof that fiction does not respect anything” (106). The novel’s plot gains momentum through the gradual merging of the narrator’s archive fever and compositional anxiety with the narration of the assassination attempt and subsequent death of the agents. This double temporality is clearly marked when a line such as “Raul Hilberg died yesterday” (196), which refers to the time of narrating, is followed a few pages later by a line referring to the time of the story: “This morning, Heydrich receives an indignant letter from Himmler” (198). However, it’s not simply that the narrating instance is collapsed with the time of writing: Binet may be a heterodiegetic narrator in the sense that he is not a character in the story he is narrating, but he is not outside the diegetic world of his characters, because for him they are real personages separated from him only by time. The novel switches between the historical story and the present-­day narration, but like a diary, the time of narrating is also interpolated between moments of writing the novel itself. On occasion, Binet elaborates these moments scenically: Natacha reads the chapter I’ve just written. When she reaches the second sentence, she exclaims: “What do you mean, ‘The blood rises to his cheeks and he feels his brain swell inside his skull?’ You’re making it up!” I have been boring her for years with my theories about the puerile, ridiculous nature of novelistic invention, and she’s right, I suppose, not to let me get away with this skull thing. (127) Binet here is referring to a sentence that we have already encountered in the previous chapter. He explains how he eventually deleted the sentence and substituted it with a hypothetical clause, imagining what Himmler may have been feeling, before ultimately restoring the original version because “clearly I wasn’t happy with the result” (128). This discussion of the labor of composition exemplifies the larger authorial anxiety that Binet experiences in trying to adapt conventions of realist fiction.

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Binet’s struggle with how to represent his characters is similar to that of intrusive omniscient narrators, and he invokes the puppet metaphor used in the work of Cumberland and Fowles to represent this concern: “That scene, like the one before it, is perfectly believable and totally made up. How impudent of me to turn a man into a puppet—­a man who’s been dead for a long time, who cannot defend himself. To make him drink tea, when it might turn out that he liked only coffee” (104). His desire to truly know these historical figures is a desire to know them as wholly as readers know a fictional character. In writing the scene in which Gabčík confronts Heydrich, ready to shoot him, only for his gun to jam, Binet intrudes: “If only I could have been inside his head at this precise instant, I am absolutely convinced I would have had enough material to fill hundreds of pages. But I wasn’t, and I don’t have the faintest idea what he felt” (255). Binet generates suspense not just by delaying the full elaboration of this scene through authorial intrusion but by making the double temporality of story and narrating parallel each other, writing first that the Germans are transfixed by Gabčík’s sudden appearance and then that “I, too, am transfixed—­because I’m reading Europe Central by William T. Vollmann, which has just appeared in French” (256). The two stories then come together in the sense that the process of writing leads the novelist-­ narrator inexorably toward a metaleptic merger with his character in his imagination as he tries to continue the scene of the assassination attempt: “And now I am Gabčík. What do they say? I am inhabiting my character” (306). To write this moment fully, however, would be to succumb to the key signpost of fictionality in the novel: access to consciousness. “I am not Gabčík,” Binet writes, “and I never will be. At the last second, I resist the temptation of the interior monologue and in doing so perhaps save myself from ridicule at this crucial point” (306). If the metafictional novels discussed earlier wrangle with the artificiality of omniscient access to consciousness and omnipotent control over the outcome of the story by self-­reflexively highlighting their fictionality, Binet’s authorial anxiety stems from the inappropriateness of such an approach for a historical novel. “My story has so many holes in it as a novel,” he laments. “But in an ordinary novel, it is the novelist who decides where these holes should occur. Because I am a slave to my scruples, I’m incapable of making that decision” (293). Although his novel was prompted by a desire to bring these historical figures to life, Binet tells us 188  Dawson

toward the end, “The truth is that I don’t want to finish this story. I would like to suspend this moment for eternity, when the four men decide not to surrender to their fate but to dig a tunnel” (314). In other words, we all know from the start that they will die, and unlike the typical novelist, Binet cannot prevent their fate. History had Gabčík die. The author cannot have him live. In his classic study of the period, Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale observes that “the postmodernists fictionalize history, but by doing so they imply that history itself may be a form of fiction” (96). In this, they participated in a general intellectual climate that recognized the epistemological implications of shared narrative techniques across the genres of history and fiction. Such a recognition is at the heart of Binet’s authorial anxiety—­how to use the conventions of fiction without fictionalizing—­but his narrator-­novelist is more concerned about how to employ fiction in the service of history. Binet’s concern for the truth status of his characters is not uncommon to earlier writers of documentary novels (such as Thomas Kenneally, who grapples with similar concerns in Schindler’s Ark), but it also places him within a broader contemporary distaste for invention that animates the recent spate of first-­person novels in which the character-­narrators appear to be autobiographical, barely fictionalized versions of the author, in deed and in name—­namely, autofiction (see Doloughan’s chapter in this volume). Binet’s suggestion that “there is nothing more vulgar than an invented character” (3) echoes the authorial anxiety that Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life (2010), asserted in a 2007 interview: “Increasingly, I’m less interested in writing about fictional people because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story.” A similar frustration with the artificiality of fiction is apparent in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. In the second volume, A Man in Love, his first-­person narrator, Karl, writes, “Just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous” (446). Knausgaard describes his loss of faith in literature as a perpetual awareness of the saturation of public discourse with fiction: “Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, dvds and tv series, they were all about made-­up people in a made-­up,

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though realistic, world. And news in the press, tv news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not” (496). This registers for Knausgaard as a crisis stemming from the observation that verisimilitude rather than factual truth has become the measure of all public discourse. His response to this crisis—­which we might want to call the problem of a “posttruth” world in which narrative dominates regardless of its truth status—­was not to revel in the license for invention afforded the genre of fiction but to seek a grounding in the voice of the self that the nonnarrative forms of diaries and essays allowed. The sensibility that Knausgaard articulates is captured by David Shields in his 2010 manifesto Reality Hunger, in which he claims that “the creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe” (21). Again, the puppet-­master metaphor—­a metaphor that, supposedly, can no longer sustain the novelist. Instead, Shields describes an inchoate movement in and across the arts to explain the cultural and aesthetic forces gathering under what he calls reality hunger: a desire for raw, unfiltered material that possesses emotional urgency and is open to artistic risk. This movement is characterized by attempts to include “chunks” of reality that result in “a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real” (5). For Shields, facts in contemporary society have become omnipresent, short lived, and irrelevant. At the same time, the energy of contemporary art lies in the autobiographical, and particularly what he calls the lyric essay, generically unconstrained and unhampered by “a fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that none of this ever really happened—­which a fiction writer daily wakes to” (27; original emphasis). This is vitally connected to the new digital age, in which books can retain their waning cultural authority only by engaging with the universal library of the internet: “It is important for a writer to be cognizant of the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and more visceral narrative forms. You can work in these forms or use them or write about them or through them, but I don’t think it’s a very good idea to go on writing in a vacuum” (Shields 31). Writers, of course, are aware of this challenge. To discuss the self-­represented status of the 190  Dawson

novelist in contemporary fiction, I now turn to Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet (2016), which seeks to write about and through new media forms. Writing a Good Novel When Everyone Is on the Internet I would not classify Kobek’s novel as autofiction, although it might come under Marjorie Worthington’s very broad definition of “novels that feature a character who shares his/her name with the author” (1), given that Kobek is a Turkish American writer living in California and one of the main characters is a Turkish American writer living in San Francisco who shares his initials: J. Karacehennem. Karacehennem is what Elizabeth King calls an endorsed authorial character because he shares the same literary values as those that inform the novel in which he appears (King). In this instance, the endorsement of the author is made clear by the consonance between the views and language of the author-­character and the overt commentary of the third-­person narrator-­novelist. The figure of authorship presented by this self-­reflexive narrative voice is my focus here. I Hate the Internet displays some of the key characteristics of reality hunger listed by Shields, including deliberate “unartiness”—­with a blunt and colloquial narrator who utters statements such as “Cunts really are still running the world” (214)—­and a literal tone, as if reporting on a strange culture: “The formalized systems in which grown men threw around balls were called sports” (62). It also shares some of the formal features of Shields’s book itself, constructed as it is out of short, fragmented paragraphs in brief chapters, as well as being highly essayistic, with exposition about the characters’ social environment offering multiple opportunities for digressive authorial observations on the state of contemporary culture. The book has the sketchiest of narratives, the main thread being the experiences of Adeline, a comic book writer who is crucified on social media for making a throwaway comment about Beyoncé in an interview. A woman expressing strong views, the narrator tells us, is “the only unforgiveable sin of the Twenty-­First Century” (3). The book follows Adeline’s relationships, sexual and otherwise, with a number of other writers and artists in San Francisco in 2013. More broadly, the book is a jeremiad against the gentrification of San Francisco under the pressure of Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism. This jeremiad itself is largely a backdrop for an extended screed about recent American political history, the ingrained sexism and racism of American society, and how all

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these inform the capitalist exploitation of the internet, whereby the very design of social media platforms is aimed at generating revenue by data mining the private information of users. It is also a story of the death of the novel in the twenty-­first-­century digital age. In the first chapter, the narrator embarks on what will become a typical digression, pointing out that Adeline’s father was an oral surgeon who had treated the Hollywood actor Jason Robards. After a brief description of the two movies for which Robards won Academy Awards, we have this assertion: Both movies were better than the books on which they were based. Almost all movies are better than books. Most books are quite bad. Like this one. This is a bad novel. (6) This self-­diagnosis forms, in essence, the subplot of the novel: how and why it came to be written. Despite his unflattering comparison of books with movies, the anxiety of authorship for Kobek is about how to write a novel in the age of the internet. This is made clear in two parodic self-­reflexive chapters about the status of contemporary fiction and his attempts to write the book we are reading. The first of these is chapter 5, which opens, “Despite never appearing as a character within its pages, Jack Kirby is the central personage of this novel. He died in 1994. He was born in 1917” (21). According to the narrator, the business practices of the American comic book industry—­which used Kirby’s ideas and characters, his intellectual content, without ever properly remunerating him—­became the business model of the internet, which thrives on exploiting user-­generated content. “Jack Kirby is also the central personage of this novel,” the narrator explains, “because this is not a good novel. This is a seriously mixed-­up book with a central personage who never appears. The plot, like life, resolves into nothing and features emotional suffering without meaning” (23). There is a bid for a kind of raw realism here, along the lines articulated by Shields, which situates Kobek’s work in the long tradition of self-­professed antinovels. We are then given an explanation for why we are reading a bad novel, and it is presented as an ideological decision emerging from the labor of composition: “The writer of this novel gave up trying to write good novels when he realized that the good novel, as an idea, was created by the 192  Dawson

Central Intelligence Agency” (24). Kobek’s novelist-­narrator argues that the cia funded the Paris Review magazine, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, all key institutions in the ideological construction of literary fiction, and that this funding was part of a Cold War battle with Russia: “The cia funded literary fiction because people at the cia believed that American literature was excellent propaganda and would help fight the Russians. People at the cia believed that literary fiction would celebrate the delights of a middle class existence produced by American dynamism” (24). Good novels, for Kobek, are about “the upper middle class and their sexual affairs” (24), and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is singled out as an example, as well as a model for a hilarious failed attempt by one of Adeline’s friends—­a writer of science fiction—­to produce a successful work of literary fiction. Kobek’s parody is ultimately informed by the same lament that Franzen, and Tom Wolfe before him, elaborated: that writers of American literary fiction, and indeed the genre of the novel itself, were “hopeless at addressing the pace of technological innovation” (24). Technological change has altered not only the nature of American society but the very tools of the writer’s trade: Now writers used computers, which were the byproducts of global capital’s uncanny ability to turn the surplus population into perpetual servants. All of the world’s computers were built by slaves in China. The business of American literature had become the business of exploiting slave labor. An example of this is the book that you are reading. This bad novel, which is a morality lesson about the Internet, was written on a computer. You are suffering the moral outrage of a hypocritical writer who has profited from the spoils of slavery. (25) The bind for Kobek, and the source of his authorial anxiety, is that the internet is “the dominant story of Twenty-­First Century life” (25), but writers have failed at engaging with it, instead using it mainly as a marketing device for their compromised output. If it is no longer viable for authors to write good novels, but they don’t want to write comic books or science fiction (which several characters in this novel do), what is left?

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What if “you were a writer who wanted to write about the Internet and you didn’t want to write a good novel” (26)? Kobek presents these options: The only solution to the internet was to write bad novels with central personages that do not appear. The only solution was to write bad novels that mimicked the computer network in all its obsessions with junk media. The only solution was to write bad novels that mimicked the computer network in its irrelevant and jagged presentation of content. (26) Unlike the other novels analyzed in this chapter, this reference to the act of writing does not establish a temporality aligned with the narrating instance in which we are invited to read the work as something he is inventing as he goes along. The use of the preterite tense establishes that he is revealing the decisions behind the finished work that we are reading. I suggest this may be because his thematic concern is not invention and the role of creativity in the construction of fiction, and neither is it the relationship between the author and his characters, given that the novel’s self-­proclaimed central personage never appears as a character. Kobek’s neglect of these concerns indicates his rejection of what is considered good fiction. It becomes clear, then, that the authorial self-­diagnosis of this book as a bad novel is not, or not necessarily, an aesthetic evaluation but a generic description of the work as an antinovel. The extent to which the narrator is admitting to any aesthetic failing would depend on the level of irony we see embedded in these comments. This becomes a challenge presented by a chapter toward the end of the book, which has a whiff of David Foster Wallace about its self-­reflexivity. This chapter is entitled “(the former) chapter twenty-­five,” and it opens, There used to be a chapter in this space. It wasn’t very good. The intention was a fine one. But in the end, the chapter was terrible. So it’s gone. (209) This is no invocation of the blank page à la Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, though, for the narrator goes on to tell us what was in the excised chapter by duplicating it, recounting its contents in a style and format identical to all the preceding chapters in the novel. It is thus a classic example of extended disnarration, or perhaps “diswriting,” given there is 194  Dawson

no narration in it beyond one action by Adeline: “Anyway, in the deleted chapter, Adeline debates whether or not to tweet about %&$#?@ and racism” (211). Kobek uses phrases such as “there was some discussion of” or “there was some suggestion,” indicating that his aim had been to provide the larger context for Adeline’s decision to post this tweet by drawing together the book’s ideas about racism, sexism, capitalism, the comic book industry, and the internet but that he was unable to do so. Characterizing this failure as the fatal flaw of the book, Kobek writes, “The problem with removing the chapter is that it served as the ideological heart of the book. It was where everything tied together” (210). Unlike the other examples discussed here, the novelist-­narrator never refers to himself in the first person, instead using constructions such as “the writer of this novel” and “take it from a professional writer” (214). The title of the book, however, affords a paratextual frame for his narrative voice. The driving force of this novel is ultimately the novelist-­ narrator’s expansion on the first-­person declaration I Hate the Internet, which creates a discursive continuum between author, novelist-­narrator, and author-­character. This voice offers a savage and acute critique of the disjunction between the celebratory proclamations of the democratic power of social media and the reality of its capitalist exploitation: “The curious thing was that Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Blogspot, a media platform owned by Google, were the stomping grounds of self-­ styled intellectual and social radicals” (213). Skewering these intentions appears to be the primary aim of the novel. “The illusion of the internet,” we are told, “was the idea that the opinions of powerless people, freely offered, had some impact on the world” (213). Perhaps the ideal of Kobek’s novelist-­narrator is that this book might have some impact on the world, or could have, were it not for the failed insight of the excised chapter whose shell is replicated here. Conclusion I Hate the Internet and HHhH present two types of contemporary narrator-­novelists who interrogate the cultural status of the novel through self-­reflexive commentary that dramatizes the act of composition. While, in different ways, novelists from Fielding to Fowles parade and valorize their own inventive power, these twenty-­first-­century authors grapple with how to write a novel in an age dissatisfied with fiction-­making. In

