fun while it lasted
In a recent piece for The New Republic, Tope Folarin argues autofiction is a designation limited to White authors; few authors of color are allowed into the category. I don’t disagree with that. But I wonder if authors of color aren’t given the autofiction designation because their work is actually lively in a way that the works of the autofiction writers of the 2010s are not. I think of 2010s autofiction as a product of dissatisfaction with the novel. It’s the form that would emerge in a culture in which there’s too much information for anyone to ever be certain of what’s going on in the world, and where we’re all so conscious of the details of others’ lives that few writers feel they can inhabit another life—especially if it differs from theirs in privilege or social position—with enough authority to create characters that will be believed and won’t be criticized. And so the novel—the realist novel with plot, entirely invented characters, themes, symbols—becomes an especially hard form to practice well.
I suppose the difference is whether you frontload that exhaustion with the form or not: whether your exhaustion with the form becomes an explicit part of your text or an explicit part of the way you describe your text in the interviews and publicity that surrounds your book. Rachel Cusk describes the structures of her earlier, more typical novels as “structures breaking down that I realized were old.” “[T]here’s a homogeneity afoot,” she noted in a 2018 New Yorker interview, “that I think everyone would accept in terms of our environment and how we live and how we communicate, and those things seem to be eroding the old idea of character”—character being a structure that dates from a “Victorian template” of the novel that is now obsolete. In My Struggle, Knausgaard often writes about how much he hates his world and everything in it. Their works seem products of this sense in our society that you can’t escape yourself—you can’t really be anyone but the traveling writer or “young urban artist” or Scandinavian dad that you are. And so there’s self-consciousness, doubt, even palpable exhaustion, in much of the autofiction written by authors who are White.
For writers of color, by contrast, their practice of the form of fiction seems vital. Books like Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man or Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater are autobiographical novels; neither Folarin nor Emezi needs to tell you in or through the structures of their books that the form of the novel, or literature itself—any means of authentic artistic representation of experience—is exhausted.
In that sense, the fact that writers of color aren’t slotted into the autofiction category is probably a compliment to them. It seems to me writers of color—like Folarin, or Emezi, whom he mentions in his piece, or Raven Leilani, whose novel Luster also seems autobiographically inflected—don’t need to emphasize artifice in their practice of the novel form by presenting an altered version of their own lives. They simply inhabit the form.
What’s more, while Folarin raises a fair point when he notes that autofiction is a designation made by critics, rather than an artistic movement that various writers gravitated to organically, or a school of writing that various likeminded writers declared themselves part of—any category made by critics could reflect their biases, and those biases will come from the cultures the critics are part of—he also seems to treat “autofiction” as a positive and prestigious designation. I’m not sure it is, even among the critics. Cusk’s Outline series is probably the best reviewed of the lot; otherwise, it’s a polarizing label. Knausgaard’s My Struggle is as reviled as often as it’s liked. Heti’s Motherhood was criticized. The Topeka School was also greeted with ambivalence by some critics (though more because of a perceived imbalance in the novel’s critique of Trumpian and liberal/soft-left masculinities; Parul Segal notes Topeka is actually the least solipsistic of Ben Lerner’s novels). Generally, the amount of appreciation anyone has for an autofictional novel of the Cusk-Heti-Knausgaard-Lerner type seems to track with how sympathetic they are to the claim of exhaustion with the traditional novel form so often implied in these works.
But with, say, Emezi’s Freshwater, critics often noted the parallels between Emezi’s own experience and their protagonist’s, but the connection was generative, because there was something in Emezi’s experience of being an ogbanje—a spirit, in the Igbo tradition, born into a human body—that she wanted to convey through the medium of her novel; the book wasn’t just a sign proclaiming that all means to narrate any story but her own were exhausted.
As Lauren Oyler pointed out in The Baffler, autofiction was fun while it lasted. But exhausted self-consciousness, art that doubts its own capacity to be authentic, isn’t ultimately that exciting. It lands with a frisson—I honestly love a lot of the canonical autofiction books, the books written by Cusk, Knausgaard, Heti, Lerner; they speak to the nature of the exhausted, information-saturated moment in which they emerged; in that moment, they were engrossing—but it doesn’t leave much of a mark.
