Autofiction, from nothing to the Nobel Prize in Literature

Annie Ernaux still can't believe it.

"I do not realize the global dimension of the Nobel Prize, except in the form of an accentuated responsibility," said the French writer a few days ago in an email from her house in Cergy, on the northwestern outskirts of Paris.

“The rise of autobiographical literature is a very complex issue.

But as far as I'm concerned, the answer is relatively simple.

I think that the Nobel does not reward the writer in the first person, but rather the one who, through transpersonal and clinical writing, has addressed issues related to women and society, to memory," she said while packing her suitcase for Stockholm. , where on Saturday he will receive the most prestigious literary distinction on the planet.

Her own response speaks of herself and, at the same time, as in her books, it transcends her personal case, and by far.

The Nobel for Ernaux could also be for an entire genre, autofiction, which has gone from being scorned as pure literary pornography to becoming the fashionable genre and the object of a cultural rehabilitation that few saw coming.

This change in perception is reflected in the words of Ernaux, treated for decades as a minor writer, “like a

”, which is how the sentimental and naive seamstresses from the provinces who came to Paris to earn a living were known.

On her day, it was said that her books were typical of "the gossip press, worthy of

”, the magazine that popularized photo novels in France, for its detailed account of female experiences and without literary value.

In the same way, the genre is no longer perceived as an exponent of the narcissism of writers obsessed by their little miseries, but as a set of individual stories that hide a collective dimension.

Annie Ernaux: "The Nobel does not reward the writer in the first person, but the one who talks about society and memory"

Its most recent evolution usually reflects the circumstances of social groups that have not always had the right to satisfactory literary representation, such as women and different minorities, the children of immigrants (Teju Cole, Fatima Daas), LGTBI authors (Édouard Louis , Ocean Vuong) or victims of abuse (Christine Angot, Vanessa Springora).

In reality, the self of autofiction could contain multitudes.

Even in the case of authors like Karl Ove Knausgård, whose family (and existential) trajectory is the mirror in which hundreds of thousands of white men of his age can look.

In a corner of the historic building of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, on top of a secular cloister in which trees stripped bare by autumn abound, a group of eight university professors have been investigating the characteristics of this controversial subgenre since 1998.

The Genèses d'Autofictions working group is directed by Isabelle Grell, a Sartre specialist who has spent years delving into the work of authors such as Hervé Guibert, Camille Laurens or Serge Doubrovsky, inventor of the term

, or "fiction of events and facts strictly real”, which he used to describe his book

(1977), an autobiographical novel constructed from a 9,000-page original manuscript.

"The bad reception that autofiction had in France responds to the historical context of the seventies," says Grell, referring to the arid emergence of the

, contrary to psychology and

, and to the influential theses on the "death of the author ” that Roland Barthes and other intellectuals proclaimed, interested in designating “an abstract writing” in which it no longer mattered who was the writer who was hiding behind any work.

The writers Karl Ove Knausgård and Rachel Cusk, exponents of the latest autofiction, at an event at the Dublin Literature Festival, in 2012.Liza Cauldwell

Over time, Doubrovsky's neologism has acquired changing definitions (for example, Larousse and Robert, the two reference dictionaries in France, offer two contradictory meanings) and has often been used as a synonym for autobiographical writing. that alternates factual narration and the techniques of the novel.

For Grell, however, there are clear differences between autobiography, which "tends to tell a lifetime", and autofiction, which tends to pull "a single thread" in the author's existence.

“But, above all, at the origin of all autofiction there is a flaw, a necessary crack for light to enter.

If not, the writer is still locked in a dark room, with the windows closed”, affirms the specialist, who considers that this genre has become normalized and has spread throughout the world,

definitively become "a personal testimony and, at the same time, absolutely universal" about any experience.

And it is this change in perception that has neutralized criticism of his alleged sick and congenital exhibitionism.

“In this genre there is also a lot of modesty.

In reality, there are autofictions of all kinds, from absolute classicism to experimental writing”, says Grell.

Another way to define autofiction is by elimination.

No author associated with this literary variant seems interested in being part of that club.

Almost no one willingly accepts the label: Ernaux hates it, preferring to speak of “impersonal autobiography”, “autosociobiography” or even “life writing”.

The same is true of some of his disciples in his country, veteran sociologist Didier Eribon (

) to the aforementioned Édouard Louis, the penultimate phenomenon of French letters with books that recount his youth as a homosexual in a family of National Front voters.

"It is a label that is better to escape," says the French-Algerian writer Nina Bouraoui, another of its greatest exponents, responsible for a work that has alternated between autofiction and pure narrative.

“Actually, it is a form of jail.

It is a genre that I like as a reader, but I have never come to tell myself that I was part of that family ”.

Nina Bouraoui: “Autofiction is a label that is better to escape.

It's actually a form of jail."

Bouraoui's best-known book, revealed at the age of 24 after his transfer to Gallimard, is

(2005), which has just been recovered in Spanish by Transit, a first-person confession about the secrets and wounds of his childhood, with the the tearing of her double cultural identity and the discovery of her lesbianism as a background.

The book is inspired by her weekly psychoanalysis sessions for three years, which makes it possible to draw a parallel between autofiction and therapy.

“Writing does not cure you of anything or, at least, I have never written books to feel better.

But there is a similarity: both use the same tool (language, the word) to restore a memory that is often distorted ”, Bouraoui replies.

17 years ago, the writer won the Renaudot Prize with

—and, with it, an unprecedented feeling of “respectability”— two decades after Ernaux won it with

, the first important recognition on the path that has led her to the Nobel.