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resisting the promise of the historical novel to offer imaginative access to the interior lives of real personages and acknowledging that fiction cannot fill in the gaps of history, Binet falls back on his own archive fever as a legitimizing force for his fictional tribute. The final page offers an imagined scene in which Gabčík and Kubiš meet for the first time on a steamboat to France. Also on this boat is a young woman who looks like the narrator’s partner, Natacha. “And me?” the narrator concludes. “I am also there, perhaps” (227). In rejecting the serious literary novel as a form ill adapted to the networked public sphere and criticizing writers as ethically compromised by their complicity with capitalism, Kobek self-­consciously undermines his own attempt to produce a novel of social critique. The disappointment of his failed chapter is compounded at the end of the novel when his proxy author-­character, J. Karacehennem, resorts to standing at the top of Twin Peaks and delivering to San Francisco an impotent extended rant against the evils of the internet, only to be ignored by the tourists around him. The failures of composition by Binet’s and Kobek’s narrator-­novelists become illustrative of the limits of the genre itself, even as they present their novels as attempts to overcome these limits. Bibliography Binet, Laurent. HHhH. 2009. Translated by Sam Taylor. New York: Picador, 2012. Cumberland, Richard. Henry. London: Charles Dilly, 1795. Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. 1749. London: Penguin, 2005. Fowles, John, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 1969. London: Picador, 1992. Franzen, Jonathan. “Why Bother? (The Harper’s Essay).” How to Be Alone. London: 4th Estate, 2002, pp. 55–­97. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. 1972. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca ny: Cornell UP, 1980. Hale, Dorothy J. “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-­First Century.” pmla, vol. 124, no. 3, 2009, pp. 896–­905. Heti, Sheila. “An Interview with Dave Hickey.” The Believer 49, November 1, 2007, https://​www​.thebeliever​.net/​an​-interview​-with​-dave​-hickey/. Johnson, B. S. Christie Malry’s Own Double-­Entry. 1973. London: Picador, 2013. King, Elizabeth. The Novelist in the Novel: Gender and Genius in Fictional Representations of Authorship, 1850–­1949. New York: Routledge, 2023. 196  Dawson

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. A Man in Love. My Struggle, vol. 2. Translated by Don Bartlett. 2009. London: Vintage, 2013. Kobek, Jarett. I Hate the Internet. Los Angeles ca: We Heard You Like Books, 2016. ­McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. London: Penguin, 2011. Sorrentino, Gilbert. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. New York: Pantheon, 1971. Spark, Muriel. The Comforters. 1957. London: Virago Press, 2009. Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero. 1848. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Worthington, Marjorie. The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2018.



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10

Dead Authors Tell No Tales The Ailing Author-­Character in Contemporary Novels about Novelists Elizabeth King

The death, exhaustion, and irrelevance of both the novel and the novelist have been declared on more than one occasion over the last century. And yet novelists not only continue to write novels, but they continue to write novels about novelists. In this chapter, I consider how anxiety concerning the much-­discussed decline and death of the novel might have manifested in fictional representations of authorship. I argue that the contemporary prevalence of novels featuring novelist-­characters who are dead, dying, diseased, depressed, or otherwise ailing can be viewed not only as a reflection of the precarious position of novel and novelist but also as an attempt to prevent their untimely demise by calling on the reader for assistance. The following represents only a small sample of ailing authors in twenty-­first-­century novels: the aging, impotent protagonist of Joseph Heller’s Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000); the incontinent author-­narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, and his deceased writer friend, E. I. Lonoff, in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost (2007); the hospitalized, hallucinating novelist in Paul Bailey’s Chapman’s Odyssey (2011); and the amnesiac author whose story is folded through Matthew Macintosh’s labyrinthine Themystery.doc (2017). Collectively, the maladies of ailing authors in novels published after 2000 include everything from heart disease, blindness, and terminal cancer to insomnia, paralysis, and periods of crippling writer’s block lasting anywhere from two to twenty-­five years.1 The maladies of these ailing author figures function as metaphors for a range of authorial anxieties surrounding the decline and death of the novel, but at the same time, the figure of the frail and ailing author 199

works to remodel the traditional power dynamic between reader and writer, implicating the reader in the struggle to save fiction. The Death(s) of the Novel Claims that the novel is dead or dying—­and that the author is a cultural and critical irrelevance—­are nothing new, although they have become commonplace in recent decades. In his 2014 article “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real),” Will Self noted, “The omnipresent and deadly threat to the novel has been imminent now for a long time—­getting on, I would say, for a century—­and so it’s become part of culture.” Arguably, it was during the first few decades of the twentieth century that serious concerns began to be raised over the genre’s decline and the author’s impending insignificance: as early as 1902, Jules Verne fretted that novels would be replaced by newspapers because “they are not necessary, and even now their merit and their interest are fast declining” (qtd. in McEvoy 173); while in 1925, José Ortega y Gasset predicted the imminent exhaustion of the veins of literary fiction’s “vast but finite quarry” (58); and in 1946, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley boldly insisted that an author’s life and intentions were irrelevant to the interpretation of the work. By the 1960s, critics were in agreement regarding the declining authority of novel and novelist. Along with Marshall McLuhan’s dark predictions in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Roland Barthes’s proclamation of “The Death of the Author” (1967), and Michel Foucault’s famous inquiry into that same author’s very function (“What Is an Author?” [1969]), Wayne Booth introduced the notion of the “implied author” as a way for critics to talk about authors without having to deal with living, breathing (or dead, or dying) authors themselves. Unsurprisingly, as Jeremy Green argues in Late Postmodernism (2005), toward the end of the twentieth century, there was a “sense of crisis surrounding the public for literature, the authority of literary and critical activity, and the ways in which value is attributed to cultural practices” (6). Late twentieth-­century stories of authorship responded to the perceived threats to the novel in distinct ways. Some novelists reacted to the proclamation of their death by defying it. In John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), the author-­narrator famously reveals himself not only to show his readers that he is the master of his characters’ fates 200  King

but also to proclaim, “The novelist is still a god, since he creates. . . . What has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority” (97). However, this “freedom” typically manifested in metafiction through elaborate performances of the author’s powers to create and destroy, to control their own text and absorb others, and to confound the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief through metalepsis. Ronald Sukenick, for example, makes himself both narrator and character in his short story about writing a short story, “The Death of the Novel” (1969), in which his analog admits that the other characters are “only characters” (84) and then walks the reader through his creative process: “Now let’s do a retake of that, with a little more accuracy this time. But first a little background material. Narrative mode” (51). Other writers imagined a near future in which the jobs of writers and critics would be usurped by machines. For example, a novelist-­character in David Lodge’s Small World (1984) loses the will to write after a theory machine at a “Centre for Computational Stylistics” analyzes his style and parrots it back to him, revealing that his most used word is “grease” (385). Some even decried the influence of literary theory and political correctness on the writer’s mission: the militant theorists who threaten the life and livelihood of the academic-­cum-­novelist hero of Robert Grudin’s Book: A Novel (1992) produce works named “Oracle, Orifice” and “The Text as Undergarment,” with one even penning “a polemic which asserted that books were not written by people, or, if they were, they were not books” (235). Despite such ripostes, concerns about the demise of literature have not ceased in the new millennium. Instead, since the year 2000, discussion of the ill health and imminent death of the novel has continued unabated, focusing on the same old issues as well as newfangled threats ranging from reports of a decline in literacy caused by our ever-­increasing “screen time,”2 to the current taste for fact-­based media described by David Shields in his manifesto Reality Hunger (2010), and the alleged threat posed to authors by identity politics and cancel culture—­the offspring of political correctness.3 Predicting that the novel would soon be absorbed into online forms, J. Hillis Miller wrote in 2002 that “the end of literature is at hand. Literature’s time is almost up” (1), while in his 2019 monograph The Decline of the Novel, Joseph Bottum contended that

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“the decline of the novel’s prestige reflects and confirms a genuine cultural crisis” as well as a “breakdown of the old agreement between readers and writers that novels matter.” Writers, too, have reflected in their nonfiction on the novel’s uncertain future: Naguib Mahfouz in 2005, Zadie Smith in 2008, Philip Roth in 2009 (qtd. in Flood), and Will Self in 2019—­to name a few. How has all this apocalyptic rhetoric registered in fiction, though? Several scholars have already recognized a continuation of the postmodern attempt to reclaim writerly authority in contemporary fiction: Paul Dawson has suggested that a recent return to omniscient narration in fiction “can be understood as one way in which authors have responded to a perceived decline in the cultural authority of the novel over the last two decades” (5), while Marjorie Worthington has argued persuasively that contemporary American autofiction is both a symptom of the declining authority of the white male writer and a reminder that this author still lives and writes. David Hadar has proposed that Philip Roth and Nicole Krauss employ elderly author-­protagonists in their novels as a way to fictionally appropriate some of the “literary capital and authority that comes . . . with late style” or is endowed posthumously (283). Curiously, though, the figure of the ailing author in contemporary fiction at times seems to achieve the opposite effect: the sick and dying novelist is sapped of power, relinquishing rather than reclaiming it. This has two significant effects: the first is that the physical and mental maladies of these author figures help make the complex and abstract predicament of the contemporary novelist more legible to the reader by somatizing it as a disease, and the second is that such representations of authorship remodel and even reverse the traditionally hierarchical dynamic of the traditional author–­reader relationship. No longer the student or congregant learning moral lessons from the Victorian novelist, nor the erudite decoder of the modernist one, nor even the victim of postmodernist pranks, the reader of stories of ailing authorship becomes the author’s guide, healer, interpreter, and savior. Instead of focusing on the author’s need to reinvent fiction and recover his waning power, stories of ailing authorship suggest that it is by strengthening the affective bonds and the reciprocal relationship between reader and writer that literature will be saved.

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Significantly, the novels discussed here largely depart from metafiction’s central mission of questioning and critiquing the supremacy of literary realism and the idea of knowable truth. Instead, they seem to advocate a return to some of realism’s humanist aims and habits; they make a move away from metafiction’s showmanship and toward sincerity, honesty, and intimacy between reader and writer.4 It is a shift that sounds a lot like the “new sincerity” described by David Foster Wallace in his essay “E Unibus Pluram” (1993), in which he hopes for future writers “who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-­consciousness and hip fatigue” (192–­93). Moreover, at a cultural moment when “fake news,” reality tv, and deepfakes mean that our reality hunger can never truly be satisfied, these contemporary author stories refuse to differentiate between fact and fiction, instead harnessing the power of magic and mystery by casting the author in the role of a prophet or clairvoyant who can receive messages from beyond the grave and even see, through a glass darkly, into the future. And yet, much like Marx’s bourgeoisie sorcerer, the contemporary ailing author “is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (78). Rather than a creative agent, the contemporary author is only able to receive and describe visions, requiring the reader’s assistance not only to interpret them but to believe in them and act accordingly. The Ghost of Authors Past: Authorial Hauntings in Enrique VilaMatas’s Bartleby & Co. and David Markson’s The Last Novel Both Enrique Vila-­Matas and David Markson compose novels from literary detritus: fiction exists in their novels only between walls of factoids salvaged from the literary past. While both authors’ novels seem to mark an end to creativity and accept the reign of fact, they also force readers to construct fiction for themselves beyond the page and between the lines. Marcelo, the narrator of Vila-­Matas’s Bartleby & Co., suffers from congenital kyphosis (a hunchback), which has led to a life of relative isolation and a string of unrequited loves. Marcelo also contends with bouts of depression and, following the publication of his debut novel “on the impossibility of love” a quarter-­century earlier, has had an unshakable case of what he calls “the illness, Bartleby’s syndrome . . . a disease endemic to contemporary letters” (15). Both Marcelo’s physical

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disfigurement and his writer’s block seem to refer to other literary texts that end in death. Much like the protagonist of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), Marcelo would simply “prefer not to” write anything at all, while his physical ailment likens him to Quasimodo in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). Just as Quasimodo is prepared to die for Esmerelda, Marcelo is willing to give up his livelihood—­indeed, he quits his job—­in order to pursue his own unrequited love for literature. Vila-­Matas’s vision of the contemporary author, then, is one who is unable to fully consummate his love for literature by actually writing—­and yet pursues this goal anyway. To this end, Marcelo commits to an act of writing that is also a way of not-­writing, penning “a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text” about other sufferers of Bartleby’s syndrome, past and present (1). Of the numerous writers discussed, some never produce literature to begin with, some give it up, and others commit suicide. Vila-­Matas relays the struggles of real novelists and poets—­from Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, Kafka, and Melville to lesser-­k nown figures such as Joseph Joubert and Felisberto Hernandez—­but he also slips in several entirely imagined literary Bartlebys. Among the fictional minority are Clement Cadou, who spends “his whole life forgetting that he once had the idea to be a writer” by painting endless pictures of furniture, all titled “self-­ portrait” (28); Paranoid Perez, whose every idea for a novel is anticipated and published by famed Portuguese writer José Saramago; and Maria Lima Mendez, a friend of Marcelo’s who quits writing after reading poststructuralist theory and realizing that “there was nothing else to write and there was nowhere even to begin saying that it was impossible to write” (43). The stories of the invented Bartlebys are typically no more or less affecting or credible than those of their historical counterparts, suggesting that privileging fact over fiction is a pointless exercise. After all, fiction has ways of manifesting in reality: real-­world artist Marco Gobbi has produced furniture artworks inspired by Vila-­Matas’s apocryphal Clement Cadou. What all the Bartlebys, historical and fictional, have in common is both the desire to write and the fear that to write something worthwhile and original is now (whenever now is in history) an impossible task. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely his interest in the impossibility of writing that has inspired Marcelo to pick up his pen. He argues that succumbing 204  King

to Bartleby’s syndrome is “the only path still open to genuine literary creation” because it “tells the truth about the grave, but highly stimulating, prognosis of literature at the end of the millennium. Only from the negative impulse, from the labyrinth of the No, can the writing of the future appear” (3). The novel’s “grave” future thus acts as a stimulant to the writer even as it hampers his work. Bartleby & Co. is its own “labyrinth of the No” from which only the savvy reader will emerge with any meaning. As a series of footnotes with no body text, the book forces readers to assemble the slight story of Marcelo’s devotion to literature through and around his portraits of others, asking them to heed the warning inherent in his description of “the last writer, with whom sooner or later, because it has to happen, without witnesses, the small mystery of literature will disappear” (136). Crucially, this last writer perishes “without witness”—­without a reader—­suggesting that the reader’s watchful gaze and willingness to solve “the small mystery of literature” might play a role in preserving it. David Markson’s The Last Novel (2007) is another novel in notes formed from snippets of literary and artistic history held loosely together by occasional references to the narrator, who in this case is known only as “Novelist” and describes himself as “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke. All of which obviously means that this is the last book Novelist is going to write” (118). The factoids that form the substance of Markson’s novel dwell on the artistic process, on the lives of artists, and on the dates, places, and situations of their deaths: “Stratford-­upon-­Avon, Marie Corelli died in” (68); “Italo Calvino died after a cerebral haemorrhage suffered while sitting in a garden” (97). Like Vila-­Matas’s work, The Last Novel is a fact-­ based fiction that forces readers to make up the story for themselves by reading between the lines, cobbling together a picture of Novelist’s sad predicament from the facts he selects and assembles. It soon becomes apparent that Novelist’s obsession with the deaths and legacies of authors and artists is a symptom of anxiety about his own imminent end. Novelist is not only losing his memory—­finding himself in “utter bewilderment” after searching for a shirt he is already wearing (87)—­he is also suffering from an illness hinted at in clinical medical reports: “Multiple surgical chain staples are evident in the right lung, consistent with prior resections” (142). This is a portrait of the artist who finds that his memory of the literary past is of no use to him in

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the present, an author who has been cut open—­dissected by critics prodding his textual insides for meaning—­and roughly stapled back together. Novelist thus attempts to bring the past to bear on the present as a way of comprehending the incomprehensible, and readers are encouraged to make meaning from the way his literary tidbits are juxtaposed. For example, the line “He who today writes artistically dies without recognition or reward. Complained Lope de Vega—­in 1609” is paired with what reads as a commentary on Novelist’s own previous works: “Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?” (155). If both de Vega’s and Novelist’s audiences have missed the point of their work, Markson suggests that it is up to the present reader to make connections between these “little things,” forging their own fiction about the state of the contemporary writer in the process. The novel actively encourages readers to make such connections by informing them explicitly that they are there to be made—­that “for all its seeming fragmentation,” Novelist’s personal genre is “nonetheless obstinately cross-­referential” (51). Markson’s novel rewards the reader who has a strong knowledge of literary and artistic history (or who is willing to acquire it with Google) and is committed to seeking out these cross-­references. An unattributed quotation given just before Novelist’s apparent suicide is imbued with greater poignancy if readers know or discover that the line—­“I was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning”—­belongs to a poem by Stevie Smith, written months before her own suicide attempt (187). Moreover, only readers who also recall, from an earlier snippet, that Sylvia Plath called herself “[a] desperate Stevie Smith addict” will grasp the full import of the quoted line, which draws Smith, Plath, and Novelist together in a kind of suicidal posthumous solidarity (152). In this way, the reading experience is uniquely augmented by the knowledge and attentiveness of the readers: every connection brings readers closer to Novelist’s dark frame of mind so that the work’s commentary on the state of contemporary letters exists most potently off the page, in the minds of its readers. Future Fictions: Prophetic Authorship in Paul Auster’s Oracle Night and Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void In Paul Auster’s Oracle Night (2003) and Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015), the author assumes the role of a naïve seer who fails to realize the import of his mysterious visions. The author figures in these 206  King

novels must learn that fiction can, in fact, have far-­reaching consequences in the real world—­a lesson they can only learn from their readers, or by becoming readers themselves. Sidney Orr, the narrator of Oracle Night, is a novelist in his thirties convalescing after a sudden collapse leaves him so ill that even months after he has left the hospital, he feels like his friends still “couldn’t believe I was alive, that they hadn’t buried me in some graveyard back at the beginning of the year” (70). Orr’s mystery illness causes symptoms ranging from extreme exhaustion to prolific, unpredictable nosebleeds. His medication, moreover, causes erectile dysfunction, which leaves him unable to perform his “duties as a husband” (130), a popular trope for creative impotence that appears in novels by Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Ben Lerner, to name a few.5 Orr’s sickness presents a powerful metaphor for contemporary authorship: weary and exhausted—­presumed dead, even—­Orr lacks control over his own body and thus his fate. He finds himself in the unhappy situation of being both unable to please his wife and almost entirely dependent on her for care, much as contemporary authors might find themselves unable to satisfy the public on whom their livelihoods depend. If readers have difficulty identifying with the plight of a forsaken, readerless novelist, they are certainly able to understand the feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy experienced by Orr as a sick man. Auster thus makes the abstract suffering of a contemporary author legible to the reader. Oracle Night also contains a second ailing author: John Trause, a successful writer in his fifties now confined to the couch with deep-­vein thrombosis, which will eventually cause the embolism that kills him. Living with thrombosis, Trause remarks, is like “walking around with a little bomb in my leg” (95), a fitting metaphor for the precarity of the novelist and the novel, whose deaths are perpetually on the horizon. Trause’s thrombosis is also a blockage that effectively paralyzes him and consigns him to inaction, making it a near-­perfect metaphor for writer’s block—­a condition from which both Orr and Trause suffer. While Trause’s thrombosis seems to be a somatization of the writer’s block that has prevented him from publishing for over seven years, Orr’s writer’s block is a direct result of the helplessness produced by his illness. A cure for Orr’s writer’s block presents itself when he purchases a mysterious blue notebook in which he finds himself finally able to write.

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However, as Orr lends details from his real life to characters in his story, the story begins manifesting in his life in unsettling ways: just as the protagonist of the tale leaves his wife for another woman, the previously faithful Orr has a highly out-­of-­character extramarital encounter; and almost as soon as Orr traps his protagonist in an underground bunker, his wife reports a dream in which the two of them meet with the same fate. Meanwhile, whenever Orr sits down to write, he seems to physically vanish from his desk, and he becomes unsure “if I’m the one who’s using the notebook or if the notebook’s been using me” (99). Compelled to write despite the damage it is beginning to inflict on his life, Orr’s situation is suggestive of the personal toll writing takes on the writer as well as of the power of fiction to impact reality rather than merely reflect it. As though to warn him of this, Trause tells Orr a story about another writer who persuaded himself that a poem he wrote about the drowning of a child caused the death of his own daughter: “A fictional tragedy had provoked a real tragedy in the real world. . . . Words could alter reality, and therefore they were . . . dangerous” (133). As this story and the novel’s title imply, literature can be prophetic, but often in ways beyond the author’s control. As Trause says to Orr, “Words are real”: “Sometimes we know things before they happen, . . . the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that’s what writing is all about. . . . Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future” (133). The idea that novels are capable of “making things happen in the future” is not so much a radical proposition as it is an observable historical phenomenon: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was banned for provoking copycat suicides that mimicked the protagonist’s tragic end; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was charged with starting the civil war that ended slavery in the United States; and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) strikingly anticipated the modern surveillance state. If readers have forgotten the prophetic and world-­changing potential of literature, Auster’s novel reminds them. Although Orr initially argues that there is “no cause and effect between the words in a poem and the events in our lives,” this is explicitly denied by the novel’s plot, in which reading fiction consistently leads to material change. It is only after reading a story by Trause that Orr finally uncovers—­or thinks he has uncovered—­a long-­standing affair between the older writer and his own wife, although he concedes, “I don’t know if 208  King

it’s fact or fiction, but in the end I don’t care” (132). Whether true or false, Trause’s story assists Orr in understanding his wife and his friend, ultimately restoring Orr’s own faith in writing: his return to artistic potency is emblematized in the conception of a child at the novel’s conclusion. The impact of fiction on reality is a central theme of Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015). Its narrator, Claude, is an investment banker working in Dublin’s financial district on the eve of the global financial crisis (gfc) when he is approached by a novelist named Paul who asks to observe Claude in order to make him his modern everyman, the star of a Ulysses 2.0. Paul—­unlike the real, award-­winning author, Paul Murray—­has written only a single unsuccessful novel seven years ago and has subsequently given up writing for a life of boozing and strip clubs. As a depressed dipsomaniac, Paul’s own particular ailments indicate a contemporary author on the brink of opting out, whether by numbing himself with alcohol or through the literal self-­annihilation of suicide. This author’s intention, though, is not to write a novel about Claude but rather to rob the bank where he works—­a plan scuppered by the fact that no cash is kept on the premises of investment banks. The novel plays on the idea that both the investment banker and the novelist trade on fictions, since the stock market is a place where hypothetical and probabilistic futures are traded off against each other: the ceo of Claude’s bank is accused of “turning reality into a fruit machine” (68). Yet just as the fictions of the banking industry led to the gfc and impacted the lives of real people, so too, Murray suggests, might the novel make its mark on the real world. Claude’s description of the stock market thus has implications for fiction: “Spread a story, no matter how wild; if even a handful of shareholders believe it and sell their stock, a notional drop in value becomes an actual drop, the false narrative supersedes the true” (384). What if, the novel posits, the intention of the storyteller is not to make a fortune but rather to, as Paul somewhat caustically confesses of his own failed novel, “usher in a new era of peace and harmony, all that” (220)? Whereas banking converts people into numbers on a balance sheet, the novel has the potential to do the reverse: it is able to forge people—­characters—­out of mere letters and words, and with them produce real emotions. When Paul finally admits that his book is a scam, Claude begs him to continue to give meaning to his life, essentially by imagining a new

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one for him: “Instead of putting my life into your book, you would, so to speak, put your book into my life” (163). Although he is in one sense Paul’s character, Claude is also his reader, insisting on continuing to suspend his disbelief even after Paul reveals his sleight of hand. After all, Paul’s offhand suggestion that Claude should fall in love with a waitress at a café prompts real feelings to develop: “Finding out the novel was a fake hasn’t dimmed her appeal . . . It’s as if, simply by making the suggestion, Paul had set something in motion. . . . The feelings refuse to leave me” (129). The solitary and aloof Claude—­who cares little for the people his work may have immiserated—­begins to develop a conscience and a romantic streak only once he starts to think of himself as Paul’s fictional character. So strong is Claude’s belief in Paul’s work that he attributes prophetic abilities to the writer, noting, “I have the strangest sense he already knows what I am going to say . . . but the sound of his voice is warm and human, not the voice of a god or an omniscient overseer” (28). Not an all-­k nowing god but rather akin to a canny trader, Paul, Claude believes, “can see the story before anyone else—­not all of it, just the first lines, the edges, as they are coming out of the future” (172). Acting on a desire to find a fitting conclusion to the bogus novel that has become his real life, Claude decides to rob the bank electronically and redistribute funds, Robin Hood style, to the needy. The depressed Paul, meanwhile, is reciprocally rescued from himself by Claude’s unwavering belief in his creative powers, as the banker appropriates the talk of his trade to restore Paul’s self-­esteem and encourage him to write again: “You are the great investment opportunity! You have the chance to get in on the ground floor—­of yourself!” (326). What these novels have in common is their insistence that the novel is not merely a fictional artifact but offers its own kind of truth, which can have real consequences. The novelist is framed not as an authority or source of absolute meaning but rather as a kind of temperamental weathervane unable to control the wind that blows it: it is up to readers to interpret the signs, believe in them, and apply the messages they receive. “For You, to You”: Writing for the Reader in J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 The author may be able to recall a forgotten literary past or predict the contours of the future, but in J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) 210  King

and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) it is made apparent that such talents are wasted if the author has no reader to receive them. The septuagenarian protagonist of Diary of a Bad Year is a famous South African novelist—­like Coetzee himself—­suffering from a degenerative nerve disease that makes it physically difficult to write. Having given up novel-­writing, he is working on an essay collection called Strong Opinions, treating topics such as terrorism, asylum seekers, anarchism, and even avian influenza. These nonfictional essays take up the bulk of each page, at the bottom of which a second and third narrative stream are appended like a series of footnotes—­fiction subordinated to fact and opinion.6 The first of these narratives charts the author’s growing interest in Anya, a twenty-­nine-­year-­old Filipina woman he hires to type up his “half-­blind scrawl” (29) and who, believing him to be South American, dubs him Señor C. The second narrative offers Anya’s perspective, including her thoughts on the work she does for the old author (“it makes me yawn”), her youth in the Philippines, and her relationship with Alan, a banker who plots to steal the dying writer’s millions by forging his will. Señor C’s disease impairs his ability to read and write: “There is no denying my handwriting is deteriorating. I am losing motor control. . . . There are days when I squint at what I have just written, barely able to decipher it myself” (31). However, his illness also mirrors his authorial angst. When Anya—­who chides C for the “know-­it-­a ll” tone of his essays (70)—­tells the author that he would be better off writing another novel, he confesses, “I don’t have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today” (54). But Anya, who represents the tastes and views of a modern readership, disagrees, telling the author, “Write your memoirs. . . . Write about the world around you. Write about the birds” (35). In other words, it is the personal and subjective view of the world—­not a detached perspective on the abstract issues of the day—­that the reader demands, and needs, from the novelist. The crotchety author is hostile to Anya’s suggestions but becomes ever more interested in her desires as he comes to know her. A manifestation of the kind of contemporary reader who interacts with the author on social media platforms and rates their works on websites like Goodreads.com, Anya is unafraid to confront the famous novelist about

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what readers want: “I enjoy a good story, . . . [a] story with human interest, that I can relate to. There is nothing wrong with that” (77). Of course, this is precisely what the footnoted narratives provide: C’s slow deterioration becomes poignant as his interest in the lively Anya throws it into sharp relief, while Anya’s own strong opinions all stem from personal experience—­of poverty, religious extremism, prostitution, sexual assault—­making the author’s writings on similarly serious subjects seem more staid and sterile than ever. As the pages turn, it becomes more difficult to attend to C’s impersonal, rational views on political problems when the bottom of the page is beckoning: the novel gradually weans its readers off fact and onto fiction. C’s penultimate contribution to Strong Opinions, titled “On authority in fiction,” asks, “What if authority can be attained only by opening the poet-­self to some higher force, by ceasing to be oneself and beginning to speak vatically?” (151) This idea of the prophetic author prompts C to jot down a premise for another novel, the first indication of his potential return to fiction. “Beginning to speak vatically” thus offers a new avenue for the author to travel, one that is revealed to him only after he acknowledges the demands of the reader. Beginning a second diary entitled Soft Opinions, C finally takes Anya’s advice, writing about his own personal and literary past: “As a young man, I never for a moment allowed myself to doubt that only from a self disengaged from the mass and critical of the mass could true art emerge. Whatever art has come from my hand has . . . gloried in this disengagement. But what sort of art has that been, in the end? Art that is not great-­souled, as the Russians would say, that lacks generosity, fails to celebrate life, lacks love” (170). C’s critics, we are told, have also made note of this tendency in his writing, calling him, he recounts, “not a novelist after all . . . but a pedant who dabbles in fiction” (191). The final gesture of the novel is to move beyond this pedantry, toward a kind of writing premised on making a connection with the reader, as represented by Anya. When she asks C, cheekily, whether he has put her into his book, his response is telling: “Yes, you are part of the book—­how could you not be when you were part of the making of it? You are everywhere in it, everywhere and nowhere. Like God, though not on the same scale” (181). Echoing and reversing Flaubert’s famous dictum about the author, Coetzee makes the reader the very center of his fictional world, as did Flaubert in writing Madame Bovary 212  King

(1856). In return, Anya inspires C to write fiction again and protects his legacy by talking her boyfriend out of his fraudulent scheme. In Ben Lerner’s 10:04, the autofictional protagonist, Ben, suffers from Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder of the connective tissue that transforms his aorta into an Achilles’ heel: “A blow to my aorta could kill me” (48). Like John Trause’s thrombosis, this venous complaint highlights the perilousness of the author’s existence in a world where the future of reading fiction hangs in the balance. The future is a major concern for Lerner’s narrator, not only the troubling possible future in which his aorta may fail him, but also the future of the literary past—­namely, how literary legacies, once constructed, might be (or fail to be) protected and maintained. In the novel, literary and artistic achievement are seemingly amplified by age and death: Ben divides the authors and critics he meets at a literary dinner into two groups, “so distinguished I’d often thought of them as dead” and “too young to be distinguished” (116–­17). A legacy, after all, is something you build over a lifetime and leave behind when you die, and the novel meditates on how the very idea of lasting into futurity can influence what the writer produces in the present. On the subject of literary legacies, Ben comes up with the idea of expanding a previously published story—­the real Ben Lerner’s “The Golden Vanity” (reprinted in full in 10:04)—­into a novel about an author’s forgery of his own literary archive. As Ben explains, when the relatively young protagonist of this proposed novel—­referred to as “The Author”—­is approached by a university library about purchasing his papers for a future archive, he decides to fabricate his own correspondence, not feeling he has anything worthwhile to offer. Ben describes this as “a response to his own mortality—­like he’s trying to time-­travel, to throw his voice, now that he’s dealing with his own fragility. It starts off as a kind of fraud but I imagine he might really get into it, might really feel like he and the dead are corresponding. Like he’s a medium” (119). Like Orr and Trause of Auster’s text, the contemporary writer is portrayed as a figure whose mortality and fragility are apparent and yet who might nevertheless serve as a kind of oracle, communing with the dead and speaking into the future. The protagonist of this story-­w ithin-­a-­story is yet another ailing author, suffering from “headaches, disordered speech, weakness, visual disturbances, nausea, numbness, paralysis. Prosopagnosia, pareidolia” (74). These last two diagnoses are significant: the first is face blindness,

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an inability to recognize the self or others, and the second is a condition where “the brain arranges random stimuli into meaningful significant image or sound: faces in the moon, animals in the clouds” (69). Although the first would seem to be detrimental to the novelist, we have seen Ben balk at what he perceives as his publisher’s hint that he should “develop a clear, geometrical plot; describe faces, even those at the next table” (156). Instead, the face-­blind yet paredoliac author can be trusted to leave the detailed description of physiognomy to others while he focuses on making something meaningful from the “random stimuli” of the world. This is precisely what Ben attempts to do one evening when, sitting on a park bench, he conjures both an imaginary daughter and a teenage interlocutor for himself, the latter of whom asks him why he has “exchanged a modernist valorization of difficulty as a mode of resistance to the market for the fantasy of coeval readership” (93) This question of coeval readership seems key to all the texts discussed here, but in Lerner’s 10:04, it manifests in Ben turning away from his tricky novel about forging a literary past in order to secure a literary legacy and toward a different kind of writing that concerns itself with his own personal present. The project of the forgery novel begins to have ominous implications: “I remembered the sensation in my chest when I’d sent off the proposal, as if that way of dilating the story was linked to the dilation of my aorta” (137). Writing another clever metafictional narrative on falseness is framed here as a health concern, injurious to the heart of the author. When Ben’s friend Alex, who is also his symbolic reader, warns him to give up the project, her reason is telling: “You believe, even though you’ll deny it, that writing has some kind of magical power. And you’re probably crazy enough to make your fiction come true somehow” (137–­38). Wisely, perhaps, Ben abandons this false fiction to write one that he might actually want to come true: 10:04 itself thus reads as a sincere effort at writing through the current conundrums of contemporary authorship, although it first masquerades as a clever self-­reflexive fiction about a novelist trying to write a novel. As Ben begins to suffer from the very same ailments he once gave to his fictional analog (“headaches, disordered speech, weakness”) and even refers to himself as “the author” (206), the forgery narrative and the one about its construction and abandonment finally merge together. The result, Ben tells his readers at the conclusion of the work, is this book: “not the one I was contracted to write about fraudulence, 214  King

but the one I’ve written in its place for you, to you, on the very edge of fiction” (237). Conclusion Representations of ailing authorship abandon earlier power dynamics in which the author is shown to be omnipotent and omniscient for one in which the author appears to have limited or no control over his powers, acting as a kind of prophet who merely presents impressions for the reader to interpret. Like the author described in David Foster Wallace’s 1999 short story “Octet,” the contemporary writer in such novels is “fundamentally lost and confused and frightened . . . more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us” (136). However, to relinquish such power in favor of this kind of unstable parity requires, arguably, the author to have once felt themselves—­or others like them—­to be in possession of this power in the first place. This may explain the fact that very few author stories by women and writers of color appear to employ ailing authors as their protagonists.7 What female-­authored novels about novelists reveal instead is that the ongoing obstacle against which women writers must struggle is not political correctness, theory, technological advancement, or even an uninterested public. It isn’t anything that prevents their work from being read so much as it is the emotional and domestic labor that robs women of the time and opportunity to write in the first place. This narrative is repeated in contemporary women’s author stories, from Carol Shields’s Unless (2002), in which an author’s worries about her daughter’s depression interrupt her writing, to Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014), narrated by a woman who dreams of being an “art monster” and devoting herself to her writing but finds herself paralyzed by part-­time work, motherhood, and her husband’s infidelity. Writers of color, similarly, have different fish to fry: the narrator of Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001) must contend with the effects of what Christopher González calls “narrative permissibility”—­his masterfully crafted novels are considered “not black enough” (2), while his rival’s We’s Lives in da Ghetto becomes a bestseller.8 As these examples suggest, while some authors see a dwindling readership and declining authority as among the most pressing challenges to contemporary authorship, for others these concerns are farther down a

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long list. One can hope, however, that the willingness of some contemporary novelists to relinquish their power, even if only in fiction, may leave room for others to assume it. Notes 1. I was able to identify seventy-­three novels published between 1960 and 2019 that contained ailing author characters as I have defined them. Of these, seven were published in the 1960s; six in the 1970s; ten in the 1980s; and fourteen during the 1990s. A further seventeen were identified in the 2000s, and nineteen more between 2010 and 2019. These numbers, although far from conclusive, do seem to suggest the increasing prominence of the ailing author in fiction. 2. Caleb Crane’s New Yorker article “Why We Don’t Read, Revisited,” for example, argues that television “remains the primary force distracting Americans from books.” 3. In a 2016 talk given at the Brisbane Writers Festival, Lionel Shriver lamented the fact that the concept of cultural appropriation had led to “proliferating prohibitions supposedly in the interest of social justice that constrain fiction writers and prospectively makes our work impossible.” See also Christopher Gonzalez’s chapter in this volume on the furor over Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt, which was widely accused of cultural appropriation. 4. For more on how stories about writers act as a response to postmodernism, see Lackey and Cernat’s chapter in this volume on contemporary biofiction. 5. Roth’s Exit Ghost, Amis’s The Information, and Lerner’s 10:04 all contain author-­characters who experience erectile dysfunction that appears to be psychologically linked to authorial performance anxiety. 6. For discussions of multimodality and authorship, see chapter 1 by Gibbons and chapter 6 by Pedri in this volume. 7. Only seventeen of the seventy-­three novels of ailing authorship identified for this study were written by women. 8. Just four of the seventy-­three novels identified were written by non-­ Caucasian authors.

Bibliography Auster, Paul. Oracle Night. 2003. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1968. Image-­Music-­Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977, pp. 142–­48. 216  King

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 1961. 2nd ed. Chicago il: U of Chicago P, 1983. Bottum, Joseph. The Decline of the Novel. South Bend in: St. Augustine’s Press, 2019. Coetzee, J. M. Diary of a Bad Year. 2007. London: Vintage, 2008. Crane, Caleb. “Why We Don’t Read, Revisited.” New Yorker, 14 June 2018, https://​www​.newyorker​.com/​culture/​cultural​-comment/​why​-we​-dont​-read​ -revisited. Dawson, Paul. The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-­First Century Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003. Flood, Alison. “Philip Roth Predicts Novel Will Be Minority Cult within 25 Years.” The Guardian, 26 October 2009, https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​ books/​2009/​oct/​26/​philip​-roth​-novel​-minority​-cult​#:​~:​text​=​%22I​%20was​ %20being​%20optimistic​%20about​,chief​%20of​%20The​%20Daily​%20Beast. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” 1969. Language, Counter-­memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca ny: Cornell UP, 1977, pp. 113–­38. Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 1969. London: Vintage, 2010. Green, Jeremy. Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Grudin, Robert. Book: A Novel. 1992. New York: Penguin, 1993. Hadar, David. “Author-­Characters and Authorial Public Image: The Elderly Protagonists in Philip Roth and Nicole Krauss.” Narrative, vol. 26, no. 3, 2018, pp. 282–­301. Lerner, Ben. 10:04: A Novel. 2014. London: Granta, 2015. Lodge, David. “Small World.” 1984. The Campus Trilogy. New York: Penguin, 2011. Mahfouz, Naguib. “The Situation of the Novel.” World Literature Today, vol. 79, no. 2 (May–­August 2005), pp. 46–­47. Markson, David. The Last Novel. Berkeley ca: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Edited with introduction by Jeffrey C. Isaac. New Haven ct: Yale UP. ­McEvoy, Bernard. “Will Novel-­Reading Cease?” Canadian Magazine, vol. 20, 1903, pp. 172–­75. ­McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. Miller, J. Hillis. On Literature. New York: Routledge, 2002. Murray, Paul. The Mark and the Void. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015.

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Ortega y Gasset, José. “Notes on the Novel.” The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Arts, Culture, and Literature. Translated by Helene Weyl. Princeton nj: Princeton UP, 1968. Self, Will. “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real).” The Guardian, 2 May 2014, https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​books/​2014/​may/​02/​will​-self​-novel​ -dead​-literary​-fiction. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. London: Penguin, 2011. Shriver, Lionel. “Lionel Shriver’s Full Speech: ‘I Hope the Concept of Cultural Appropriation Is a Passing Fad.’” The Guardian, 13 September 2016, https://​ www​.theguardian​.com/​commentisfree/​2016/​sep/​13/​lionel​-shrivers​-full​ -speech​-i​-hope​-the​-concept​-of​-cultural​-appropriation​-is​-a​-passing​-fad. Smith, Zadie. “Two Paths for the Novel.” New York Review of Books, 20 November 2008, https://​www​.nybooks​.com/​articles/​2008/​11/​20/​two​-paths​ -for​-the​-novel/. Sukenick, Ronald. “The Death of the Novel.” The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. New York: Dial Press, 1969, pp. 41–­102. Vila-­Matas, Enrique. Bartleby & Co., translated by Johnathan Dunne. 2000. London: Vintage, 2005. Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 151–­94. ———. “Octet.” Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999. Wimsatt, W. K., and M. C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review, vol. 54, no. 3, 1946, pp. 468–­88. Worthington, Marjorie. The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2018.

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Coda

Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology Stefan Kjerkegaard

Within narratology, the author has always been a controversial concept, as evidenced by the much-­debated notion of the implied author. As Susan Lanser writes, “Few terms have stirred narratologists to so much vexation—­a nd passion—­as implied authorship” (“[Im]plying” 153). Additionally, as Liesbeth Korthals Altes states, classical narratology has “cordoned off real authors” but also “let them in through the back door” via the implied author “in order to account for what these critics e­ xperienced as the intentional, strategic, or ideological organization of point of view within the text” (Ethos 133). Paul Dawson adds to these accounts that narratology “has long eschewed consideration of authorship, except in the controversial guise of the implied author, originally proposed to unyoke the question of ‘intentionality’ from its relation to authorial biography” (105). What is it, then, that has prevented narratology from incorporating “the author” as a full-­blown narratological concept? And how can contemporary narratology recover “the author”? In this chapter, I first examine the notion of “the implied author” that emerges in classical narratology by taking a closer look at two concepts that have influenced its conception of the author—­namely, the literary work and authorial intentionality. Second, I examine how postclassical narratology’s critique of the implied author depends on what could be named the contextualists’ main objection (which applies not just to narratology but also to much literary theory), that the concept fails to account for the actual settings in which literature, real authors, and real readers are situated. Finally, I propose to nuance and challenge the term postclassical narratology through 221

postcritical narratology as a means of both meeting and moving beyond the objections raised against the implied author in postclassical narratology. This involves moving toward a more radical view in which narratives and their authors are more properly contextually situated. The overall reason for thinking through these steps is an ambition to explore new and hopefully productive ways of thinking about the author in relation to the literary text. Although this chapter is devoted to theoretical conjectures only, the ambition described must be seen against a background wherein much contemporary literature has been experimenting with new autobiographical forms and where previous ways of reading seem to meet their limits, or at least leave us with insufficient answers. Works by Philip Roth, Bret Easton Ellis, Delphine de Vigan, Michel Houellebecq, Sheila Heti, and Karl Ove Knausgaard are primary examples of such literary experimentation with autobiography and reading. In many of the novels by these authors, our standard views on the literary work and authorial intentionality are contested. They not only show us how, for example, the genre of autofiction explores the borders of fiction and nonfiction; they also shed light on how all novels may potentially be equally complicated when it comes to their relationship to both the outside world and their authors (cf. Kjerkegaard’s “Getting” and “Mediatization”; Schmitt and Kjerkegaard’s “Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle”). These novels challenge customary understandings of literature by incorporating into the often fictional storyworld an unruly element—­namely, the author him-­or herself. In doing so, such texts are asking their readers to relate to not only the truth in fiction but also the truth of fiction. Novels, such as autofictions, then, not only ask their readers about the internal relations, networks, and alliances within the boundaries of the literary work; they also explicitly challenge readers regarding the boundaries between fiction and the outside world. As Knausgaard summarizes his ambitions toward the end of My Struggle, the commitment to the novel was not enough for him; he also wanted to commit himself to reality (The End 977).1 Literary Work and Authorial Intentionality Classical narratology’s treatment of the author emerges from and has been hindered by, as I see it, two concepts: the literary work and authorial intentionality. The principal argument against classical narratology’s 222  Kjerkegaard

