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Autofiction across Borders: Anglo-Metamorphoses of a French Concept

2022; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/abr.2022.0037

2153-4578

Karen Ferreira-Meyers,

French Literature and Critical Theory

Autofiction across BordersAnglo-Metamorphoses of a French Concept Karen Ferreira-Meyers (bio) It is common knowledge within literary circles today that the term and concept of autofiction started its generic journey in the Francophone context, more particularly in the French context. Serge Doubrovsky, French literary critic and novelist, was the first to identify and develop autofiction, both in theory and in practice. Since that period—the end of the 1970s—the concept has been widened, narrowed, diverted, and evolved rapidly. It is not possible to analyze its evolution in detail. So, a general overview is what I propose below. In the globalized, postcolonial, and postmodern world of today, the influence felt by Anglophone literary trends in literature written in other languages is omnipresent. The repeated va-et-vient between Francophone and Anglophone cultural objects, artifacts, and symbols, including literary and other media-based representations, is part of our awareness of literary history. Since the early twentieth century, the direction has been mainly from the Anglophone spheres toward and into the Francophone ones. One example would be the linguistic transfers through borrowings. However, with auto-fiction a reversal of this trend has been at play. Doubrovsky himself wrote his autofictions and his critical discussions about the concept first in French, then in English. Autofiction gained traction in France and in Francophone contexts and traditions early, and while the uptake in Anglophone literatures was slow, it became a sure value in the UK, the US, and other English-speaking regions and countries, especially since the start of the third millennium. Various scholars have examined the trajectory that autofiction took since its inception—the coining of the term by Doubrovsky on the back cover of his 1977 book Fils: “Fiction, d’événements et de faits strictement reels; si l’on veut autofiction” (Fiction, of strictly real events and facts; autofiction if you like). Because autofiction brings together different aspects, such as authenticity, identity, language, memory, ineffability, psychology, trauma, and intermediality, the boundaries between autofiction and other forms of life writing, those between autobiography and literature, and those between literature and life are constantly blurred in this genre. As Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf [End Page 18] notes in her Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (2018), most, if not all, Francophone and Anglophone researchers working in the field of autofiction note that there is no unified definition or globally accepted understanding of the term. In her discussion of autofiction in the Handbook of Autobiography/Auto-fiction, Claudia Gronemann further observes that “genre theorists inferred from Doubrovsky’s model that any text could be called autofiction if it bears the subtitle ‘novel’ while producing referentiality as an autobiography does, usually by virtue of the author and protagonist sharing the same name.” In the age of postmodernity and the media, it is considered one option of self-presentation, one that is mostly adopted by French authors due to its origins in this literary scene marked by specific traditions. How did the notion evolve in the Francophone literary domain, and was this evolution similar in the Anglophone uptake? This is what I aim to describe below. Francophone Autofiction: Genre and Literature Philippe Gasparini’s Autofiction: Une aventure du langage (2008) is the first to give an overview of the transformations the concept underwent since the end of the 1970s. On the one hand, there are scholars like Vincent Colonna, who view autofiction as the intentional fictionalizing of the Self (for instance in his 2004 Autofiction et autres mythomanies littéraires). On the other, researchers like Jacques Lecarme (in his coedited 1993 Autofictions & Cie), Marie Darrieussecq (in her 1996 article “L’autofiction, un genre pas sérieux”), and Claude Burgelin (in his 2010 chapter “Pour l’autofiction”) note the hybridity, the innovation, and the generic invention of autofiction. Gasparini, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska (in her 2007 essay Autofiction et dévoilement de soi) and Régine Robin (in her 1997 book Le golem de l’écriture: De l’autofiction au cybersoi) focus on the so-called hybrid approach, where the autofictional blend between fiction and autobiography makes it impossible to decide what is fictional and what is autobiographical in a text. Particular to the history of autofiction in French and...