Seductions of Form in Contemporary Autofiction
Published in Contemporary Literature, 2024
Abstract
For many commentators, autofiction is defined by a particular mode of representation. Marjorie Worthington, for example, suggests that autofiction “revels in ambiguity” between fiction and fact, between life-writing and the novel. I’d like to propose that works fall into this murky category not only because they hybridize or destabilize questions of fact or fiction—in other words, not because of their approach to representation—but because these works express an agency relative to a larger social world. In so doing they render available images both of their artists and their audiences, images which can be abducted from the works themselves. More pointedly, I’d like to think of autofiction, as Alfred Gell might, as a trap. To that end I describe the agency of autofiction using the phrase “seductions of form.” In the two works I read in detail—Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (2019) and Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday (2018)—we encounter a sharp foregrounding of form, which in each case begins by dividing the text into three parts. These divisions, and the ways the parts are then made to bear on one another, incite practices of reading which make these texts irresistible, at least to some (at least to me), while making them insufferable for others. Trust Exercise and Asymmetry suggest that autofiction’s designs on its readers are not only more elaborate than may have been noticed, but also more fundamentally aimed at the reader’s experience of their own power and freedom. How could these authors do what they are doing? What unseemly courage licenses their acts of exploitation? Because we could not ourselves do what these authors are doing, they operate Gell’s magical mechanism: by a kind of enchantment, they transmute captivity into freedom.