In recent years, authors have increasingly combined autobiographical and fictional conventions to gain readers’ trust. As opposed to the apathetic and unreliable postmodern narrator, whose fun-house mirrors and rambling digressions leave the reader to sift through meaning for truth, contemporary authors use an autobiographical protagonist to inspire faith in their readers. When the author acts as narrator they present a single, unified perspective to the reader, breaking down generic and experiential barriers. The unnamed protagonist in Ben Lerner’s latest novel, for example, has an uncanny amount in common with the author, who the reader assumes is also interested in the metaphysical world where fiction and reality cross. Sheila Heti is another author who, by naming her protagonist after herself, compounds generic ambiguity through a sincere, dialogic tone to invite the reader’s interpretation of textual events in a real world context. And Karl Ove Knausgaard goes so far as to admit that some of the details in his autobiography are the result of his intuition, showcasing the inherently unreliable nature of autobiography while encouraging the reader to understand the innate nature of storytelling. By blending autobiographical and fictional elements, these authors invite the reader to see truth as unstable as genre, and to interpret their texts through the perspective of the author as narrator.
The Autobiographical Pact
The development of critical theory as a practice last century led to both an eschewing and an embrace of an author’s personal and cultural context in order to better interpret a text. In the second half of the century, perhaps no essay was as influential as Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” in which the essence of humanistic interpretation is called into question. He announces the birth of the reader and writes, “The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (Ed. Leitch, 1325). The destination is the reader and a unified interpretation of a text comes from reading the page without focusing on the author’s intentions or background. While Barthes advocates interpretation based exclusively on a text, Michel Foucault, in his seminal, “What Is An Author?” proposes a new set of questions about a text’s background, agreeing with Barthes when he writes: “It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the “author-function” arises out of their scission—in the division and distance of the two.” (Ed. Leitch, 1484). The author-function is the timeless gap between author and narrator, which inexperienced readers may assume to be the author themselves. From early on in their education, readers are taught to preserve the author-function in their analysis and remember that the author’s intention is limited to those words on the page. Yet the literature of the early twenty-first century is reacting to these critics—as I will demonstrate, contemporary authors are intent on showing that they are alive, not through readers’ interpretations, but through frank admissions of how they have created texts. In the blending of autobiography and fiction, these writers create narrators who refer directly to their authorship, in a role I call the “author-narrator.”
Ben Lerner’s 10:04
Ben Lerner is one modern novelist who uses an author-narrator to engage the reader. Lerner’s second novel 10:04 (2014), is about an unnamed character who plans to write a novel about expanding a story published in The New Yorker, which happens to be by the novelist Ben Lerner. Is this, then, autobiography, fiction or something altogether different? These questions point to the novel’s primary theme: “…the tension between the metaphysical and physical worlds, between two orders of temporality…” (10:04, 10). Lerner’s project can be interpreted as plucking this tension—and so, by entering the metaphysical world of text, the reader learns how the author borrows from his physical world to create fiction. In writing the story which will help the narrator to land a large advance for his second novel, the narrator describes how he plans to write it, “The story would involve a series of transpositions: I would shift my medical problem to another part of the body…I would change names…the protagonist, a version of myself; I’d call him the author…” (10:04, 54). Here the narrator defines how the author writes himself into a narrator. When the author-narrator includes his New Yorker story in the novel’s second section, the reader becomes aware that the novel itself is an exercise in the possibilities of fiction: “…a nice crossing of reality and fiction, which is what the story is about in the first place” (p. 57). The reader must be wary about reading the text as autobiography; through criteria set out in Philipe Lejeune’s “The Autobiographical Pact,” the reader can better classify Lerner’s project: The fact that the protagonist is not named but only implied to be Ben Lerner through shared biographical facts hints that the reader is entering an autobiographical pact with the author; however, the subtitle A Novel on the book’s cover page indicates a fictional pact (14). Lerner has entered into neither; he has composed what Lejeune calls a “phantasmic pact” (27), a kind of metafiction, a pact that is intentionally indirect through the contrast of genres, which occupies an “autobiographical space” (27). Such execution would not have been possible in Lerner’s first novel. As Jejeune writes, “Perhaps one is only an author with one’s second book, when the proper name inscribed on the cover becomes the “common factor” of at least two different texts and thus gives the idea of a person who cannot be reduced to any of his texts in particular, and who, capable of producing others, surpasses them all” (p.11). In 10:04, the nature of novel-writing implies the author’s becoming, and the unnamed narrator coming to terms with this phenomenon is divulging his consciousness, entering into conversation with the reader about who he is, or can be. 10:04 is neither autobiography or fiction, but both, and the author’s honesty and openness in explaining this gives the text unity, placing the power of interpretation in the reader’s hands. In other contemporary novels, the generic pact is more clearly defined from the outset, arguably bringing the reader closer to the narrator and the author, as well as the text itself.
Sheila Heti’s Moral Narrator
In How Should A Person Be?, Sheila Heti writes a character named Sheila Heti, but the generic pact the reader enters into with the author is made ambiguous by the subtitle, A Novel From Life. Because the author has named her narrator after herself, the reader could follow Jejeune’s chart to claim How Should A Person Be? as autobiography (The Autobiographical Pact, 16), even if it does have novelistic elements. Again, the reader enters into a phantasmic pact; however, genre seems to be less of a concern to Heti than morality. This is evidenced by the text’s title, as well as in its latter third when the narrator asks, “Hadn’t I always gone into the world making everyone and everything a lesson in how I should be?” (p. 214). This self-referential question takes on different layers of meaning because of the text’s autobiographical space; here the pronoun ‘I’ could easily refer to the author-narrator. Since this novel is “From Life,” insofar as the author and narrator share the same name, the narrator could be asking how the author should be, or vice-versa. This reflexiveness also involves the reader: “Everyone” and “everything” necessarily includes the text, which serves as a lesson for the reader, and whose reading becomes the fulfillment of the author-narrator’s “making,” and marks the success of her lesson to herself. The acknowledgment of the reader by the author-narrator has been defined by the critic Adam Kelly as a two-way conversation characteristic of all the fiction of the New Sincerity (Consider David Foster Wallace, 145), a movement into which this text presumably falls. Through this dialogic tone, the reader must take the narrator’s question sincerely, and come to their own conclusions of how a person should be, examining the narrator’s shortcomings as representative of the author’s as well. The lessons the narrator presents to the reader take on more resonance then, because they hold up not only in a fictional world, but also in reality. In this way, life imitates art, offering the reader a lesson in how, or how not, to be. Those authors whose work is primarily autobiographical can also make use of the autobiographical space with an author-narrator to approximate truth.
Karl Ove’s Fictions
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six volume series My Struggle is more autobiographical than either 10:04 or How Should A Person Be? through its title alone, and its fictional admissions encourage textual interpretation. Early on in Volume One, A Death In The Family, the narrator, Karl Ove, recalls an encounter from his youth: “…it is sometime in the spring, I suppose, for my father is working in the garden” (p.7). Immediately, the referential “I suppose,” calls into question the veracity of this autobiographical scene. Another fictional element is the use of the present tense, although it is used colloquially to impart immediacy to this recollection. The narrator continues, relying on fiction to cement the reader’s trust. He assures us, “Nevertheless I have more than enough information to know his mood. This is apparent not from his facial expressions but from his physical posture, and you do not read it with your mind but with your intuition,” (p.8). The impersonal “you” and “your intuition,” though general, create the same dialogic tone as Heti’s repeated and self-conscious use of “I”; the narrator is inviting the reader to imagine with him his father’s mood. The reader understands that through the autobiographical pact, the author, who is no longer a child, and at the writing of this autobiography is well into his forties, is also using his intuition to remember his father’s physical posture and facial expressions. Such an early admission in Knausgaard’s series hints that he has used his intuition to create details not only in this scene, but through the other five volumes of his series. Once again, the reader has entered a phantasmic pact and an autobiographical. The author-narrator is drawing upon fiction in this scene because he has to—if veracity were necessary, he would be unable to recount his youth. As a result, the reader is led to believe in and trust him—on one hand through his appeal in the second person, and on the other, through his honesty in telling us when he has supposed. In the same way that fiction and truth blur, by using “your intuition,” the barrier between reader and author-narrator blurs—we occupy the same place of uncertainty and use our belief in the narrator’s real life authority to overcome it, not through thought, but feeling. The art of story—writing and reading—involves an intuitive leap to yield mutual trust—a relating through shared consciousness rather than intellectual games.
As writers such as Lerner, Heti and Knausgaard examine the relation between reality and art, their work calls into question the generic constraints of autobiography and fiction. In these sincerely narrated novels, the autobiographical space is narrowed for the sake of honesty and openness, in a direct invocation to the reader, who can interpret the text more deeply by understanding the narrator’s world as the product of an actual author. Through the attempts of the author-narrator to define perception, genre breaks down, which makes sense based on the pervasive online world of the twenty-first century, where the barrier between actual and virtual falls away, with one just as easily influencing the other. How ironic that in our technological age, the author’s acknowledgment of their textual creation unites them with the reader in a way that is not new, since after all, the best storytellers have done this for thousands of years.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2010. Ed. Leitch, Caine, Finke, Johnson, McGowan, Sharpley- Whiting, Williams. 1322-26. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is An Author?” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2010. Ed. Leitch, Caine, Finke, Johnson, McGowan, Sharpley-Whiting, Williams. 1475-90. Print.
Heti, Sheila. How Should A Person Be? New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2012. Print.
Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and The New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider David Foster Wallace. Ed. David Hering. Los Angeles/Austin: 2010. Web.
Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle: Volume 1. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009. Print.
Lerner, Ben. 10:04. New York: Macmillan, 2014. Print.
Lejeune, Phillippe. “The Autobiographical Pact.” 1975. Web. On Autobiography pp3-30 by Phillippe Lejeune.pdf – eDocs.10/8/15.
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