account of the author rests on its basis within the text, or more precisely, its starting point within the concept of the literary work. Indeed, Ruth Ginsburg and Shlomith Rimmon-­Kenan speak of “the Janus-­like concept of the author” (72) precisely because that concept refers to “both an agent responsible for the text and a position within it” (72). As Tom Kindt and Hans-­Harald Müller explain in The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy, Wayne C. Booth attempted to resolve a conflict between two objectives: “On the one hand, he [Booth] wanted to bring author and recipient back into focus in the academic study of literature; on the other hand, he wanted to avoid stepping outside the work itself and thus committing one of the fallacies that the New Criticism had established as heresies of interpretation theory” (50). In attempting to settle this conflict within narratology, Booth’s solution was, therefore, the idea of an implied author. However, since a coherent and unified idea of a literary work is itself very hard to maintain (cf. Birke and Christ), some of the concepts developed along this line of thought also are to be—­and indeed many have already been—­questioned. The concept of the literary work has always been problematic, not only in narratology. One need only recall Roland Barthes’s writings—­for instance, the essay “From Work to Text.” Alternatively, one might consider Gérard Genette’s study of paratext that, as Georg Stanitzek summarizes, rests on a tension concerning the boundaries of the literary work: “[Genette’s] concentration on the paratext . . . leads to a negation of the unquestioned premise that was thought to be his starting point. A view of an ‘“undefined zone” between the inside and the outside’ is opened up, and in it perspectives are divided, multiplied, and dispersed” (32).2 Florian Sedlmeier additionally contends “that Genette’s conception of the paratext facilitates testing the limits of narratology precisely because it destabilizes a central tacit assumption that unites formalism, structuralism, and deconstruction—­the existence of a text—­without, of course, giving up on it” (64). Since Genette’s early work in narratology, the sense of what constitutes the limits of the literary work has changed, and the emergence of a profoundly new media landscape raises questions about what defines literature in a time when the bound book is no longer as “natural” a host for the literary work as it used to be. The question of intentionality is also a tricky one within narratology.3 As shown by David Herman, the historical development of narratology Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology  223

has resulted in some inherited misconceptions, including the question of the implied author. According to Herman, “An anti-­intentionalist bias was given impetus by New Critical strictures against the ‘intentional fallacy’” and was later “reinforced by structuralist narratologists’ reliance on Saussurean language theory” (“Narrative Theory” 238). Herman claims that Booth’s construct “was an artifact of the formalist commitments of the formalist New Critics” (243) and that anti-­intentionalist objections were misplaced from the start. Herman’s critique is mainly based on the idea that structuralism and especially poststructuralism, with Saussure as the focal point, is focused on the linguistic system and perhaps even more on how language does not work (in accordance with langue) instead of how it actually works (in accordance with parole). Herman therefore proposes a rethinking of the nature of intentionality “and the cascade of consequences that derive from an anti-­intentionalism based on ‘internalist’ models of intentions as (wholly) immaterial mental states” (244). His wish therefore is for future narratology to shift from intention conceived as an inner mental object to intention conceived as a structure of know-­how. Herman suggests reading with and using intentional stances instead of buying into the premise that they are either forbidden or limited starting points of interpretations—­or put more plainly, interpretative fallacies. In this view, intentionality is instead “distributed across text producers, text interpreters, textual designs, and the communicative environments in which such designs are produced and interpreted” (256). In fact, this is a view of both literary work and intentionality that aligns with many of Genette’s more or less implicit conclusions about the literary work in his paratext studies. In general, however, postclassical narratology (cf. Herman, “Introduction”; Alber and Fludernik) seems to offer better solutions for how to manage such a dispersed idea of the literary work and how to bypass the anti-­intentionalist fallacies inherited by classical narratology. As Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck argue, “Whereas structuralism was intent on coming up with a general theory of narrative, postclassical narratology prefers to consider the circumstances that make every act of reading different” (“Postclassical” 450). It is this change in postclassical narratology’s scholarly attention—­for example foregrounding the particular, but often discursive and multimediated, communication between authors and readers instead of an abstract and limited idea of a 224  Kjerkegaard

literary work communicating to its readers—­that influences, and to my mind also should influence, our idea of authorship and hence our notions about authorial intentionality and the literary work. In a postclassical narratology conception, we are much less dependent on the idea of the literary text as a closed linguistic system (cf. Saussure’s idea of langue) and therefore also less dependent on examining it in search of a kind of grammar that unlinks its possible narrative features from context and contingencies, the (empirical) author included. Postclassical and Contextual Narratology The postclassical view of the literary work and authorial intentionality therefore seems to be much more pragmatic and aligned to other forms of mediated communication in the twenty-­first century. Literature is no longer treated as a cultural artifact with special features that other forms of cultural artifacts do not comprise. In this sense, postclassical narratology seems to expand a kind of deromanticizing of literature and literary scholarship and its considerations about the author (dead or alive) that has been more or less observable since the beginning of literary theory—­for instance, in Russian formalism. This deromanticizing development can perhaps also be thought of and/or explained as a gradual contextualization throughout the twentieth century. Even if the idea of making every reading act different is essential to understanding how postclassical narratology fundamentally aims at breaking with classical narratology, it is also this sense of the uniqueness of each literary act that perhaps makes postclassical narratology not really postclassical at all but rather what Seymour Chatman—­with much reluctance—­coined contextualist narratology. The term comes from his 1990 article “What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology?” in which he writes, “The Contextualists’ chief objection to narratology is that it fails to take into account the actual setting in which literature is situated. . . . The more we learn about the nature of language in its social setting, the harder it is to accept simplistic attempts to isolate a ‘literary’ language from language at large” (309–­10). In the article, Chatman actually argues against a contextualist approach, positioning Barbara Herrnstein Smith as his main opponent. Smith’s On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language (1978) introduces a pragmatic distinction between natural discourse and fictive discourse Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology  225

with which the more recent rhetoric of fictionality—­as exemplified by Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh (“Ten Theses”)—­shares sympathies. Later, Smith wrote the article “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,” in which she invented the now famous (among narratologists, at least) formula of “someone telling someone else that something happened”: “Accordingly, we might conceive of narrative discourse most minimally and most generally as verbal acts consisting of someone telling someone else that something happened. Among the advantages of such a conception is that it makes explicit the relation of narrative discourse to other forms of discourse and, thereby, to verbal, symbolic, and social behavior generally” (232). The formula has subsequently been revised and introduced into classical narratology by James Phelan (Somebody), although many of its most radical consequences do not come through in his version. Of relevance here, for instance, is that Smith’s initial definition would probably exclude any idea of an implied author, since it would depend on what she calls “dualistic models” of language that are “confined to the examination of decontextualized structures,” which are “deficient in descriptive subtlety and explanatory force” (“Narrative” 236).4 With “dualistic models” Smith refers to a “naive Platonism” (213) that—­in accordance with, for instance, a Saussurean thinking—­distinguishes between langue and parole. She thinks that (classical) narratology inherits such ideas in, for example, the idea of story versus discourse. Nevertheless, what Chatman does see as redeemable about the contextualist approach is the attempt to take into consideration the actual setting in which literature is situated. Significantly, such considerations also characterize many of the postclassical arguments against the implied author. I will demonstrate this with reference to the critiques in different postclassical positions ranging from what can be called a prepostclassical approach from Susan Lanser; a discursive approach from Paul Dawson, Liesbeth Korthals Altes, and Herman and Vervaeck; and finally a rhetorical approach from Richard Walsh and Henrik Zetterberg-­Nielsen. The Prepostclassical Approach: Lanser It might seem somewhat anachronistic to place Susan Lanser’s work, both in general and specifically her critique of the implied author, within a frame of postclassical narratology (hence the heading above). Herrnstein Smith would then, we might presume, also qualify as prepostclassical. Yet 226  Kjerkegaard

according to Chatman’s view, Lanser, who is also mentioned in Chatman’s article alongside Smith, has a contextualist approach, which has been one of the major inspirations for much postclassical narratology, not least by Paul Dawson, whose thinking I will return to shortly. In “(Im)plying the Author” from 2001, Lanser notices that “the persistence of the author in a supposedly postmodern moment is not peculiar to narratology; despite the deconstructive challenges of such theorists as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, authorship still dominates the study and the consumption of literature” (153). Lanser is evidently interested not in getting rid of the term implied author altogether but rather in offering a more reasonable approach through a critique that nuances the concept within the confines of existing narratology. She argues that we need to move beyond the notion of a unified and coherent understanding of the author-­subject that has previously dominated the concept of authorship. Instead, we must recognize that implied authors can be, and perhaps more often are, multiple personalities. Lanser’s article—­much like Ginsburg and Rimmon-­Kenan’s critique of Booth’s original conception of the implied author discussed above—­takes notice of the double bind of authorship: “Having produced the text, the author must surely exist outside and before the text; yet if the text produces the author, then the author can only be found in the text” (154). Her observation is similar not only to the Janus-­like author proposed by Ginsburg and Rimmon-­Kenan but also to Seán Burke’s commentary on the changes in the role of the author during the nineteenth century: “The author is no longer a privileged reader of the Divine script in nature, nor an elect who inspirationally mimes the Divine discourse, but is now seen as imitating the act of creation itself. . . . As translated into literary terms, the author can be identified with the entirety of the work while being nowhere visible within the work” (xxi–­x xii). The similarity between their remarks reveals that problems with the implied author are far from limited to narratology. Instead, the term reflects issues of h ­ andling authorship and intentionality when reading literature in general and assuming that, in this act, we are dealing with a literary work that has to be treated differently, in communicative terms, from other texts. Furthermore, the concept of authorship in general appears to be aligned with a concept of the (coherent) subject or self/identity. Lanser does not bring this correlation as directly into focus as Burke, but both Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology  227

refer to Foucault’s (“What Is an Author?”) and Barthes’s (“The Death of the Author”) famous essays on the author, in which this correlation is imperative: the subject and the author must mutually be criticized as being authoritative instances that stand in the way of understanding discourse and writing better. The line of father figures that needs to be eradicated extends from God to author to the subject (self/identity). Lanser, too, brings identity politics into the picture when dealing with the (implied) author: If we forego the need for coherence that has dominated our discussions of implied authorship, if we read textual surfaces instead of attempting to resolve them into a noncontradictory deep structure, we might figure the implied author not as a body but as the clothes the body wears—­clothes that can be altered, discarded, tried on, changed before or behind our eyes. This need not mean that a particular writer is capable of producing an infinity of “implied authors,” like an endless Barbie wardrobe, but that our current notion of implied author has been too small, too tight, too circumscribed. (“[Im]plying” 158) As we can see, Lanser, with thoughts from gender studies, deepens our understanding by nuancing the identity that we ascribe to implied authors.5 Although I welcome this effort very much, one could still argue that classical narratology cannot cope with real authors for reasons other than its limited theory of identity and that the solution may therefore require more than adjusting the way identity is conceived of in relation to the implied author. What if the notion of the implied author has inherited some unfortunate fallacies from its starting point—­that is, through the compromise between a more rhetorical and communicative approach to literature and the heresies of literary interpretation theory that Kindt and Müller address, such as the idea of an intentional fallacy? What if one were to tentatively propose that the notion of the implied author is a subtle and intellectual way of actually “not talking” about the most obvious thing in the world—­namely, that texts have authors? The implied author function, you could call it, is ultimately a function to protect and preserve the literary text from being considered plain language—­that is, as an intentional and communicative act that actually works in some contexts and might not work in others. 228  Kjerkegaard

The Discursive Approach: Dawson and Korthals Altes In “Real Authors and Real Readers: Omniscient Narration and a Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model,” Paul Dawson investigates narrative voice in “a broader discursive context” (91). This broader context functions to acknowledge that literary narratives partake in a literary (media)ecology, not only as private or abstract communication between individual authors and readers, but as public sites of negotiation between a range of subject positions (104–­5). To develop the idea of literary communication in a time of new media, Dawson reflects on Booth’s classical diagram, shown in figure 8. In Dawson’s view, the “story of postclassical narratology may be seen as an attempt to take up the challenge of theorizing the agent on the far right of the diagram, what is variously called the real reader, the actual reader, the empirical reader and the flesh-­and-­blood reader” (100). Instead of this diagram, Dawson therefore proposes another, shown in figure 9, which complies with his objectives for a discursive narratology. Dawson’s two theoretical points of departure for developing his new diagram are Genette’s ideas on paratext and Lanser’s The Narrative Act (1981), wherein she locates narrative authority within extrafictional voices and material related to the book itself, from chapter divisions to authorial prefaces and publication. What is gained by the revision is a better picture of how literature is discursively placed in our mediatized reality, not only how it is read by narratologists. Once again, the idea is to widen the perspective in order to see literature in its actual setting. Similar arguments are made by scholars integrating ethos into narratology. For instance, in “The Implied Author: A Secular Excommunication,” Herman and Vervaeck argue in favor of the term negotiation, seeking—­like Dawson—­to study “the intricate processes of interaction between reader, author, text, and context” (19). Liesbeth Korthals Altes should also be mentioned again here, since in Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction, she focuses on how the author, through self-­representation, positions him-­or herself in different kinds of value systems and how this affects our reading of their work. Much of her work, like Herman and Vervaeck’s, relies on French sociology in combination with literary research. A key example given by Korthals Altes (“Slippery”) is the French author Michel Houellebecq, who Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology  229

Fig. 8. Booth’s classical diagram as presented in Dawson (99).

Fig. 9. Dawson’s discursive reformulation of the diagram of narrative communication (110).

seems to be frustratingly unclassifiable and divides both literary scholars and common readers into at least two positions—­those who consider him and his unclassifiabilty as commercial and market based and those who appreciate and acknowledge his literature as an important artistic contribution. The important thing here, however, is how Korthals Altes displays the opposition between the more scholarly reception of Houellebecq and the reception by common readers. Once again, we notice the distinction between literature in its more academic and theoretical setting and literature in its actual setting. The Rhetorical Approach: Walsh and Zetterberg-­Nielsen The rhetorical approach is a dominant approach within contemporary postclassical narratology and holds some controversial, certainly dismissive, attitudes toward the implied author, not least through its thought-­ provoking theories of fictionality. Fictionality is understood by Richard Walsh as a rhetorical rather than an ontological quality (7). Walsh argues that whether you read a text as fictive or assume that a statement is fictional depends on relevance. What he seeks to develop is not a theoretical discourse that removes the artistic enunciation from the world, or from referentiality altogether. On the contrary, to adopt a fictionality approach in relation to any kind of work or discourse is, in Walsh’s view, to maximize relevance. One of the novelties of his theory is that it leads literature back to a simpler rhetorical model—­simpler than the ones developed within classic rhetorical narratology—­and that it considers an always already communicative relationship between a sender and a receiver (empirical author and reader) and disengages the concept 230  Kjerkegaard

of fictionality from specific media and genre questions. The simpler model seen from the sender’s perspective does not contain any implied author (Rhetoric 82–85), only characters. Walsh here claims to subscribe to Genette’s principle that “agents should not be multiplied unnecessarily” (Genette, Narrative 148). The seeming advantage of Walsh’s new model is that it will better explain the employment of fictionality and also that it more adequately captures the way we actually read. In addition to Walsh’s work, one could mention that of Henrik Zetterberg-­Nielsen in general as well as specifically his chapter “Author” in the collection Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited, which deals with the relation between fictionality and the author. In the chapter, Zetterberg-­Nielsen mentions the “strange gap between theory and reality” (27) when it comes to how narratology and other branches of literary theory have dealt with authors. In narratology, “the idea that communication in literary fiction is taken to proceed from a narrator to a narratee has led narratologists to consider literary fictions as acts of communication and ‘reports’ by narrators, and have resulted in a prevailing lack of interest in the author” (31). Zetterberg-­Nielsen tries to remedy this lack through the concept of fictionality defined as intentionally signaled invention in communication, claiming that if, when relevant, we change our attention to the specificity of fictional language, we will be able to understand many forms of communication better, including literary forms of communication. This, of course, also goes for the relationship between senders (authors, implied authors, and narrators) and receivers (listening characters, implied and empirical readers). Again, the idea is, on the one hand, to see the literary work from the outside in (context) rather than from the inside out (e.g., as literary work; Kjerkegaard, “Getting” 144), and on the other hand, to maintain that fictional language is found among ordinary language use. The use of fiction is therefore both normal and special at the same time according to this fictionality approach. The main point for Nielsen is that authors of fictive discourse are intentionally signaling invention when they write novels but that much classical narratology acts as if this intention is not signaled. In this way, experiences and concepts are often transferred fairly unmodified from nonfictional narratives to fictional ones. Zetterberg-­ Nielsen therefore suggests that “in neither case—­historical nor fictional Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology  231

narratives—­is there an attention to an author employing overtly inventive language” (31). I support Nielsen’s overall argument in favor of different unnatural elements within narratology—­or more simply put, that literary language can thrive on unnatural resources6 simply because what mainly constitutes literature is writing. Even so, I am a bit skeptical when it comes to the relation between sender, signal, and receiver: Can authors in fact intentionally signal that something is “overtly invented”? I don’t think so, neither in nor outside the text. Of course, authors and publishers can signal, just by writing “novel” on the cover, that this might be “overtly invented.” But this is not a normal intentional signal, in my opinion. Rather, the signal is indirect, since it is first and foremost signaling the potential that some things might be fictionalized. To my mind, Nielsen puts too much (communicative) faith in fictionality—­more precisely, in the exact signaling of fictionality.7 Authors as Good Company Do authors (and other persons) always know why, where, and when they invent things when they are in the course of narrating something? And can and do readers conceive this as clearly invented? To me, these are unsolvable questions, and the ambiguity as to authorial intention might form part of what makes reading literature pleasurable—­that is, that we often cannot distill invention from narration about reality or real things.8 I do not only mean that some literary works—­such as autofictions—­benefit aesthetically from blurred lines between fact and fiction. Rather, what I also aim to capture is something extraliterary that affects the reading experience and adds value beyond the text: for instance, our view and appreciation of a specific author’s voice, regardless of whether that voice can be perceived as fictional or not. When we read, we ask ourselves, Is this voice good company (cf. Booth)? “Good” here refers not to moral values but rather to whether we are entertained, challenged, and appealed to and whether we as readers can mirror ourselves (in good and bad ways) in the voice or the story told. Such issues are, of course, very dependent on the text itself and the values it produces, but they are by definition also “contaminated” by extratextual features that transcend the literary work, such as the voice that an author produces through the course of several books as well as paratexts in the 232  Kjerkegaard

form of both peri-­and epitext (Pignagnoli 2018) and so forth—­in other words, an authorial ethos understood as something the author produces through the text but also as something ascribed by the reader. Such a pragmatic view of how to deal with authors when we read literature—­which accepts that authors are not only paper constructs but also living and public persons alongside their work—­may be seen as one of “the fallacies that the New Criticism had established as heresies of interpretation theory,” to repeat Kindt and Müller’s phrasing (50). To support this, one could also turn to a more historically anchored perspective and from such a view relativize narratology’s need to construct implied authors and maintain the distinction between an inside and an outside of the narrative text. As Barbara Hochman shows in her book Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism, reading literature is also about literary conventions—­conventions that are ultimately bound to change, given certain times and different aesthetical regimes of value: “Realist writers of the 1880s and 1890s conceptualized the text as a window or a mirror. They insisted that their readers were looking at a world, not [as much literature before them] engaging in ‘a kind of conversation’ with the author of the book. In Henry James’s formulation, situations were to ‘speak for themselves.’ The realist aesthetic thus posed a direct challenge to the idea of a book as a catalyst for proto-­personal intercourse between writer and reader” (11–­12; my brackets). What for an academic reader of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries might seem natural—­that is, not to engage in conversations with books and authors—­might once have been the natural thing. As Hochman states, “The idea of a book as the reader’s ‘friend’ and reading as ‘a kind of conversation’ with an author, these and other turn-­of-­century assumptions are no longer readily apparent, at least to academics, partly because they have been declassed” (7). In other words, authorial self-­effacement—­both from the author’s and from the reader’s perspective—­is a historical convention that might be useful in certain analytical contexts but that may block further insights in others, particularly when we think about how authors actually function when we read. Seeing narratives and literary works as art does not necessarily produce the most valuable insights into how narratives and authors function. Such a perspective is fundamentally a general act of anthropomorphizing discourse but also a specific way of treating literature as a special language Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology  233

that either communicates in very specialized ways or does not communicate at all. This way of thinking comes from Russian formalism but was absorbed by New Criticism and later reluctantly inherited by classical narratology. More recently, it has also made its way into postclassical narratology in the form of different ideas about the autonomous nature of literary language and its specificity as an object.9 Toward a Postcritical Narratology It seems that we have an implied theory going on in postclassical narratology that, in a sense, is really just another version of contextualist narratology. This theory addresses how classical structural narratology, and the structuralist paradigm underwriting it, prevents us from thinking both about real authors and about real readers; perhaps, more broadly, it prevents us from thinking about the uses of literature, to borrow Rita Felski’s phrase (Uses). However, at the same time, almost nowhere in postclassical narratology are actual authors or actual readers included. Eventually, there is a kind of unquestioned argument going on behind all these theories: reality always trumps theory. This, in turn, is ironic, because that reality is never really displayed; rather, it is a kind of theoretical idea about how reality works that eventually and in theory outdoes another theory. In a sense, then, the theory about literature in its actual setting remains a theory, not a practice. In general, I sympathize a lot with postclassical narratology, not least its work on the author; but it might be time to “get our hands dirty,” so to speak, by engaging with reality instead of using it as another theoretical knockout argument that always outdoes previous theory.10 It is in this sense that I would like to introduce the term postcritical narratology as a way of thinking within the confines of postclassical narratology. Inspired by postcritical theory, especially as it is described in Felski’s books and articles (Uses [2008], Limits [2015], and “Postcritical” [2017]), a future literary narratology could focus on literary language not only as the means and ends of a literary form but also in terms of its observed rhetorical use, its intentions and impacts emotionally, politically, and ethically. Use here must be distinguished from usefulness: When Felski talks about “uses of literature,” use relates to how literature is actually read and used—­for example, what is done with literature and not just how literature is used as an instrument for other subject areas. 234  Kjerkegaard

The particular way in which the discussion of literary reading is raised here is that the normative question “How (ought we) to read?” shifts to the more pragmatic one “How do we (actually) read?” One problem with the former normative question is that it produces an often inopportune gap between academic/critical reading and other common and useful but unauthorized ways of reading. This is why the latter pragmatic question seems liberating. It opens a larger space and gives rise to a revision of rooted reading habits. The irony is that much critical/academic reading, the purpose of which is to criticize conventional reading, has itself developed into a conventional kind of reading, at least according to postcritical theory. Consequently, the aim is not to get rid of established critical reading practices but rather to rethink and innovate these practices within the framework of postcritical theory as “ways of reading that are informed by critique while pushing beyond it” (Felski, “Postcritical” 4). It is therefore vital that the term postcritical must be understood not as no critique and theory but as a revision of those second-­nature theoretical stances that tend to block our engagement with narratives and authors. David Hadar’s article “Author-­Characters and Authorial Public Image: The Elderly Protagonists in Philip Roth and Nicole Krauss” can be taken as one representative postcritical approach to the study of authors in narratology. Instead of disregarding the simple fact that we often read fiction to get to know the author, Hadar argues that getting to know the author is often a key motivational factor when we read (and this is regardless of whether the work we read is autobiographically informed). Hadar’s theoretical framework comes from Erving Goffman and the idea of public identity. Literary works, the argument goes, shape the author’s public identity (for a discussion of the differences in the public identity of authors of fiction and authors of autobiography, see Schmitt in this volume), which we probably all know but have not paid much attention to, because this is not in alignment with how we usually do scholarly reading. According to Hadar, “Any aspect of a narrative can be analyzed as a part of managing the author’s public identity” (287), though he chooses to zero in on how this works with regard to character in particular. Hadar’s examples include Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Chris Kraus’s Leopold Gursky, and Nicole Krauss’s Alma Singer. One could add many more; think, for instance, of Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman. Characters therefore “are not only Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology  235

artificial, imagined people, and carriers of ideas, but also the offshoot of an author who comes to be defined by them” (287). What Felski more generally calls “ordinary motives for reading” (Uses 14) are therefore often either overlooked or undervalued in literary scholarship, and paying attention to such motives does not have to result in naïve or uncritical readings. In the case of authors such as Roth, Kraus, or Ellis, the different responses of readers—­ranging from lay readers to critics—­a lso influence the perceived aesthetical goals of their works in vital ways. Roth’s oeuvre simply wouldn’t have looked like it does today without these different responses to the main character in his breakthrough novel Portnoy’s Complaint. Hence the novel opened up a kind of media-­ driven feedback loop between Roth’s authorship and the reactions of his audience, forcing him to think of themes such as (Jewish) identity and also the identity of the author through different alter egos, not least the fictional author-­character Nathan Zuckerman, whose career has similarities with Roth’s—­for instance, Zuckerman also makes his debut with a scandalous novel named Carnovsky. The approach of a postcritical narratology to authorship would therefore mean focusing on how literary language both inside and beyond the literary work indeed does affect readers, including narratologists. It could teach us not to dismiss the Janus-­like character of the author concept. Of course, literature can teach us not to see life through language and therefore that language might be deceitful when mirroring our lives, as shown by Paul de Man (“Autobiography as De-­facement”) and others. On the other hand, and in a more affirmative interpretation, literary language can in fact also be used to teach us how to see life. Literary language is not just mimesis and a reflection of the real; it is also real, a real discourse that moves us and means something to and in our lives. Therefore, literary language not only thrives in its ability to subvert communication. It also thrives in its ability to connect and communicate, although much literary theory has flourished on disdaining this fact. Literature and the study of literature do not always have to involve critique, especially not if critique is an automated reaction only. Similarly, literary language does not always have to be the exception that disregards the rules of communication. It can also be an exception that confirms and nuances well-­k nown communicative structures and rules, as shown in recent studies on fictionality. It is perhaps time to think 236  Kjerkegaard

about how a narratology based on such a language would look. And, of course, how such a postcritical narratology would deal with authors—­whether it would look beyond the implied author or not. Conclusion In this chapter, I have discussed ways in which postclassical narratology seems to challenge and sometimes transgress ideas about the implied author. The conventional concepts of the literary work and authorial intentionality establish certain limitations in regard to more pragmatic and reasonable solutions within the realms of classical narratology. At the same time, the chapter shows that postclassical narratology only carries on a strong emphasis on context that has been a defiant force in narratology’s general attempt to think about and treat structure and literary language apart from actuality since the very beginning. In this regard, postclassical narratology seems to be a continuation of a contextual narratology (prepostclassical narratology), which today has developed into different positions, such as the discursive and rhetorical ones. Hence I have taken issue with postclassical narratology for not being postclassical enough (and thus being contextual). Postclassical narratology’s use of the argument that reality always trumps theory turns out to be another theoretical idea about how reality works that eventually and in theory outdoes another theory. Consequently, the theory about literature in its actual setting stays a theory, not a way of doing narratology. I therefore propose that narratologists turn their attention toward postcritical theory and the uses of literature as developed by Rita Felski. Observations about how actual readers, narratologists included, practice literature and digest narratives can perhaps inform and bring a real reality into our varied theories of narrative and also teach us how to think about authors in much more than implied ways. Notes 1. Cf. Timothy Baker, who introduces the term autobiografication and talks about a “new sense of realism” (55). 2. The “undefined zone” is Genette’s concept for the threshold between text and paratext—­a threshold that seems to breed new metaphors such as a “fringe” or a “vestibule,” a zone without any hard-­and-­fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text). Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology  237

