Autofictions?
November 18, 2022
The Lost Daughter, Weather, and Leaving the Atocha Station are autofictions––works that feature a main character who is more or less a surrogate for their author. Sure, to some extent any act of writing is autobiographical, but the novels in question here belong to a distinct class, one whose project, in part, is to tow the line between fact and fiction dangerously and deliciously; for the objects of the author’s life and those of the world they render on the page to be indistinguishable. Lerner most cleanly squares into this grouping. It’s understood that Atocha Station presents a decent facsimile of events he actually lived. Whatever the shared DNA threshold, it meets. Ditto Weather. The pseudonymous Elena Ferrante proves more elusive. She throws us red herrings: Nina’s daughter (e.g.) shares the Elena name. Such trickery figures into Ferrante’s investigation of art’s originator, the myth of the author, etc., a key feature of her thematic concern. If you’ll offer me some license, I’d wager that Leda and Ferrante’s similarities outnumber their differences. What possibilities does the closely resembling avatar afford? Presumably the ugly feelings that course each novel are so potent because to access them in the process of writing was less of a lift. And yet, early on at least, it seems the mission of Adam Gordon (Lerner)’s Spanish sojourn is to excise himself from his own work. His prime anxiety when it comes to his art is his own involvement in it. He is anti himself. Considering the aesthetic essence of his trip, Adam even has the thought: I will never write a novel. Lerner writes himself into one. In the novel he writes, his page self seeks to not be a self at all, and to not write. An inability to truly sever. Our stock phrase: obstructed agency. Can Lerner escape? It’s in his attempt, in his grappling with ugly feelings, that we find merit, identify ourselves. This is an incomplete (incoherent?) formulation. Gave up on its ambitions too. Recall Bechdel: “But don’t you think that if you write minutely and rigorously enough about your own life you can, you know, transcend your particular self?” (200). Do Lerner, Offill, and/or Ferrante transcend?
(18 November 2022)
P.S.
There’s that ending again. And the note of resignation that precedes it. I patch together some profundity in the closing measures, it is salvaged, but this one could have been honed more. Ferrante is probably the section to go. But I suppose there’s a Weather-10:04 comparison in the works by this point and we didn’t want a retread. The redeployment of the quote isn’t earned as much as I thought it was at the time of writing. I felt good about that callback. This one did anticipate our autofiction discussion tract at least. Simplify.