Against Autofiction: The French resistance to Autofiction from Gérard Genette to Julia Kristeva

In her 2016 autobiography, Je me voyage, Julia Kristeva confesses: I do not like autofiction, because it does not liberate from sadomasochism by exhibiting it, it endures it and perpetuates its pleasure by inoculating it to a hypocritical reader, “its double, its brother,” whose desire is, by definition, to power and submission. . . . By replacing [de Sade’s] philosophy in the boudoir with pornography, or with miserabilism, the Spectacle distributes the designer drugs of autofiction, the tailor-made and legal drugs, to a hyperconnected people. This dislike is surprising for several reasons. One of the most prominent post-structuralist French intellectuals, Kristeva belongs to the generation of writers who “invented” autofiction as a hybrid genre, born from experimental prose (the new novel), narratology, and psychoanalysis. Cultivating her outsider position—as a Bulgarian deeply entrenched in the core of Parisian avant-garde life in the 1970s and 1980s, and as one of the main exponents of French theory in New York—Kristeva has always practiced what is now labeled autotheory. Probably the most famous example is her virtuoso 1977 essay on motherhood, “Stabat Mater,” in which she juxtaposes a raw, poetic account of her pregnancy against a cultural history and analysis of the cult of the Virgin mother in Catholicism. Since the 1980s, her studies on the abject, love, melancholia, and the experience of foreignness all contain memorable autotheoretical fragments that link her own experiences and those of her patients, psychoanalytic theory, and readings of the Western canon. When she turned to fiction around the turn of the century, her novels—in various genres—baffled critics and were predominantly read autobiographically, including by herself in Je me voyage, where she readily links many characters to people in her life. Kristeva’s objections against autofiction are double and familiar. On the one hand, autofiction relies on questionable psychological mechanisms in both writer and reader, like sadomasochism, exhibitionism, and narcissism. On the other hand, it is a commercial phenomenon, linked to the digital [End Page 37] sphere and its penchant for reality, self-display, and confession, that, like the opium of religion, lulls the masses to sleep and prevents genuine reflection. Considering the fact that today autofiction and autotheory are most often associated with women’s writing and feminism, Kristeva’s harsh judgment brings to mind an equally scathing passage from her 1981 essay “Women’s Time” about the different waves of feminism and women’s writing. Here, while advocating a revolutionary new language, she explicitly condemns not just attempts to find a “women’s language” but also most literary production by women as “a reiteration of a more or less depressed romanticism and always an explosion of an ego lacking narcissistic gratification,” or, quite simply “naïve whining” or anachronistic “market-place romanticism.” In a note, translator Alice Jardin explains this passionate attack as directed against the “mass marketing” of écriture feminine in France at the time. Still, it is quite remarkable, considering that in the Anglo-Saxon world—including the special issue of Signs where “Women’s Time” appeared in 1981—Kristeva is presented as one of the main exponents of “French feminism,” together with Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. In order to understand the aversion to the related phenomena of autofiction and écriture féminine, it is important to look once again at autofiction as “the forgotten face of French theory,” as Hywel Dix calls it in a 2017 article in Word and Text and in his 2018 edited volume Autofiction in English, and at what Mounir Laouyen termed, in a 2021 article, the “problematic reception” of the genre in France. Dix makes a distinction between Anglo-American autofiction, which is more concerned with an exploration of the status of the author, and French autofiction, which focuses on the distinction between truth and fiction. The association of autofiction with the blurring of boundaries has received a negative value judgment primarily because of Gérard Genette’s oft-cited distinction in 1991 between “true” autofictions, that is, genuinely fictional stories in which author, narrator, and character bear the same name (like Borges in...

Jaar van publicatie:2022

Toegankelijkheid:Closed