3. Some of the reasons motivating critical questions about inherited ideas of intentionality within narratology and the literary system can also be related to the development of the media landscape. This, however, is not my main concern here, though it might be against this background that we must understand many of the interests in this article (cf. Kjerkegaard “Getting,” “Mediatization,” “Lyric Poetry”; Kjerkegaard and Schmitt). 4. For further discussion of the relationship between the formula in James Phelan’s version and Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s, see Iversen. 5. Here I think mostly of the influence of Judith Butler’s work, not least her two early works Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993). 6. By unnatural elements and resources, I have in mind, for instance, narrators or thinking characters that deviate from human beings or representations of time or space that do not follow the physical rules of our reality (cf. Alber’s “Unnatural Narrative”). 7. This faith looks very much like an equivalent to the way Russian Formalists and others have tried to pave the way for literature as a certain kind of poetic language, although Roman Jakobson later softened the conception by putting poetic language into a communicative model. It is worth noting that Nielsen speaks not of the specificity of literary language but of fictional language. Yet how should anyone recognize, or agree about recognizing, such specificity? In addition, this effort seems counterproductive in regard to the intention of possibly bridging the language conception within scholarly literary language and ordinary language use, which basically informs postclassical narratology and also Walsh’s initial idea of the rhetoric of fictionality. Within an extremely pragmatic way of seeing how literature works between senders and receivers, Nielsen introduces a literary component that seemingly and without further notice can be transferred back and forth from authors to readers. My conception of fictionality seems to be more in line with that of Walsh when he writes, “What is crucial about the assumption of fictionality is that it directs interpretative attention away from the informative relevance of the utterance towards indirect kinds of relevance” (“Exploring Fictionality: Afterword” 226). 8. Jessica Mason (“Making Fiction Out of Fact”) makes this point in her investigation of “false flag” events in a special issue of Narrative Inquiry on the topic “real fictions” (edited by Browse, Gibbons, and Hatavara). Gibbons, in the same issue that is relevant to my reasoning here, convincingly also argues that “autofiction is not only a literary genre, but also a reading strategy” (“Dissolving Margins” 411). 9. This conception, one might think, must be outdated, but it still thrives within literary circles. This is evident, for example, in Derek Attridge’s 238  Kjerkegaard

otherwise eminent book The Singularity of Literature (2004), which deals with the relationship between people and literature but in fact ends up as an ethically based description of how people should read and read one another. See, for example, the chapter “Reading and Responding,” which speaks of hospitality and of being friendly to the unknown, alterity, and so on. The singularity that must bring about such an exemplary reaction, I would claim, cannot be rooted in the text alone, regardless of its aesthetic qualities, but must always be due to a human being either in front of or behind the text. Attridge anthropomorphizes literature in an unrealistic way, but being able to learn something about being human and possibly even responding responsibly to others via literature does not require this extrapolation of the literary. The singularity of a literary work, in my opinion, is always connected to certain people—­that is, authors and readers; it cannot only be a linguistically rooted phenomenon. What lurks behind Attridge’s conception of literature is the same thing that Herman criticizes in the anti-­intentionalism of classical narratology: the fact that it is derived “largely from its attempt to use Saussure’s code-­centered structural linguistics as paradigm for inquiry” (245). But what if this possible misconception of how language works has formed the way we approach literary artifacts and specifically how we think about the author within narratology? 10. In fact, within current narratological research, an empirical strain appears to be emerging (cf. Anglistik special issue “Empirical Approaches to Narrative,” edited by Jan Alber and Sven Strasen; Gibbons, “Why Do You Insist Alana Is Not Real?”), and while embryonic, such research might form part of the postcritical approach I advocate herein.

Bibliography Alber, Jan. “Unnatural Narrative.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University, https://​www​-archiv​ .fdm​.uni​-hamburg​.de/​lhn/​node/​104​.html. Alber, Jan, and Monika Fludernik. “Introduction.” Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, edited by Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010, pp. 1–­32. Alber, Jan, and Sven Strasen, editors. “Empirical Approaches to Narrative.” Special issue, Anglistik, vol. 31, no. 1, 2020. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Baker, Timothy C. “Autobiografication.” The Routledge Companion to Twenty-­ First Century Literary Fiction, edited by Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019, pp. 48–­56. Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology  239

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern; A Reader, edited by Seán Burke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004, pp. 125–­30. ———. “From Work to Text.” 1971. The Rustle of Language. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986, pp. 56–­64. Birke, Dorothee, and Birte Christ. “Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field.” Narrative, vol. 21, no. 1, 2013, pp. 65–­87. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Burke, Seán, editor. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern; A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995. Chatman, Seymour. “What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology?” Poetics Today, vol. 11, no. 2, 1990, pp. 309–­28. Dawson, Paul. “Real Authors and Real Readers: Omniscient Narration and a Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 42, no. 1, 2012, pp. 91–­116. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-­facement.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 94, no. 5, 1979, pp. 919–­30. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago il: U of Chicago P, 2015. ———. “Postcritical Reading.” American Book Review, vol. 38, no. 5, 2017, pp. 4–­5. ———. Uses of Literature. Malden ma: Blackwell, 2008. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca ny: Cornell UP, 1988. ———. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Gibbons, Alison. “The ‘Dissolving Margins’ of Elena Ferrante and the Neapolitan Novels: A Cognitive Approach to Fictionality, Authorial Intentionality, and Autofictional Reading Strategies.” Narrative Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 2, 2019, pp. 391–­417. ———. “‘Why Do You Insist Alana Is Not Real?’: Visitors’ Perceptions of the Fictionality of Andi and Lance Olsen’s ‘There’s No Place like Time’ Exhibition.” Style and Reader Response: Minds, Media, Methods, edited by Alice Bell et al. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2021, pp. 101–­21. Ginsburg, Ruth, and Shlomith Rimmon-­Kenan. “Is There a Life after Death? Theorizing Authors and Reading Jazz.” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1999, pp. 66–­87. 240  Kjerkegaard

Hadar, David. “Author-­Characters and Authorial Public Image: The Elderly Protagonists in Philip Roth and Nicole Krauss.” Narrative, vol. 26, no. 3, 2018, pp. 282–­301. Herman, David. “Introduction: Narratologies.” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1999, pp. 1–­30. ———. “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 6, no. 2, 2008, pp. 233–­60. Herman, Luc, and Bart Vervaeck. “The Implied Author: A Secular Excommunication.” Style, vol. 45, no. 1, 2011, pp. 11–­28. ———. “Postclassical Narratology.” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al. London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 450–­51. Hochman, Barbara. Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2001. Iversen, Stefan. “Narrative Communication or Communicating Literature?” Style, vol. 52, nos. 1–­2, 2018, pp. 88–­93. Kindt, Tom, and Hans-­Harald Müller. The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006. Kjerkegaard, Stefan. “Getting People Right. Getting Fiction Right. Self-­ Fashioning, Fictionality, and Ethics in the Roth Books.” jnt: Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 46, no. 1, 2016, pp. 121–­48. ———. “Lyric Poetry as Anti-­mimetic Bridging in Narratives and Motion Pictures. A Case Study of the Affective Response to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014).” The Edinburgh Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018, pp. 305–­16. ———. “Mediatization, Self and Literature: Fictionality as a Means of Self-­ Fashioning in Bret Easton Ellis and (Claus Beck-­) Nielsen.” Literature in Contemporary Media Culture: Technology-­Subjectivity-­Aesthetics, edited by Sarah Paulson and Anders Malvik. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016, pp. 129–­48. Kjerkegaard, Stefan, and Arnaud Schmitt. “Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: A Real Life in a Novel.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2016, pp. 553–­79. Knausgaard, Karl Ove. The End. My Struggle, vol. 6. Translated by Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett. London: Harvill Secker, 2018. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2014. Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology  241

———. “Slippery Author Figures, Ethos and Value Regimes.” Authorship Revised: Conceptions of Authorship around 1900 and 2000, edited by Gillis J. Dorleijn et al. Leuven: Peeters, 2009, pp. 95–­117. Lanser, Susan S. “(Im)plying the Author.” Narrative, vol. 9, no. 2, 2001, pp. 153–­60. ———. “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of Structuralist Narratology.” A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Malden ma: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 206–­20. ———. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton nj: Princeton UP, 1981. Mason, Jessica. “Making Fiction Out of Fact: Attention and Belief in the Discourse of Conspiracy.” Narrative Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 2, 2019, pp. 293–­312. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, et al. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative, vol. 23, no. 1, 2015, pp. 61–­73. Pignagnoli, Virginia. “Narrative Theory and the Brief and Wondrous Life of Post-­postmodern Fiction.” Poetics Today, vol. 39, no. 1, 2018, pp. 183–­99. Phelan, James. “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Narrative: Or, from Story and Discourse to Authors, Resources, and Audiences.” Soundings, vol. 94, nos. 1–­2, 2011, pp. 55–­75. ———. Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2017. Sedlmeier, Florian. “The Paratext and Literary Narration: Authorship, Institutions, Historiographies.” Narrative, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018, pp. 63–­80. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, 1980, pp. 213–­36. ———. On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language. Chicago il: U of Chicago P, 1978. Stanitzek, Georg. “Texts and Paratexts in Media.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 1, 2005, pp. 27–­42. Walsh, Richard. “Exploring Fictionality: Afterword.” Exploring Fictionality: Conceptions, Test Cases, Discussions, edited by C. A. Maagaard et al. Odense: UP of Southern Denmark, 2020, pp. 213–­38. ———. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007. Zetterberg-­Nielsen. “Author.” Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited, edited by Lasse Gammelgaard et al. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2022, pp. 25–­45.

242  Kjerkegaard

Contributors

Laura Cernat is a Flemish Research Foundation postdoctoral researcher at ku Leuven, Belgium. She has contributed to the edited volumes Virginia Woolf and Heritage (2017), Theory in the “Post” Era (2021), and Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (2022); has published in the journals Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and Partial Answers; and has guest-edited a special issue of American Book Review on autofiction and autotheory. She organized the hybrid bilingual 2021 conference Biofiction as World Literature (https://w ​ ww.​ arts.​ kuleuven​ .be/​biofiction​-as​-world​-literature). Paul Dawson is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of three monographs, including, most recently, The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel (osu Press, 2023). He is coeditor, with Maria Mäkelä, of The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory (Routledge, 2022). Fiona Doloughan is a senior lecturer in English (literature and creative writing) at the Open University, UK. She has published two monographs on contemporary narrative to date (Continuum, 2011; and Bloomsbury, 2016) with a third, Radical Realism, Autofictional Narratives and the Reinvention of the Novel, published in 2023 by Anthem Press. Alison Gibbons is a reader in contemporary stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the author of Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (Routledge, 2012) and has coedited numerous collections, most recently Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). Her research pursues a cognitive approach (including empirical methodologies) to innovative contemporary narratives, and she is currently writing a monograph on autofiction and fictionality. 243

Christopher González is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Endowed Chair and Professor in the Department of English at Southern Methodist University. He is an award-­winning author and editor of many books, including Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and tv and Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature (University of Arizona Press, 2019). Odile Heynders is a professor of comparative literature at the Department of Culture Studies in the School of Humanities and Digital Sciences at Tilburg University. She has published several books and many articles on European literature, authorship, and strategies of reading, as well as on how literary fiction intervenes in democratic public spheres. Her book Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy (2016) was published by Palgrave Macmillan. Her current book project is Fictions of Migration, focusing on how literary texts can offer new knowledge within the interdisciplinary context of migration studies. Heynders is a member of the nwo (Dutch Research Council) Board: Social Sciences and Humanities. Stefan Kjerkegaard is an associate professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research spans a wide range of topics, from how new literature deals with mediatized cultural context to autobiographical novels, poems, and autofiction. He has published widely in the field of modern literary theory, interaction between literature and media, and narratology. Elizabeth King received her PhD from the University of New South Wales, where she tutors and guest lectures. Her work has appeared in Geniuses, Addicts, and Scribbling Women: Portraits of the Writer in Popular Culture (Lexington Books, 2023), and she is the author of The Novelist in the Novel: Gender and Genius in Fictional Representations of Authorship, 1850–­1949 (Routledge, 2023). Michael Lackey is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses about twentieth-­ and twenty-­first-­century intellectual, political, and literary history. He has authored and edited twelve books and guest-­edited five special journal issues. He is one of the managing editors of Bloomsbury Academic’s new series Biofiction Studies, and he is currently working on a book about German biofiction. Jaclyn Partyka received her PhD in English from Temple University and is currently a lecturer in the Writing Arts Department at Rowan 244  Contributors

University, Glassboro, New Jersey. Her research focuses on authorship, genre, and contemporary multimodal literacies. Her work can be found in Contemporary Literature and the collections Metaliterate Learning in the Post-­truth World (ALA/Neal-Schuman, 2018) and Trump Fiction: Essays on Donald Trump in Literature, Film, and Television (Lexington Books, 2020). Nancy Pedri is a professor of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She has edited or coedited ten books on comics and multimodality in literature and authored two books: Experiencing Visual Storyworlds: Focalization in Comics with S. Horstkotte (Ohio State University Press, 2022) and A Concise Dictionary of Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2022). Arnaud Schmitt is a professor of American studies at the University of Pau. Schmitt has worked extensively on the concepts of autobiography, autofiction, and “self-­narration,” and published, among others, The Phenomenology of Autobiography: Making It Real (Routledge, 2017) and more recently The Photographer as Autobiographer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

Contributors  245

Index

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, xix, xxvii, 4–­7, 58–­59; Americanah (2013), 11–­15, 17; “Dear Ijeawele” (2017), 4; Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), 7–­11, 17; “We Should All Be Feminists” (2014), 4, 15 Aftermath (2012), 143, 145–­48 agency, xx, 7, 112, 124 Alcott, Louisa May, 33 Allen, Woody, 157–­60; Deconstructing Harry (1997), 157–­58; Midnight in Paris (2011), 159–­60 Altes, Liesbeth Korthals, xxii, 221, 226, 229–­30 Amazon, xiii–­xiv ambiguity, 7, 116, 121, 168, 232 Americanah (2013), 11–­15, 17 American Dirt (2020), 48, 50–­51, 56 anti-­intentionalism. See intentionality artificiality, 121, 123, 149, 183, 188–­89 A Time for Everything (2004), 137 auctor, xvi, 67–­68. See also authors aura, xxvii, 70–­73, 77, 83 Auster, Paul, 206–­9 auteurs, 71–­72, 81 authenticity, 164; authorial, xiv, 52; and autobiographical texts, 76, 98–­99, 112, 120–­23, 132, 135, 137, 141; cultural, 24; and identity, 9, 28, 37; and Romanticism, 86

authority: of authors, 127, 158, 168–­69, 185; of novels, 190, 200; and self-­ representation, 122, 124 authors: and anxiety, xxix, 33, 120–­21, 179–­96, 199, 205; death of, xxi, 72, 160–­62, 168, 171, 199, 205–­7, 213; doppelgänger-­, 29–­30; function of, xiii, 70, 228; as God, xvi, 67, 185, 201, 210, 212, 228; implied, xxi–­xxiii, xxix, 68, 87, 133, 200, 221–­33; readers’ perceptions of, xxvi, 46, 68, 80, 88; and status, xvi–­ii, 7, 68–­7 1, 76–­77, 79–­82, 184 authorship: autobiographical, 68–­69, 74–­82, 86, 113–­14, 122, 127; and collaboration, 24, 25, 33, 36–­38, 39n10; as competence, 6, 68–­75, 79, 81–­82; contemporary, xv; and gender, xiv, 24–­27, 31, 38, 133, 143, 148, 215; Latinx, 43, 44–­47; and race, xiv, 12, 45, 53; and sexuality, 45, 172; theories of, 71. See also authors autobiographical novels, 76–­77. See also autofiction autobiography, 67–­69, 73–­74; status of, 76–­79, 82. See also graphic memoirs autofiction, 77–­78, 86–­87, 132, 137, 149, 189, 202, 222. See also autobiographical novels

247

automatic association, 68–­70, 72 Bal, Mieke, xxv, 33 Barnes, Julian, 163–­67 Barry, Lynda, 111–­12 Barthes, Roland, 74, 158, 161–­62, 168, 171, 200, 223, 228 Beyoncé, 4–­5, 16–­17 Binet, Laurent, 160–­66, 186–­89 biofiction, xv, xxviii, 157, 159, 161–­63, 166, 171–­72, 177n12 biographical novels. See biofiction blogposts, 3, 11–­14, 44, 195 Bojar, Karen, 24, 35, 37 Booth, Wayne C., xiii, xxi–­xxii, 68, 200, 223–­24, 229–­30, 232 Brabner, Joyce, 112, 114 Brick, 115 Brontë sisters, 25, 39n10 Burke, Seán, xv, 227 Calle, Sophie, 87–­88, 94–­105 capitalism, xxvii, 32, 43, 192–­93, 195–­96 Carey, Peter, 174–­75 Carlyle, Thomas, xvi–­xvii Carson, Anne, 88, 105 celebrity, 4, 7, 16, 27 Chatman, Seymour, xxi, xxv, 225–­27 Cisneros, Sandra, 44, 54, 59 classical narratology. See narratology Coetzee, J. M.: Diary of a Bad Year (2007), 210–­12; Foe (1986), 167–­7 1; Youth (2003), 167 cognitive theory, xxiii–­xxiv, 78, 85–­86, 88–­90, 105 Cohn, Dorrit, 74–­76 collaboration. See authorship comics, 112, 116–­19, 123–­24, 191–­93, 195

248  Index

competence. See authorship counterdiscourse, 7–­10 Cumberland, Richard, 182, 188 Cummins, Jeanine, 43–­45, 48, 49, 56; American Dirt (2020), 48, 50–­51, 56 Cusk, Rachel, xix, 132–­33; Aftermath (2012), 143, 145–­48; Kudos (2018), 142–­45; Outline (2014), 133, 143–­49; Transit (2016), 143, 145 Dahl, Ken, 115–­16 Dalí, Salvador, 159–­60 Dawson, Paul, xxiii, 23, 31, 202, 221, 229–­30 “Dear Ijeawele” (2017), 4 Deconstructing Harry (1997), 157–­58 deconstruction, 158, 223 Defoe, Daniel, xvi, 169–­70 deixis, 82, 88–­90, 92–­93, 102, 107n6 Diary of a Bad Year (2007), 210–­12 Díaz, Junot, 46–­47 Diderot, Denis, 181 Didion, Joan, 78 digital revolution, xiii–­xiv, xviii, 6 direct address, 186. See also readers discourse: and autobiographical texts, 113, 117, 120–­22; and deixis, 91–­93, 98, 102; free indirect, 92, 95, 97, 105; narrative, xxi, 139, 142, 147, 180, 185, 225–­26, 230–­31, 233, 236; public, 6, 9, 14, 189–­90; and Text World Theory, xxiv, 89, 95–­98. See also counterdiscourse; metadiscourse disnarration, 194 Drabble, Margaret, 34 drawing style, 117–­18 elegy, 85, 88, 93–­95; autobiographical, 94, 104, 106; and fictionality, 86–­88

Eliot, George (Marian Evans), xvii, 25–­26, 38n3 embodiment, 113–­14; and performance, 115, 121; pictorial, 116, 122 emotion: authorial expressions of, 18–­19, 88, 96, 132, 133, 203; in biofiction, 162, 164, 166, 171; in graphic memoir, 115–­16, 124; and reader response, 88, 104, 209; and truth, 10–­11, 37, 124, 190 epitexts, xxii–­iii, 232–­33 erasure, 125–­26, 175 ethos, 229, 233 Evans, Marian. See Eliot, George extratextuality, xxiii, 31–­33, 95, 170, 232 Faulkner, William, 159, 166, 175 Felski, Rita, 234–­36 Ferrante, Elena, xiv, xxvii, 23–­25; Frantumaglia (2016), 24, 31, 35; Neapolitan quartet, 24–­25, 28–­37 fictionality, xxii–­xxiii, xxiv, 29, 225, 230–­32, 236; in autobiographical elegy, 86–­89, 93, 104, 238n10; and novels, xvi, 28, 131, 181–­82, 184, 188 Fielding, Henry, xvi, 181–­82 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 159–­60 Flaubert, Gustave, 164–­66, 212 focalization, 9, 118 Foe (1986), 167–­7 1 formalism, 223, 225, 234. See also New Criticism Forney, Ellen, 116–­17 Foster Wallace, David, 194, 203, 215 Foucault, Michel, xxi, 200, 227–­28 Fowles, John, 182–­84, 200–­201 Frank, Anne, 81 Frantumaglia (2016), 24, 31, 35

Franzen, Jonathan, 3, 179, 193 free indirect discourse. See discourse Gallagher, Catherine, xvi, 28 Gavins, Joanna, 91 Genette, Gérard, xxi, 148, 180–­81, 223–­24, 229, 231, 237n1 genre, 35, 133, 136; and autobiographical texts, 67, 76–­79, 111; and elegy, 86–­87; fiction, xiv, 32; and gender, 28, 31–­32, 133, 142–­43, 148, 189 Gibbons, Alison, 28 Giovanelli, Marcello, 90 Grace, Sina, 118–­22 graphic memoirs, 111–­13, 115, 118, 127–­28 Gurba, Myriam, 44, 56, 58 Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), 7–­11, 17 Hemingway, Ernest, 75, 159–­60, 162 Herman, David, 223–­24 Heti, Sheila, 139, 189 historical novels, 132, 180, 187–­88, 196 Holmes, Anna, 52 Houellebecq, Michel, 222, 229–­30 “I,” 123, 133–­34; experiencing-­, 75, 81; narrating-­, 75, 81 identity: authorial, xix, xxii, xxvii, 30–­33, 43, 76, 80, 228; in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work, 4–­5, 8–­9, 11, 12, 14, 17; cultural, 71, 72; and gender, xiv, 38; and graphic memoir, 112–­13, 114, 120–­22, 126–­27; and Jeanine Cummins, 48–­49; of marginalized groups, 58; politics, xiii, xix, 38, 201, 228; and pseudonyms, 23–­25; public, xxii, 235; self-­, 227–­28; sexual, 172

Index  249

implied authors. See authors implied readers. See readers Instagram, 4, 55 intentional fallacy, xiii, xx, 224, 228. See also New Criticism intentionality, xiii, xx–­xxvi, 35, 70, 76, 209, 221–­23, 237; anti-­, 161, 200, 224, 239n9; and fictionality, 231–­32 interpretation: and authors, xiii, xxi–­vi, 23, 83, 168, 215, 223–­24, 228; and autobiographical texts, 28, 115–­16; and implied authors, xxi; and readers, xxiii, 202–­3, 210; and subjectivity, 35; and Text World Theory, 92, 99 invention, 180, 182–­83, 185, 187, 190, 194, 232; distrust of, 131–­32, 189; and fictionality, 29–­30, 231 Iversen, Stefan, 87, 106nn2–­3 James, Henry, xvii, 162–­63, 172, 233 Johnson, B. S., 149n2, 184–­85 Kafka, Franz, 157, 204 Kelly, Ned, 174–­75 Knausgaard, Karl Ove: My Struggle series (2012–­18), 87, 106n2, 132–­41, 146–­49, 189–­90, 222; Out of the World (2020 [1998]), 135; A Time for Everything (2004), 137 Kobek, Jarett, 191–­96 Kraus, Chris, 235 Krauss, Nicole, 202, 235–­36 Kudos (2018), 142–­45 lamentation poetry, 90–­91 Lanser, Susan, 221, 226–­29 Lejeune, Philippe, 73, 77, 88, 137 Lerner, Ben, 105, 207, 213–­15

250  Index

Levi, Primo, 75–­77, 81 Luiselli, Valeria, 50, 54 Manguso, Sarah, 82 marginalization, xix, xxvii, 31, 43–­46, 49, 53, 58–­60; of literature, 190 Margolin, Uri, 117 Markson, David, 205–­6 masking, xiv, 23, 25, 59, 122, 166 McCourt, Frank, 78 McHale, Brian, xviii, 189 metadiscourse, 12 metafiction, xviii, 147, 163, 169, 179–­80, 184–­88, 201, 203 metalepsis, xviii, 68, 167, 169, 180–­81, 201 Midnight in Paris (2011), 159–­60 mind style, 117 mirrors, 112, 118, 120–­21, 233 modernism, xvii, xxviii, 27, 87, 114, 157–­62, 166 Montero, Rosa, 172 multimodality, xxviii, 88, 98–­99, 102, 105 multiplicity, 35, 102, 116, 122 Murray, Paul, 209–­10 My Struggle series (2012–­18), 87, 106n2, 132–­41, 146–­49, 189–­90, 222 Nabokov, Vladimir, 75, 165, 235 narrative permissibility, 43–­46, 52–­54, 60; defined, 43 narratology: classical, xxv, 221–­22, 225–­26, 228, 231, 234, 237, 239n9; contextualist, 225, 234; discursive, xxiii, 229; postclassical, 225–­27, 229–­30, 234; postcritical, xxix, 222, 234–­37; rhetorical, xxii–­iii, 226, 228, 230–­32, 237

narrators, xx–­xxii, xxv–­xvi, 91, 105, 111, 142, 180–­81, 185; omniscient, 188, 201, 202, 210, 215; relationship to authors, 94, 99, 133, 137–­38, 141, 146, 149, 180–­81; unreliable, 165 Neapolitan quartet, 24–­25, 28–­37 Nelson, Maggie, 79, 82 New Criticism, xx, 223, 233–­34 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 58 Nigeria, 4, 7–­11, 17 Nilsen, Anders, 88, 105 Nixon, Rob, 56–­57 Nobel Prize, 76, 193 nonfictional novels, 136, 147 omniscience. See narrators otherness, 11 Outline (2014), 133, 143–­49 Out of the World (2020 [1998]), 135 paratexts, xxvii, 31–­32, 37, 76, 223, 229, 232; and titles, 4–­95, 195 Pekar, Harvey, 112 pen names. See pseudonyms performance, xiv, 5–­7, 11, 15, 17–­19 peritexts, xxii–­iii, 233 perspective, 91, 97, 118, 147, 211, 223; annihilated, 144 Phelan, James, 29, 226 positioning, 6, 11–­12, 14, 16–­19, 95 postclassical narratology. See narratology postcritical narratology. See narratology postmodernism, xviii, xxviii, 131, 160–­61, 164, 166–­67, 182 poststructuralism, 168, 204, 224 prestige: and authors, 4–­5; and fiction, 82, 202

prizes, literary, 4, 23, 27, 78, 82 prosopopoeia, 91–­95, 99, 105 pseudonyms, xvi, 23–­31, 37–­38 public intellectuals, 3–­4, 11, 17–­19; authors as, 5–­7 publishing: digital, xiii–­xiv, 190–­92; industry, xiii–­xiv, 27, 32, 43–­44, 46–­47, 53–­57, 59, 70. See also digital revolution radical attentiveness, 132, 141 radical realism, 132, 135, 146, 148–­49, 149n2 Raja, Anita, 37–­38 Reader Response theory, xx–­xxi, xxiii readers: and autobiographical texts, 74–­75, 122, 133, 135, 138; as characters, 33–­34, 211–­12; ideal, 34; implied, xxi; and participation, 120, 171, 199, 206; and postclassical narratology, 229; relationship with authors, xvi, xxiii–­xxiv, xxvi, 24, 200–­203, 215, 229, 233; and Text World Theory, 89–­91, 95, 99–­100; and unreliability, 165; and whiteness, 53, 60n4. See also Reader Response theory realism, xx, 114, 149n2, 184, 192, 203, 233; radical, xxviii, 132, 146 reality hunger, xv, 132, 190–­91, 203. See also Shields, David referentiality, xxix, 89, 93, 117, 230 Renaissance, xvi, 68 Romanticism, 68, 71, 86 Roth, Philip, 202, 207 Rugg, Linda Haverty, 113 self-­knowledge, 116, 127 self-­narration, 75, 112

Index  251

self-­portrait, 112, 116, 118, 120–­22, 124–­25, 205 self-­reflexivity, xx, 90–­93, 194. See also metafiction self-­representation, xxi, xxvi, xxviii, 112–­18, 120–­27. See also self-­portrait serialization, 116, 135, 140, 146 Shields, David, xv, 73, 79–­80, 132, 140, 190–­92, 201 slow violence, 53, 56–­58 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 225–­26 Smythe, Karen E., 86–­91, 104–­5 Sorrentino, Gilbert, 185 Spiegelman, Art, 113–­14 Starnone, Domenico, 37–­38 status: of literature, xviii, 171, 179, 181, 192, 195. See also authors; autobiography Stein, Gertrude, xvii, 159–­60 stereotypes, 15, 19, 45, 50–­51, 56–­57 Stockwell, Peter, xxiv, 90–­92, 105 storyworld, xv, 30, 53, 112–­13, 115, 117, 127–­28 structuralism, xx, 223–­24, 234 style: drawing, 117–­18, 120, 122, 127; elegiac, 88–­89, 93; literary, xvii, xxviii, 139, 147, 201, 202 ted talks, xix, 4, 14–­17 Text World Theory, xxiv, 88–­92, 98 Tóibín, Colm, 162–­63, 172–­74 Transit (2016), 143, 145 truth: in autobiographical texts, 88, 112–­15, 120, 132, 135, 144, 147–­48, 190; emotional, 10–­11; and his-

252  Index

tory, 171, 189; impossibility of, 160, 170; in novels, xvi, 28–­29, 38, 203, 210; relationship to fiction, xxvi, xix, xviii, 158, 160, 164–­68, 182, 222 unreliability. See narrators Urrea, Alberto, 49–­50, 55 verisimilitude, 88, 182, 184–­86, 190 Vila-­Matas, Enrique, 203–­5 voice, 7, 8; authorial, 121, 133, 144, 195, 210, 229; intrusive, 181; loss of, 123–­26; of marginalized groups, 57, 60; metafictional, 185, 191; narrative, xxviii, 13, 229, 232; poetic, 90–­91; prosopopoetic, 91–­92 Wallace, David Foster, 194, 203, 215 Walsh, Richard, 226, 230–­31 Webber, Georgia, 123–­26 “We Should All Be Feminists” (2014), 4, 15 whiteness, 44, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60n4 whitewashing, xiv Wilde, Oscar, 172–­73, 204 Winfrey, Oprah, 54–­55; and Oprah’s Book Club, 56–­57 Woolf, Virginia, 158, 161–­62, 175 Worthington, Marjorie, 191, 202 Youth (2003), 167 Zetterberg-­Nielsen, Henrik, 231–­32

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