Despite its roots in French territory, autofiction was not born in Paris at the end of the seventies.

At this point in the party, it is clear that it had existed, with different aspects, since the beginning of time, as evidenced by names like Balzac, Diderot, Kafka, Joyce, Henry Miller, Borges or Nabokov.

Or, going back a little further, Dante, Nerval, Quevedo or the

, Lucian of Samosata's imaginary travelogue in the 2nd century, one of the earliest examples of the fabled self (if we discount the Bible).

Goethe already made it clear that recounting a life attending only to the factual had no interest.

“I believed that fiction was capable of representing the truth in a much more appropriate way than a mere enumeration of everyday experiences,” says another specialist in this genre, Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, professor at the University of Münster and author of a manual on reference on autobiography and autofiction, a monumental world atlas of this genre in three volumes of 2,000 pages, which he published in 2019 after seven years of research.

The French writer Serge Doubrovsky, inventor of the neologism 'autofiction' in 1977 to designate his autobiographical book 'Son'.ANDERSEN ULF/SIPA (ANDERSEN ULF/SIPA)

One of his conclusions was precisely that the self-fiction existed in all the world's traditions.

For this reason, he considers it delicate to affirm that the Ernaux prize is the first Nobel for autofiction, since the works of other winners, such as Nelly Sachs, Pearl Buck, Patrick Modiano or JM Coetzee, are not so far from the genre.

“Actually, elements of autofiction can be found in the books of any Nobel Prize winner in Literature, but it is no coincidence that Ernaux won it at a time when the genre was at its most prominent throughout the world,” adds Wagner-Egelhaaf, who considers that the award marks "a turning point" after decades of critical and academic contempt.

Fiction is no longer seen as a necessary evil in autobiographical books;

now it is even a literary quality.

“It has ceased to be perceived as an inevitable factor when it comes to telling a life to become lucky, an opportunity, an asset that opens every story to a more experimental, literary and artistic dimension.

That is what explains the bum we see today,” she says.

And he urges not to underestimate the political and sociological dimension that these stories have acquired in light of the importance acquired by identity politics in recent years.

Nor is it true that autofiction is a strictly bookish genre, as demonstrated by the cases of Sophie Calle, Christian Boltanski or Paul McCarthy, who emerged at the same time as the literary genre, or the multiple experiments with hybrid alter egos in the cinema, which They have returned in recent times thanks to Pedro Almodóvar (

), James Gray (

) or Steven Spielberg (

, his new film, inspired by his childhood and his relationship with his parents).

In the fifties, Gombrowicz generated a small scandal by choosing

a Pole who emigrated to Argentina who had the same features.

Three decades later, Paul Auster was becoming a superstar.

Manuel Vilas: "Conservative criticism reproaches us for using what we have lived as if we were doping ourselves, as if we did not compete on an equal footing with other writers"

In Spanish literature, examples also abound.

Since the nineties, the genre has conquered a lot of ground, as evidenced by the books by Javier Cercas (

and almost all of the following), Enrique Vila-Matas (whose games between narrator and protagonist are also permanent, from

to the recent

), Rosa Montero (

), Marta Sanz (

), Luis Landero (

), Milena Busquets (

), Elvira Lindo (

), Miren Agur Meabe (

), Javier Montes (

), Aixa de la Cruz (

, which blended autofiction with the essay) or Elizabeth Duval (

), among many others.

On the other hand, authors such as Alejandro Zambra (

), Guadalupe Nettel (

), Nona Fernández (

) and Emiliano Monge (

) also demonstrate their roots in Latin America.

But the author most closely linked to autofiction may have been Manuel Vilas with

, the mourning book for his parents, which was at the same time a generational portrait of the children of the lower-middle class during the Franco regime, although he has always renegade those ties with this rescued genre.

“The problem is the word, which seems inaccurate to me and leads to somewhat gross inaccuracies.

I have done autofiction, but not with that book, but with almost all the previous ones, in which I invented events not lived on behalf of a protagonist who resembled me, "replies Vilas, alluding to novels such as

or

.

“It wouldn't make sense, in a book about mourning my parents, for me to make things up.

On the contrary, what I was looking for was attachment to what really happened”.

In the Spanish context, Vilas believes that there is still a reluctance towards these hybrids, despite their undeniable success.

“From the most conservative critics, who tend to highlight the values ​​of absolute fiction, we are reproached for using what we have lived as if we were doping ourselves, as if we did not compete on an equal footing with other writers, perhaps because of the favor that readers have given our books, in which they have seen a plus of authenticity with respect to the traditional narrative”.

The writer Manuel Vilas, who renounced the autofiction label when he published 'Ordesa', in Madrid in 2021.Santi Burgos

For the author of

y

, the proliferation of the openly autobiographical novel in Spain has had to do with the growing transparency that came after the end of the dictatorship.

“Autofiction can only occur in places where individual freedom is guaranteed.

In

, written in 1975, Threshold is sheltered in an abstract narrative.

Nothing to do with the explicit realism of

by Sergio del Molino.

Between one book and another, democracy had been installed in our country.

On the other hand, the erosion of the notion of privacy also has to do with this unusual rise of the autobiographical.

"Intimacy is no longer a sacred refuge, but something that can be shared," agrees Vilas.

It is no longer something that is protected from prying eyes, but is even displayed, with the indiscriminate exposure of private life and intimate thoughts on social networks.

The question is whether the bubble of autofiction will burst when reading about real experiences stops giving us that little chill.

You can follow BABELIA on

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber