(New Literary Theory) Hywel Dix - Autofiction and Cultural Memory-Routledge (2022)

ROUTLEDGE FOCUS
AUTOFICTION AND
CULTURAL MEMORY
Hywel Dix
Focus
‘Autofiction and Cultural Memory offers an excellent overview of
recent thinking about the nature of autofiction and advances a
persuasive argument. Drawing on a varied range of sources, Dix
proposes a unique approach that will be useful for both literary
study and interdisciplinary approaches to cultural memory. This is
a key text for both experts and new scholars.’
Professor Timothy C. Baker, University of Aberdeen
‘Reversing the polarity of autofiction from individual to society,

Hywel Dix’s Autofiction and Cultural Memory shows how a form
once understood to be concerned with the self becomes a way of
telling collective stories and broadening cultural memory for
contemporary writers from postcolonial cultures.’
James Harker, Bard College Berlin
Autofiction and Cultural Memory
Autofiction and Cultural Memory breaks new ground in autofiction

research by showing how it gives postcolonial writers a means of
bearing witness to past cultural or political struggles, and hence of
contributing to new forms of cultural memory.
Most discussion of autofiction has treated it as an individualistic
form, dealing with the personal growth of its authors. In doing so, it
privileges narratives of private development over those of social
commitment and accords with Western concepts of ownership and
authorship. By contrast, Hywel Dix shows how a variety of writers
outside the Western world have used the techniques of autofiction in a
different way, placing themselves on the side lines of their own stories
to show solidarity with struggles against imperialism and tyranny.
Drawing on examples from Algeria, Ethiopia, the Caribbean, the
Americas, India and Turkey, Dix presents autofiction as a form which
combines the life stories of authors with the collective struggles of
their societies to restore to view historical injustices that have been
marginalised and forgotten. By contributing to new forms of cultural
memory, autofiction raises important questions about what we choose
to remember and what we value in the present. This book will be of
interest to anyone working in postcolonial studies, world literature,
trauma studies, autobiography, life writing or social justice.
Hywel Dix is Professor of English at Bournemouth University. His

research interests include modern and contemporary literature, critical
cultural theory, authorial careers and autofiction. His publications
include The Late-Career Novelist (2017) and Autofiction in English (2018).
New Literary Theory
Series editors: Andy Mousley and Jeff Wallace
Just Literature
Philosophical Criticism and Justice
Tzachi Zamir
Happiness
Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Philosophy and the Art of Writing
Richard Shusterman
Autofiction and Cultural Memory
Hywel Dix
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
New-Literary-Theory/book-series/NLTH
Autofiction and Cultural
Memory
Hywel Dix
First published 2023
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© 2023 Hywel Dix
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-32223-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-32226-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-31346-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003313465
Typeset in Times New Roman

by MPS Limited, Dehradun
For my mother, Lesley Dix. I’m very proud to be your son.
Contents
Series Preface x
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
1 On Autofiction and Cultural Memory 4
2 How the Author Became: Precursors and

Preludes 23
3 The Author as Minor Character: Alternative

Perspectives 48
4 The Poetics of Exile and Return 67
5 Autofiction Once, Twice, Three Times Removed 80
Conclusion 101
References 104
Index 110
New Literary Theory: Series
Preface
Why does or should literature matter to us? What is its value and
significance for human existence in the twenty-first century? New
Literary Theory aims to breathe new life into the way we think about
literature. The books in the series will be erudite but not narrowly
specialist, informed by up-to-date research but not overburdened by
scholarly reference. The spirit of the series is to emulate the vitality,
experimentalism and freedom of literature itself, and to find fresh and
accessible ways of writing about our engagements with it.
The re-focusing of attention upon the particularities of literature is
not intended to be nostalgic or defensive. The series will encourage a
plurality of approaches to ‘the literary’ and will not seek to prescribe
what literary studies now is or might become in an era of revolutionary
cultural transformation in which the conditions for reading texts as
‘literature’ are drastically changing, if not disappearing. For ‘literature’
consists not simply in its sources of value – works of art and their
creators – but in the reading formations and institutions that make
the concept of literature possible: textual literacy; the possibility of
the individual’s sustained, private encounter with the text, or time and
space to read in an undistracted way; an educational system in which to
teach the concept of the literary. Books, the market activists tell us, are
still alive and well; but are their readers still out there and, if so, for how
long? The reorientation of human consciousness in ‘developed’ societies
and the monopolisation of attention and concentration through digital
technology, screens, mobile phones and social media is occurring with
extraordinary rapidity.
Our rationale for reinvigorating and re-imagining the literary is in
part provoked by the implications of these far-reaching cultural
changes. But it can simultaneously be traced back to the historical
and conceptual drift between ‘literary theory’ and the thing that became
‘theory.’ The revolution in literary studies from the 1960s onwards was
New Literary Theory: Series Preface xi
fired by an initial interest in the theory of what literature is and does,
gathered from various twentieth-century sources – from, say, Russian
formalism, through New Criticism, stylistics, structuralism and
narratology to post-structuralism. But then ‘theory’ detached itself,
becoming no longer simply a concern with the literary as such, but a way
of reading literature in and through philosophy, psychology and
psychoanalysis, movements of political thought and activism, and
frameworks of ethical value. The series will build upon each of these
aspects of ‘literary/theory’, acknowledging their immeasurable
enrichment of literary studies as a mode of intellectual work. Yet we
are also eager to (re)focus attention on what it means to think
concertedly ‘with literature’ about any given field of enquiry.
There has been a tendency, also, for the teaching of literary theory in
undergraduate programmes to become routinised, with undergraduate
modules delivering literary theory as a ‘toolkit’ of critical approaches
which bleach out the historical contexts or political motivations and
struggles behind such approaches. The perceived obligation to master
and deploy literary-theoretical languages did, inevitably, lead to new
kinds of professional performance in critical writing, perhaps sometimes
neglectful of the need to keep what was once called, most notably by
Virginia Woolf, the intelligent ‘common reader,’ alert and awake. In this
sense the academicisation of theory could seem to be at odds with its
emancipatory promise. Resistance to such tendencies means trying to
assimilate theory with those more ‘common’ terms in which readers and
students might want to register their engagements with literary texts –
emotion and evaluation, perplexity and enlightenment, loving and
hating.
Andy Mousley and Jeff Wallace
Acknowledgements
I first started thinking about the relationship between autofiction

and cultural memory during conferences on Trauma, Narrative,
Responsibility at the University of Bucharest and Autofiction: Theory,
Practices, Cultures – A Comparative Perspective at Wolfson College,
Oxford in 2019. The invitation I received from Andy Mousley and Jeff
Wallace in 2021 to contribute a volume to the New Literary Theory
series gave me an opportunity to expand my thinking on the connection
between these two areas. I am grateful to James Harker of Bard College,
Berlin and Timothy Baker of the University of Aberdeen for reading my
initial proposal and helping me clarify the nature of my argument. My
thinking about autofiction in general has I am sure been enhanced
through conversations with my friend and colleague Roy Watson during
the course of his own research. My student Ahone Lane produced an
excellent undergraduate dissertation on postmemory in the cinema of
Jordan Peele in 2022 and I am grateful to her for bringing some of the
sources I quote here to my attention for the first time. Any errors and all
interpretations are of course my own.
Introduction
Human beings are storytelling animals. They are also political animals.
The stories a society tells about itself reveal much about its core ethos
and what it stands for. These become embedded in the fabric of the
society through the workings of cultural memory, the process by which
certain people, experiences and events from the past are re-narrated
and mythologised so that they pass into the common consciousness:
America as land of opportunity and freedom, France as revolutionary
republic, the celestial origin of Japan’s emperors. These myths are
simplifications rather than strict truths but as myths they wield a very
strong power, encouraging a sense of belonging, shared purpose and
emotional connection.
In cultural memory whether or not specific myths are true is less
important than how people feel about them. This means that although
it is not necessarily incorrect, cultural memory is incomplete and in-
herently selective: It celebrates iconic figures and events from the past
while allowing others to lapse out of the collective consciousness.
Cultural memory is therefore problematic because the stories a society
celebrates about itself also entail forms of forgetting and can give rise
to the marginalisation of dominated peoples or oppressed minorities
whose narratives of the past do not square with the dominant narrative
of the society. This in turn has the effect that a higher premium is
placed on certain lives, histories and experiences than others, giving
rise to symbolic patterns of inequality that are repeated in the present.
For example in the cultural memory of Britain, the Tudor period, the
Spanish Armada, the First World War trenches and the spirit of the
Blitz are shoehorned into a narrative of Britain as a plucky underdog,
fighting for freedom and decency in the face of adversity. It is a story
quite at odds with the experience of colonisation, the reality of the
slave trade and the history of the empire. But these things tend not to
feature in the collective consciousness to anything like the same degree.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003313465-1
2 Introduction
This book explores how far the recently emerging form of literature
broadly known as autofiction affords writers from diverse societies,
many of them postcolonial, the means to re-write dominant narratives
about the world in which they work and thereby to broaden the cul-
tural memory of those societies in the service of greater diversity and
equality. On the surface, developing a theoretical connection between
autofiction and cultural memory is challenging because autofiction
appears chiefly concerned with the life stories of the named individuals
who narrate them whereas cultural memory is defined by its shift from
the individual to the collective domain. However, the main argument
presented by the book is that there exist various forms of autofiction in
which, concurrent with narrating aspects of the life of the author,
certain texts also position authors as typical members of a given cul-
ture, society, community or even nation, thereby enacting the shift
from individual to collective narration that is characteristic of cultural
memory. That is, by narrating their own stories such writers are also at
the same time involved in narrating the wider stories and cultural
struggles in which they have played a part. Whilst it would be un-
reasonable to expect an individual author to act as a spokesperson for
an entire community, let alone a whole city, nation or culture, auto-
fiction makes it possible for authors to insert themselves into stories
about those communities as representative figures who tell their life
stories in relation to the wider stories and histories of the collective.
Although a few theorists have briefly posited the possibility of con-
necting autofiction and cultural memory, none has previously explored
it in full. In what follows a sustained attempt is made to map out those
connections in more detail. The opening chapter provides a theoretical
overview of the emergence of the concepts of both autofiction and
cultural memory and then identifies propitious areas of connection be-
tween them. Chapter 2 explores precursors and preludes to the concept
of autofiction in works by James Joyce, Colette, Jeanette Winterson,
Ben Lerner and Siri Hustvedt. It argues that although there are flashes
of communal solidarity expressed in these texts, for the most part they
function as coming-into-being narratives for the careers of the in-
dividual authors in question so that the bridge between autofiction and a
fully collective form of cultural memory is not established. Chapter 3 by
contrast explores a variety of alternative perspectives in autofictional
texts from outside Western Europe and North America: Mario Vargas
Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Peru, 1977), Carlos Fuentes’s
Distant Relations (Mexico, 1980), Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (Turkey, 2002)
and Jeet Thayil’s Book of Chocolate Saints (India, 2017). It shows that
these writers insert themselves into their narratives in a de-centred way,
Introduction 3
positioning themselves as minor protagonists in much broader forms of
cultural struggle against oppression and marginalisation, thus departing
from the individualistic tendencies of Western autofictions and instead
treating the individual story as a component of the collective one.
This congruence between individual narrative and wider social
concern is further explored in Chapter 4 with regard to writing in
response to exile and political displacement in French-Algerian author
Nina Bouraoui’s 2018 novel All Men Want to Know and Haitian-
Canadian writer Dany Laferrière’s poetic work The Enigma of the
Return (2009). Finally, Chapter 5 looks at how certain writers have
told the life stories of previous generations of their families as aspects
of their own life histories, thus giving rise to the possibility of forms of
autofiction at one or more generational removes. Such a possibility is
discussed with regard to Peruvian writer Renato Cisneros’s confes-
sional account of growing up as the son of a prominent figure in the
country’s military dictatorship, The Distance Between Us (2018);
Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé’s imagined reconstruction of the
life of her maternal grandmother, Victoire: My Mother’s Mother
(2006) and the African-American author Maaza Mengiste’s use of
details from the life of her great-grandmother in her novel set during
the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, The Shadow King (2019).
Overall the book argues that owing to its literariness, autofiction is a
form in which Western concepts of individual authorship and ownership
of stories can be challenged by a variety of non-Western practices that
treat storytelling, memory and history as aspects of a common in-
heritance. Thus the assumption that the self-narration of autofiction is
solely and entirely concerned with the individual self can be replaced by
the assumption of the self as always already embedded in wider re-
lationships and circulating discourses including those of literature, his-
tory and ideology. This substitution once made enables the barrier to an
autofictional practice of cultural memory to be overcome.
1 On Autofiction and Cultural
Memory
As suggested in the introduction, bringing autofiction and cultural

memory into dialogue with each other presents a number of chal-
lenges, mainly because the former is chiefly concerned with individual
self-narration whereas the latter is more about social processes.
Moreover, there is no single definition of autofiction, the varieties of
which seem to have expanded rapidly over the past three decades. This
chapter proposes to draw upon that open-endedness by treating it as
an opportunity for developing a new way of thinking about what
autofictional writing can achieve, specifically by exploring connections
between these apparently contrasting fields. First through a brief dis-
cussion of the emergence of autofiction, then of cultural memory and
finally by drawing together points of connection between the two, the
chapter argues that autofiction has the potential to contribute to new
forms of cultural memory when it is applied by writers from margin-
alised, dispossessed or disempowered communities in order to combat
that same marginalisation and dispossession.
The Rise of Autofiction

As autofiction research and scholarship have increased in recent years,
so too has our understanding of its background and origins become
more multifarious. Until recently the conventional account of the
emergence of the term autofiction was that it was developed by the
French author and academic Serge Doubrovsky as a response to his
compatriot Philippe Lejeune’s research into forms of autobiographical
writing, especially Le pacte autobiographique (1975); and that the first
published use of the term was made on the back cover of Doubrovsky’s
1977 novel Fils. Lejeune had argued that to write an autobiography is to
enter into a pact with the reader, who is entitled to assume that the ‘I’
who narrates the autobiography is the same as the ‘I’ who wrote it, and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003313465-2
On Autofiction and Cultural Memory 5
that the autobiography is therefore both referential and truthful. This
autobiographical pact, Lejeune argued, differs from a fictional pact,
whereby readers are made aware in advance that the events narrated are
not real and need not refer directly to the author or his or her own
experiences. Lejeune produced a now-celebrated table classifying what
kind of writing is produced within each pact. These were then sub-
divided further into cases where the author’s name is the same as the
protagonist’s name; and cases where they are not. Where the work
follows the fictional pact and the author’s name differs from the pro-
tagonist’s, the work is designated a novel. Where the author’s name is
the same as the protagonist’s and the work adheres to the auto-
biographical pact, the final product is designated an autobiography.
However, Lejeune had no term for cases where the work is presented as
a novel but the author’s name is also the same as the protagonist’s. This
box at top right on his summarising chart is simply graded out (Lejeune
1975: 16–17).
This is a possible starting point for autofiction scholarship because
Doubrovsky’s use of the term autofiction can be seen as a means of
addressing the question left unanswered by the gap in Lejeune’s classi-
fication: How to conceptualise works where author and protagonist
share a name, but the work is referred to as a novel rather than an au-
tobiography. Building on Doubrovsky’s work, Philippe Gasparini has
proposed ten criteria for designating a work as autofiction, as follows:
1 onomastic identity of the author and hero-narrator;

2 subtitle: ‘novel’;
3 primary importance of the narrative;
4 pursuit of an original form;
5 writing that aims to ‘immediately articulate’;
6 reconfiguration of linear time (through selection, intensification,
stratification, fragmentation, disorientation);
7 a significant use of the present tense;
8 an effort to only tell ‘strictly real facts and events’;
9 the urge to reveal one’s self truly;
10 a strategy that requires active engagement from the reader.
(Gasparini 2008: 209, my translation)
In other words, autofiction is initially defined as a form of fiction based

on real events, in which the author appears as main protagonist and
narrator under his or her own name (rather than in the form of a thinly
disguised avatar, as in works that would be better considered auto-
biographical novels than autofiction) in a creative work specifically
6 On Autofiction and Cultural Memory
designated a novel. The possibility of treating Doubrovsky’s coinage of
the term as a direct response to Lejeune has been strengthened by Isabelle
Grell, who has shown that although his first published use of autofiction
was not until 1977, Doubrovsky had jotted it down in his notebook in
New York (where he taught) in 1973 (Grell 2014: 9) – the same year as
Lejeune published an article entitled ‘Le pacte autobiographique’ which
subsequently featured in the 1975 book of the same name.
From here, according to the conventional narrative (e.g. Ferreira-
Meyers 2018) the field subsequently known as autofiction would
expand and emerge, spreading around France and a number of other
Francophone countries in North Africa and the Caribbean before being
picked up by writers across Europe as well as the English-speaking
world, other parts of Africa, South America and Asia. However, this
conventional account has recently been challenged. Myra Bloom has
shown that the first published use of the term autofiction was made by
the British-American novelist and critic Paul West ‘in a New York Times
review of Richard Elman’s novel Fredi & Shirl & The Kids’ in 1972, a
year before Doubrovsky’s notebook entry (Bloom 2019: 4). A different
start date again is proposed by Dan Sinykin, who has argued that from
1965 onwards, especially in the USA, the emergence of a small number
of large multimedia conglomerates having ownership of what were
previously smaller and more numerous independent publishing houses
‘ripened the conditions for the contemporary trend toward autofiction’
(Sinykin 2017: 465) by placing a high economic premium on properties
such as marketability and relatability, which is often seen as a hallmark
of autofiction because of its commitment to honesty and self-revelation.
Bran Nicol suggests that autofiction was ‘introduced to American
readers’ by Jerzy Kosinski in the article ‘Death in Cannes’ in 1986 (Nicol
2018: 258), while Max Saunders has described it as ‘Edmund White’s
term’ (2010: 329).
The crucial point here is that these chronological inconsistencies
need not necessarily suggest factual error on any individual part as
much as they suggest multiplicity of origin. In other words, there are
many different contexts in which the emergence of autofiction can be
situated. If Lejeune’s research into forms of autobiography was a key
context for Doubrovsky, then his autofiction is distinguished from
autobiography mainly on stylistic grounds; that is, both narrate events
that are strictly real, but autobiography does so using the conventions
associated with nonfiction whereas autofiction does so using the
looser, creative techniques associated with a modernist experimental
novel. It must be noted that identifying stylistic differences between
autobiography and autofiction has been one of the most contentious
elements of the field from its inception, mainly because it would be
naïve to assume that autobiography is written in a straightforwardly
factual way, without the distorting effects of memory, the emotions
and biases of all kinds so that an element of fictionalisation is also
necessarily operative in autobiography. For this reason, Arnaud
Schmitt has proposed replacing the term autofiction with self-narration,
thereby creating less of a binary distinction between the former and
autobiography (Schmitt 2010: 122). Doubrovsky’s autofiction can
therefore be seen as a gradually more nuanced response to the category
of autobiography as it had been conceptualised in the early 1970s.
As autofiction research and scholarship have extended outwards, not
only has the concept become increasingly refined and elaborated, but
there has also been a gradual change in emphasis away from stylistic
questions and towards sociological ones. This is the case, for example, in
the work of Ricarda Menn (2018), to whom there is a tension between
autofiction as generically distinct from autobiography and autofiction as
a variant of autobiographical writing, which nevertheless responds to
the dominant cultural conditions of the time in ways that differ from
earlier autobiographies. Marjorie Worthington has suggested that for
English-language writers in particular, those conditions include anxi-
eties about the nature of authorship in an age of both ‘literary celebrity’
and the proliferation of ‘new media’ (Worthington 2018: 79, 65). Bran
Nichol echoes Worthington in suggesting that a renewed concern over
the institutional settings in which authorship occurs has been an im-
portant background for the development of autofiction’ especially in
North America. In addition, he notes the further context arising out of
the public nature of ‘literary scandal,’ and the growth of so-called
‘reality’ genres in both literature and other media (Nicol 2018: 257).
If there are several different contexts in which to locate the emergence
of autofiction, there are also as many correspondingly different varieties
of it. To some, it is an egocentric genre, dedicated to navel-gazing and
self-celebration. One effect of this indulgence is that it risks becoming
complicit in the neoliberal capitalist order since, as Sarah Wasserman
points out, its characteristic emphasis on ‘subjectivity, the incessant
drive toward the new, the tyranny of the individual’ are also ‘the very
hallmarks of neoliberalism’ (Wasserman 2022: 566). Moreover, in the
specific case of the USA, Worthington has drawn attention to the fact
that ‘by far most American autofiction is written by white men’
(Worthington 2018: 19), prompting Wasserman to wonder, ‘How is it
that a genre frequently dedicated to the minutiae of the writer-
protagonist’s life has largely evaded the criticism made of novels that
focus on the interiority of privileged subjects?’ (Wasserman 2022: 562).
If autofiction was no more than the self-congratulation of a privi-
leged minority it would probably not detain us very long. However,
Wasserman also responds to Worthington’s comment about the
whiteness of American autofictions by suggesting that that this is a
‘symptom of how the term itself has been constituted,’ whereas the
category of autofiction
would appear very different were critics to include earlier [African-

American] works, such as Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,”
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) or James Baldwin’s
“semi-autobiographical novel,” Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953),
as early instances of the form.
(Wasserman 2022: 583)
Her identification of a potentially alternative tradition in autofiction,

that both pre-dates the term itself and expands its parameters beyond
the confines of a socially and racially privileged few, suggests the
possibility of a whole different approach. In doing so, she echoes the
recent method of Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor, whose own 2021
collection The Autofictional took a step towards ‘a more global per-
spective by shining a light on select underrepresented practices, tra-
ditions, and cultures, both within and outside of Europe, and by
putting these into dialogue with the more established traditions’ (Effe
and Lawlor 2021: 5).
I seek to pick up on the possibility of an expanded approach to
autofiction by adding a further context in which its evolution should
be understood: The legacy of imperialism and the unresolved historical
injustices arising out of the colonial era. My central argument is that
because autofiction blends truth and fiction in a highly self-conscious
way, and because it has the capacity to modulate between individual
voice and collective experience, autofiction has the capacity to operate
as a form of testimony or witness-bearing with regard to past cultural
and/or political struggles. In doing so it also has the capacity to restore
to contemporary view experiences and conflicts that have been his-
torically marginalised or overlooked and thus contribute to a new
form of cultural memory.
Origins of Cultural Memory

The emergence of cultural memory studies can be summarised in the
following way. In the early years of the twentieth century, diverse
scholars including Maurice Halbwachs, Aby Warburg, Henri Bergson
and Osip Mandelstam started to develop their interests in the complex
relationship between time, history, memory and social identity. These
interests would then be pursued by a later generation of scholars such
as the Moscow Tartu Semiotic School of thought centred on Juri
Lotman in the 1970s, the French thinker Pierre Nora and a more re-
cent group of American philosophers including Patricia Cook. But
although the origins of the notion of cultural memory are clearly
multiple, there is considerable consensus that the pivotal figure in its
establishment was Jan Assmann, working at the Egyptological
Institute of Heidelberg University in the 1980s. Dietrich Harth iden-
tifies a series of public lectures delivered to mark a specific memorial
event, the 600th anniversary of the university in 1986, as a ‘crucial step’
in the establishment of cultural memory (Harth 2020: 88). The re-
sulting publication Kultur und Gedä chtnis (‘Culture and Memory,’
1988) edited by Assmann and Tonio Hö lscher can be seen as some-
thing of a manifesto for the field. Assmann’s essay ‘Kollektives
Gedä chtnis und kulturelle Identitä t’ (‘Collective Memory and Cultural
Identity’) which opened the volume was among the ‘seminal works
initiating this new history of memory’ (Grabes 2010: 34). His book Das
kulturelle Gedä chtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitä t in
frü hen Hochkulturen appeared in 1992, with an English translation,
Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance and
Political Imagination, in 2011. By this time the field had been firmly
established.
At its most basic, cultural memory is the term used to refer to the
process by which individual memories are transposed onto the social
plane. It provides not only access to the past but also an orientation
and perspective on the present. Cultural memory has the capacity to
generate a shared sense of history, a collective identity based on
knowledge, understanding and meanings that are widely held, and
perhaps even a common purpose. Like any cultural category that of-
fers to instil a dominant set of values it has also provoked critical
attention, significant debate and at times fierce contestation. As
Herbert Grabes puts it,
in a dynamic culture which is constantly changing, the contest

over which of the cultural achievements of the more distant or
more recent past will be able to secure a position in cultural
memory finds its most prominent expression in the competing
canons that serve as its archives.
(Grabes 2010: 318)
Looking back in 2010 at the development of his central tenets sur-
rounding cultural memory, Assmann acknowledged that his coinage of
the term was directly as a result of his engagement with Halbwachs’s
concept of collective memory. In an attempt to clarify the distinction
between various forms of this, Assmann proposed the term cultural
memory as a contrast to what he calls communicative memory, where
both are versions of the wider category of collective memory.
Communicative memory can approximately be equated with living
memory. It has no institutional basis and is not operationalised by any
of the material means which typically form the basis of public com-
memorative practices such as statues, anniversaries, specialist journals
or learned bodies. On the contrary, it exists in daily interaction be-
tween people and is handed down directly from one person to another
where the senders and recipients are in close physical and temporal
proximity to each other: no more than eighty years apart, Assmann
suggests, or members of three to four adjacent generations. After this
time, living memory expires and whatever collective memory we have
of earlier times, periods or events depends less on the passing down of
memories in daily human interaction but is dependent instead on
material and institutional practices which communicative memory
does not require. He goes on:
This information, however, is not committed to everyday com-

munication but intensely formalized and institutionalized. It exists
in the forms of narratives, songs, dances, rituals, masks, and
symbols; specialists such as narrators, bards, mask-carvers, and
others are organized in guilds and have to undergo long periods of
initiation, instruction, and examination. Moreover, it requires for
its actualization certain occasions when the community comes
together for a celebration. This is what we propose calling
‘cultural memory.’
(J. Assmann 2010: 112)
Cultural memory, then, is constituted by the vehicles that carry it, ve-
hicles which can be considered congruent with the category of lieux de
memoire or sites of memory proposed by Pierre Nora. A site of memory
need not be a particular place, but can as readily be an object or artefact
in which memory is invested, a story by which it is transferred or an
image that conveys it. In turn, this means that the conceptualisation of
cultural memory has recourse (like the conceptualisation of individual
memory) to a particular notion of storage, where the term memory re-
fers simultaneously to the process of storing and the process of retrieval
as well as to what is stored. The group of people among whom these
forms of cultural memory are performed and circulated can then be
referred to as a memory culture.
Perhaps the most important thing about cultural memory is that it
enables the cultivation of a collective identity in the present. It exists in
the form of foundational myths, myths of origin and common history
and when these are reaffirmed in the present they offer to inculcate
within a particular community, group, society or nation a feeling of
shared values and hence a structuring principle of what that particular
group stands for. Without this relationship between understanding of
a common past and the cultivation of a collective identity and purpose
in the present, memory itself ceases to be the object of discussion and
instead collapses into abstract knowledge. Or as Assmann says:
Memory is knowledge with an identity-index, it is knowledge

about oneself, that is, one’s own diachronic identity, be it as an
individual or as a member of a family, a generation, a community,
a nation, or a cultural and religious tradition.
(J. Assmann 2010: 113–14)
Harth sees the relationship between culture and memory as one where
culture is reckoned as ‘an authoritative, symbolically coded “world of
meaning”’ in which the collective memory provides ‘a repertoire and
generator of values which transcend the span of a lifetime and create
identity’ (Harth 2010: 88). In the process of drawing on that stock of
values, a given social group arrives at a consensus surrounding the
common acceptance of particular self-images which are in turn soli-
dified through the canonisation of specific religious, historical or cul-
tural traditions at the expense of others. Not only does this mean that
forms of cultural memory also necessarily entail forms of forgetting of
anything that is not canonised, it also has the effect of placing a very
positive premium on the role of script-based cultures, and on writing in
general, in the process of collective remembering. According to Harth:
Kultur, in this view, unfolds as a dense fabric of writings before the

eyes of those who read and are able to interpret what they read.
These are both abilities acquired through learning, and in earlier
times were mastered by only a few, very powerful elites, and which
even today are associated with privileged access to the general
culture and corresponding group loyalties. Illiteracy, inadequate
mastery of the written word, and hermeneutic incompetence
would, according to this understanding, exclude large majorities
and entire social classes from participation in the Kulturelles
Gedä chtnis [cultural memory] and its rewards of identity creation.
(Harth 2010: 93–4)
Jan Assmann’s primary field of study was ancient Egypt, and his ex-
amples of the cultural myths that give rise to cultural memory by
providing both a narrative of common origin in the past and one of
shared purpose in the present include both Moses and the pharaohs. It
is easy to see how in this context the importance assigned to writing in
the generation of cultural memory brings in its train some considera-
tion of the scribal or priestly class who in those societies had privileged
access to the technologies of written communication, which most
people could not access. In this sense, cultural memory studies is a
projection into the distant past of what in the study of cultures and
societies since the Industrial Revolution Raymond Williams refers to
as cultural materialism: ‘analysis of all forms of signification, including
quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their
production’ (Williams 1983: 210). However, few researchers have
made connections between cultural memory studies and cultural ma-
terialism. This is a significant omission because the purpose of ana-
lysing culture materially is not only to identify the power structures in
a given society or the culturally sanctioned ideological structures that
support them, but actively to challenge and change them. When such a
challenge is brought to bear on the domain of cultural memory, this
raises significant questions about the process by which a common
culture is constructed and what experiences, lives and values are
omitted or marginalised as a result.
As mentioned above, forms of cultural memory bring with them
corresponding processes of cultural forgetting because the concept of
cultural memory depends on a notion of storage and retrieval which
according to Aleida Assmann is marked ‘by a notorious shortage of
space’ (A. Assmann 2010: 100). Not all of the myriad myths, legends,
texts, beliefs, objects and artefacts from the historical past can be
carried forward with common recognition in the present so that col-
lective identity is based on the retrieval from cultural memory of a
limited number of these things which are positioned in such a way as to
appear both foundational and normative. In the process, others are
allowed to lapse out of collective memory. This is why Aleida
Assmann has emphasised that to remember some things is also to
forget others, and that acts of forgetting can be both actively fostered
or passively experienced just as acts of memory too have an active and
a passive side: ‘The institutions of active memory preserve the past as
present while the institutions of passive memory preserve the past as
past’ (A. Assmann 2010: 98).
Having made this distinction between active and passive forms of
memory, she goes on to propose referring to those institutions that
actively maintain an image of the past in the present as a canon; and
those passive forms that store memory by preserving merely trace
elements of the past thereby preserving also their pastness as an ar-
chive. Implicit in this distinction is the possibility that if artefacts are
taken out of the archive and circulated, interpreted and above all in-
vested with emotional and identarian values in the present they would
not only move from archive to canon but also change the canon itself.
That is, they would change the construction of cultural memory for the
whole culture, which in turn would entail challenging, transforming,
altering or expanding the collective identity politics of that culture.
Such a process would be of particular importance for people on the
periphery of a particular culture, who live within it but whose values,
lives, histories and experiences have nevertheless been overlooked,
neglected or simply left out of its collective identity. Such people might
include those marginalised as a result of class, race, ethnicity, na-
tionality, religion, language or sexuality. For this reason, Seyyed
Mehdi Mousavi, Farideh Pourgiv and Bahee Hadaegh propose sup-
plementing cultural memory studies with a ‘cosmopolitan orientation’
that is ‘concerned with changing the status quo and imagining alter-
native futures’ (Mousavi, Pourgiv and Hadaegh 2018: 68).
In other words cultural memory is not stable. On the contrary, it is
subject to an open-ended and continual process of ratification and re-
newal. Jan Assmann has warned that owing to the special role played by
writing and hence by a scribal class in its generation, cultural memory
gives rise to particularly canonical forms of the past and thus ‘has an
inherent tendency to elitism; it is never strictly egalitarian’ (J. Assmann
2010: 116). Harth takes a different view, arguing that ‘society’s accep-
tance of norms and values does not depend on a “sacralized,” written, or
in any other form symbolically coded canon’ because they are based on
the processes of negotiation and agreement ‘that are part of common
experience’ rather than the exclusive preserve of a cultural elite (Harth
2010: 94). One of the most significant transitions that can take place is
when something that has previously been located at the periphery of a
memory culture is brought into a new position at the centre of that
culture – moving, that is, from the archive into the canon.
According to Aleida Assmann, the three ‘core areas’ of cultural
memory are religion, art, and history (quoted in J. Assmann 2010: 100).
She could have added a fourth, literature, because the key argument of
this book is that autofiction is a particular kind of literature that has the
potential to play a role in both the dissemination and contestation of
forms of cultural memory. In fact, numerous researchers of cultural
memory have commented on the role literature plays in these processes,
without necessarily identifying the specific role played by autofiction in
them. For example, in an article about the ethics of literary addressivity
in the age of globalisation, Roger D. Sell has argued that when a literary
text draws on the resources of cultural memory, it does so in a way that
is ‘shot through with frequent and radical discontinuities, alternatives,
and contradictions, and is open to recall and use in many different ways’
(Sell 2012: 209). In the last instance, the fundamental alterity of the text
enables it to operate as a space for dialogue between author and reader
that avoids imposing a single perspective on the reader and instead re-
cognises the infinite heterogeneity of all readers, thus envisioning a post-
postmodern form of globalisation that is based on equality rather than
Western hegemony.
Ann Rigney’s account of the relationship between literature and
cultural memory is a paradoxical one according to which, since fiction
has the freedom to invent rather than merely to record, it lends itself to
a particular form of remembrance because ‘narrators who are free to
design their own stories can more easily evoke vivid characters and
give closure to events’ whereas nonfictional genres such as history or
biography might ‘end up with a more historical and authentic story,
but also a less memorable one, than the producers of fiction’ (Rigney
2010: 347). Aleida Assmann makes a similar point when she notes
that ‘[w]hile historians have to adjust their research and questions to
the extension and range of the archives, literary writers may take the
liberty to fill in the gaps’ (A. Assmann 2010: 106). She goes on to cite
Toni Morrison as a writer who deals with gaps in the historical record,
where the gaps in question surround the historical imposition of
slavery in the Americas, which, because it is a history of violent rup-
ture and fragmentation can be seen as ‘wounds in memory itself, the
scar of a trauma that resisted representation and can only belatedly,
long after the deeply destructive events, become articulated in the
framework of a literary text’ (A. Assmann 2010: 106).
Literature, then, can contribute to cultural memory by telling emo-
tional truths in fictional form. Peter Burke takes a slightly different
approach to the relationship between literature and cultural memory,
drawing not so much on paradox as on dialectics to argue that the
former both produces and is produced by the latter: ‘memories as active,
shaping texts, but also memories as passive, themselves shaped by earlier
texts, especially literary classics’ (Burke 2017: 21). Renate Lachmann
observes that the most appropriate term for conceptualising how lit-
erature contributes to the processes of cultural memory is therefore in-
tertextuality: ‘Intertextuality demonstrates the process by which a
culture, where “culture” is a book culture, continually rewrites and re-
transcribes itself, constantly redefining itself through its signs’
(Lachmann 2010: 301). This implies that fictional texts make possible
not only an encounter between author and reader but between canon
and archive, in which ‘literature recovers and revives knowledge in re-
incorporating some of its formerly rejected unofficial or arcane tradi-
tions’ (Lachmann 2010: 306). In such a reckoning, the text participates
in processes of cultural memory both as a means of storing cultural
knowledge and (when read) as a means of retrieving what is stored. The
whole field of literature can thus be seen as an archive or repository of
cultural memory, which is expanded and enlarged each time a new
contribution is made to it. Where the new contribution narrates a story,
history, incident or experience that has not been widely documented but
that is nevertheless pertinent to a sub-culture within the society as a
whole, the localised forms of knowledge and memory within that sub-
culture are tantamount to a form of extra-textual archive, the narration
of which in textual form thus enables the transition from archive to
canon and breaks down previously existing forms of exclusion.
Towards an Autofiction of Cultural Memory

During the period when cultural memory was emerging as a field of
study, the concept of autofiction was developing within the field of lit-
erature. Because autofiction is typically interested in the problematics
of memory, scholars of cultural memory could scarcely fail to be in-
terested in its emergence. However, no detailed or sustained con-
sideration of the relationship between autofiction and cultural memory
has been attempted. It now remains to undertake this work.
In fact, there is perhaps surprising congruence between the two fields,
glimpsed by their suggestively parallel histories, not only in the gradual
convergence of the former with the latter, but in the wider fates ex-
perienced by each. Wolfgang Becker argued in Art Worlds in 1982 that
new fields of creative endeavour require both symbolic figureheads and
institutional homes in order to become recognised as such. It could then
be said that Serge Doubrovsky was such a figurehead for autofiction and
Jan Assmann for cultural memory. Moreover, much of the early French
work on autofiction took place at the Colloquium of Cerisy, while the
Heidelberg school provided an equivalent institutional basis for the
then-nascent field of cultural memory.
Since then, both fields have expanded beyond their institutional
‘homes’ and arguably have surpassed the work of their pioneers. The
research of a number of cultural memory theorists subsequent to those
of the Heidelberg school can then be read partly as a form of reaching
towards the concept of autofiction. Indeed, in the work of one or two
such scholars the word itself succeeds in making a brief appearance,
although typically as no more than a brief discussion treating it as an
interesting subvariant of the wider category of cultural memory. For
example, in a reading of William Golding’s novel Pincher Martin
(1956), Pia Brînzeu discusses the way memory is represented in lit-
erature and how this has the capacity to resonate with a wider world
by evoking the complex dynamics of the culture and society from
which the memories emerged. Such resonance depends not on the
memories themselves, or even on their objects, but on the way the
objects become cathected as bearers of symbolic meaning. She thus
argues that ‘scholars should feel encouraged to link cultural memory
to narratology’ in order to highlight the way in which ‘the dynamics
of individual remembering can be linked both to national remem-
brance and to the transnational circulation of memory’ (Brînzeu
2017: 87). Cultural memory studies therefore has the potential to be
enriched by the addition of concepts from the field of narratology,
which in turn is where the study of autofiction first arose so that
there is an implicit node of connection between the two fields in
Brînzeu’s account.
Birgit Neumann makes a comparable argument for the benefits of
bringing narratology and cultural memory studies together to their
mutual enlargement on the basis that ‘works of fiction have specific,
genuinely literary techniques at hand to plumb the connection between
memory and identity’ (Neumann 2010: 333). Interestingly she suggests
that: ‘For a long time, no genre designation existed for texts which
represent processes of remembering. However, recently critics [such as
Ansgar Nünning] proposed the term “fictions of memory” to designate
such works’ (Neumann 2010: 334). The term ‘fictions of memory’ has a
deliberate ambiguity built into it. On the one hand it refers to those
literary texts in which the process of remembering – in all its com-
plexity and unreliability – is represented. On the other hand, owing to
this unreliability it also hints at the idea that all memories are them-
selves fictions and that memory itself is elusive, ever-changing and
impossible to pin down. In other words, it need not only refer to
specific works of literature but can also refer to the broad stories ‘that
individuals or cultures tell about their past to answer the question
“who am I?”, or, collectively, “who are we?”’ (Neumann 2010: 334).
Although Neumann uses the term fictions of memory to designate a
genre for which she found no prior term existed, it seems there is a
high level of congruence between fictions of memory and autofiction.
Both are typically focalised on a narrator looking back on a particular
experience in the past and attempting to invest emotional meaning and
significance on it in the present. They thus take the form of narrative
retrospection or analepsis. Moreover in classical autobiographies
which presuppose the possibility of a coherent reconstruction of the
past, she suggests that such analepses tend to be arranged in linear,
chronological order, ‘bridging the gap between a specific past event’
and ‘a moment in the present at which the process of remembering is
initiated’ (Neumann 2010: 336). By contrast, in contemporary fictions
of memory, writers are more doubtful of the possibility of marshalling
the past into a single, teleological narrative of the self so that ‘this
chronological order is dissolved at the expense of the subjective ex-
perience of time’ (Neumann 2010: 336).
Arguably, autofiction is a term that refers precisely to those fictions of
memory in which a linear timeframe is disrupted in the face of the sub-
jective experience of both time and recollection; this is what distinguishes
it from autobiography. These connections between autofiction and fic-
tions of memory imply a useful overlap between autofiction and cultural
memory, especially if autofiction is considered to situate the individual
within a wider culture rather than embodying some kind of retreat by
the former from the latter. To elucidate this component of autofiction
therefore requires a grasp of the relationship between Assmann’s com-
municative and cultural memory, or between narratives that are appar-
ently concerned with individual experience and the positions they come
to occupy within the wider culture transcending the individual.
Understanding this relationship in turn necessitates a consideration
of how a person can remember something of which they in fact have
no memory because they did not experience it. This is the whole basis
of cultural memory. In a paper arguing that it is important for the
development of civic and democratic structures, Thomas Docherty
illustrates the paradox using the example of a citizen of Berlin born
after the fall of the Wall in 1989, walking along the line indicating
where the Wall used to be and reflecting on what it means to her:
she is in a place where she is remembering, certainly; but what she

is remembering in a certain sense has nothing to do with her. If the
memory is of an absence, she, paradoxically, is the very absence in
question: she simply was not there when the Wall was.
(Docherty 2017: 58–9)
If cultural memory is precisely the memory I have of something I did not
experience this paradox has a precise parallel in autofiction. Gérard
Genette has argued that autofiction is a form of narrative evoking a
fictionalised version of the author which may bear some resemblance to
extra-textual reality but may equally be highly fictional and which
Genette considers authentically so precisely because it is not pretending
to be real: ‘I, the author, am going to tell you a story of which I am the
hero but which never happened to me’ (Genette 1993: 76).
With the growing recognition that literature has a specific role to
play in the construction, contestation and dissemination of cultural
memory has come a corresponding realisation that writing has a tes-
timonial dimension which means not only documenting and recording
past experiences but also making them present. For example, in a
highly original reading of autofictional works by French-speaking
Caribbean writers, Renée Larrier has proposed a powerful idea of
‘témoignage’ (Larrier 2006: 8) or bearing witness to the injustices of
colonial history. Specifically, she says:
privileging of the I in Caribbean prose literature is one direct

response to particular historical circumstances. The dispossession
that resulted from slavery and its legacy of economic exploitation
makes challenging the dominant discourse urgent. For one, first-
person narratives narrow the gap created since the colonial period,
during which travelers’ diaries, government documents, handbooks
for male settlers, and colonial literature constructed an image of the
Caribbean that excluded the perspective of the majority population.
Caribbean autofiction challenges the authority of travel narratives
that were among the few first-person accounts about the Caribbean.
(Larrier 2006: 6)
The specific ways in which autofiction affords Caribbean writers the

opportunity to bear witness to historical anti-colonial struggles against
slavery, oppression and inequality will be explored further in Chapters
4 and 5. Larrier’s emphasis is on how autofiction can be used to enter
into a dialogue with dominant colonial accounts of the New World,
which were mainly written in nonfictional genres such as travel writing
and diaries. It is therefore logical that the gradual convergence be-
tween cultural memory and autofiction has been especially prominent
in the discipline of life writing.
Noting a growth of interest in nonfiction genres such as journals,
letters, travelogues, biographies and autobiographies (including un-
published ones) during the twentieth century, Max Saunders proposes
to treat such forms as historical documents. That is, instead of as-
suming that they give us privileged access to the experiences they re-
cord, they should be seen in the context of the wider social processes of
which they were part and from which they cannot therefore be iso-
lated. When looked at in this way they provide not so much evidence
of objective historical facts as indicators of complex historical pro-
cesses surrounding the creation of common values:
Rather than giving us direct access to unmediated memory, what

such texts reveal is, instead, memory cultures. When we study life-
writing as a source for cultural memory, that is, our conclusions
will also be literary-critical ones: interpretations of the ways in
which memory was produced, constructed, written, and circulated.
(Saunders 2010: 322–3)
He gives feminism, and the histories of sexual, racial and class identities as
forms of identity politics that each turned to forms of life writing as ways
of establishing ‘biographical counter-cultures’ (Saunders 2010: 327)
during the twentieth century. By contrast, the rise of poststructuralist
theory during the third quarter of the century posed a challenge to these
forms because poststructuralism is anti-foundational, disavowing the
possibility of any essential truth claims at all. One response for practi-
tioners of life writing in the face of this challenge, Saunders reasons, was
for forms of biography and autobiography to adopt elements of post-
modern fictional practice marked by such typically postmodern attri-
butes as self-conscious narrativity and metafiction. He mentions
Barthes’s Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) as an example of the
postmodern turn within life writing and then goes on:
This turn, coinciding with the increasingly auto/biographic turn in

twentieth-century fiction, has produced writing which nomadically
crosses the borders between biography and fiction. ‘Faction’ or
non-fiction novels – like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) or
Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) – narrate real-life
content in novelistic forms and styles. Edmund White’s term
‘autofiction’ similarly claims a different mode of generic fusion, in
which rather than saying a novel is based on autobiographical
fact, it is intimated that selfhood is itself already fictionalized.
(Saunders 2010: 328–9)
Here at last in a discussion ostensibly about forms of cultural memory

is an explicit recognition that autofiction has a potentially meaningful
contribution to make to it. That is not to say, however, that this ex-
tract alone represents a detailed extrapolation of that contribution and
should really be seen as no more than a suggestive first step in un-
dertaking such work. Interestingly Saunders attributes the concept of
autofiction to the American writer and gay rights campaigner Edmund
White rather than to Serge Doubrovsky, as is more usually the case. In
fact White has referred to his own practice as ‘gay autofiction’ (White
1995: n.p.) and possibly the most useful convergence between auto-
fiction and cultural memory made by Saunders is the suggestion that
when forms of life writing participate in the processes by which cul-
tural memory is created and passed on, ‘Such work is often avowedly
inspirational in its aim, offering a sense of historical solidarity for
oppressed minorities, and seeking to record counter-cultural memories
that official cultures tend to repress or try to forget’ (Saunders
2010: 327).
In a separate article discussing the relationship between literature,
memory, history and psychology, Peter Burke has drawn attention to
the capacity of literature to both shape and be shaped by developments
in each of those other fields and hence to participate in the process of
making contemporary meaning through the construction of a memory
culture. As with Saunders’s discussion of how life writing can restore
to contemporary view aspects of cultural memory that dominant
cultures tend to repress or forget, Burke discusses the capacity for life
writing to operate as a form of testament to a writer’s past and
therefore to correct or change errors in how the writers themselves
have been perceived and hence set the record straight:
For a vivid example, fictional in every sense, I turn to a novel by

the Spanish writer Juan Marsé , La muchacha de las bragas de oro
(1978), in which the protagonist – one can hardly say the hero – is
the writer Luys Forest, a former supporter of the Falange, who is
writing his memoirs in order to persuade the world that he was
always a liberal. In other words, he is attempting not only to write
his memoirs but to rewrite his life. The French have a word for it:
‘autofiction.’
(Burke 2017: 23–4)
Unlike Saunders’s counter-cultural forms of life writing, Burke’s fic-

tional example can be considered anti-counter-cultural, the fictional
protagonist of La muchacha de las bragas de oro using the fiction to
reconstruct how he is perceived. As with Saunders, Burke sees a pos-
sible connection between cultural memory and autofiction more or less
in passing and stops short of undertaking a lengthy exploration of how
each informs and is informed by the other. His example is a fictional
character, but in a more properly autofictional work the narrator
would be the real empirical author. This status would present a chal-
lenge to readers, not knowing whether the events narrated are strictly
true or not (a difficulty they would not have, for example, if they were
reading works that adhere to Lejeune’s novelistic pact and hence knew
that the narrative is invented). An important intervention in this debate
has been made by Arnaud Schmitt, who notes that readers cannot ne-
cessarily know whether the purportedly truthful elements of a text really
are true or not and therefore are in a position of choosing whether or not
to accept such works in the sincerity with which they appear to be of-
fered: ‘At its best, self-narration can be a post-postmodern form of
personal expression based on the reader’s decision to give a text the
benefit of the doubt and open a dialogic interaction with a potentially
empirical person through a literary text’ (Schmitt 2010: 135).
This restoration to theories of autofiction of the role of the reader in
determining which works are authentic instances of self-narration and
which are merely fabricated is paralleled in cultural memory studies by
the work of Andreea Paris, whose research found that ‘there are al-
most no references to the reader as [an] instrumental part in the for-
mation of cultural memory’ (Paris 2017: 96) and who then set about
addressing that deficit. Reasoning that cultural memory arises out of
the rendering common what originates as individual memory, and that
memories cannot exist independently of the individual rememberers
who hold them, this leads her to argue that cultural memory too
cannot exist without a specific group of people to play the role of
rememberers. Since it has been established that literature has a specific
part to play in constructing cultural memory, the role of the re-
memberer is often then the same as the role of the reader: ‘with respect
to literary studies, the multiplicity of memories that establish literature
as cultural memory could not exist without readers’ (Paris 2017: 106).
Yet it is axiomatic of reader response theory that the role of the reader
is to construct the literary work while reading it, thereby transforming
an (unfinished) text into a (completed) work. When such an insight is
applied to the construction of cultural memory, the role of the reader is
thus to activate specific forms of memory rather than allow them to
drop out of collective awareness. Or as Paris says drawing on Aleida
Assmann, the specific part played by the reader of literary texts in the
generation of cultural memory is to ‘keep the canon as an active form
of remembering […] instead of turning it into a passive literary archive’
(Paris 2017: 106).
This distinction between active and passive is at the heart of the
dynamics of cultural memory. The implication of the theoretical de-
velopments in cultural memory studies that have been discussed in this
chapter is that literature in general and autofiction in particular par-
ticipate in those dynamics in highly specific ways. Not only is it pos-
sible to conceive of autofiction as making a shift from the individual
plane to the social in exactly the way that cultural memory elevates
individual memories onto the collective level, but also and more im-
portantly this approach to autofiction proposes to treat individual
rememberers as living archives, that is as people carrying embodied
forms of knowledge and identity that they have either experienced
directly or have received as a result of communicative memory through
contact with one or more immediately preceding generations. When
the forms of cultural memory embodied in those people become ex-
ternalised as written texts they undergo the transition from archive to
canon. In cases where this transition is made on behalf of oppressed
minorities, relating experiences or events that have previously been
allowed to lapse out of the collective literary or historical conscious-
ness of the dominant culture they have the effect of challenging his-
torical forms of injustice, iniquity and inequality. In other words, the
object of bringing cultural memory studies and autofiction together is
not merely to narrate the past but to provide a new orientation on the
dominant ideology of the present.
2 How the Author Became:
Precursors and Preludes
As was suggested in the previous chapter, although it has been common

to attribute the coinage of the term autofiction to Serge Doubrovsky,
recent researchers have generated a more multifarious view with other
writers, including Paul West, Edmund White and Jerzy Kosinski cred-
ited with decisive contributions, especially in English. In France,
Arnaud Genon has sidestepped the question of coinage, pointing out
that even if Doubrovsky coined the term autofiction he did not invent
the ‘thing’ itself (Genon 2013: 205). To instantiate this argument,
Isabelle Grell has suggested that two important precursors of autofiction
are James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and
Colette’s Break of Day (La Naissance du jour, 1928) (Grell 2014: 16).
Partly to test Grell’s hypothesis that these books can be seen as instances
of autofiction before the word, and partly to gauge the extent to which
they engage in the dynamics of cultural memory, this chapter discusses
each of them in detail. It argues that although there are strong grounds
for considering them literary precursors to autofiction, their contribu-
tions to evolving forms of cultural memory are more muted. This is
primarily because in different ways, these texts function as coming into
being narratives for their authors as authors. Rather like Kipling’s Just
So stories (1902) How the Camel Got His Hump, How the Leopard Got
His Spots or Ted Hughes’s children’s story How the Whale Became
(1963), they are largely concerned with telling the story of how the au-
thor became an author. This means that although it has been common in
the century since these novels were written to assimilate Colette and
especially Joyce to collective canons of French and Irish writing, the
element of collective solidarity expressed within the texts is very much
downplayed when compared to the individual narrative of authorial
coming into being. In other words, the autobiographical nature of these
works is not quite autofiction as Doubrovsky would conceptualise it in
the 1970s, but nevertheless bears witness to each author’s pre-history as
DOI: 10.4324/9781003313465-3
24 How the Author Became
an author and so in meaningful ways can be considered as preludes to
those careers.
Having made this argument, the chapter then turn to three more re-
cent heralds of autofiction: Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the
only fruit (1985), Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Siri Hustvedt’s
The Blazing World (2014). In these cases, things are a little different
because they were published after the concept of autofiction had been
established and cannot therefore be considered precursors to it. On the
other hand, they can be considered instances of ‘beginnings’ in Edward
Said’s sense – interventions in things that have already begun – and
hence preludes to authorial careers in the more general Wordsworthian
sense. This means that whereas the books by Joyce and Colette are
precursors to autofiction, the emergence of the category of autofiction
can in turn be seen as a structural prelude to the work of subsequent
writers of it. However, in these cases too there is a tension between
autofiction as coming into being narrative for the individual author and
autofiction as a form capable of contributing to new forms of cultural
memory at the collective level of solidarity and social responsibility.
Thus in all the texts to be discussed in this chapter either as precursors to
the concept of autofiction or as preludes to authorial careers, these
autofictions tantalisingly gesture towards new forms of cultural memory
but stop short of practising those forms.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as Precursor and

Prelude
To read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) as a
manifestation of autofiction before the word is a complex undertaking.
Although it is tempting to see the young Stephen Dedalus as an alter ego
for Joyce himself, not only is there nothing particular in this identifi-
cation that could not potentially also be applicable to any author and
any character, but the absence of homology in the names militates
against classifying the text as autofiction as Doubrovsky defined it. The
process of mapping incidents recounted in the novel onto empirical
experiences in Joyce’s life is fraught with methodological challenges and
a burden of proof that may in some cases be insurmountable. In other
words, because the novel is positioned as such, this has the simultaneous
effect of making it possible to attempt a preliminary extrapolation of its
autofictional properties on the one hand, while also disavowing those
properties on the other. Or as Peter Burke puts it, ‘In Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (1916), the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus both is
and is not a self-portrait’ (Burke 2017: 22).
How the Author Became 25
Two things that can certainly be identified as major preoccupations
of Joyce’s in the text are exploring what social, cultural and material
circumstances are most propitious for pursuing an authorial vocation;
and the role of memory in the creative process. The meandering
structure of thought and the tendency for conscious, active thinking to
be interrupted by other digressive thoughts and memories as they flare
up from time to time in the external world are frequently represented
by Joyce both in his digressive sentence, paragraph and chapter
structures and in the symbolism of physical objects which often spark
the thought digressions and memory intrusions into being. Within the
opening pages of the novel, the young boarder Stephen is pushed into
a ditch by a fellow pupil at the Clongowes boarding school for refusing
to swap his snuff box for a conker, and later finds himself thinking
about it, then thinking about a few other things, before coming back
and remembering the same thing again. Presumably the feelings of
anger and injustice provoked by the physical aggression are too strong
to be simply dismissed and left behind so that they keep coming back
to the forefront of the narrator’s consciousness.
In this circularity of thought processes can be found a microcosm
for how memory is represented in the novel as a whole. Also within the
first chapter several boys play truant from school, teasing and making
jokes about each other, with one boy mocked for supposedly having
hands like a woman’s. This makes Stephen think of a time when the
girl he likes, Eileen, had touched him with her hands. It had happened
when they had watched a group of waiters from a smart hotel hanging
up some bunting in the outside grounds of the premises and he re-
members it again in Chapter 2, when he takes the last tram home from
a party with Eileen. Although by this point in his life he has left the
Clongowes school owing to a decline in his father’s fortunes and
the boys mentioned in Chapter 1 have been replaced by a new cast of
classmates in Belvedere, the structure of memory and its tendency to
interrupt conscious waking thought at any moment is very much to the
fore and supplements the apparently linear succession of characters
and relationships with a repetitious process that is much more circular.
When he performs in a pageant at the new school, he is teased by one
of the boys, Heron, on account of the young woman who comes with
his father to watch. This immediately makes Stephen remember a time
two years earlier when he had got into a physical fight with the same
boy after arguing about who was the greater poet. This is the first real
conjunction made in the novel between memory and the role of a
creative artist. Soon after it, Stephen travels with his father to Cork
where his father is auctioning off all his remaining property due to
ongoing financial troubles. Back at home in Dublin, Stephen wins a
prize for his school work and is for a time happy to treat his parents to
meals and entertainments. But he tires of this – and spends his first
night with a woman (apparently a prostitute), thereby setting the tone
for the central dilemma which emerges in the second half of the novel:
not so much between sexuality and repression (although this tension
does arise) as how to reconcile desire for creative freedom with a sense
of duty and obligation that has been institutionally instilled.
For example, by the time he is a prefect at the College of the Sodality
of the Blessed Virgin Mary he goes directly from a long sermon on the
importance of spiritual retreat onto the streets where sight of a girl,
Emma, fills him with both sexual desire and shame for that feeling (as
well as for having masturbated). He then hears a second sermon on the
theme of preparing for judgement day and eternal life, but goes straight
from this to Heron and his gang, who mock the preacher. Then a third
sermon on the nature of the torments of Hell puts the fear of damnation
into him and he rushes off to confession in a church far from the college,
too ashamed to confess his sins at home. The priest tells him he is only
sixteen and so he can still save himself spiritually if he really repents and
gives up. But the key question that is starting to emerge is whether or not
he really wants this kind of salvation, especially if it comes at the cost of
the creative freedom he is only gradually starting to discover. Although
the director of the College flatters him with the suggestion that he might
be suitable for taking Holy orders, and although he is tempted by the
status and authority this might bring him, he is unable to accept because
of the compromise this would necessitate in what he is only starting to
realise is a properly creative vision.
A key symbolic moment in the text occurs when Stephen finds
himself pacing back and fore between a pub and a chapel where his
father is talking to a tutor about the possibility of his going to uni-
versity, thus representing the twin poles of duty and vocation that he is
caught between. In his wandering he comes across a group of lads
from the college diving naked in the sea and this seems to be an image
of untrammelled pleasure that contrasts with the sober moral teaching
of the church. Though he is unable to give voice to a cry of joy he feels
in his throat, this confirms that he wants to be free and creative rather
than bound by the church and so he decides to become a creative artist
and not take orders. As he walks on, he comes across a girl paddling
bare-legged in a stream and this time the sight makes him feel not
shame but joy and wonder. His boyhood is over and he is ready to
make his own choices about the world, ‘to recreate life out of life’
(Joyce 1916: 174–5) rather than follow a deadening moral code.
Yet even this decision is a conflicted one, as he finds when he gets to
university in Chapter 5 and examines his triangular relationship with
the church; the Irish nation; and his creative aspiration (of which his
sexuality and his desire for women are an instance). He is upbraided by
his friends McCann, a socialist, and Davin, an Irish-speaking na-
tionalist, for not joining the struggle of the Irish people. The Dean of
Studies is English, and Stephen envies the fact that as such the English
language (and culture) appear more authentically his than they are
Stephen’s own. In other words, it is not true that he has no feeling of
cultural nationalism; but that religious and political settlement turn
him off because they are barriers to creativity. He thinks that Irish
culture is stultified by the Catholic church and that its people are
complicit in this weakening of their culture through compromise with
the British state: some of his contemporaries are delighted to have
done well in the Civil Service exam, which he shuns, and he terms his
people ‘a race of clodhoppers’ for mourning the death of Gladstone
(Joyce 1916: 258) who had advocated Irish Home Rule. This combi-
nation of complicity and stultification is why Stephen realises he must
go into exile: he would not serve something he cannot believe in,
whether that is his country or the church.
The decision by Joyce to have Stephen leave Ireland as a way out of
the mechanisms of repression and an entry into the creative phase of
his life not only repeats and replays the same decision he took in his
own life, but also reveals how far A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man conforms to a vision of creativity as a primarily a matter of the
growth of the individual genius and the single creative mind to the
exclusion of others. Since the late twentieth century it has become
common to assimilate Joyce to a canon of Irish literature, and even to
interpret his work along postcolonial lines (e.g. Kiberd 1995, Attridge
and Howes 2000, Cleary 2012). But to do so in the case of Portrait is a
complex undertaking because Stephen’s antagonisms are at least as
much with the typical organs of Irish nationalism, especially the
church, as they are with the British state, and may be more so. In other
words, it would be misleading to interpret the novel as a testament to
Irish anti-colonial struggle.
In an article exploring the relationship between literary canons and
cultural memory, Charles Moseley has used the example of Joyce to
illustrate the complexity involved in retrospectively mapping him onto a
postcolonial canon. Arguing that western writers have been influenced
by the entire histories of Judeo-Christian, Greek and Roman literature
even if they are not consciously aware of it, he suggests that ‘Leopold
Bloom [the protagonist of Joyce’s Ulysses] and Stephen Dedalus have to
move through a phantasmagoria of literary memory and inheritance’ so
that ‘[t]his sort of writing is truly intertextual, in dialogue with the works
of the past, a self-definition against the point of origin, a memory that
defines, challenges, enables’ (Moseley 2017: 69).
In other words, inasmuch as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
can be read as a novelisation of Joyce’s early life, it is a genuine pre-
cursor to the concept of autofiction. To the extent that it bespeaks the
coming-into-being of the author James Joyce it functions as a prelude
to his authorial career while also acknowledging the cultural chal-
lenges that had to be overcome in order for that career to be launched.
But this is not yet the same as generating a new form of cultural
memory: it would take a century of subsequent research into the Irish
land question, the potato famine, the Easter Rising, the Troubles and
so on to do that and thereby to generate new collective memories for
the Irish people. In Joyce, and in Portrait, what happens instead is the
symbolic coming into being of a writer who would only later be ret-
rospectively included in those canons.
Authorial Presence as Puzzle and Tactic in Break of Day

Unlike A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the French writer
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s 1928 novel Break of Day is not so much a
pre-history of an authorial career as it is a retrospective portrayal
of that career in miniature. It starts with the female protagonist – a
woman in her fifties apparently named Colette – remembering her
now-dead mother, who ‘in a mean, close-fisted, confined little place,
opened her village home to stray cats, tramps and pregnant servant-
girls’ (Colette 1928: 6). As the day dawns and light spreads over the
farm in Provence from where the narrator is writing, she thinks about
people she has known and the fact that she doesn’t think she will have
any more lovers. The themes of the novel are thus nature, memory and
relationships between men and women.
In an extended metaphor, love is intrinsically related to writing
because most of the novels Colette had already written by this point
were romances, so the writer’s farewell to men is also a farewell to
writing. But ironically, this process is documented in writing so that
the practice of being a writer continues even while it is being dis-
avowed. Moreover, the retrospective mode also means that the novel
functions as an account of what made her a writer to begin with: her
relationships with men, which equipped her with thematic experience
for the romance genre; and that with her mother – who, like her, had
had two husbands.
To the extent that there is a plot, it concerns her younger male
Provençal neighbour Hector Vial, a furniture maker hoping to sell ar-
tefacts in his shop in Paris, and the young woman Hélène Clément.
Hélène is falling in love with Vial, but he is attracted to Colette, who
initially sets herself the task of matchmaking this couple. Upon realising
that she is the object of Vial’s desire she can only warn him to treat
Hélène decently, and give Hélène a few words to the wise. Vial takes the
hint and withdraws to Avignon and Colette is left reflecting that this
may be the last time she turns a potential lover down. When she goes
out dancing with Hélène and other members of their Bohemian artistic
set he does not attend and for the next eight days she is unable to write
anything – a period she considers long enough to forget how to write
altogether.
During the romantic crisis at the centre of the novel, when Colette
realises that she rather than Hélène is the object of Vial’s desire, she
reflects that he is probably a kind man, unlikely to hurt women, and
that the only thing she would really be afraid of would be getting too
amorously attached to him, at the cost of her freedom. This in turn
prompts a reflection about her writing:
Why do men – writers or so-called writers – still show surprise that

a woman should so easily reveal to the public love-secrets and
amorous lies and half-truths? By divulging these, she manages to
hide other important and obscure secrets which she herself does
not understand very well.
(Colette 1928: 62)
To some extent these lines can be read as a historical defence of wo-

men’s writing as a whole, and especially of the tendency to dismiss it as
mere autobiography rather than as true art. But they also take the
reader to the heart of a deeper question posed by Break of Day which
is: how far can the ‘Colette’ of the text be equated with the Colette who
wrote it? In this interplay between lies and half-truths, between what is
divulged and what remains hidden as a result, we are alerted to the
possibility of identifying narrator with author while also given reasons
for exercising caution in doing so. As the epigraph of the novel says:
‘Are you imagining, as you read me, that I’m portraying myself? Have
patience: this is merely my model’ (Colette 1928: 5).
There is, in other words, a tendency to exalt the status of the text
as a revelation of authentic autobiographical truth, at the same time
that this is undercut by a contrasting tendency to impose limitations
and restrictions on that status. This playful alternation between self as
character and self as author enables Colette to engage in a series of
tactical manoeuvres that are more accomplished than may seem to be
the case on first glance. It is used, for example, to rein in Vial’s desire
for her at the point of her realising that she has made an involuntary
conquest of him:
These involuntary conquests have nothing to do with a time of

life. We must look for their origin in literature – and this is where
my responsibility begins […] Vial, who has only known me for two
or three summers, must still be trying to find me in two or three of
my novels – if I dare call them novels. There are still young girls –
too young to notice the dates of editions – who write to tell me
they have read the Claudine books in secret and that they will look
for my answer at the poste restante.
(Colette 1928: 63)
Through the means of disavowing the association of author with

character, the habit of seeking traces of the author in the fiction is both
projected onto a number of different imagined readers and applied to
Colette’s earlier novels. This in turn raises questions about how a
reader of this novel is to interpret the position of its author, and the
character Vial is placed in the position of exactly this reader, won-
dering what his relationship to the author is. This positioning is re-
inforced when the character Colette imagines the character Vial
asking: ‘who could have given you the idea of such a character? Didn’t
you know So-and-so, about the time when you were writing such-and-
such a book?’ (Colette 1928: 65). She responds sharply: ‘We’re not
concerned with my books here, Vial’ (Colette 1928: 100) so that Vial is
rebuked for seeking the author in the fiction even though she is at least
somewhat present in it so the search is shown to be partly valid. This
contradiction has the effect of blunting his passion for her and en-
abling her to escape the too close amorous attachment that would cost
her the liberty to write. Her tactical mastery of this deflection then
ceases to be about Vial’s pursuit of Colette and functions instead as a
metonym for how readers envisage writers. In effect, it warns readers
not to assume that they can straightforwardly assign autobiographical
elements to the author of the fiction, while reserving for the author the
right to assert which elements can be so assigned. This latter point is
reinforced when we remember that the narrator Colette had already
confided to readers that her early books were published under her
husband’s pseudonym Willy; that this had prevented her from writing
under her own name so that in them ‘I called myself Renée Néré or
else, prophetically, I introduced a Léa’; and that eventually she got
dissatisfied with this and started appearing both as character and au-
thor under her own name: ‘So it came about that both legally and
familiarly, as well as in my books, I now have only one name, which is
my own’ (Colette 1928: 19).
Thus there is an impulse to dismiss the autobiographical imperative
when it is exercised by readers but an equally effective reflex to re-
apply it when this proves tactically contingent. This is demonstrated
for example when the narrator Colette says that although Vial is an
attractive man, she no longer feels as much physical desire as she
once did,
and in order to see him better I made use of a former self of mine who
awoke in me with the day, a self that enjoyed physical exchanges and
was expert at discerning promise in the shape of a body.
(Colette 1928: 108)
By trying to remember her earlier, desiring self she puts herself in

precisely the position of the readers she has just dismissed, hungrily
searching for evidence of her personality and emotions by hunting for
them through earlier versions of herself (which for an author means
through her books).
Following Vial’s departure the romance plot is aborted and the nar-
rator’s thoughts return to memories of her mother, whom she identifies
as a forebear in the business of writing – not because she was a published
author (she wasn’t), but because of her numerous letters. For example,
the penultimate letter written to Colette by her mother before dying was
about an elaborate coffin given away to her sister-in-law and thence to a
charwoman, even though she would have liked it for herself. The letter’s
combination of dark humour and gossip has the character of prose
fiction. By contrast her final letter was constructed out of fragments that
were almost beyond language altogether:
strokes, swallow-like interweavings, plant-like convolutions – all

messages from a hand that was trying to transmit to me a new
alphabet or the sketch of some ground-plan envisaged at dawn under
rays that would never attain the sad zenith. So instead of a confused
delirium, I see in that letter one of those haunted landscapes where,
to puzzle you, a face lies hidden among the leaves, an arm in the fork
of a tree, a body under a cluster of rock.
(Colette 1928: 142)
Trying to use the letter to bring to mind a visual memory of her mother
creates a trompe l’oeil effect whereby the figure of the mother is
sometimes glanced but sometimes steals away. Such a device is highly
appropriate for Colette’s depiction of her mother because on the one
hand the mother is entirely incidental to the Hélène-Vial plot but on
the other the memory of the mother is the strongest feeling the text
evokes. The mother is there but not there, a component of the narrative
but not an active protagonist in it. Colette uses this metaphor of a
puzzle to show herself clutching at the memory of her mother precisely
because she does not want her mother’s contribution to be forgotten and
she knows that unless actively worked for, it will be. This might be
seen as an instance of Assmann’s communicative memory – that is, the
personal recollections transmitted directly between members of im-
mediately adjacent generations. But it is then important to emphasise
that Assmann’s communicative memory is not so much a form of cul-
tural memory as it is a threshold to it: glimpsed, but in this text not yet
not crossed. Instead, the trompe l’oeil device by which Colette con-
ceptualises her memory of her mother rebounds onto the author herself.
The writing causes readers to wonder whether they can discern traces
of her presence in the novel or not, but each time she seems just about to
be pinned down the mediating role of fiction obtrudes and she recedes
into the background once more. She too is there but not there and the
elevation of her individual life story into a properly collective form of
cultural memory is not made.
Cultural Memory as Heteronormativity in Oranges are

not the only fruit (1985)
After A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Break of Day, a
third example of autofiction before the word suggested by Isabelle
Grell is Jeanette Winterson’s autobiographical novel Oranges are not
the only fruit, published in 1985 shortly after the term autofiction had
begun to be used in both French and English, but before it had become
common in English. The book is a novelistic portrayal of Winterson’s
upbringing as the adopted daughter of an evangelical Christian mother
and a working-class father in an unnamed industrial town in the North
of England during the 1960s and 1970s. It exists in two distinct nar-
rative modes, a relatively linear realist narrative of Jeanette’s early
years and discovery of her latent homosexuality interspersed with
short vignettes of a more mythical or archetypal nature. Its eight
chapters are named after the first eight books of the Bible from
Genesis and Exodus to Judges and Ruth, and this reflects not only the
important structure church life played in Winterson’s life but also the
fact that she eventually had to leave the church in order to become the
woman – and the writer – she subsequently became. In the process,
Jeanette is involved in a personal struggle for sexual liberation in
which cultural memory becomes recoded as the dominant ideology of
heteronormative sexual relationships and hence is the very thing she
struggles against.
The first vignette in Chapter 1 is about a melancholy princess whom a
hunchbacked woman promises to cure if she agrees to take over her
duties: milking goats, educating children, and composing music. When
the princess agrees the woman dies, thus trapping the princess in these
conventionally feminine roles forever. The second vignette is about a
prince who executes the princess who refuses to marry him and sub-
sequent vignettes increasingly depart from conventional fairy-tale roles.
They are used to interrupt the realist narrative, provide oblique, indirect
commentary on it and represent Winterson’s gradual sloughing off of
the assumptions about gender and sexuality she had inherited.
Oranges are not the only fruit was published less than four years after
the royal wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, at
a time when all the machinery of monarchic pomp and ceremony
would have placed the figure of a perfect (that is, conventionally
beautiful and obedient) princess firmly in the public eye. In an essay
first delivered as a public lecture on ‘Royal Bodies’ Hilary Mantel has
argued that since the time of Henry VIII royal women in Britain have
been under immense public pressure to conform to a particular view of
womanhood: courtly, demure, and above all fertile. Diana’s tragedy
was then the result of her inability to meet these expectations, a tra-
gedy ‘located in the gap between her human capacities and the de-
mands of the superhuman role she was required to fulfil’ (Mantel 2020:
277). Jeanette in Oranges are not the only fruit is not a princess but
alluding to the royal wedding through the vignettes has the effect that
the individual life story narrated through the ‘main’ realist strand in
the narrative is elevated to that of a counter-narrative that departs
from existing assumptions about gender and sexuality and about re-
lationships between men and women. Making the story stand for more
than itself in this way in turn poses the possibility of dismantling those
hegemonic assumptions and replacing them with an alternative set of
expectations.
The novel’s retrospective evocation of Winterson’s childhood shows
her departing from highly gendered assumptions about what con-
stitutes appropriate behaviour for young boys and young girls.
Reading out to her class an essay about how she spent her Summer
holidays (hiring baths for a baptism service for the church’s Healing of
the Sick crusade) is so tedious for other pupils that her teacher makes
her stop. When she starts making a sampler in needlework, she decides
to make it for Elsie Norris, an older female member of her con-
gregation. But she uses black thread rather than the bright, cheerful
colours expected of pretty young girls and the message she stitches
into the sampler – ‘The Summer is ended and we are not yet saved’
(Winterson 1985: 39) – provokes other mothers to complain that she is
giving their children nightmares by talking about the fires of Hell.
Because it is over-zealous her religious sentiment is treated as contrary
to conventional constructions of femininity and hence transgressive, to
be corrected, and so her religious upbringing gradually aligns with her
ideas about gender to mark her out as different. On the other hand, she
hates country dancing with boys and is glad to be cast as the narrator,
rather than Mary, in the Sunday School play because this enables her
to avoid being kissed by one of the boys.
In this context, same-sex desire is constructed as deviant to such an
extent that Jeanette internalises it as such even before she understands
what it is. Only when she starts going to the library and reading widely
does she discover how deeply heteronormative assumptions had be-
come entrenched in the society around her. For example, her reading
of Beauty and the Beast causes her to reflect that it is impossible to
know in advance which men will turn out to be beasts: ‘There were a
lot of women and most of them got married. If they couldn’t marry
each other, and I didn’t think they could, because of having babies,
some of them would inevitably have to marry beasts’ (Winterson
1985: 73). To read this passage in 2023 is partly to acknowledge how
successful challenges to the heteronormative ideology have been be-
cause since 2014 it has been possible for women to marry each other,
and it has become increasingly recognised through practices of adop-
tion, fostering and surrogacy that not only heterosexual couples are
able to raise children. In 1985 when Oranges are not the only fruit
was published and in the mid-1970s when this part of it takes place
these developments were still in the future so that the novel can be read
as Winterson’s contribution to the establishment of an alternative
narrative. But the extent to which the novel positions hetero-
normativity as a form of cultural memory which is also a dominant
ideology is underlined when the teenaged Jeanette overhears her
neighbour Doreen talking to another neighbour about the fact that her
daughter Jane has been spending a lot of time with a studious friend,
Susan, and Doreen wishes Jane would get a boyfriend otherwise ‘folks
will talk’ (Winterson 1985: 76).
Ironically, at this time Jeanette’s mother thinks she is getting close to
a boy at church, Graham, and warns her off giving in to sexual desire,
whereas she has actually entered into a relationship with her first fe-
male lover, Melanie. After meeting Melanie at a market stall, Jeanette
introduces her to the congregation where Melanie stands up to ask
forgiveness for her sins, before listening to Pastor Finch’s sermon
warning of an epidemic of demons in Cheshire and Lancashire. They
start meeting in private to read the Bible and even after their first night
of sexual intimacy they proceed to help out organising the church’s
Harvest Festival, which is directly followed by a vignette of a medieval
feast laid out for a group of knights which ends up being stormed by
rebels. Not only does the mythic element provide a different means for
expressing the nature of Winterson’s own sexual rebellion as articu-
lated in the realist narrative, but to a culturally sensitive reader, the
combination of church with dominant heteronormativity is likely to
sound like an echo of the Lancashire witch trials of 1612, in which nine
women and one man from the town of Pendle were accused of
witchcraft and executed. In the logic of the text, Jeanette and Melanie
too are positioned as transgressive women who are likely to be pun-
ished. Indeed, Jeanette is subjected to a series of humiliating ritual
exorcisms by her pastor to separate her first from Melanie (who re-
nounces her) and then from her subsequent lover, Katy.
Jeanette’s refusal to submit to the latter exorcism results in her being
thrown out of her mother’s house so that when her friend Elsie dies,
she is not permitted to go and see her. Since she is now working at the
funeral parlour, she does get to say her own private goodbye to Elsie,
but she subsequently decides to leave the funeral home and get a job in
a mental hospital, where she will have ‘A room of my own, at least’
(Winterson 1985: 158). This conscious allusion to Virginia Woolf is
highly instructive because it underlines the extent to which she has
struggled against the dominant heteronormative assumptions of the
patriarchy. Since the main purpose of Woolf’s Room of One’s Own
(1929) was to argue that in order to have any chance of becoming
artists and writers, women needed both financial independence from
men and a physical place in which to work, Winterson uses this allu-
sion to signal the extent to which she trails in Woolf’s wake. At the
same time, she also points up the connection between her life experi-
ence and her status as a writer so that Oranges are not the only fruit sits
within the How The Author Became genre.
The final chapter of the novel alternates between mythic archetype
and realist narration. It is accompanied by a series of vignettes of Sir
Perceval, the youngest Arthurian knight, setting out on an uncertain
mission. Unlike the vignette in the opening chapter, in which a princess
had been trapped in conventionally female roles, the heroic age is now
past and both Camelot and the Round Table have come to ruin. The
point of the Perceval vignettes is that the age of chivalry really is dead.
It has to be broken so that the dominant heteronormative narratives
can be changed. The last fable, about Jeanette’s archetypal alter-ego
Winnet Stonejar, is about a young woman in the remote and mythical
past getting tricked by a sorcerer to be his apprentice and live in his
castle. When she is attracted to a young man, the sorcerer locks him up
and when she helps him escape, she realises she too must leave the
castle and seek a new place. This is exactly what happens in the realist
narrative arc, where Jeanette leaves not only her mother’s home but
also her church and the Northern town in which she had grown up, to
move to a large city in pursuit of greater sexual and social freedom.
Sometime later Jeanette bumps one last time into Melanie, who
denies they ever had a relationship:
Then she laughed and said we probably saw what had happened
very differently anyway … . She laughed again, and said that the
way I saw it would make a good story, her version was just the
history, the nothing-at-all facts. She said she hoped I hadn’t kept
any letters, silly to hang on to things that had no meaning. As
though letters and photos made it more real, more dangerous. I
told her I didn’t need her letters to remember what had happened.
(Winterson 1985: 171–2)
This distinction between history and story is figured as part of

Melanie’s betrayal of Jeanette, her disingenuous insistence on nothing-
at-all facts functioning as a way of denying their relationship. The
contrasting emphasis on Jeanette’s memory of the relationship as a
good story reinforces this denial, while also and paradoxically insisting
on its status as story and hence on Winterson as the author of that
story through the novel’s overall portrayal of the prelude to her career
as an author. In other words, although she is a writer of stories this
does not necessarily mean that stories are not true. In the final instance
the discrepancy between Melanie’s claim to factual veracity and
Jeanette’s commitment to story ceases to be about their relationship
alone and is elevated to a metonym for the conventional expectations
of women that Winterson had inherited and which she uses the text to
expose. Those inherited expectations can be interpreted as a form of
cultural memory both because they had been handed down from the
past and because they had been allowed to become dominant in the
present. Melanie’s desire to destroy the letters that had passed between
them is then a form of what Aleida Assmann refers to as active for-
getting: that is, the process by which aspects of cultural memory that
cannot be made to cohere to its dominant narrative are filtered out of
the public consciousness and any evidence of the traces they leave
behind are destroyed so that the dominant narrative is reinforced.
At the centre of Oranges are not the only fruit is a short fifth chapter
which interrupts the plot to muse metafictively on the relationship
between fiction, storytelling and history. In an extra-textual com-
mentary that prefigures Melanie’s distinction between history and
story the narrator of this section points out that ‘[v]ery often history is
a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise
its integrity’ (Winterson 1985: 93). This of course is precisely what
Melanie subsequently does: under public pressure and social ex-
pectation, she refutes the relationship and denies that it ever existed, in
order to conform. Yet in the metafictive chapter, using the example of
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge during the Cultural Revolution in
Cambodia Winterson shows how destroying the physical vestiges of
the past – documents, maps, charts, files, pictures – makes it possible
to provide an entirely different perspective on history and hence pro-
vide a legitimising narrative for the dominant ideologies that have
come to prominence in the present: ‘People have never had a problem
disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos
will burn, and memory, what is that?’ (Winterson 1985: 94). Her object
in Oranges are not the only fruit is not to destroy history: on the
contrary, it insists that the transgressive homosexual love affair with
Melanie not be forgotten, in the face of enormous personal and cul-
tural pressure to forget it. At the same time, her object is also to
contest that form of cultural memory which laid down specific ex-
pectations for young women and established heterosexuality as both
dominant and normative. Yet this contestation is couched and ex-
pressed largely as a personal rebellion so that her challenge to the
dynamics of cultural memory is inseparable from the coming into
being narrative, that is the genesis, of her own authorial self.
Autofiction Versus Cultural Memory in Ben Lerner’s

10:04
An aspect of autofiction that has been commonly remarked upon is the
frequency with which it has been written in the aftermath of traumatic
experience. Among a newer generation of French theorists of auto-
fiction since Doubrovsky, Arnaud Genon has coined the term faille
fondatrice or founding fault (Genon 2013: 58) to refer to this capacity
for autofiction to be provoked or incited by a foundational experience
of trauma. The French word faille has connotations that correspond to
the English words fault and flaw, as well as to the geographical concept
of a faultline (which is commonly used as a metaphor in literary stu-
dies to refer to areas of divergence between two or more different
perspectives). For this reason, the founding fault can also refer to a
breakage or rupture between dissonant elements within a whole.
In Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04 the survival of trauma is posi-
tioned as both an individual experience and a collective concern,
notably in the text’s portrayal of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle
disaster and its wider concern for climate emergency. Throughout the
novel, its narrator (who happens to be named Ben Lerner) meditates
on the question of literary value by positing a book that the author
has been contracted to write, which is nevertheless different from the
book that readers read. Not only is he living with an unspecified
medical condition affecting the aorta, but he is also considering a
request from a female friend, Alex, to donate sperm so that she can
have a baby via intrauterine insemination (IUI). Owing to this unu-
sual concatenation of elements the novel posits a dialectical re-
lationship between producing work and fathering life, a dialectic that
opens beyond the merely metaphorical designation of authored works
as literary offspring because nurturing new life simultaneously calls
the literary father into being.
For example, at a writer’s event Ben tells a famous female novelist
that he has had an idea to create an archive of fake correspondence
from authors who featured in a small magazine he once edited, and to
use this archive as the basis of a novel for which he has already re-
ceived a cash advance – with which, in turn, he plans to pay for the
IUI. On a writer’s retreat in Texas, he reflects that poetry blurs the
boundary between reality and fiction more than prose and writes a
poem which sums up what he is trying to achieve by going to the
retreat. Specifically, this is to produce work that has artistic value as
well as the potential for monetisation so that he can pay for the IUI
while at the same time becoming a successful writer. In other words,
the potential act of fathering new life also has the potential to summon
forth his authorial self. Towards the end of his time in Texas, he goes
to a party with some local socialites and then drives into the desert to
see the unexplained atmospheric phenomenon known locally as the
‘Marfa lights’ – where he decides not to write the fake archive book
he had been contracted to write, but to write instead the book readers
are currently reading – that is, 10:04.
There is thus a difference between the book as conceived and con-
tracted and the book as written – a difference which implicitly raises
the question of which is worth more. Presumably Ben’s decision to
abandon his earlier project in favour of the latter is based on a con-
viction that the latter is of higher literary and artistic merit. By con-
trast, the contract presumably was based on the perceived potential
saleability of the forged archive material in a commercial marketplace.
Ironically, once he begins deleting the fake letters he had already
drafted this makes them feel more true than when he wrote them, as if
it were the essence of an archive to be based on material that is always
already lost. Since scarcity rather than supply is the principle that
secures surplus value in the abstract logic of capital, this also has the
potential effect of increasing the monetary value of the fake archive
once it is no longer available (just as his sometime girlfriend Alena has
set up a group called the Institute for Totaled Art which collects works
of art that have been declared write-offs by insurance companies after
accidents).
Making a distinction between the book as conceived and the book
as read in turn opens a disjunction between self as author and self as
character. Working in the field of cognitive literary stylistics, Pia
Brînzeu has demonstrated that distinctions of this kind create different
degrees of focalisation which correspond to different levels of fictional
reality, the narrative functions of which include ‘the influence focali-
zation has in shaping cultural memories’ (Brînzeu 2017: 94). In a
discussion of Lerner’s use of pronouns to create autofictional effects by
modulating between subject and object (‘I’ and ‘he’), Alison Gibbons
suggests that autofiction has ‘been discussed as a genre that expresses
distinctively contemporary concerns in the way it represents and ques-
tions self-hood, ontology, truth and memory’ (Gibbons 2018: 76). In a
separate article she interprets 10:04 as a corrective to the loss of his-
toricity and over-insistence on the perpetual present that characterised
postmodernism, restoring both a critical historical consciousness and
a critical orientation towards the future – particularly with regard to
man-made climate change in the Anthropocene. In such a reading, 10:04
‘offers a heterochronic model of time and temporality’ (Gibbons 2017:
140) in which the doubling of self as author and character contributes to
that heterochronicity because different selves occupy different tempor-
alities and thinking about the past makes it possible to consider future
challenges, especially of an ecological nature.
On the other hand, Rosi Braidotti has argued that the notion of the
Anthropocene gives rise to an inherently human-centric perspective on
climate change, which would be more ethically addressed by relocating
humans across a non-hierarchical range of ‘social and environmental
ecologies’ (Braidotti 2019: 3) encompassing the ‘life of all beings’ on
Earth (Braidotti 2019: 10). Donna Haraway has made a similar point
about the Anthropocene, drawing attention to the fundamental in-
terconnection between all forms of life on the planet and calling for
urgent ‘multiplayer, multispecies thinking and action’ to address the
climate emergency (Haraway 2016: 71). Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza
Garrido and Linda M. Hess have gone even further, suggesting that
like the notion of the Anthropocene, the category of life writing is
implicit in the diffusion of a species-ist outlook on the state of the
planet. They then seek ways to conceptualise a new form of life writing
in which ‘humans’ allegedly unique subject position’ might be de-
centred in the interest of a critical call to action whereby future life on
the planet ‘ceases to be regarded as an exclusive property of humans’
(Batzke, Espinoza Garrido and Hess 2021: 2, 4).
10:04 can be seen as an attempt at such a form of life writing. Its
most powerful emblem of the different temporalities in play when
questions of climate change are considered is the art installation The
Clock by video artist Christian Marclay, a montage work consisting of
thousands of images of clocks that scroll through in sequential order
according to the time they display on a perpetual loop that unfolds in
real time. Yet observing the installation causes Ben to consider that
time is apportioned in advance, rather than as it is experienced. Thus
when he takes the Latino boy Roberto whom he tutors to the Natural
History Museum, some of the exhibits look like old films such as 2001:
A Space Odyssey, because nothing feels more outdated than what was
considered futuristic in the past. Ben treats looking after Roberto as a
practice-run at fatherhood, and the anxiety he feels for the boy’s
welfare throughout the museum visit causes him to worry that he will
not make a good parent – which in the logic of the How the Author
Became genre means not making a good writer. This association
perhaps explains why stories from his childhood dominate the text.
The title 10:04 is a reference to the time at which lightning strikes the
tower in Back to The Future (1985), a film he enjoyed as a child, and
the still of the clock striking 10:04 in the film is included at 10:04 in
Marclay’s installation, thus representing a merging of literary artistic
‘time’ with empirical everyday sidereal time. Again, the sense of syn-
chronisation is undercut by a sense of temporal expenditure and ex-
haustion: the year after 10:04 was published (2015) is the distant future
to which Marty McFly travels in the final instalment of the Back to
the Future trilogy, and this sense of the future no longer being future
evokes a sense of time having been used up.
Ben as narrator continually invokes the film to suggest that when
what we know of the past changes, our relationship with the present
changes too. At a literary reading he reveals that inasmuch as there
was a specific moment when he decided to become a poet, it was
watching the Challenger space shuttle disaster live on television in
1986, shortly before his seventh birthday. In a school project, he had
written a letter to one of the crew who died in the tragedy, Christa
McAuliffe, who was due to become the first teacher in space. In other
words, there is a cultivated association between life, death and writing
wherein the tragedy of McAuliffe’s death gave rise to its re-inscription
first in Lerner’s letter to her and subsequently on the several occasions
when he remembers both the tragedy and the letter.
In some ways, extrapolating the memory of the Challenger disaster
in 10:04 strengthens an interpretation of the novel as one that (contra
postmodernism) restores a critical connection between past and future
with regard to climate change. Not only does the destruction of the
shuttle symbolically seem to rule out space travel as a solution to
problems on Earth (which is how it is often treated in science fiction),
but the enormous expenditure of fuel involved in the space pro-
gramme is arguably part of the problem rather than of the solution.
Moreover, it is tempting to see the disaster as something like a col-
lective trauma in 1980s American culture, heralding an end to the
excitement and optimism of the space age that had been inaugurated
with Kennedy’s announcement in 1961 that it was his ambition before
the decade was out to put a man on the moon. Although the space
shuttle programme limped on after 1986 until 2011, by then the break-
up of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War had made
the space race a much lower priority in American politics, a move
which might have been intensified by the public mood of loss arising
from the tragedy itself.
If Challenger was experienced as collective trauma then remembering
it would clearly have a role to play in the construction of cultural
memory. In a discussion that makes this connection, Peter Burke has
noted that:
After the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, for instance,

the psychologist Ulrich Neisser conducted an experiment, twice
asking the same group of people what they remembered about the
incident, on the first occasion on the day after the accident and a
second time three years later. He looked for discrepancies between
the two accounts in order to show the unreliability of memory.
(Burke 2017: 25)
The point is not merely the commonplace observation that memory is
unreliable but that as memories vary over time, the feelings and values
we associate with them become as affective in our recall as empirical
factual verification. Indeed, it is when social meaning is added to
historical fact that cultural memory is constructed.
Overall, however, modulation between individual voice and collec-
tive memory is surprisingly absent from 10:04. The memory of the
Challenger disaster is positioned as a foundational moment in the life
of the single writer rather than as a collective trauma for the culture as
a whole or for any sub-cultural community within it so that the tra-
gedy is figured as a part of the narrative of coming-into-being of the
individual author. Moreover, storytelling itself is primarily presented
in this way so that although the capacity to tell stories is shown to be
an important pre-condition for human life, the role and use-value of
stories is again primarily individual. For instance in the text Alex’s
stepfather tells a story about once having had a girlfriend who for a
year told people she was suffering from cancer. Although this was not
true, how people reacted to it and hence to her endowed it with
meaning in an affective sense.
In fact, the closest 10:04 comes to a consideration of cultural memory
at the genuinely collective level is the subplot in which Ben volunteers
distributing food at a community food cooperative where a fellow vo-
lunteer, Noor, discovers that the man she grew up believing to be her
father was not biologically so, and that therefore she is not an Arab by
birth (as she had thought). Again, stories take on an affective dimension
within individual lives and she starts to imagine her own body differ-
ently, seeing herself as a Western woman rather than Middle Eastern.
Moreover, when asked to give a talk on the Arab Spring she now
wonders if she has the right to do so, if it is her story to tell.
Although relatively recent, the Arab Spring of 2011–12 is already
passing into the collective cultural memory of the people in the Middle
Eastern societies who participated in it and were affected by it.
Emerging forms of autofiction and self-narration have a part to play in
this process. In her analysis of Egyptian autofictional blogs between
2005 and 2011 (the years immediately before the Arab Spring) Teresa
Pepe has found that:
Autofictional authors activate the readers by disclosing their own

life story, expressing intimate feelings and emotions. They invite
readers to change the reality of the text by pushing a button, by
clicking and navigating from one link to another, and by posting
their own stories in the comment section. It is from this interaction
that new communities of authors and readers emerge. Within
these communities, new values, stories, and subjectivities are being
played out, discussed, and validated.
(Pepe 2015: 89)
Although the use of social media in the form of online blogs had a key
role to play in connecting communities and building interpersonal
solidarity during the Arab Spring, in 10:04 the memory of the event is
largely treated as property of an individual, which one either possesses
(as an individual) or does not. Ironically, a similar feeling is elicited by
the text’s consideration of climate change, which mainly arises in the
form of Ben and Alex being forced to shelter at home during two
separate extreme storms, each of which is described as a once-in-a-
lifetime event so that the recurrence cannot fail to hint at the way
climate change has been accelerated during the Anthropocene. Even
here, the experience of nesting with Alex raises the possibility of in-
timacy and in turn of Ben’s potential surrogate fatherhood of her baby
and so becomes an instance of the narrative of Ben the adult coming
into being rather than a communal rallying call in the face of possible
ecological catastrophe. Sheltering at home causes Ben to wonder who
gets to name the storms and how, thereby gesturing towards the lim-
itations of understanding a process such as environmental crisis
through recourse to individual notions of naming, ownership or re-
sponsibility, but without being able to transcend those limits. As a
result, 10:04 follows the novels by Joyce and Colette discussed above
as a similar ‘prelude’ to an authorial career, which bears witness to
the foundational moments on which that career is based. But at the
same time, it is not fully able to embody a shift from conventional
autobiographical fiction to cultural memory by articulating connec-
tions between individual experiences and collective memories.
Avatars of Avatars in Siri Hustvedt’s Blazing World

Published the same year as 10:04, Siri Hustvedt’s novel The Blazing
World (2014) is the fictional biography of a female artist in New York
who through various publicly staged spectacles assigns ‘authorship’ of
her work to a number of different manufactured personae (of different
races, genders and sexualities) in order to test whether or not public
reaction to the work varies according to the perceived identity of the
artist. At the same time, the question of how reality is perceived is
intimately bound up with her character Harriet Burden’s vocation as
both an artist and a woman because the whole experiment is an
exploration into how the work of this woman artist is perceived. The
experiment then ceases to be a question of what is real or not, and
becomes much more a matter of what kind of symbolic truth emerges
from the text and how this bears witness to the kinds of margin-
alisation female artists typically have to struggle against. Moreover,
The Blazing World is an epistolary novel, consisting of letters, diaries
and documents that have been collected together by a fictional editor,
I.V. Hess. In several of these, Burden refers to the writer and novelist
Siri Hustvedt in terms that vary from the flattering to the questioning
and the downright critical. Not only does this represent Hustvedt
opening a dialogue with her own work, but also by inserting herself
into the narrative as a minor character she evokes a sense of the po-
sition on the side lines from which she speaks in order to critique male
cultural authority.
As The Blazing World progresses, the different textual fragments
supposedly compiled by Hess gradually cohere to narrate a hoax
played by Burden on the male-dominated art world of New York in
the 1990s and 2000s: hosting three different exhibitions, and attri-
buting them to three so-called ‘masks’ (other artists co-opted for this
purpose). Because these are all men, their use represents an experiment
designed to explore if the reaction to the work varies according to the
gender of the artist (as well as other facets of their identity such as their
race and sexuality). The first, Anton Tish, is a young naïve artist who
is easily manipulated but who has his own dream of becoming an artist
damaged by the encounter with the abrasive Burden and disappears
from New York altogether so that Hess cannot verify whether the
installation attributed to him was really his work, or Burden’s. The
second, Phineas Q. Eldridge, is a bi-racial burlesque performance artist
who is willing to concede that the artist was Burden and that this, once
publicly known, will change the way the work is received. This after all
is what the experiment set out to prove, or Q.E.D. as his very name
seems to imply. However, the third mask Rune bears a name hinting at
the opposite tendency – for the symbolism of art to be fundamentally
opaque and hence for settling questions of truth to be fraught with
difficulty and instability. Indeed, Rune betrays Burden by taking sole
credit for a performance piece exploring alternating gender and sexual
roles that they devised together. His death in a work of performance
art while attempting merely to simulate the experience of dying makes
his claims impossible to confirm or refute.
Throughout The Blazing World the question of what we can know
to be true versus what we can prove to be true arises when Burden uses
the masks of Tish, Eldridge and Rune to carry out her experiment into
how far knowledge of the artist’s identity affects the reception of the
work. These manufactured personae and the textual artefacts associated
with them are tantamount to avatars of avatars, fictional artists created
by Hustvedt’s own fictional artist. They are thus an example of what
Vincent Colonna has referred to as autofiction fantastique, or fantastic
autofiction, in which authors fabulate a new or alternative existence for
themselves (Colonna 2004: 34). Moreover, Hustvedt uses her avatar’s
avatars as a way of contesting the inequality and marginalisation to
which women artists – including herself – have historically been subject.
The reality that Burden wants the art-viewing public to experience dif-
fers from that constructed by the exhibition materials accompanying
Rune’s exhibitions. Thus the multiple kinds of textual object employed
by Hustvedt bear testament to how reality is constituted and perceived
in an affective and meaningful way that moves beyond the simple
question of real versus non-real. The masks, that is, the different avatars
of Burden all function differently in different social situations, while also
contributing equally to the overall experiment.
One of the pivotal textual documents in The Blazing World is a letter
purportedly sent by art critic Richard Brickman (another avatar of
Burden’s) to the periodical The Open Eye, in which ‘he’ claims that he
recently received a letter from Burden explaining her recent experiment
with the three masks, and asking him to publicise it more widely. The
name Brickman, with its echo of brinkmanship or posturing, could be
seen as a further mask, positioned somewhere between the Q.E.D. (or
definite proof) of Phineas Q. Eldridge and the undecipherability of
Rune. Just as the use of masks by Hustvedt via Burden represents the
adoption of avatars of avatars so too the letter submitted by Brickman
bears a meta-textual component: It is a letter about the letter suppo-
sedly sent to him by Burden which not only summarises that earlier
letter but also comments directly on her ideas: ‘I cannot say that her
wild romp into the more peculiar aspects of philosophy convinced
me. The woman flirts with the irrational’ (Hustvedt 2014: 272). Yet
because Brickman is a pseudonym for Burden – the author of both
letters – this can be seen as a critical dialogue set up by the artist with
regard to her own philosophy of art and expressing different aspects of
her artistic self in a way that transcends simple definition or categor-
isation. Furthermore, because Brickman is a creation of Burden’s and
both Burden and Brickman are creations of Hustvedt’s, the same
comment is applicable to Hustvedt herself. That is, she aligns different
fragments of textual object with different levels of textual reality in
order to explore varying elements of her vocation as a practising artist.
The connections between Brickman and Burden on the one hand and
Burden and Hustvedt on the other are explicitly articulated when
‘Brickman’ (that is Burden, that is Hustvedt) writes in ‘his’ letter to
The Open Eye that the letter he had received from Burden explores
theories of the self variously expounded by a diverse range of writers
and thinkers from Homer to Vico, Janet, Freud, William James,
Edmund Husserl and an ‘obscure novelist and essayist, Siri Hustvedt,
whose position Burden calls a “moving target”’ (Hustvedt 2014: 272).
In other words, just as Brickman’s comments on Burden represent a
critical comment by Burden on herself, so too Burden’s comments on
Hustvedt have the effect of opening a dialogue between one aspect of
Hustvedt’s personality and another. Presumably Hustvedt has Burden
refer to her own position on identity politics as a moving target be-
cause she feels that identities themselves are myriad and evolving ra-
ther than singular and settled so that this comment again takes up a
mobile perspective when contrasted with the static definitive responses
attached to Eldridge on the one hand or Rune on the other. Moreover,
because The Blazing World is a multi-layered novel consisting of nu-
merous textual fragments compiled by the fictional editor I.V. Hess,
Hustvedt attributes to this editor a brief footnote explaining: ‘Which
works by Siri Hustvedt Brickman/ Burden has in mind are unclear,
although in Notebook H, she notes that the author’s novel The
Blindfold is a “textual transvestite” and “a book of the uncanny á la
Freud”’ (Hustvedt 2014: 272). The Blindfold was Hustvedt’s first novel,
so that in this footnote Hustvedt has in effect created a fictional reader
of her real work. By including her own name on a list of writers
supposedly read by her fictional artist she semi-fictionalises her status
as author. That is, by inserting herself into the narrative as a very
minor character, no more than a name, she evokes a sense of the
marginal position from which she speaks, and thereby emphasises the
critical neglect which she considers female artists have suffered.
In Ben Lerner’s 10:04, the narrator imagined himself inhabiting
various different roles: teacher, student, writer, friend, lover, father.
Each of these corresponded to different aspects of the self, and the text
was autofictional primarily in the sense that it demonstrated the idea
of a single coherent self to be a fiction. It stopped short, however, of
considering the multiple selves of characters other than Lerner.
Hustvedt’s use of masks in The Blazing World widens the scope of
social solidarity through its commitment to combatting the margin-
alisation of female artists. However, because this commitment is
mainly represented through the specific portrayal of one individual
case, Burden (for whom all the masks turn out to be an avatar), the
status of the individual emerges as more important than that of the
collective – even ironically when the novel is a critical portrayal of
what happens when that status is denied. The importance of the artist
is affirmed as a reaction against that denial, and in the process, im-
plicitly so too is that of the author.
As has been seen throughout the European and North American
examples of the authorial coming into being genre discussed in this
chapter, the tradition of autofiction that has evolved strongly reflects
Western notions of individualism. Other examples could have been
chosen and writers who have tended to dominate critical discussion of
autofiction so far include Philip Roth, Brett Easton Ellis, David Foster
Wallace, Sheila Heti, Megan Boyle, Will Self, Rachel Cusk and more.
In a variety of ways these too tend to tend to treat autofiction as
dealing with identity and subjectivity at the individual level rather than
through notions of community solidarity and collective identity that
are more central in other cultures. This means that though their au-
tofictional works are all in various ways affective preludes to authorial
careers, and they each hint at forms of social commitment and wider
responsibility, they are not able to embody a sustained connection
between writing the self and creating new forms of cultural memory at
the collective level. The following chapter explores alternative tradi-
tions using examples from global majority communities, to see if this
connection has been sustained elsewhere.
3 The Author as Minor
Character: Alternative
Perspectives
The previous chapter concluded that although important works by

Joyce and Colette can be considered literary antecedents of autofic-
tion, the somewhat individualistic nature of these narratives makes it
difficult to see much of a connection to cultural memory as a collective
category beyond occasional flashes of socially thematic concern. The
novels that were discussed by Winterson, Hustvedt and Lerner post-
date the development of the concept of autofiction and can even more
appropriately be categorised within it, yet they too take the form of
narrative preludes to an authorial career – narrating how the author
became an author – and so again are centred strongly on their in-
dividual subjects. This was ironically true even of Hustvedt because
although she appeared in her narrative only as a very minor character,
The Blazing World re-centred at its heart the fictional artist who could
be identified as an avatar of hers.
Picking up on the technique used by Hustvedt, this chapter maps
out an alternative genealogy of autofiction to that found in the pre-
vious chapter by exploring further instances where writers have ap-
peared in their fiction as minor characters under their own names:
Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Peru, 1977),
Carlos Fuentes’s Distant Relations (Mexico, 1980), Orhan Pamuk’s
Snow (Turkey, 2002) and Jeet Thayil’s Book of Chocolate Saints (India,
2017). The chapter argues that coming from societies outside Western
Europe or North America, these writers have practised the technique
of including themselves in their fiction only in a very nominal capacity
specifically to eschew Western narratives of individual fulfilment in
favour of communal narratives of collective commitment and shared
undertaking in the face of common cultural struggle. This is the case
because although it would be a mistake to homogenise global majority
cultures, in a variety of ways the writers from these diverse societies
have used the technique of positioning themselves on the edges of their
DOI: 10.4324/9781003313465-4
The Author as Minor Character 49
narratives in order to assert a form of solidarity with the societies they
portray and whose social themes and conflicts they express. In other
words, in this alternative genealogy of autofiction, the classic Western
coming-into-being narrative of how the author became an author that
typified the works discussed in Chapter 2 is replaced by forms of
narrative in which the author is de-centred, displaced and merged into
a collective multiplicity of voices. Moreover, because this is an ap-
proach that has been practised by writers coming from such a diverse
range of societies, when they are read comparatively alongside each
other, not only can useful connections be made between them but
there emerges a different approach to writing autofiction, which is
explicitly alternative to the author-centric practice typical of Western
autofictions.
The Postcolonial Inferiority Complex in Aunt Julia and

the Scriptwriter
Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) is at once
a fictional exploration of the relationship between high art and pop-
ular culture in mid twentieth-century Peru and a critical evaluation
of the racial politics of that country at the time. Through the portrayal
of radio soap operas and the people who write, produce, act in and
listen to them Llosa is able to make a subtle linkage between forms of
cultural capital and the relationship between indigenous South
American, African, Mestizo and European communities. This is be-
cause within the novel the typical artforms that enjoy the highest levels
of cultural capital such as literature, fine art and classical music are not
only imported from Europe but also lauded and upheld by the
European sections of Peruvian society – who also happen to command
the highest degree of economic and political power. By contrast a
populist genre such as the radio novella is much more likely to be
enjoyed by a diverse cross-section of the population, especially mem-
bers of the indigenous and Afro-Caribbean communities, who are also
more likely to have traditional working-class occupations and much
lower incomes and hence less political authority. This means that to
elevate the status of the soap opera in the way that Llosa’s scriptwriter
does also entails challenging and reversing the tightly structured racial
hierarchy of Peruvian society.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a first-person narrative in which the
narrator bears the same name as the author: Mario Vargas. Although
it is used sparingly and in the diminutive form Varguitas (‘little
Vargas’), when this facet of the novel is combined with a meta-level
50 The Author as Minor Character
commentary on the status of a writer, which is one of the text’s central
thematic preoccupations, it enables the author to create a testament to
the process by which Vargas Llosa the man developed into Vargas
Llosa the author. Not all the events in the novel can necessarily be
located within the author’s biography at the factual level and in fact
Llosa’s first wife Julia Urquidi – on whom he based the Aunt Julia of
the fiction – published a rejoinder, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (‘What
Varguitas did not say’) in 1983. Nevertheless at the oblique and loosely
symbolic level it testifies to the cultural challenges involved in devel-
oping an artistic career in Peru. In turn, this personal testimony is then
elevated to the status of an eyewitness account of the racial inequalities
and injustices in the country at the time.
At the start of the novel, Vargas is an 18-year-old law student in the
1950s who works as a part-time news editor at Panamericana Radio to
support himself. Its owners the Genaros also run the more populist
station Radio Central, where much of their income derives from radio
soap operas. The snag is that these are imported from Cuba and often
arrive with pages missing or damaged, which are cumbersome to patch
up and broadcast. Their solution is to employ a Bolivian, Pedro
Camacho, who has become a recognised master of the genre in his own
country – and indeed, as soon as he joins them, their ratings (and
advertising revenue) go up. Although he never describes his work as
literature, Camacho is serious about his art and encourages the main
actors and technicians to take it equally seriously so that the text
implicitly raises a question about whether the soap opera form should
be seen as mere mass commercial commodity, or a kind of art in its
own right. In doing so, it also satirises the racial politics of con-
temporary Peru because the majority of listeners are from black and
mestizo communities, at a time when these were strict categories in a
concrete hierarchy of race, that also seems to castigate Argentineans
and other foreigners. Camacho passes on these racial assumptions by
building anti-Argentinean assumptions into many of his stories (even
though at one point he hints that he may be Argentinean himself,
rather than Bolivian), and all of the examples of high culture and re-
fined civilisation come from Europe as if to hint at a postcolonial in-
feriority complex in the Peruvian nation.
One of the most challenging aspects in reading Aunt Julia and the
Scriptwriter is that the ‘main’ comical plot about Mario’s love affair
with his aunt Julia is interspersed with examples of storylines from
Camacho’s soap operas, with each extract ending on a note of sus-
pense so that none are ever resolved and instead continually give rise
to the next in a disorientating succession. For example, one of the plots
concerns Dr Alberto de Quinteros, who attends the wedding of his niece
Elianita and finds out she is (incestuously) pregnant with her brother
Richard’s baby. It would be tempting to see this as a lampooning of the
characteristic domestic melodrama associated with the soap opera form,
but given the way the novel gradually enables a reconsideration and
repositioning of the genre it appears that something more complex than
mere parody is in play. In another soap opera, the character Sergeant
Lituma discovers a naked black immigrant hiding in a warehouse in
Lima’s port area and unable to work out where he comes from, is or-
dered by his superiors to shoot him. This story breaks off with the moral
dilemma: Will he do this or not? Again, this could be interpreted as a
parody of the emotional cliff-hangers of melodrama. However, when
the unnamed black man recurs in some of Camacho’s other storylines
something much more complicated starts to happen. In some cases he
has arrived by plane rather than ship, and in others he is ‘yellow’
(Chinese) rather than black. In different stories the title and rank of
Lituma (who appears in other novels by Llosa) seem to vary at random –
and in one he is not a sergeant but a priest.
These inconsistencies are the first hint of how Llosa interrogates the
status of soap operas. They reveal inconsistency itself as the funda-
mental pre-condition both of the genre and also of the relationship
between different genres, especially those of high and low cultural
capital. Thus the ironic point to emerge is not so much that the soap
opera is a trashy genre, but that on the contrary the relationship be-
tween all genres is inherently unstable and continually evolving and
hence subject to revision and change, as is the relationship between the
different social groups who purvey each one. For this reason, incon-
sistency is a valuable tool in Llosa’s box. Thus in one of the soap plots
the magistrate Don Pedro Barreda y Zaldívar examines a case of a
man, Gumercindo Teller, accused of raping a girl, Sarita Huanca
Salaverría, but in the magistrates court the accused cuts off his penis to
show that he is pure of sexual sin. These characters recur in other
stories, but again their roles and names undergo slight variation. As
this happens experiences and actions attributed to a character in one
serial start to be attributed to another in one of the others.
In some ways, this building into the manuscript of textual errors
gives the text a metafictive aspect because it is about what the writer
experiences when he has forgotten what he has already written and
picks up his pen again without checking what point in the narrative he
has reached. It forms a ludic game with the reader, because readers too
might not always remember exactly what has gone before and there-
fore won’t necessarily spot all of the ‘errors.’ But the bigger point bears
on the question of how a vernacular art form like soap opera relates to a
more canonical one like literature; and through this relationship, how
an indigenous culture relates to the perceived superior culture of
Europe. Specifically, two literary genres that Latin America is particu-
larly known for are a) the soap opera, and b) magical realism – which
seem to be at opposite ends of the pop culture/high art spectrum. Thus if
we chose to situate the novel in a genre of high cultural capital (such as
magical realism) we would probably praise its narrative innovation and
break with realism; whereas if we situated it in a genre of lower capital
(such as the soap opera) we could probably dismiss it is as poorly
written, badly edited and cheaply thrown together. By using both
genres, Llosa breaks down the hierarchy that separates them. Moreover,
by giving the narrating ‘I’ his own name he imbues the narrative with a
testimonial function that critically questions both the cultural hierarchy
of different genres and the racial hierarchy that had historically treated a
Latin American culture such as Peru’s as more impoverished than those
of other parts of the Americas, and more importantly, of Europe.
In the novel, listeners confused by these inconsistencies start to
complain about Camacho to the station owners but the actors and
staff try to insulate him from criticism because he has been good for
their careers, so they ask Mario to intercede with them. When he
confronts Camacho about the inconsistencies, Camacho first reveals
that he is working almost twenty-four hours a day to write new epi-
sodes in several different daily serials as well as acting in and produ-
cing them. He then admits, however, that he is getting tired and
forgetting what details he has used in which stories because he never
keeps his old written scripts. This fact can be read as a further indirect
reference to the fraught relationship between canonical forms of lit-
erature which exist primarily in print and so value the written word
over the spoken, and oral ones of which the opposite is true.
Although Camacho never claims to be an artist, he nevertheless
treats his work with the seriousness of art. On the other hand, in doing
so he burns himself out, suffers a break-down and eventually forgets
ever writing soap operas at all. By the end, television has come to Peru
and the golden age of radio serials is passed. Because Camacho had
worked so hard to produce them that it made him ill, this seems to be
the cost of opposing the country’s cultural hierarchy. His cultural
capital has used itself up and the status of the radio serial as art expires
at the very moment that it is asserted. Unlike the high art of Europe,
the soap opera is associated with members of Peru’s oppressed, dis-
empowered and impoverished races so that to resist the hierarchy of
different cultural forms is also to participate in their struggle for racial
equality. That is, although Camacho’s contribution to it is fictional,
this struggle itself was real and it is to this real struggle that Llosa,
through the voice of a narrator named after himself, bears autofic-
tional witness.
Free Indirect Discourse in Distant Relations

Like Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Carlos Fuentes’s 1980 novel Una
familia lejana (published in English as Distant Relations, 1982) is much
concerned with the legacy of colonialism in the New World vis-à-vis
the Old. It is primarily written in the form of free indirect discourse,
with a brief frame narrative that sets up the scenario in which the
narrator, a young Mexican living in Paris (whose name we later learn
is Carlos Fuentes) goes for lunch with an older French aristocrat,
Branly, who tells him the story of an incident that happened to him the
previous summer. This creates the effect of two different narrators
since it feels as though the story is substantively narrated by Branly,
with only occasional interjections by the narrator Fuentes reminding
us of the frame narrative. Only for the final three chapters does the
scene cease to be that in the Automobile Club where Branly is telling
his story and move on to a few brief actions taken by him and the
narrator Fuentes after he has finished telling it. These late sections that
occur after the narrative has seemingly concluded are also those in
which the narrator is revealed to have the same name as the author
Carlos Fuentes. But some of the biographical details of the narrating
Fuentes diverge from those of the author Fuentes so that the two
cannot straightforwardly be identified with each other. Instead, the
interplay between these two figures can be understood as an instance
of what Colonna categorises as autofiction spéculaire or ‘mirror au-
tofiction’ (Colonna 2004: 119).
Branly’s narrative tells how during a visit to Mexico the previous
year he had met an archaeologist, Hugo Heredia, and his son Victor,
and subsequently invited them to visit him in Paris. When they arrived,
he indulged them in a game by looking up another Victor Heredia in
the telephone directory and taking them to visit him. Over the course
of several days, he had observed the young Victor getting closer to the
older Victor’s (lame) son, André, and even caught them having sexual
relations. The older Victor expresses the hope that this will provide his
son the mate he never had and symbolically make him whole again.
For this to happen, Hugo returns to Mexico leaving his son in France.
Hugo Heredia had descended from a class of Spanish people rejected
and cast out of Spain to intermarry among the indigenous populations
in the New World and form the new ruling class of its colonies there, and
since Mexico’s revolution (1910–20) he has taken an increasing interest
in his indigenous ancestors. The older Victor, by contrast, comes from a
line of French arrivistes who made their fortune through trade and
corruption in the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, thus representing
new money without gaining access to the top echelons of French society.
His resentment towards the aristocratic Branly is not based on egali-
tarian anti-colonial principle but is the grievance of those who have not
reaped the fullest rewards. Time and again Victor makes historical
claims about his family which are demonstrably untrue: Events hap-
pening before the protagonists were even born, or after they were too old
to give birth, or in different places from those he claims. Whether or not
the factual details he attributes to the past are accurate matters less to
him than the tactile relationship he has with it: ‘true generations have
nothing to do with ordinary chronology’ (Fuentes 1982: 144).
Such inconsistencies of date and time parallel the vexed relationship
between the New World and the Old, evolving along different time-
frames in separate locations. Thus the coupling of the Mexican boy
Victor with the French boy André conveys a symbolic merging and
oneness that represents the mending of relations between these two
worlds. When the older Victor makes a pact with Hugo, offering his son
André as a mate for the young Victor in return for the restoration of a
broken artefact found by young Victor on one of his father’s archae-
ological digs, this artefact takes on the significance of metaphorically
conveying the fractured relationship between post-conquest Mexico and
its Spanish colonisers, a wounded and broken history not easily made
whole. In other words, the artefact further emphasises the metonymic
function of the relationship between the boys, and its capacity to sym-
bolise the fraught attempted recuperation of a relationship between
Mexico and Europe through the hereditary inheritors (‘Heredias’) of a
comparably transgressive and illegitimate form of coupling. By not
wanting to explore his connections to his past (unlike his father), the
young Victor thus betrays the Mexican part of his ancestry which Hugo
had tried to uncover. By allowing this son to be metaphysically re-born,
Hugo allows that complex history to be reconciled.
Given the nature of the frame narrative, the text mobilises a total of
three different narrative voices: Fuentes narrating what Branly told
him Hugo told him. Through these dispersed proxies, Fuentes is able
to perform the role of narrator while also distancing himself from it.
Indeed, in a highly unusual variation on the How the Author Became
genre, it is a role he professes to neither accept nor fully understand.
For example, after hearing Branly’s account of Hugo’s account, the
narrator Fuentes’s reaction is: ‘I didn’t want to be the one who receives
and then must spend the rest of his life seeking another victim to whom
to give the gift, the knowing. I did not want to be the narrator’
(Fuentes 1982: 199). These words are an implicit rebuke to Branly,
who had promised Hugo not to reveal the pact to anyone in case it
jeopardises his son’s life. This is highly ironic given Fuentes’s role as
narrator, and in fact this is the very stage in the text where Branly first
addresses him by name: ‘Tomorrow is November 11th, Fuentes. Your
birthday’ (Fuentes 1982: 214). He goes on:
Every novel is in a way incomplete, but, as well, contiguous with

another story. Take your own life. In 1945, Fuentes, you decided
to live in Buenos Aires, near Montevideo; you did not return to
your native Mexico; you became a citizen of the River Plate
region, and then in 1955 you came to live in France. You became
less of a River Plate man and more French than anything else.
(Fuentes 1982: 215)
Despite the apparent identification of the narrator with the author

who bears the same name, these details are categorically not true of the
author Fuentes’s life. Branly then goes into a hypothetical mode, in-
viting the character Fuentes to imagine what his life would have been
like if instead of living in South America and Europe he has settled
permanently in Mexico and developed his career as an author there.
This hypothetical ‘what if’ scenario suggested by Branly to Fuentes the
narrator is in fact much closer to the empirically verifiable life history
of the author Fuentes than the first scenario, which is presented in the
novel as the real history:
Imagine; what would have happened if you had returned to Mexico

after the war and put down roots in the land of your parents?
Imagine; you publish your first book of stories when you are
twenty-five, your first novel four years later. You write about
Mexico, about Mexicans, the wounds of a body, the persistence of a
few dreams, the masks of progress. You remain forever identified
with that country and its people.
(Fuentes 1982: 215)
Since this is approximately what did happen to the real Carlos

Fuentes, the narrating character Fuentes in the novel can be seen
as the protagonist in a form of mirror autofiction. That is, the novel
sets up one image of him that is not empirically true, and then
rebounds onto another version of him that although presented as
imaginary is the more real. This bouncing back and fore between
Fuentes’s real life story (which is presented as imaginary) and a fic-
tional one (which is presented as real) is reflected in the doubling effect
of the structure of the novel, which is narrated sometimes in Branly’s
voice and sometimes in Fuentes’s.
This feature of the text illustrates an argument made by Monika
Fludernik (1993), that although reported speech has the effect of
creating the impression of two different voices, with one reporting the
words attributed to another, these different voices have to be created
by the author in order to be evoked so that in the last instance there
are not two voices, but only one. In other words, what appears to be a
mediation of the voice of the Comte de Branly by the narrator Carlos
Fuentes transpires to be a mediation of the voice of the character
Carlos Fuentes by the author Carlos Fuentes. This reassertion of au-
thorial voice is a significant feature in enabling the text to operate as a
form of mirror autofiction because although the protagonist shares a
name with the author, the two cannot easily be identified with each
other except in the mood of the hypothetical what if. The what if of the
narrator Fuentes’s life is the it was of the author Fuentes’s so that
when Branly asks him to imagine what it would be like to imagine
himself as a novelistic representative of Mexican culture with regard to
the history of relations between Mexico and Europe, this is the role
occupied by the author Fuentes who explored that history and those
relationships throughout his career.
Having established this role, the narrating character Fuentes takes
on greater prominence in the final sections of the novel. For example,
after taking Branly home from the Automobile Club where their
conversation took place, he wanders into Branly’s library and leafing
through the books there discovers a handwritten note by Branly’s
grandfather saying that in 1870, the writer Alexandre Dumas came to
his house in Enghien with a blond baby boy whom he had swapped for
a black child born to Branly’s grandfather’s father-in-law and a slave
woman on the Caribbean plantations. In this reapplication of the
classic plot device of babies swapped at birth, there are significant
implications for how we think about the return of the past in the
present, specifically in regard to the relationship between the Old
World and the New. For all Branly’s talk of an ancient family name,
we can see that his ancestry is something other than he has continually
asserted. Origins are interconnected rather than singular and direct
lineage is interrupted by the ghosts of the past that return in the
present, giving rise to the highly metaphysical conclusion of the novel.
Entering the salon next to the room where Branly is sleeping,
Fuentes comes across a dim figure lighting all the candles like the boy
Victor did at the start of the tale. On a table by her bed she has placed
the two items Branly values most: A clock and a photograph of
Branly’s father. The clock is reminiscent of the harpsichord played by
Victor Heredia’s mother Mme. Lange during her Venezuelan exile in
the nineteenth century and she is romantically conjoined in Branly’s
memory with the image of a woman he had loved and lost as a young
man, just as his memory of a boy he had failed to befriend is associated
with the boy Victor. Moreover, the spectral figure lighting the candles
is identified by Fuentes as the phantom of Hugo Heredia’s dead wife
Lucie, who is also a further incarnation of Mme. Lange. In memory
past and present are fused because phantoms are the remains of a
mortal being caught in the ‘unspeakable transit between yesterday’s
body and tomorrow’s specter’ (Fuentes 1982: 220).
The identification of this phantom causes the character Fuentes to
realise that Branly will only be visited by the spectre of the woman he
once loved for as long as he does not know she is dead. He further
understands that Lucie will live again when Branly dies, and through
this her dead son will be returned to her. Most importantly of all, when
she addresses him directly as ‘Carlos’ he realises that he, Fuentes, has
his own ‘Lucie,’ that is, his own phantom that has accompanied him
throughout his life. He has spoken several times in the text of having
lived in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, but he has not been able to
abandon his own phantom in these places as he had thought when he
was young: This will take place only at the moment of his death. In
other words, he cannot abandon the claim of the past on his own life in
the present. This claim is in fact his phantom. Recognising it as such
sends him back through the streets of Paris to the Automobile Club
where the swimming pool has apparently become a jungle thick with
trees, parrots and monkeys. The water is fetid and overgrown and in it
he sees twin faces of two conjoined, centuries-old, simian animals re-
presenting the faces of the Old World and the New. In this transfor-
mation of the luxurious pool of the elite Parisian club into a Mexican
wilderness the latter returns finally to confront the former and as if to
make the point he hears a voice say to him: ‘You are Heredia’ (Fuentes
1982: 225). Yet Heredia has also variously been identified with Branly
on the one hand and André on the other and Branly’s memories are
transposed with André’s which are also Victor’s and so Heredia’s. By
expressing this metaphysics of co-presence through the metafictive
device of employing a narrator Fuentes who is a hypothetical mirror of
his authorial self, the author Fuentes bears witness to a complex
cultural legacy that includes forebears from both sides of the chasm
separating the Old World from the New. In this way he posits a cul-
tural poetics of reconciliation and reconnection not only between past
and present but also between one culture and another.
Speculative Autofiction in Pamuk’s Snow

At first glance, the autofictional aspect of Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel
Snow (English translation 2004) is difficult to discern. Its portrayal of a
coup de théâtre which is simultaneously a coup d’état recalls the con-
nection between military control and control of the press demon-
strated by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
Its action, which takes place in the Turkish border city of Kars during
a three-day period when it is bound in by snow and unreachable by the
outside world, uses this microcosmic setting to raise questions about
the tensions between republican democracy and Islamic tradition, the
relationship between Turkey and Europe, and the role of the artist in
communicating with the people – which are themes of Pamuk’s work
more broadly. At the level of structure and style, the novel alternates
between an omniscient third-person narrative focalised on Ka, a dis-
sident poet and journalist who has returned to Turkey from political
exile in Frankfurt, and an intermittent first-person narrator by the
name of Orhan who is also an active participant in the action. Since
this narrating character is also a writer and cites The Black Book and
The Museum of Innocence (which are the names of works by Orhan
Pamuk) as examples of his publications, a strong connection is culti-
vated between this occasional narrator Orhan and the empirical author
Pamuk. The connection is all the more striking given that at the time
of Snow, The Museum of Innocence had not yet been published; though
presumably it must on some level have been conceived. On the other
hand, the fact that Orhan narrates only certain sections of the novel,
and that even when he does so his name is used only sparingly, has the
effect of playing down that same connection. As with Fuentes, the
effect is to generate a form of speculative autofiction: It is not a
question of Orhan Pamuk using the novel to narrate events he has
empirically experienced but on the contrary, of creating fictional cir-
cumstances to imagine his potential responses to them.
The ostensible plot of Snow is sparked by the visit of Ka (whose
name also means ‘Snow’) to the border city of Kars to investigate a
spate of suicides by young women there. He is also motivated by an
attempt to re-connect with a woman he once loved, İpek, who has
recently separated from her husband Muhtar, who in turn seems likely
to win a forthcoming local election on behalf of the increasingly
popular Islamic faction (although he had earlier been a secular critic of
religious authority). Kars is a city that historically and culturally exists
at the intersection of several different cultures. When modern Turkey
was created, representatives of the Ottoman and Russian empires
withdrew, leaving it much more impoverished in the narrative present
(the 1990s) than in its imperial heyday: In the novel, the horse and cart
is still a common form of transport, and there is only one set of traffic
lights in the whole city, which is technologically and economically
under-developed. There are also strong Armenian and Kurdish influ-
ences, as well as those from other cultures in the region.
When Ka talks to the father of Teslime, one of the young women who
committed suicide, he discovers that this is apparently because young
women who want to wear the veil have been prevented from attending
college in Turkey’s secular state. At the same time, suicide is considered
a sin against religion. There is thus a campaign against the women from
both sides, which in turn brings up questions about the role of religion in
a secular state; and about Turkey’s Westernisation (as well as the push-
back against it in some quarters). After witnessing the murder of the
Director of the Institute of Education, carried out by an Islamic fun-
damentalist apparently because he had been preventing the headscarf
girls from attending education, Ka is taken to a salon run by the
Kurdish Sheikh Saadettin Efendi, whose followers mock him for being
an atheist Western journalist but in whose presence he admits that he
feels a little more spiritual belief than he had previously recognised. This
is symbolised by the fact that as he explores the city, he finds that new
poems occur to him in moments of particular crisis, as if they have
originated from a higher power. Moreover, two youths Necip and Fazil
take him to meet Blue, a more militant political Islamist whose home is a
secret and who is believed to have murdered a television game show host
who made a joke about the prophet Mohammed. There is no way of
verifying whether or not this is true and in fact it remains disputed to the
end of the novel. Nevertheless, it hints in miniature at the inter-
relationship between political violence and censorship of broadcasting
thereby prefiguring the crisis at the heart of the novel, the coup that
takes place at the National Theatre in Kars during a variety perfor-
mance by the actors Sunay Zaim and his wife Funda Eser.
During the spectacle soldiers open fire on the mainly young Islamic
members of the audience, killing several. In other words, the coup is a
strike against religious fundamentalists, whose leader, Blue, is taken
into captivity and threatened with execution. But Sunay proposes a
deal: If Blue’s lover Kadife agrees to take part in a play during which
she is to take off her headscarf and bare her head, he will arrange for
Blue to be released. Although to non-Islamic readers this might seem
like an easy deal to accept, doing so has to feel like a genuine dilemma,
even a sacrifice, for both Kadife and Blue in a way that is perhaps
difficult for secular readers to imagine, otherwise the central tension of
the novel would not exist. But Blue’s previous lover İpek is Ka’s
current partner and when Blue is killed in hiding, a great moral am-
bivalence erupts concerning whether Ka had betrayed him out of se-
cular, anti-fundamentalist principle or out of mere personal jealousy.
İpek, who had arranged to run away with Ka when the snow finally
thaws, becomes convinced of the latter and decides not to go with him.
After Kadife shoots Sunay in the course of the play, political and
military leaders are able to enter the city, round up the leaders of the
coup and tidy up all loose ends.
Except that the questions raised by the novel will not so easily go
away. At several key points the linear narrative is interrupted as if to
overflow its own parameters and refuse to be so neatly contained. It
repeatedly jumps forward to a time four years after the coup, when Ka
has left Kars to return to Frankfurt – and been murdered there. These
future-ludes are also the precise points when the narrating ‘I’ intrudes
into the story and when we learn that he bears a certain verisimilitude
to the author Orhan Pamuk. It might be said of Snow therefore that
the author uses the techniques of fiction to bear direct witness to the
novel’s central portrayal of the conflict between fundamentalism and
Westernisation in Turkey. The narrator Orhan tells us that he visited
Frankfurt shortly after Ka’s death to try and find the notebook in
which he had written the finished version of the poems he had written
in Kars. Among Ka’s things he finds a snowflake diagram in which Ka
had arranged the poems into different themes headed Reason,
Imagination and Memory. This snowflake has three poles for each of
its six points plus a single central point giving 19 points in total, for
each of which Ka had written a poem so that he knew his work in Kars
was complete after he had written nineteen poems.
Although Orhan provides a degree of narrative closure by concluding
that the people who murdered Ka in Frankfurt four years after the coup
were political Islamists who had tracked him down there in order to get
revenge on him for betraying Blue, he never finds the poems themselves.
This means that the novel Snow posits the existence of an anterior book
which is nevertheless distinct from the book readers actually hold in
their hands. This doubled perspective can be considered symptomatic of
the relationship between Orhan and Pamuk in this work by Orhan
Pamuk because Pamuk too is sometimes present, sometimes kept apart.
One of the interesting features of Pamuk’s snowflake is how closely
it corresponds to Lejeune’s theoretical table classifying the relationship
between autobiography, fiction and nonfiction in The Autobiographical
Pact. Pamuk – through his fictional poet Ka – uses his chart to explore
the same three-way relationship now re-coded as that between memory
(‘autobiography’), imagination (‘fiction’) and reason (‘nonfiction’).
The different permutations between these three constructs, and their
further relationship to a central organising ‘I’ figure, give rise to spe-
cific and different poems based on the properties of each. But whereas
Lejeune was attempting to create an overarching taxonomy, Pamuk is
involved in the more modest and provisional project of classifying only
those specific poems attributed to Ka. Yet for this too there is precedent
in the theoretical development of the concept of autofiction because not
only did Doubrovsky arguably coin the term in response to the unfilled
box in Lejeune’s chart, but he also did so in the specific context of de-
scribing his own specific work, Fils, rather than necessarily attempting to
forge a whole new genre or category. In the case of Snow, a return to this
local, provisional working definition of autofiction has the advantage
that it does not try to encompass works any greater than themselves.
The wood of autofiction in this sense need not be obscured by the trees
of autofictional works.
The Autofictional Mode in The Book of Chocolate Saints

The testimonial function in Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,
Fuentes’s Distant Relations and Pamuk’s Snow rehabilitates a notion
of truth-telling which can be contrasted with the textual games of
much postmodern fiction, in which the category of truth is exchanged
for an ontological emptiness, an always sought for, never managed
goal. For this reason, and notwithstanding their diverse experiments in
narrative structure and narrative form, they are perhaps better thought
of as works of critical realism than postmodernism as such. Although
no claim is made to narrate the empirically experienced, externally
verifiable life histories of their authors they nevertheless bear witness
to wider historical truths about significant cultural conflicts, conflicts
in which those authors have participated to a greater or lesser degree.
Their presence as minor elements in the overall compositions not only
adds verisimilitude but more importantly posits the conflicts themselves
as greater than the roles played in them by the individual writers which
they nevertheless include. The cultural inferiority complex of post-
colonial Latin America with regard to Europe that is a key theme of
both Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and Distant Relations is addressed
by both Llosa and Fuentes so that their individual responses are sub-
merged within the wider struggle. Turkey’s complex dilemmas regarding
Westernisation, Europe, Christianity, Islam and fundamentalism are
Pamuk’s own, but are also much more widely experienced in the society
so that in Snow the experiences of the fictional characters are broadly
symbolic of the author’s while also transcending them.
As a fourth example, Jeet Thayil’s Book of Chocolate Saints (2017) is
a multi-textured work which simultaneously portrays a fictional Indian
poet and the scholar researching him. It is made up of fictitious arti-
cles, transcripts and interviews conducted between the researcher (who
is also the narrator) and people close to the poet whose life he re-
searches – including, at several points in the novel, a thinly disguised
version of the author Jeet Thayil. One of Thayil’s messages is that
relative to the Indian novel in English, Indian poetry in English has
been critically overlooked and is less widely read, which is damaging
because it strips the medium of its critical anti-establishment potential.
In turn, re-valuing literature as a medium of social and political cri-
tique becomes associated with a critical portrayal of the transition of
the colonial city of Bombay into the global economic powerhouse,
Mumbai, with corresponding levels of inequality, deprivation and
precarity. Because Mumbai is Thayil’s home city, the story of this
transition is his own story, but also more than just his. By including
himself as a minor character he is able to bear witness to the transition
between India’s colonial past and global capitalist present, a transition
that concerns him directly but also involves many other people.
As such, it can be understood using Bart Moore-Gilbert’s concept of
relational lives. According to Moore-Gilbert, certain mainly post-
colonial writers have tended to situate their subjectivity as a compo-
nent within a larger structure of collective social relationships rather
than considering it to be the expression of a single determinate ego.
When looked at in this way, the subjectivity expressed by such forms
of life writing is ‘primarily relational rather than monadic’ (Moore-
Gilbert 2009: 18). This means that although it would be theoretically
weak and culturally insensitive to ascribe to an individual author the
role of spokesperson for a whole culture, this kind of writing positions
the author as a typical member of the society in question, and one
whose struggles are somewhat congruent with those of the wider so-
ciety while also open to a form of dialectical encounter with them. In
turn, this reflexivity with regard to the social structure and wider
questions of solidarity and belonging are possible because the
‘achievement of individual Selfhood, whether understood as centred or
de-centred, is not their protagonists’ sole, or even prime, objective’
(Moore-Gilbert 2009: 17). Thayil’s diffuse presence in The Book of
Chocolate Saints thus endows it with a measure of representativity
precisely because the form of self-fashioning that it articulates is re-
lational rather than monolithic.
The first and third parts of the novel consist of transcripts of in-
terviews about the fictional poet Francis Newton Xavier carried out by
the fictional researcher Dismas Bambai in the 1990s and early 2000s
with the poet’s former neighbours, teachers, colleagues and relatives.
Xavier’s reputation as a poet rests on two well-received volumes of
poetry written in England in the 1950s and 1960s. After that he
stopped writing poems, turned to fine art and returned to live in India,
where he started mixing with some of the other Indian poets and artists
of the time. The retired Bombay professor of poetry Rama Raoer tells
Dismas that he himself was one of these Indian poets and that he
played a role in developing an Indian poetry scene, with the former
untouchable Narayan Doss (apparently based on the Marathi poet
Namdeo Dhasal) at its centre. In an interview supposedly about
Xavier, Raoer says far more about Doss – whose work, he laments,
never got translated into English and so never achieved a wide circu-
lation. The circle also includes the real poets Adil Jussawalla, Arun
Kolatkar, Dom Moraes, Dilip Chitre and Nissim Ezekiel. When Raoer
tells Dismas about a trip purportedly made by Allen Ginsberg and the
Beat poets to Bombay, he says that the Beat poets were an irrelevance
to Indian life because they were white, Western and privileged.
Xavier’s decision to get a British passport and leave India for the
first time had partly been as a protest against the Indian annexation of
Goa from Portugal which, because it denied Goans their Portuguese
citizenship, he interpreted as an act of Hindu imperialism. The im-
mediate occasion for his second departure from India (to New York)
was meeting the young art critic Goody Lol and starting a relationship
with her. By the time Xavier and Goody settle in New York in the
early 2000s, Dismas is also working there as a hack journalist for the
local paper Indian Angle. In fact the textual fragments which constitute
the novel The Book of Chocolate Saints are interspersed with poems
from the unpublished manuscript Book of Chocolate Saints, a collec-
tion of poems written by Xavier and collated by Dismas and Goody
after his death. This means that there is a difference between two
different textual artefacts – one posited by and encompassed within the
other – which happen to share a common title. The novel The Book of
Chocolate Saints is a meditation on the role of art and poetry in Indian
life while the poetry book of the same name apparently serves as a
corrective to the ‘white-washing’ of history through its portrayal of
myths, leaders, saints and ordinary lives. This thematic distinction
between two different Books of Chocolate Saints, where the novel
readers hold in their hands has the same title as the separate work
posited within it but is nevertheless distinct from it, creates a doubled
perspective, with one textual object folded Russian-doll like inside
the other. This metafictional structure enables Thayil to mobilise the
technique identified in Pamuk above of incorporating an individual
author’s response to a broader cultural struggle within a narrative that
is more about the struggle than the individual.
Dismas is eventually forced to leave the USA by an upturn in hate
crime directed against South Asians after 9/11 and he and Xavier part
on bad terms because Dismas has started a sexual relationship with
Goody: Xavier does not object to this as such, since he does not claim
to own her; but when he sees a draft of an apocalyptic poem by
Dismas referring to Goody as his wife Xavier tells him this can never
come true and the real strength of his objection is that the poem itself
is second-rate. At their final New York meeting on Xavier’s doorstep,
Dismas also reveals that since living in India he has been in possession
of two paintings believed to be by Xavier, which he asks the artist to
authenticate. Xavier doesn’t quite do this; instead enigmatically saying
they are worth keeping. This answer leaves open the possibility that
the paintings might have been produced by Goody rather than Xavier.
By making us ask whether this would make them any less authentic
and if so whether this is due to Goody’s status as both a woman and an
assistant to the male artist Xavier, this final conundrum transcends the
ludic games of postmodernism to raise questions of public value.
How we distinguish between what is real and what is not; and be-
tween what is authentic and what is not therefore emerges as one of the
recurring themes of the text. In turn, these questions are reflected by
the novel’s simultaneous depiction and occlusion of its own author.
When Dismas later travels to Goa and reads a recent history book
about the local saint after whom Xavier is named, he notes that the
mythology associated with the saint has changed over time, rendering
appeals to cultural unity through recourse to a shared past – typical of
much Hindu nationalism – unstable. Moreover we later learn that
Bambai is not Dismas’s ‘real’ name and that he only adopted it to hide
his caste origin. As if to underline the difficulty of separating fact from
fiction this is also the exact point in the novel that Thayil applies the
autofictional technique of including himself as a minor character.
For example, after returning to India for his touring exhibition in
Part Four, substituting Goody for a new lover, Dharini, and getting
involved in a project to rehabilitate the reputation of a Christian
television evangelist who has been undermined by Hindu extremists,
Xavier gradually starts to drink himself to death. The arts activist
Farzana Amanella Kaur tells Dismas about the last time she saw Xavier,
at a poetry reading in 1996–97. Xavier was there along with several other
members of the poetry scene plus ‘a poet whose name I can never re-
member, skeletal fellow, strung out or drunk, who put together an an-
thology some years later, The Bloodshot Book of Contemporary Indian
Poets, or something like that’ (Thayil 2017: 353).
This skeletal figure is a barely veiled avatar of the author-as-
character Jeet Thayil himself, whom we are told on the jacket blurb to
the hardback edition of the novel is editor of an anthology bearing
almost exactly this name, the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian
Poets. The description of Thayil as strung out or drunk might be ex-
plained by his Wikipedia page, which states that in 2006 he told the
Hindu newspaper that he had been an alcoholic and cocaine addict for
over two decades. Clearly an informal source such as Wikipedia
should be treated cautiously, but Thayil is an author who is particu-
larly interested in his public personae and different forms of authorial
self-presentation, and rightly or wrongly the internet encyclopaedia is
a powerful tool for mediating and conveying these things, which in
turn is why it is not only possible but actively necessary to have re-
course to it in thinking about them. Indeed, it has been argued by
Allira Hanczakowski (2022) that paratextual material is important to
autofiction in determining whether the protagonist can be identified
with the author, because it is only through references to extra-textual
material that this identification can be verified.
As we have seen, one of the points that Thayil makes is that relative
to the Indian novel in English, Indian poetry in English has been
critically overlooked. His brief appearance in the novel as poet rather
than as novelist might then be a means of challenging that neglect.
Moreover, his first novel Narcopolis (2012) was a lament to the pas-
sing of old Bombay in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of economic
liberalisation and capitalist expansion which coincided with a tide of
cheap, largely uncontrolled cocaine flooding the streets of the city
and destroying many lives, including the lives of people known to
Thayil personally so that he wrote Narcopolis as a form of memorial
to them. This commitment to remembering the lives that were lost
as a result of the widespread practices of addiction that were un-
leashed during India’s transformation to a market economy is re-
affirmed in the section of The Book of Chocolate Saints where Thayil
appears at the poetry reading, because he decides against reading his
own poetry:
Instead he improvised a lecture about Nosferatu, starting with the
Murnau version and ending with Werner Herzog’s, which he said
was a secret portrait of the junkie as vampire, not as caricature
of evil but as an addict filled with self-loathing to the point of
paralysis.
(Thayil 2017: 355)
This theme, the damaging effects of addiction and how it had not only
failed to be prevented, but had been positively fostered by the get-rich-
quick culture of Bombay in the transition to a capitalist economy, is
the real subject of Thayil’s testimony or witness-bearing.
Making such a fleeting appearance in the novel does not quite meet
Doubrovsky’s original definition of autofiction, for whom the same ‘I’
is both author and narrator, which is not the case here. Yet there are
other means beyond name and pronoun by which the identification of
author with character can be made, so that it might be helpful to see
The Book of Chocolate Saints as an instance of what Lorna Martens
refers to as ‘autofiction in the third person’ (Martens 2018: 49). On the
other hand, the emanation in the text of Thayil’s authorial presence is
so small as to render it dubious grounds on which to base either a
classification or interpretation of the whole. It might be more appro-
priate to follow a recent suggestion by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf that
autofiction is better understand as a ‘mode’ of writing, rather than a
genre as such (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2022: 24). Not only does this have the
advantage of resolving a confusion that has dogged the field of auto-
fiction since its inception by moving the basis of definition onto grounds
other than ones of genre, but it also points to the capacity for autofiction
as a mode of writing to flare up from time to time at specific moments in
texts which need not be thought of as autofictional overall. By em-
ploying this mode Thayil activates the form of autofiction identified
throughout this chapter: Positioning the author as a minor character in
the fiction to bear witness to forms of marginalisation and cultural
struggle that have otherwise been unrecorded in the broader mytholo-
gies and cultural memories of the society in question.
4 The Poetics of Exile and Return
If an upturn in autobiography research was one context for the devel-

opment of autofiction in the 1970s, this corresponded to a reaction against
theories of the death of the author in the same period. The rebuttal of the
death of the author was particularly prominent among postcolonial
writers, whose voices and experiences had been historically marginalised
until the very recent past, so that they are unlikely to accept the tacit
silencing that theories of the death of the author imply. However, a par-
ticular challenge is that autobiography offered to tell the life story of a
sovereign self, and in the period of the European empires the concept of a
sovereign self implied the existence of other selves who were not sovereign,
who literally did not hold sovereignty over their own bodies, having been
denied historical subjectivity by the impositions of the master-slave re-
lationship. In other words, autobiography offers opportunities for truth-
telling in a way that rejects the dominant tropes of otherness instilled
during the period of imperialism and orientalism, but to the extent that it
implies a sovereign self, autobiography risks re-inscribing the idea of a
master narrative and hence replicating that relationship.
This chapter argues that the techniques of autofiction have afforded
certain writers a way out of this double bind by mediating between
individual and collective forms of memory. When it does this, auto-
fiction can have a testimonial function, bearing witness to some of the
injustices and inequalities of the colonial past. Moreover, in many
postcolonial societies the years immediately after independence were
followed by periods of military dictatorship and neo-colonialism that
exacerbated rather than healed those prior injustices, with the effect
that political opponents, dissidents and intellectuals were driven into
forms of either explicit or implicit exile, leaving their home countries
and writing about them from abroad.
By discussing French-Algerian author Nina Bouraoui’s 2018 novel
All Men Want to Know and Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière’s
DOI: 10.4324/9781003313465-5
poetic work The Enigma of the Return (2009), the chapter proposes
that autofiction as critical testimony is a mode of writing that involves
a dialogic interplay between text and paratext which has the capacity
to recall to public consciousness injustices from both the colonial
and neo-colonial periods which have been left to drop out of public
memory. In the process of re-presenting those injustices, these writers
challenge that cultural amnesia at simultaneously an individual and
a collective level of discourse, so that autofiction has the capacity to
enact an integration of subjective narratives with concerns that are
social and historical, or of “I” with “we,” and so re-inscribe ex-
pressions of collective experience. In other words, when endowed
with this testimonio function among writers writing from political
exile, autofiction can be articulated in the genesis of new forms of
cultural memory.
Trauma and Repetition in All Men Want to Know

In keeping with the tradition that has descended from Doubrovsky,
Nina Bouraoui’s 2018 novel All Men Want to Know (English transla-
tion 2020) is described on the back cover as a ‘work of autofiction’ that
‘traces her early life, torn between two countries: Her mother’s France
and her father’s Algeria.’ It consists of 126 passages of prose most of
which are between 200 and 500 words long, of which all except five are
titled ‘Becoming,’ ‘Remembering’ or ‘Knowing.’ These are framed by a
first and last passage that have no title and serve as temporal thresh-
olds into the fiction by establishing the narrative present from the
perspective of which the rest is reported. Three short sections at the
end of the book are simply entitled ‘Being’ and therefore gesture to-
wards an attempt at closure for the cultural struggles in which
Bouraoui was involved: With her sexuality, with the French grand-
parents who would not accept her Algerian heritage and with her early
attempts at writing while visiting gay nightclubs in Paris. These
struggles are chiefly narrated in the sections entitled ‘Becoming.’ The
sections entitled ‘Remembering’ deal with events from Bouraoui’s
childhood and adolescence both in Algeria and France and collectively
constitute a dispersed prelude, scattered throughout the entire text, to
her subsequent life as an author and adult finally able to feel com-
fortable with her French and Algerian identities and her homo-
sexuality. By contrast, the sections titled ‘Knowing’ document events
from her parents’ early courtship in France before moving to Algeria,
and events even earlier than that again, during her mother’s childhood
in Rennes during the Second World War. In other words, they are
The Poetics of Exile and Return 69
family histories that Bouraoui remembers even though they happened
before she was born, and thus feed in to her cultural memory.
All Men Want to Know contributes to that process by alternating
between ‘Knowing,’ ‘Remembering’ and ‘Becoming’ in a temporal
structure that disrupts the linear progression from childhood to ado-
lescence and adulthood and instead makes the memories that
Bouraoui has of each co-present with the others. This structure enables
her to treat the text as an exploration – as opposed to an assertion – of
the experiences, events and decisions that make her the person she is,
including ones that preceded her life but nevertheless played a formative
role in it. Different aspects of her identity and memories from different
phases of her life infuse one another giving rise to an impressionistic
atmosphere in which truths emerge gradually and partially and only
very slowly begin to cohere, making it possible to retrospectively re-
construct the chronology of her life. They are thus a further instance of
the relational lives discussed in the previous chapter. Moreover, in the
specific case of postcolonial women’s writing, Moore-Gilbert has sug-
gested that understanding the individual writer in a relational context
has a testimonio function because it enables a female writer ‘to break the
silence enjoined on her gender, using one individual voice in a relational
and representative manner […] to speak up about the true condition of
many members of her sex’ (Moore-Gilbert 2009: 44).
For example, although it is not the first thing narrated, the earliest
thing readers find out about in the novel is that during the Second
World War Bouraoui’s French grandparents had witnessed their
Jewish neighbours being arrested without intervening and Bouraoui
appears to feel uncomfortable with this truth even though she must
know that it would have been almost impossible for them to have
helped the neighbours. During the War her grandparents moved out
into the countryside from their home in Rennes and when they re-
turned their home had been bombed, symbolically destroying her
mother’s childhood in a way that Bouraoui later says leaving Algeria
due to the rise in Islamist extremism destroyed her own. At the
grandparents’ new house in Thabor Gardens in Rennes her grand-
mother liked to entertain guests, including Monsieur B, a childhood
friend who had been in a concentration camp for a year and whom
Bouraoui’s grandparents invited to live with them to recover – but who
also molested little girls. So when Bouraoui’s mother chose to move to
Algeria with her husband even though he thought she might not be safe
there at the end of its bloody war of independence from France
(1954–62), this is implicitly both because of the abuse by Monsieur B,
and owing to her grandparents’ refusal to accept her mother’s marriage
to an African man. Even when Bouraoui and her sister visited her
grandparents in Rennes as children her grandparents (who were den-
tists) subjected them to various humiliating check-ups as if to search for
evidence of innate savagery and wildness.
When Bouraoui’s mother moved to Algeria with her husband in
1963, Bouraoui was born just as the remnants of the French colonial
apparatus were moving in the other direction so that the Second
World War and the legacy of French imperialism each play a partly
determining role in Bouraoui’s sense of self. In this regard, it is striking
that neither her grandparents, her parents, nor her sister are identified
by name in the text: They are identified only via their relationship to
her as if to testify to forms of relationship even in cases where this was
one of negation and downright refusal. The same is true of her father’s
(Algerian) brother who had been killed in Algeria’s war of in-
dependence before her birth but who is also in a meaningful sense
present in her life. Or as Antonia Wimbush puts it, ‘Autofiction, for
Bouraoui, facilitates a fusion of the personal and the political: She
expresses her own identitarian issues in addition to illustrating the
acuity of suffering within the wider Algerian context of exile and mass
displacement’ (Wimbush 2021: 46).
Bouraoui’s sister was born in France and moved to Algiers at an
early age. The opposite is true of Nina herself, whose continual
childhood movements back and forth between Algeria and France are
narrated by the ‘Remembering’ sections of the text. This movement in
turn becomes a wider metaphor for the dislocation that she feels as a
result of having grown up caught between two different worlds. This is
why the apartment in Paris which she remembers uncertainly gives way
in her mind to the apartment the family occupied in Algiers when they
moved back there in 1972. This too feels like a kind of cocoon and it is
the location in which Bouraoui’s childhood happiness is at its greatest:
‘The chamber of the winds’, as my sister and I call it, in the

apartment in Algiers, harbours countless secrets. Light and air
filter through latticework screens. Sheets hanging on the line small
of laundry soap and Ourdhia’s perfume. Ourdhia looks after us.
She coats herself with musk after bathing, squatting on her
haunches in the washroom. She undoes her braid, lets her
hennaed hair fall down her back. When I walk in on her and
find her naked, she pinches the skin around her hips, on her belly,
looks at me and laughs as she says: ‘look at these breasts of mine,
nothing but scraps.’
(Bouraoui 2020: 39)
The apartment in Algiers which is invoked several times throughout
the text calls to mind Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 paintings Femmes d’Alger
dans leur appartement (‘Women of Algiers in Their Apartment’); as well
as Pablo Picasso’s reworking of the same theme in the series of paintings
Les Femmes d’Alger (1954–55) and possibly also the Algerian writer
Assia Djebar’s 1980 novel Femmes d’Alger dans leur Appartement. But
whereas Delacroix’s paintings on the subject have been discussed as
examples of Orientalist discourse typical of the imperial period, and
Picasso’s have been seen as instances of female sexuality refracted
primarily by a male gaze, Bouraoui neither exoticises nor sexualises the
women in her apartment (including her younger self). Instead she nor-
malises household behaviour in the portrayal of a domestic interior
which is simultaneously a peaceful, harmonious and safe space
whose very security is shortly to be ripped apart by the growing threat of
extremist political violence. Thus different layers of cultural memory
are heaped on top of each other through the implicit invocation of
different ‘texts’ from distinct moments of the imperial past and post-
colonial present.
One result of Bouraoui accessing different meanings from an os-
tensibly related set of images is that if the girls of her Algerian
apartment are unlike the Algerian women of Delacroix or Picasso,
they are also very unlike ‘the boys of Algiers on their home-made
skateboards, hitching rides behind cars and trolleybuses’ whom she
says were her ‘role models’ growing up: ‘my wild, crazy brothers,
handsome, muscular, free, playing their reckless games’ (Bouraoui
2020: 55). In chronological (though not narrative) order, watching the
Algerian boys playing in a carefree, masculine way is one of the first
occasions on which she experiences a feeling that she would subse-
quently come to recognise as her sexual difference from other girls and
therefore her same-sex desire. Not only is this registered as initially
somewhat troubling for her (and remains a source of anxiety for a long
time) but it is also the same point at which political violence and
danger start to enter her life. As Islamic extremism takes a tighter grip
on Algerian society, the boys she envies and identifies with will become
the young men who treat Bouraoui’s French, non-Islamic mother as a
deviant. That is, they ‘insult my mother, expose themselves to her, lust
after her’ (Bouraoui 2020: 55).
As the liberal freedoms of the immediately postcolonial period are
gradually replaced by the politics of religious fundamentalism,
Bouraoui’s mother proposes an extended trip to the South of the
country, taking a few friends and neighbours, plus the young Nina and
her (male) friend Ali. The narrative of this trip provides an important
underlying structure for the novel as a whole: It is invoked several
times as they pass through the towns of Bérard, Timimoun, Ghardaïa
and Tamanrasset. Another boy, Tarek, is invited at the last minute
because he has started misbehaving since his father left to live in
Rome, for which he blames his pharmacist mother. Once the trip is
under way, Tarek immediately begins turning Ali against Nina, dis-
missing her as a ‘faggot’ (Bouraoui 2020: 162) and engaging in the
kinds of macho activities that she had already envied among the boys
of the city. Visiting a chapel on the edge of the Sahara makes Nina
want to say a prayer to cure herself of Tarek, ‘my disease, my patient’
(Bouraoui 2020: 165), and this emotional ambiguity over her re-
lationship with the boys expresses her ambivalence towards her gra-
dually awakening sexuality: Not a boy, not like other girls. However,
Tarek refuses to enter the chapel and the strand in the text narrating the
journey around Southern Algeria breaks off without resolution. Because
the narrative eschews a conventional linear chronology, readers already
know that after their return to Algiers, Tarek’s mother is murdered by
friends of his at his behest, since he perceives her to have failed to live
like a respectable Muslim woman. This, together with the murder of
another family friend, a psychiatrist, represents the political violence
affecting the country directly entering the young Nina’s life, ‘murdering
my childhood’ (Bouraoui 2020: 99), just as the destruction of the house
in Rennes during the war had murdered her mother’s.
Soon after this comes the climactic trauma of Bouraoui’s life: The
violent sexual assault on her mother which resulted in the family
leaving Algeria permanently. Although Bouraoui was not present at
this event itself, she did witness and experience its immediate after-
math, describing the scene explicitly at three separate points and al-
luding to it at several more:
When my mother came home with her dress torn, I was struck by
the peculiar noise made by the central furnace concealed in the
bushes of the gardens. In the months that followed, that sound
reminded me again and again of the image of my mother half naked,
her skin streaked with dirt; every time the image appeared, I wove
together the elements of the story my mother refused to divulge –
nothing else had happened, she said, there was nothing more to say,
and so my imagination constructed another narrative, different
from hers, a narrative to wrap hers in, to heal it, to smother it with
light, colour, perfume, and clothe the truth in beauty.
(Bouraoui 2020: 122)
Owing to its invocation of the cocoon impulse already conveyed in
the earlier descriptions of Algiers, Paris and Rennes, and because
Bouraoui keeps coming back to it, this description evinces a strong
sense of repetition, which is the belated form taken by the experience
of trauma as it recurs in an altered setting. It happens throughout the
text, as when Bouraoui’s mother visits an asthma clinic in Algiers, or
when she suffers a panic attack on a flight, or when she starts visiting a
German consultant. These behaviours are all evidence, in the extended
aftermath of the attack, of her mother’s need ‘to be taken care of […]
to put herself in the hands of experts who know what to do’ (Bouraoui
2020: 96). Nina herself also experiences a similar repetition compul-
sion, so not only does the sound of the furnace remind her of the
attack on her mother every time she hears it for months afterwards,
but this repetition is symbolically re-enacted in the multiple passages
where she returns to discuss it: ‘When I begin to write, my first creation
is a woman, alone and abused. I don’t realize I’m sketching a portrait
of my mother’ (Bouraoui 2020: 9).
According to the American theorist Cathy Caruth, the point about
symbolic repetition of traumatic experience is that it transforms the then
and there of the original experience which could not be expressed into the
here and now of a later time and place so that these latter become para-
doxically associated with the trauma itself. Or as Caruth summarises:
The repetitions of the traumatic events which remain unavailable

to consciousness but intrude repeatedly on sight thus suggest a
larger relation to the event that extends beyond what can be seen
or what can be known, and is inextricably tied up with the
belatedness and incomprehensibility that remains at the heart of
this repetitive seeing.
(Caruth 1996: 92)
The impossibility of understanding a traumatic experience in direct

unmediated form as it happens in real time is present in All Men Want
to Know when Bouraoui recalls her mother telling her childhood self
about the molestation she suffered by saying: ‘I’ve learned how to
ignore things for which there are no words. Without a name, nothing
can exist’ (Bouraoui 2020: 26). But if this applies to Bouraoui’s mo-
ther, it is also in some senses true of Bouraoui herself, who, though she
did not experience the assault, experienced the painful aftermath of it
as its own kind of trauma. Since Caruth is interested in the relationship
between trauma and the ethics of literary address, the present moment
of reporting – that is, of writing – is therefore as much of a traumatic
scene as that in which the traumatic experience occurred. Thus the
paragraph where Bouraoui describes seeing her mother coming home
with her dress torn and her skin dirty is immediately preceded in the
same passage by one where she says:
because I see in my mother what others have not seen, I will pass
those sorrows and misdeeds on to others; I will write, I will piece
together the story with my words, I will create scenes that are
invented, reported, true, untrue, I will bring the tale to life and
stop it from haunting me.
(Bouraoui 2020: 121)
Yet it seems that she is haunted by it otherwise there would not be the
compulsion for repeating the experience. That is, she is haunted by
something that she did not directly experience and although it is ar-
guable that the childhood experience of witnessing her mother coming
home directly after being assaulted is a primary form of trauma in
itself, it is nevertheless important to distinguish between these two
traumas. This is why Caruth’s account of trauma can be applied to
elucidate the relationship between autofiction and cultural memory in
Bouraoui’s work, since the concept of cultural memory addresses
precisely the question of how we remember things that we did not
experience. Because trauma is too overwhelming to be understood or
apprehended as it is occurring, it is experienced above all as a semantic
gap, as something that cannot be described or expressed on its own
terms. The act of repetition then becomes the name for the process of
re-inscribing various symbolic forms of re-enactment in the discursive
and imaginative space created by this gap:
it is here, in the equally widespread and bewildering encounter with

trauma – both in its occurrence, and in the attempt to understand it
– that we can begin to recognize the possibility of a history which is
no longer straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on
simple models of experience and reference). Through the notion of
trauma, I will argue, we can understand that a re-thinking of
reference is not aimed at eliminating history, but at resituating it in
our understanding, that is, of precisely permitting history to arise
where immediate understanding may not.
(Caruth 1991: 182)
The history that Caruth describes is non-referential because it refers to

a history that although real, has not been understood because the
trauma embodied within it has made expression inadequate. She thus
proposes that traumatic histories are better understood through
recourse to a notion of ‘indirect referentiality’ (Caruth 1991: 187) ac-
cording to which the traumatic history is registered precisely in its
discernible absence, the space it leaves behind.
For Bouraoui remembering the vestiges of her mother’s assault is the
foundational trauma that gave rise to the performance of her authorial
self in writing, that is, as writer. Yet the assault on her mother took place
not just because she was a woman, but because she was specifically a
French woman arriving in Algeria at the end of French colonial rule
and the beginning of Islamic fundamentalism. Thus an account not only
of her individual life but also of the history of the encounter between
France and Algeria, Europe and Africa, Christianity and Islam is in-
scribed in Bouraoui’s account of her traumatic departure from Algiers.
Here is an instance of how All Men Want to Know, which heralds itself
as a work of autofiction, can properly be treated as a work of cultural
memory.
Writing about Writers in Dany Laferrière’s The Enigma

of the Return (2009)
The short prose passages that make up All Men Want to Know com-
bine spectacle and diegesis; they construct visual invocations of the
scenes of Bouraoui’s trauma while also narrating the process by which
she left Algeria and became a writer. This structure closely replicates
that employed by the Haitian Canadian writer Dany Laferrière in his
earlier book, The Enigma of the Return (2009), a moving work that
combines prose and poetry in its gradually evolving narrative of
Laferrière’s return to Haiti after 33 years residence in Montreal, to
bring his mother and sister in Haiti news that his father had died in
exile in Brooklyn. His father had left Haiti when Dany was only four,
fleeing to the USA after falling foul of the notorious dictatorship of
Papa Doc (François Duvalier) and Laferrière himself made the same
decision to leave Haiti when his fellow journalist Gasner Raymond
was murdered by the followers of ‘Baby Doc,’ Duvalier’s son and
successor Jean-Claude, in 1976. His mother and sister had stayed be-
hind, putting a temporal gulf of more than 40 years between his two
parents and more than 30 between him and them.
Part One of The Enigma of the Return is about Laferrière receiving
in Montreal the phone call telling him of his father’s death in New
York, followed by his preparations for departure which evoke mem-
ories of the first time he had left Haiti for Canada. The poems in this
part are dominated by images of snow, books and suitcases, powerful
symbols of the life of the exile and of the climatic and cultural dif-
ferences between his home country and that in which he had ended up.
He then makes his departure, including a stop-over in New York for
the funeral where his father’s few friends are virtual strangers to him
and where he inherits a locked case from his father without knowing
the code to open it so he cannot know what his inheritance is. In the
longer Part Two he carries on to Port-au-Prince to bring the news of
his father’s death to his mother. The poems here are about his en-
counter with the grinding poverty in Port-au-Prince, his uneasy
meeting with his mother, sister and aunts and his realisation that al-
though this is where he was born, he no longer belongs there.
Several poems contain comments on naïve art, on the picture
postcard image of a Caribbean idyll, which contrasts with the squalid
reality of an under-developed country. In contrast to this idyllic image,
he recounts a conversation with his compatriot and fellow writer Gary
Victor in which he had suggested that the most appropriate theme for
the yet-unwritten great Haitian novel would be hunger: Throughout
The Enigma of the Return there are numerous images of unnamed men,
women and children sweeping dirt, cutting sugar cane, picking ba-
nanas and trying to scratch a living. The book thus gives verbal em-
bodiment to the dispossessed people of the country, ‘half of whom are
literally starving to death’ (Laferrière 2011: 61).
In this consideration of what Haitian writers should write about
there is a metafictive element that recalls Derek Walcott’s Omeros
(1990), an epic poem about the historical coming into being of the
people of St Lucia after the Caribbean island nation became in-
dependent from Britain in 1979. However, Walcott makes few refer-
ences to other St Lucian writers so that while narrating the coming
into being of the people of St Lucia, Omeros is also about his personal
growth as a writer. By contrast, Laferrière in The Enigma of the Return
makes great effort to situate his poetic self within wider bonds of at-
tachment and relationship to other Haitian writers. These include
Gary Victor; Ghislain Gouraige, ‘author of the monumental History of
Haitian Literature’ (Laferrière 2011: 140–1); Jacques Stephen Alexis
whose book General Sun, My Brother Laferrière calls ‘one of the most
beautiful novels in Haitian literature’ (Laferrière 2011: 141) and
Rassoul Labuchin, a review of whose novel Ficus was Laferrière’s ‘first
article’ (Laferrière 2011: 140). There emerges a sense of a shared un-
dertaking in the ongoing and collective evolution of Haiti’s culture, to
which the development of Laferrière’s authorial career contributes but
in which it is not unique and cannot be treated in isolation from the
many other writers who are part of the culture.
In an article that makes a claim for the special capacity of literary
texts to contribute to cultural memory, Ann Rigney has drawn attention
to the fact that although in some ways such texts can be considered as
simply one form of remembrance among others, they are nevertheless
‘capable of exercising a particular aesthetic and narrative “staying
power” that ensures that they are not always simply superseded by later
acts of remembrance’ (Rigney 2010: 352). She goes on:
Whether as objects to be remembered or as stories to be revised,

literary texts exemplify the fact that memorial dynamics do not
just work in a linear or accumulative way. Instead, they progress
through all sorts of loopings back to cultural products that are not
simply media of memory (relay stations and catalysts) but also
objects of recall and revision.
(Rigney 2010: 352)
Laferrière’s inclusion of his fellow Haitian writers in The Enigma of the

Return can be interpreted as an instance of the memorial dynamics
Rigney describes. In most cases they may never have been very well
known outside Haiti and even if they were, they have likely been
forgotten now so that The Enigma of the Return has the effect of
bringing or restoring their work to the view of a wider audience. Since
memorial dynamics do not work in a straightforwardly linear way they
become themselves both objects of recall and subjects of cultural
memory. In this way The Enigma of the Return, though ostensibly
about Laferrière’s exile and homecoming, addresses collective issues
and builds forms of solidarity within the wider culture that transcends
the narration of his individual life.
In the process, one of his recurring reference points is to the Notebook
of a Return to the Native Land (1939) by the Martinican poet and po-
litician Aimé Césaire. Césaire was a leading anti-colonial figure during
the final decades of colonialism in the Francophone Caribbean as well
one of the founders of the Négritude movement, which adumbrated a
transnational community of black peoples for the purposes of sharing
cultural resources in the common struggle against imperialism. One of
the themes of his work was the discrepancy between the egalitarian
values of the French Revolution (1789) and the undemocratic values
exhibited by the French imperial state in violently quelling the Haitian
slave rebellion of 1791–93 led by Toussaint Louverture, a rebellion
known as the Black Jacobins. As a punishment for leading the 1791
revolt Louverture had been imprisoned in France where he died, and
in the Notebook Césaire calls for his body to be returned to Haiti.
Moreover, since climate is one of the symbols of cultural difference
between the Caribbean and Laferrière’s self-imposed exile in Canada,
receiving in snowy Montreal news of his father’s death in New York
prompts a juxtaposition between this death and that of Louverture in
the cold of France:
I remember that passage in the Notebook where Césaire demands

the body of Toussaint Louverture, arrested by Napoleon, killed by
the cold during the winter of 1803 in Fort de Joux, France. His lips
trembling with contained rage the poet comes to demand, 150
years later, the frozen body of the hero of the slave revolt: ‘What is
mine a lone man imprisoned in whiteness.’
(Laferrière 2011: 43)
Louverture had died in exile after fighting against the French state just
as Laferrière’s father had gone into an exile that ultimately proved
fatal after opposing the Duvalier dictatorship. Just as Louverture’s
body was not returned to Haiti, so too Laferrière is unable to take his
father’s body back to Haiti except in memory. Instead, his mother
reminds him of his father’s old friend Jacques, who was arrested by the
regime and died in prison. He also goes to meet two surviving political
dissidents and comrades of his father: Gérard and François. Gérard
has become part of the political and cultural establishment and is a
former government minister who collects Haitian art. François on the
other hand is now living as an impoverished peasant, and tells Dany
that whatever is in the locked case he inherited from his father, it is
unlikely to be ‘money’ (which did not interest him) and is more likely
to be ‘documents’ (Laferrière 2011: 192). These are potentially valu-
able because they are the material that make it possible to restore a
record and hence a history to a people deprived of them. But
Laferrière is unable to unlock the case containing his father’s papers
and can ultimately only speculate over what they might contain.
Moreover, in keeping with the structure of Bouraoui’s All Men
Want to Know, where the account of her journey around Southern
Algeria prior to her eventual departure for France gave shape and
organisation to the whole text, Laferrière’s account of visiting these
former friends of his father gives rise to a journey across Haiti that
symbolises much of his experience as a returning exile. For example,
when he visits the cemetery where his grandmother is buried he reflects
that she still lives on in the books he has published. When he narrates
driving from village to village, he acknowledges that the mere fact of
being in a car driven by the chauffeur of a former government minister
gets him access to places he otherwise would not have. Some of the
villagers greet him as Zaka, the voodoo god of peasants, and identify
his nephew as an incarnation of Legba, the god who stands at the
border between the visible and invisible worlds. Although he is
scornful of this belief, and of the tourists who seek the thrill of the
exotic by deluding themselves that they have attended ‘a real voodoo
ceremony’ (Laferrière 2011: 201), there are more and more references
to voodoo as The Enigma of the Return progresses, as if to signify
Laferrière’s gradually deepening immersion into the culture from
which he has been estranged.
As he at last approaches his father’s birthplace, Baradères, he sends
home the nephew who has been travelling with him, giving him his
copy of Césaire’s Notebook because it is more useful to read ‘before we
leave’ than ‘when we return’ (Laferrière 2011: 209), and carries on
alone. In the truck that takes him there is a widow taking her dead
husband home to bury, and attending this funeral is a symbolic fare-
well to his own father on the one hand, while enabling him to provi-
sionally resituate himself within the culture on the other. When he
leaves the village after the ceremony, he does so by boat and this
makes him think of the slaves, brought from Africa, who were never
allowed sight of the beach in case it made them want to escape. This in
turn makes him think of the ‘Indian genocide/ so expertly orchestrated
by the Spanish’ (Laferrière 2011: 227) and the pre-Columbian beauty
of the place. This mean that the memories provoked by the journey
and inscribed in the book are not only memories of his father but also
memories of a whole culture – pillaged by the conquest, by centuries of
imperialism and slavery and then after independence spoiled again by
dictatorship and neo-colonialism. Thus the whole book The Enigma of
the Return is a memorial to all the countless and nameless lives de-
stroyed and an act of homage to Laferrière’s comrades whose work,
like his, has kept those memories alive.
5 Autofiction Once, Twice, Three
Times Removed
The preceding discussion of work by Bouraoui and Laferrière explored

a particular dialectic that exists among writers in exile. For such wri-
ters, memories of their country of origin are filtered through the lens of
the new country just as their position in the new country is inflected by
the experience of having come from the old. To say this is not to re-
duce the experience of exile to the banal simplicities of not belonging
fully to either place, or of having one foot in each, or even of existing
in a constant state of in-betweenness. It is rather to establish that
the condition of exile involves an ongoing traversing of boundaries, a
repeated movement back and fore between one place, society and
culture and another. In other words, rather than a singular event exile
is a continual process that is re-enacted and reperformed every time a
memory of one place or culture takes place in another.
Having left Haiti as a young man, returning to it provoked in
Laferrière some of the guilty feelings of a returning exile who has re-
nounced his own country. The act of researching his father’s life,
mainly through the informal method of talking to surviving relatives
and family members, is then in part a matter of achieving catharsis
with regard to this guilt. It is also in part a question of self-discovery
because in knowing more about his father he also came to know more
about himself, giving rise to a feeling of intergenerational connection,
a connection made manifest in narrative.
This final chapter applies Marianne Hirsch’s concept of post-
memory to analysis of a further series of narratives of intergenera-
tional connection: Peruvian author Renato Cisneros’s confessional
account of growing up as the son of a prominent figure in the country’s
military dictatorship, The Distance Between Us (2015); Guadeloupean
writer Maryse Condé’s imagined reconstruction of the life of her
maternal grandmother, Victoire: My Mother’s Mother (2006) and the
African-American author Maaza Mengiste’s use of details from the life
DOI: 10.4324/9781003313465-6
Autofiction Once, Twice, Thrice Removed 81
of her great-grandmother in her novel set during the 1935 Italian in-
vasion of Abyssinia, The Shadow King (2019). In doing so, the chapter
also considers how far the idea of postmemory usefully informs the
broader field of cultural memory. Cisneros’s account of the life of his
father, Condé’s of her grandmother and Mengiste’s of her great-
grandmother are all in meaningful ways aspects of the life histories of
Cisneros, Condé and Mengiste themselves. In these works, post-
memory is the point at which a delineated narrative of the self (au-
tofiction) pivots into a narrative of the wider society in question
(cultural memory). What emerges in the case of Cisneros’s portrait of
his father, which is also simultaneously a portrait of himself, is a form
of autofiction displaced by one generation, or autofiction at one re-
move. For Condé this displacement takes her back by a further gen-
eration, relating her life to that of her grandmother – autofiction twice
removed – and for Mengiste, including details from the life of her
great-grandmother gives rise to a form of autofiction at fully three
removes from its author.
Narrating Postmemory in The Distance Between Us

Mary Ann Hirsch’s term postmemory refers to a series of events,
structures and experiences that take place before a particular person’s
birth but which continue to exert a strong influence over their life to such
an extent that they become aspects of that person’s own narrative of self,
identity and belonging. Her primary examples are of the Holocaust, and
how seeing photographs from the Holocaust gives rise to a complex
feeling of both relation and distance on the part of the descendants of
Holocaust survivors. For such people, postmemory ‘characterises the
experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded
their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of
the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither
fully understood nor re-created’ (Hirsch 1996: 659).
This feeling of having had one’s own memories evacuated and
usurped by those of a previous generation to such an extent that the
latter become part of one’s own is a useful way of approaching
the Peruvian author Renato Cisneros’s memoir of coming to terms with
the fact that as a senior figure in Peru’s military dictatorship of the 1970s
and 1980s, his father Luis Federico ‘El Gaucho’ Cisneros was likely
involved in orchestrating various forms of political violence, possibly
including torture and murder. For Cisneros, the biggest challenge in
researching his father’s life history was not a lack of public awareness of
his subject, but rather a superabundance of it: The people of Peru knew
82 Autofiction Once, Twice, Thrice Removed
only too well who his father was. But even though Renato knew his
father was a public figure who was often absent and very strict he would
also come home and play table tennis or go swimming with him, giving
rise to the paradox whereby ‘[m]y father managed to make the worst
years of Peru the best years of my life’ (Cisneros 2018: 267). His book
The Distance Between Us is thus an attempt to settle accounts with a very
complex figure and hence with an uncomfortable truth about Cisneros’s
heritage. Nevertheless, he remains insistent that the book should be seen
as a novel rather than a work of biography or history:
It’s a novel about him or someone very like him, written by me or

someone very like me. It’s not a biographical novel. Not a historical
novel. Not a documentary novel. It’s a novel conscious of the fact
that reality occurs only once and that any reproduction made of it is
condemned to adulteration, to distortion, to simulacrum.
(Cisneros 2018: 2)
In other words, Cisneros acknowledges that the father who features in

the fiction is a representation only, and that the representation is not
the man just as the ‘I’ under which Cisneros narrates is a construct
rather than the living person. The Distance Between Us is thus si-
multaneously an account of the research he undertook about his
father (a process in which he takes centre stage) and the narrative he
built of his father’s life as a result (in which the father is the main
protagonist). But although these twin aspects of the novel are inter-
twined throughout they are analytically distinct and maintaining the
distinction between the account (of the research) and the narrative (of
the life) is important in exploring how The Distance Between Us pivots
between individual memoir and intergenerational memory. This is why
the category of postmemory is such a useful one in approaching the text.
As Hirsch says, postmemory is ‘a powerful form of memory precisely
because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through
recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’ (Hirsch
1996: 659). This of course is particularly true of Cisneros, whose re-
lationship to his subject (his father) is invested with all manner of emo-
tions, both private and public, and is temporally highly complex.
The account begins with Cisneros’s confession that only while he
was seeing a counsellor in 2006 about how to deal with the latest of a
series of failed relationships did the counsellor ask the apparently
unrelated question of how his parents met, thus sparking the central
question of the novel. The narrative, by contrast, starts a century and a
half earlier with his great-great grandfather Gregorio Cartagena
having seven children by a woman whom he was unable to marry
because he was a Catholic priest, and so raised the family with only a
veneer of normal family life, thus establishing a pattern that would
recur over several generations of the family. Cartagena’s son Luis
Benjamín was a poet, and in turn his son Fernán (Renato’s grand-
father) was a newspaper editor in Lima who was driven into exile in
Argentina for writing editorials critical of Peru’s regime of the 1930s.
Fernán was followed to Argentina by both his wife Hermelinda and
his mistress Esperanza Vizquerra and in the account of his research,
Renato acknowledges being told by one of his uncles (that is, one of
Fernán’s sons) that Fernán would get up in the morning at home with
his wife and children, then walk to the home of his mistress and his
alternative family to spend the day there before returning home in the
evening, maintaining two essentially separate families.
All the while Fernán raised his children to remember they were
Peruvian (although they had never been to Peru) and so to expect to
return there one day. This is how his son ‘El Gaucho’ Luis Federico
(Renato’s father) came to be trained at Argentina’s military academy
in the 1940s (where he befriended many of the people who would form
Argentina’s dictatorship of the 1970s) and then posted to Sullana,
Northern Peru, in 1947. By then he was engaged to an Argentinean
lover, Beatriz, and sought permission to travel back to Argentina to
marry her. This was refused and in Renato’s account of researching his
father’s life in the files of the ‘Little Pentagon’ in Lima where the
military archive is based, discovering this information is the first time
he comes across an official description of his father as someone who
was emotional, vulnerable and tender (as opposed to countless docu-
ments and newspapers articles that subsequently presented him as
ruthless and without self-doubt). This too sets an essential pattern: In
El Gaucho’s private papers the doubts and questions come up, but in
public they were never seen.
Renato’s account of his research describes how, upon learning of his
father’s thwarted love for Beatriz, he travelled to Argentina in 2014 to
learn more. Although Beatriz had died, he met her sister Ema and her
daughter Gabriela, who told him that after the end of her mother’s
relationship with his father in 1947, they did meet again years later in
1979 and that on that occasion, El Gaucho had presented Beatriz with
his military baton (which Gabriela now symbolically returns to
Renato). The symbolism of this returned gift thus provides narrative
closure to Beatriz’s story, which is plotted perhaps a little too neatly
like a romance novel, prompting Cisneros to refer to it as fiction rather
than biography or history:
Gabriela and I are both the fruit of a thwarted story. We are the
children that the Gaucho and Beatriz would have wanted to have
together and ended up having with other people whom they also
loved, but who now get in the way of the story we are trying to
reconstruct. The two of us, her and I – not her siblings or mine, but
the two of us – by the mere fact of being here in this café, implicated
in this situation brought about by me and accepted by her, in a
scene both symbolic and thrilling, in asking each other these
questions, have the right – by this mere fact – to speculate that
our parents have channelled themselves through us, and our mission
is to recount all of this to each other because it’s the last encounter
that they would have wanted to have.
(Cisneros 2018: 85)
The account of the research cannot be separated from the narrative of

his father’s life so that in writing one Renato is at the same time
constructing the other. The narrative tells us that when Luis Federico’s
original relationship with Beatriz ended in 1947, they had exchanged a
few letters but Beatriz had quickly become engaged to one of Luis
Federico’s friends from the military academy in Argentina and spent
her life with him. Hearing this seems to have propelled Luis Federico
into an equally swift marriage with the middle-class woman Lucila
Mendiola during his posting to Sullana in Northern Peru, and the
marriage gave rise to three children, Melania, Estrella and Fermín,
each of whom Renato documents speaking to during his research.
However, the marriage broke down in 1969 when the democratic gov-
ernment of Fernando Belaúnde was ousted in a coup led by Juan
Velasco Alvaro and Luis Federico was given a post in the treasury in
Lima, where he started a relationship with the secretary Cecilia Zaldívar
that would last for life. Although he wanted to avoid repeating the same
situation as his father in Buenos Aires – trying to raise two totally se-
parate families simultaneously – Lucila would not divorce him, even
when he left her. So he set up home with Cecilia and even arranged three
different quasi wedding ceremonies to try and confer a veneer of offi-
cialdom on their relationship.
In 1975 the Velasco government was replaced in a further coup by
that of Francisco Morales Bermúdez, bringing Peru’s military dicta-
torship into its second phase, and also resulting in Luis Federico (now
General) Cisneros becoming Minister of the Interior. During this phase,
not only did he receive and admire the strongly anti-Communist
American politician Henry Kissinger, but he also visited and forged
links with Pinochet in Chile and many of the leaders of Argentina’s
junta. The 1970s also coincided with a number of leftist uprisings across
Peru, which Cisneros put down brutally, censoring the press and car-
rying out arrests without charge whenever necessary. Ironically, his
daughter Melania (from his first marriage) took part in a number of
demonstrations and her only way of dealing with her father’s repression
was to quit Peru for good and move, along with her partner, to Paris,
where Renato visited her while researching the book. In his account of
this research he also describes talking to his other two siblings from
his father’s first marriage, Fermín and Estrella, who in his account both
tell him that they consider themselves, and their mother, to be Luis
Federico’s authentic family – so that although they are pleased to have
met Renato, his very existence is an imposition on their lives.
In other words, presenting the research in the present is analytically
distinct from narrating his father’s life in chronological order as it
happened in the past. The former continually intrudes upon and in-
terrupts the latter so that the more research Renato documents, the
less certainty he feels in what he knows about his father. This is why
the resulting book is not designated history but fiction, a novelistic
exploration of certain facts that cannot easily be marshalled into a
single truth:
One day I understood that I didn’t want to write a profile or a

biography or a documentary: what I needed to do was fill the
blank spaces with my imagination, because you are also – or
above all – made of what I imagine you were, of what I’m unaware
of and what will always remain a question mark.
(Cisneros 2018: 349)
Despite – or perhaps because of – his capacity to elude singular

characterisation, by the end of 1977 General Cisneros had become so
powerful it was widely rumoured that he would assume the presidency
from Morales Bermúdez, who pre-emptively sent him away to Paris as
a military attaché for a year, taking Cecilia and the children. When
Renato went to visit Melania there during his research in 2012, he also
went to see the apartment where he had lived as a little boy in
1978–79 and in his account of this trip he whimsically imagines
meeting his younger self:
What face would he make if I told him that someday he’ll end up
bearded and alone in a room, writing down the memories of this
fictitious encounter? He’d probably throw a nut or a pebble at me
and run to hide behind those tree-like columns that are the legs of
the Peruvian military attaché who is his father. Perhaps it would
be wise not to approach at all, just to watch them with a
benevolent gaze. Better for them not to know how badly life will
treat them.
This reference forward to how life will treat them anticipates in ret-
rospect General Cisneros’s return to Peru first as Chief of Staff and
then, following his retirement from the military, as Minister for War in
the newly reinstated government of Fernando Belaúnde. By this time,
the biggest threat to the Peruvian state was the emergence of Shining
Path, a Communist guerrilla group mainly based in the rural areas of
the North but making greater and greater incursions southwards. As
Minister for War El Gaucho treated them with the same extreme force
that he had the earlier demonstrations of the 1970s, giving numerous
speeches and articles to justify such force and the use of mass execu-
tions. By contrast, President Belaúnde was not as extreme as General
Cisneros in dealing with Shining Path – which provoked Cisneros to
keep up a campaign of his own against them. This was unacceptable
to Belaúnde, who removed him from the post of Minister of War. But
as Belaúnde himself was replaced first by the incompetent Alan García
and then by Alberto Fujimori, Cisneros kept up his habit of absolute
outspokenness, constantly criticising the government for not being
hard line enough with dissidents and promising to remove them. Based
on this promise he then made two efforts to be elected to Peru’s
congress: The failure of the first, with a slim campaign backed by a
minor party, was no surprise. However, the failure of the second in
1995, in a party run by the former Director General of the United
Nations Javier Perez de Cuellar, was a genuine shock. Not only did
this provoke murmurings that his opponents had rigged the election
against him, but it also caused him to lose the will to keep fighting the
prostate cancer with which he had been diagnosed, and that same year
he died, while Renato was still only 18.
In writing about these events Renato has no difficulty in accepting
the designation of Shining Path as terrorists and tells us that in some
articles he positively defended his father’s reputation against de-
tractors. However, he also admits that he finds it impossible to re-
member as an adult how much he knew of his father’s activities as a
child and hence to reconcile his father the family man with his father
the public General. On asking a former contact of his father’s whether
his father ever actually ordered anyone to be unlawfully killed and
receiving an evasive answer, he thus concludes:
I’ll never resolve the paradox that was my father, I’ll never free
myself from the weight of the stone that’s been crushing my
shoulders all this time, deforming them […] I wonder how many
people this man must have damaged, intentionally or otherwise –
this man who, among other things, was my father; this man I’ve
now known for more years dead than I knew him alive; this man
who lives inside me, yet remains so far out of reach.
The question raised by The Distance Between Us is how far its narrative
can be taken at face value. Renato admits that ‘my father’s death cast me
into the world, grounded me, made me appreciate the gravity of what
had happened and was continuing to happen around me’ (Cisneros
2018: 268). In other words, he was no longer insulated against the public
demonstrations of the 1970s, or the more militaristic tactics taken
by Shining Path in the 1980s, or again from the repressive counter-
measures actioned by his father. In this regard, the alibi of childhood is
trumped by the experience of disillusionment. Nevertheless, he seems
not to be fully disillusioned: The family’s assumption that his father
could only have lost an election because it was rigged bespeaks a sense of
entitlement to power that can only arise from having wielded it for so
long. Renato goes along with this feeling, so that when he defends his
father’s public reputation he cannot be seen as a paragon of democracy.
On the other hand, he also says that: ‘Power doesn’t interest me. Not
that sort of power. If I were moved by any kind of power at all, it would
be the power of revealing absolutely everything about who we are’
(Cisneros 2018: 347).
A commitment to avoiding ‘internalized censorship,’ even if this
avoidance entails revealing painful or difficult truths about one’s family or
one’s own self, has been described as characteristic of autofiction (Cusset
2012: 13). The extent to which Renato sincerely engages in this pursuit,
torn between the twin poles of scrupulous self-scrutiny and defensive
complicity with his father’s actions after the event is then unresolved:
When I think about it, I have the impression that I’m still being
constructed by him. That I’m still following his dictates. That for
the eighteen years we shared, he filled my mind with ideas,
thoughts, orders that still govern me today.
This means that the book evinces a certain level of awareness that
although uncomfortable with the realities of his father’s public actions,
Renato was nevertheless to some degree constructed by them precisely
because of the formative role his father played in his life. At the same
time, writing the book is a public gesture that enables him if not to
atone for his father’s actions (history cannot be so easily expiated) then
to reverse the influence of the father on the son. In writing the book the
son becomes the creator, the father the created because ‘Here, I have
begotten the Gaucho, bestowing his name on an imagined creature’ so
that literature ‘is the biological process that has allowed me to bring
him into the world, into my world, giving rise to his birth in fiction’
(Cisneros 2018: 345). Through writing the book, the death of General
Cisneros the man gives birth to General Cisneros the character and to
Renato Cisneros the author. When this happens the passage of auto-
fiction into cultural memory can begin.
Cuisine as Creative Art in Maryse Condé’s Victoire

(2006)
The distinction identified above between the account of the research
Cisneros carried out into his father’s life and the narrative of that
life can usefully be applied to a further series of autofictional works
where the author simultaneously documents the process of researching
the life of an ancestor and narrativises the life in question so that an
account of the research is built into the final narrative. In some cases,
because the historical archive is inevitably incomplete, gaps in his-
torical evidence have then to be supplemented with elements of spec-
ulative or imaginative reconstruction in order to flesh out such a
narrative. In other words, what happens is not only narrativisation but
also fictionalisation. This happens for example in Victoire: My
Mother’s Mother (2006) by French writer Maryse Condé, a novelisa-
tion of the life of the author’s grandmother Victoire, who was born on
the island of Marie-Galante in Guadeloupe in 1873.
The stimulus for writing Victoire was Condé’s discovery of a pho-
tograph of her grandmother, which prompted a realisation that she
knew virtually nothing about her. A chance comment by her mother
about how Victoire was employed as a cook in a creole household
surprised Condé, to whom this skill had not been handed down at all.
Moreover, the discovery that her grandmother was a servant for a
white family does not sit easily with the fact that many of her other
ancestors of the time were involved in highly racialised forms of anti-
colonial struggle. Seeking to reconcile these contradictory positions
provoked Condé to learn as much as she could about her grandmother
and to turn what she found into a written portrait. For this reason, the
concept of postmemory is highly germane to a discussion of the text
because as Tim Woods points out, in postmemory ‘the present ac-
quires its meaning only with reference to the disjointed and conflicted
narrative of the past’ (Woods 2018: 24). The book is subtitled A Novel
and although centred on Victoire, Condé (like Cisneros) frequently has
recourse to her own speaking voice to explain and document the re-
search and necessary conjecture involved in its composition. Since the
use of the first person and designation novel are both key components
of autofiction as Doubrovsky defined it, these are strong grounds for
treating the text accordingly. Indeed, with all the ambiguity of auto-
fiction Condé begins by presenting to the reader ‘the portrait I have
managed to trace, whose impartiality or even exactitude I cannot fully
guarantee’ (Condé 2010: 4).
Jenny Odintz has argued that owing to its unusual combination of
verified fact with historical imagination, ‘Condé ’s genealogical “por-
trait” establishes resistance through its form, as part of a feminist
tradition of semi-autobiography, which challenges the realist truth
pact between author and reader that constitutes the traditional textual
authority of the autobiography’ (Odintz 2014: 240). The possibility of
a text that is formally resistant to narrative closure and hence to tra-
ditional forms of knowledge and power is made manifest from the
outset by the text’s departure from a traditional genealogical quest
narrative, when it is revealed that Victoire’s mother Eliette died giving
birth to her, without revealing the name of her white, creole father, so
she was left to be brought up by her grandparents Oraison and
Caldonia Quidal. In other words, it is a quest that announces from the
start that the genealogy it traces can only ever be partial and in-
complete, skipping the generation between Victoire’s grandparents and
Victoire just as it also ultimately skips the generation between Victoire
and her granddaughter, Maryse Condé. Or as Odintz puts it, Victoire
mobilises an imaginative framework which ‘powerfully destabilizes
more traditional genealogical quests and their underlying world-view,
and, in particular, this world-view’s reliance on patriarchal, racial,
colonial and neocolonial ideology’ (Odintz 2014: 239).
Caldonia worked as a washerwoman for the mayor of Grand Bourg,
Fulgence Jovial, who was one of the first self-styled Grand Nègres, black
intellectuals and aspiring members of the bourgeoisie, and whose
daughter Thérèse became Victoire’s godmother. Through this relation-
ship Victoire too was employed in the Jovial household but given only
the most menial tasks by the jealous staff who disliked her because of
her lighter mulatto skin – thus framing the text’s key theme of racial
inequality in a highly domestic setting (as opposed to an overtly public
or political one). The first key event in the text is when the young rising
black political leader Dernier Argilius dines at the Jovials’, becoming
both Thérèse’s comrade and lover. His abrupt departure from the island
to work as a political journalist in La Pointe is thus a surprise to the
whole Jovial family, who are even more surprised to learn that Victoire
was pregnant by him. Condé makes clear that she has no way of
knowing how this relationship between Victoire and Dernier came
about but imagines that Victoire and Dernier met when she delivered
him food during the course of her employment, and that the relationship
developed from there. This causes her to be shunned by the Jovial
household and her grandfather Oraison disowns her altogether so that
she gets a job as a cane bundler on a sugar plantation, with a clear echo
of the history of slavery in the Caribbean. However, this job only lasts a
single day and Condé subsequently notes that when she was growing up,
‘nobody in my family told me anything about slavery or the slave trade,
those initiatory voyages that founded our Caribbean destiny’ so that
‘individual stories have replaced our collective history’ (Condé 2010: 84).
For Condé, born in 1937 and reaching adulthood in the 1950s at the
beginning of the period of decolonisation, this inherited amnesia with
regard to the historical enslavement of her ancestors is bound to feel
somewhat troubling. It perhaps implies that the replacement of collective
history by individual story directly informs her use of the text to negotiate
the complex boundaries between autofiction and cultural memory.
Although a real historical figure, Victoire’s lover Dernier Argilius is
probably not much known outside Guadeloupe today and even where he
is known, he tends to be positioned as a localised George Washington or
Nelson Mandela figure: That is, as a heroic leader of the struggle for anti-
colonial liberation (and specifically, racial equality). The fact that he died
young, in a fire at the office of his newspaper in La Pointe which was
believed to have been started by white creoles in a direct act of assassi-
nation, may have contributed to this iconic image. Condé, by contrast,
generates a more nuanced portrait of the man who was her grandfather,
in which he wronged Victoire by abandoning her and her baby:
My question, then, is what is an exemplary man? Is it only his

writings, his public speeches, and his gesticulations that count?
What weight does his personal life and private behaviour carry?
Dernier Argilius took advantage of I don’t know how many
women, wrecked the life of at least one of them, and engendered I
don’t know how many bastards who grew up without a father.
Doesn’t that count?
(Condé 2010: 30)
The point is not that it is untrue to depict Dernier as a leading figure in
Guadeloupe’s struggle for racial and political liberation, but that the
tendency of cultural memory to create myths means that the myth can
sometimes simplify a more complicated reality, especially when what is
in question is how far Dernier the public historical figure can be re-
conciled with Dernier the private individual who never acknowledged
his relationship with Victoire or his daughter by her, Jeanne (Condé’s
mother). Condé acknowledges the possibility that Dernier might not
have known she was pregnant when he left Marie-Galante but also
suggests that even if he had known, it is unlikely that it would have
made much difference to either Victoire’s life or Jeanne’s because: ‘Up
till very recently our men were like sowers, carelessly sowing the first
field they came across. Sociology and literature are full of stories illus-
trating this machismo’ (Condé 2010: 83). In the present, by contrast, she
notes that the gendered social structure ‘is in the process of changing’ so
that she wonders: ‘What will our American students have to write about
in the coming years?’ (Condé 2010: 83). In the text’s presentation of
Dernier Argilius there is thus a clear example of cultural memory being
first constructed (in the image of a heroic leader of the liberation
struggle), then deconstructed in the face of a more complicated personal
and private history before being finally reconstructed in a new way that
incorporates the subtly shifting vicissitudes of history.
Because Victoire is presented as a novel, forged out of the scant
traces and minimal historical evidence that Condé was able to uncover,
certain emotive scenes and episodes are of necessity highly conjectural.
After her abortive job in the sugar fields, Victoire gets a job as a cook
in the home of the white creole Rochelle Dulieu-Beaufort, the wife of a
sugar factory owner. When Rochelle’s daughter Anne-Marie is mar-
ried off at age 16 to the much older Boniface Walberg, she takes
Victoire with her. In fact, Anne-Marie feels sexually repulsed by
Boniface and is happy to let Victoire relieve her of her conjugal role.
On the other hand, Condé chooses to believe that Victoire was sensual
and fond of making love with Boniface – although this is not recorded
anywhere, so all she can do is imagine it. In contrast to the inherited
image of disempowered black female servants being brutalised by
white masters, their relationship is thus presented as an unconven-
tional but loving one so that even when Victoire has an affair with
a black waiter, Alexandre, whom she meets at the wedding of one
of Boniface’s wealthy cousins in Martinique, she ends up returning to
Boniface fully forgiven.
As their relationship advances, members of Guadeloupe’s white
creole society are suspicious of Victoire, believing her to be a gold
digger. Many mulattos shun her, thinking her relationship with a white
creole is a betrayal. Boniface’s other servants distrust her too but, not
daring to vent their anger on her because she is his lover, instead take it
out on her child by Dernier, Jeanne (who is much darker than Victoire
and hence the subject of much racial prejudice). Jeanne saves herself by
throwing herself into her studies and historically in 1906 she became
the first black girl to pass the scholarship exam to enter the Versailles
boarding school in the island’s capital, Basse-Terre. This puts a huge
barrier between Victoire and Jeanne because Victoire cannot read or
write and is a domestic servant living in sin, in an interracial relationship
with her married master. By contrast, Jeanne is highly intelligent, not
quite able to talk to her mother as an equal, and apparently somewhat
socially embarrassed, even ashamed, of her.
The acutely critical portrayal of Jeanne’s hostility to Victoire’s re-
lationship with Boniface is all the more striking given that Jeanne is
Condé’s own mother. But Condé repeatedly likens her grandmother’s
burgeoning skill as a cook to forms of creativity and artistry like those
of an author. By seeing a symbolic connection between the creativity
of cuisine and creative writing she thus forges a connection between
herself and her grandmother:
I want to establish the link between her creativity and mine, to

switch from the savors, the colors, and the smells of meat and
vegetables to those of words […] head bent, absorbed over her
kitchen range like a writer hunched over her computer.
(Condé 2010: 59)
Moreover it is a form of creativity that is empowering for Victoire

because ‘it was her way of expressing herself, which was constantly
repressed, prisoner of her illiteracy, her illegitimacy, her gender, and
her station as a servant. When she invented seasonings or blended
flavors, her personality was set free and blossomed’ (Condé 2010: 71).
By insisting on her own present interpretation of the past relationships,
Condé thus illustrates Hirsch’s belief that postmemory is not an
identity in itself, but provides the occasion and means for a ‘genera-
tional structure of transmission’ (Hirsch 2008: 114).
When Jeanne becomes part of the Grand Nègres, a group of rising
intellectual, class-conscious black Guadeloupeans who see themselves
as an elite whose job it is to usher in the postcolonial future, they often
meet at her house and Victoire is able to cook for them. This gives her
a renewed sense of purpose having lacked a role after leaving her os-
tensible position as Boniface’s chef. However, Jeanne also insists
Victoire participate in the political discussions at the meetings, which
she finds torture. She is no intellectual, considers people like Boniface’s
family (or Anne-Marie’s) to be good masters rather than class or co-
lonial enemies and speaks only Creole, not French so that all attempts
at involving her in dialogue are a humiliation. Thus in an odd paradox,
Condé suggests that Jeanne was so desperate to show the world she
wasn’t ashamed of her mother that she forced her to do things like this
and so became tyrannical and cruel to her. Consistent with the novel’s
extended metaphor of cooking as creative act, Victoire thus
found herself in the position of a writer forced to honor a

commission from her publisher. Very quickly, her work weighs
heavy on her, becomes unbearable and a chore. For cooking, like
writing, can only blossom in an atmosphere of total freedom and
cannot stand constraints.
(Condé 2010: 144)
Moreover, the writerly metaphor can in turn be related to what Odintz

terms the novel’s ‘alternative epistemology’ of ‘addressing both knowl-
edge and the process of arriving at and transmitting that knowledge’
which she says
takes on particular political urgency in the case of the Caribbean,

a region marked by the legacy of slavery, a resulting cultural and
racial hybridity, and assimilationist and neocolonial pressures
in the present, which attempt to shape collective national and
regional identity.
(Odintz 2014: 244)
This alternative epistemology plays out in a number of ways during the

final third of the novel. First, when Jeanne starts a relationship with
the young black intellectual Auguste Boucolon his highly racialised
political worldview makes it impossible for him to befriend the mu-
latto Victoire or the creole Anne-Marie and at a dinner to announce
his engagement to Jeanne he humiliates them by talking pointedly
about the black political leader Jean-Hégésippe Légitimus (who had
ended white and creole supremacy in Guadeloupe, and of whom
Dernier Argilius had been a supporter). Jeanne is now even more ve-
hement in her opposition to Victoire’s relationship with Boniface, in-
sisting that her mother cannot have a relationship with a white creole
because they are ‘our enemies’ who ‘had subjugated and whipped their
slaves for generations’ and ‘had only one desire at heart: humiliate the
blacks by every means possible and reduce them to the level of ani-
mals’ (Condé 2010: 139).
Although this is the kind of compartmentalised approach to race
that Condé’s alternative epistemology attempts to transcend, such
recriminations create a gulf between Victoire and Jeanne that ‘was
never bridged’ (Condé 2010: 161) and Victoire’s cooking (i.e. her
creativity) gradually declines. Thus at the wedding of Boniface’s
daughter Valérie-Anne to a prosperous white creole, Maximilien, the
meal she cooks turns out to be a disaster. Condé imagines that tra-
velling for Valérie-Anne’s wedding must have prompted Victoire to
remember the earlier wedding she had travelled to in Martinique with
Boniface, a wedding that had been the occasion of her love affair with
Alexandre. In a vividly imagined scene for which she admits having no
historical evidence, she depicts an ailing Victoire visited in a dream by
Alexandre calling her to join him in the next world. But as if to en-
courage a healthy suspicion of historical narratives whose truth con-
tent can never be fully verified or disproved, she also says that she finds
it hard to believe Jeanne’s claim that Victoire died calmly with the
words: ‘You go on. I leave now’ (Condé 2010: 194). The imagining of
these final words, attributed to Jeanne and refused by Condé, reveal an
impulse towards comforting fiction that is somewhat at odds with the
painful history of Victoire’s life. The past is not finally knowable as the
past and a certain amount of historical imagination is necessary as part
of the novel’s project to interrogate the inherited patriarchal ideology
of the colonial Caribbean through an alternative epistemology based
on different kinds of truth.
In fact, the discrepancy between these things is the novel’s final
testimony. Victoire died in 1915 leaving Jeanne grieving a mother for
whom she had never been able to express her love. Condé shows how
to compensate for this lack, Jeanne constructed a clichéd image of a
Guadeloupean mother courageously facing up to the trials of life. By
contrast Condé prefers that her grandmother remain ‘secretive, enig-
matic, the improper architect of a liberation that we, her descendants,
have known how to enjoy to the full’ (Condé 2010: 195). Just as she
had dismantled the myth of Dernier Argilius the legend in order to
gain a more complex view of Dernier Argilius the man, so too she
dismantles the dominant racial ideologies of the period so that these
can be supplemented and ultimately replaced with a more complex
picture. This process shows that the most important aspect of post-
memory is not simply what it tells us about the past but the critical
orientation it provides on the present and the future. Or as Maria
Bellamy puts it: ‘Trauma begins with rupture from the past as it was
once lived and ends with other forms of rupture’ (Bellamy 2016: 5).
Such intergenerational ruptures are instantiated in the text when, two
weeks after Victoire’s death, her first granddaughter, Condé’s sister
Ena, was born. Although the text breaks off at this point, presumably
the birth of Condé herself was to follow soon after. The text could then
be placed within the How the Author Became genre discussed in
Chapter 2. But because it is focused on Victoire rather than on Condé
it is generationally displaced by two removes. In this way, Condé’s
autofictional work of postmemory passes into cultural memory more
widely defined.
Fictionalising Postmemory in The Shadow King

Chapter 4 showed that Nina Bouraoui uses the structure of All Men
Want to Know to make a conjunction between the memories she has of
her own childhood and the wider category of cultural memory which
involves French-Algerian relations more generally, especially in the
aftermath of the lengthy and violent war (1954–62) that led to
Algeria’s independence from France. Maaza Mengiste’s important
novel The Shadow King (2019) makes a similar contribution to the
cultural memory of one of Europe’s most forgotten colonial wars:
Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia) in 1935. At its
heart is the relatively simple conceit that after the emperor Haile
Selassie had gone into exile in England to evade capture his people
were in danger of losing hope, so his remaining soldiers developed a
plan to disguise a peasant as the emperor and thereby inspire re-
sistance against the Italians. They in turn are embodied in the novel by
Colonel Fucelli and his soldier Ettore, a photographer whose pictures
are used by Fucelli to support the official story told in the Italian press
at the time of an easy military conquest. Since the novel has the benefit
of historical hindsight, however, they end up testifying to the contrary:
The invasion became a fiasco for the Italian forces because the
Abyssinians resisted strongly and by 1941 the emperor was safe to
return because the occupation was over.
The novel is framed by a meeting between the female Abyssinian
warrior Hirut and Ettore almost 40 years later, in 1974, and when his
photos are re-visited at this point they serve as a counter-hegemonic
archive, remembering the dead and the victims of the invasion as well as
the bravery of the resistance. Perhaps for this mnemonic reason, there is
a great emphasis in the novel on names and titles: The peasant who
dresses as the emperor is called Minim (which means ‘nobody’), as if to
hint at his status as a mere shadow king. But the novel’s title could just
as easily refer to the emperor Haile Selassie himself, driven into the
shadows of history during his exile in England in the first half of the
occupation. In fact the Ethiopians have many different names and titles
for each other (as do the Italians) and it is notable how even minor
characters are given names. The novel and the photographs thus serve as
an album of the dead, and a contribution to restoring their memory.
One of Mengiste’s main points seems to be that war affects women
as much as men; and that women are key protagonists in it as much as
men. Before the invasion, the young woman Hirut’s parents Fasil and
Getey had both died and she was taken in by Kidane, one of the
leading warriors in Abyssinia. She had brought with her the old rifle
that belonged to her father, which he had used in defence of Abyssinia
the last time the Italians had tried to invade at Adua in the 1890s.
Among the many ghosts that haunt The Shadow King Hirut is con-
stantly struck by memories of her dead parents Fasil and Getey, to
whom the rifle provides a connection that is both physical as well as
symbolic. But when the emperor orders that everyone must contribute
their weapons to the army to fight the Italians, Kidane takes this rifle
and gives it to another male warrior. Since it is old and poorly
maintained it misfires during an ambush and the soldier is hit. As she
nurses him while he lies dying, Hirut takes the rifle back – but Kidane
punishes her for this by raping her repeatedly.
In an Author’s Note at the end of the text Mengiste says that her
great-grandmother was an Abyssinian woman called Getey who had a
rifle confiscated by male soldiers and then tried to reclaim it. In the
novel, she deploys this story by attaching it to Getey’s daughter Hirut,
but also retains the name of her ancestor Getey, in the characterisation
of the mother. Dividing her real historical great-grandmother into two
separate characters, one of whom bears her name and the other of
whom enacts her story, enables Mengiste to disperse aspects of the real
historical Getey’s life within the wider Abyssinian culture.
The relationship of four adjacent generations from great-grandmother
to great-granddaughter stands right at the limit of Assmann’s commu-
nicative (i.e. living) memory discussed in Chapter 1. Assmann’s expiry
date for communicative memory was 80 years, so that the novel The
Shadow King, published in 2019, 84 years after the Italian invasion of
Abyssinia in 1935, is situated at the cusp where communicative memory
ceases to be communicated between living protagonists and so starts
to become converted into cultural memory. As such it can be interpreted
as a further example of Hirsch’s postmemory: ‘the active role of the
generation born after a traumatic event in transforming the memories
that they inherit’ (Gulesserian 2022: n.p).
According to Hirsch, the creation of postmemory is the work of
intellectuals, artists, writers and cultural producers who owing to
diasporic interruption, forced migration, trauma, exile or other loss
have lost their ‘direct link to the past’ and seek to ‘reactivate and re-
embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures by
reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of med-
iation and aesthetic expression’ (Hirsch 2012: 33). The Shadow King is
simultaneously a work of autofiction and postmemory because having
come down through her great-grandmother’s generation it is Mengiste’s
history, but also more than hers.
Dorian Stuber has drawn attention to the fact that postmemory as
defined by Hirsch is highly performative in nature. It consists of the
symbolic repetition of patterns of inherited behaviours, including
storytelling, visualisation and re-enactment, ‘and what it performs can
be healthy, in the sense of attaching us to the past’ (Stuber 2013: 2–3).
In the process of carrying out just such a performance, the novel goes
through the gear changes elevating individual memories to collective
ones that characterise postmemory. In The Shadow King this is per-
formed on behalf of the people of modern-day Ethiopia, whose sa-
crifice and suffering during the war against Fascism has not been widely
documented or acknowledged in the Western world. At the same time, it
also has implications for contemporary African-Americans of Ethiopian
heritage because as Bellamy has shown, ‘the possible applications of
postmemory grow exponentially’ when the marginalisation, displace-
ment, and political animosity towards ethnic groups such as Asians,
Africans and Latinos is examined (Bellamy 2016: 5). This means that
the sense of transgenerational communication evoked by the Author’s
Note makes it possible for Mengiste subtly to imply that in a meaningful
sense the story of her (Ethiopian) great-grandmother can be considered
her own in the contemporary USA. In other words, researching the life
of her great-grandmother and embodying it in fiction is a means by
which Mengiste is able to demonstrate a renewed commitment to re-
membering a history of which, because it happened before she was born,
she has no direct recollection.
This sense of individual memory merging with that of Abyssinian
cultural memory is the more striking given that one of the features of
the text is its portrayal of how the Abyssinians were not unified: They
had their own class of nobles including Kidane and Aster who are
mainly loyal to the emperor, but below them is a servant class who
gradually lose loyalty to their masters. Haile Selassie had married his
daughter Zenebwork off to Gugsa, a rival member of Abyssinian
nobility, in order to cement a royal alliance. But she died in his
household within a year, and Gugsa sided with the Italians. Moreover,
the Italian army is supported by a large group of ascari – that is, native
Abyssinians who (like the Sepoys in British India) fought for the co-
loniser against their own people.
These internal divisions give rise to a feeling of hauntedness. During
one of the early skirmishes of the guerrilla war in 1935, Hirut sees a
young man, Beniam, die choking on poisoned gas dropped by an
Italian plane but is unable to help him and is haunted by the memory.
As the Italian occupation progresses, Ettore is made to photograph the
body of Tariku, hung from a tree as a punishment for rebellion, and as
a warning to other rebels. Tariku’s father Seifu breaks into Fucelli’s
camp and attacks Fucelli but stops short of killing him because he
fears this will provoke more reprisals. And indeed, Fucelli builds a new
prison on the cliffs of a mountain where captive Abyssinians are
thrown to their death and Ettore is made to photograph them as they
fall. Things come to a head when Aster and Hirut are both captured
but instead of being thrown off the cliff, they are held there and
photographed in a variety of humiliating poses.
These images are included in the novel and in fact have a crucial role
to play in its construction of postmemory. In an interview with the
New York Times in 2020 Mengiste explained that during her research
for the book, she discovered that the period of Fascist rule in Italy was
marked by an explosion of state propaganda encompassing radio,
newspapers, films and photography in order to provide ideological
legitimisation for the actions of the Fascists and their curtailment of
democracy and rights. This attempt at ideological legitimisation was
also practised by the Italian authorities in Abyssinia: ‘sending cameras
into the war to take photographs would justify that war’ (Mengiste
2020: n.p.). However, by the time of her research the ‘official archives’
of these photographs and other materials had all been censored years
before by the Fascists so that she was obliged to look elsewhere for
uncensored material. As a result, she met descendants of Italian sol-
diers who had fought in the war and came across their old letters,
journals, diaries and pictures. Visiting Italian flea markets also enabled
her to accumulate a significant collection of period postcards and
photographs, which, though they depict people unknown and often
unidentified to her, allowed her to create a visual imaginary for the
world she was portraying in fiction.
Within the field of visual art, Cheryl Simon has identified a recent
trend whereby artists increasingly make use of archived material in
creative work. She refers to this trend as an archival turn which is
characterised by the ‘increased appearance of historical and archival
photographs and artifacts, and the approximation of archival forms’
(Simon 2002: 101). Ernst van Alphen has similarly noted a con-
temporary trend towards ‘archival thinking’ whereby artists utilise raw
material found in historical archives in a number of different ways and
in the process both ‘probe the possibilities of what art is and can do’
and also ‘explore and challenge the principles on which archival or-
ganisations are built’ (van Alphen 2014: 7). According to Elin
Ivansson and Alison Gibbons there has been a concurrent archival
turn in contemporary literature and crucially this too is partly ‘visual
and material’ so that the works produced can be described as ‘multi-
modal’ (Ivansson and Gibbons forthcoming: n.p). In a consideration
of multimodal poetry Rebecca Macmillan has suggested the term
‘archival poetics,’ which ‘presses us to consider the contents collected
and to notice the process of collection’ (Macmillan 2017: 201).
In The Shadow King, although the photographer Ettore is a fictional
character, the photographs attributed to him are not. They are testa-
ment to the lives destroyed by Fascism and imperialism in Africa so
that their inclusion in the novel restores to history a trace – it cannot
do more than this – of those forgotten people. The novel is thus an
example of what Brian Davis has termed multimodal book-archives:
i.e. books that employ ‘an experimental mode of contemporary writing
and bookmaking that constructs narratives and textual sequences
through the collection and representation of reproduced texts and
other artifacts, in which the book-object is presented as a container for
preserving and transmitting textual artifacts’ (Davis 2021: 84–5).
Mengiste has since created an online archive of these images, which,
together with the novel, contest the Fascist’s official account of the war
at the time in order, as she says in the interview, to ‘decolonize the
archives’ (Mengiste 2020: n.p.).
Hirut and Aster eventually escape but not before Hirut has seen
Ettore bury a box containing his most precious pictures and letters –
i.e. his family heritage – under a tree. Ibrahim is flogged for allowing
the prisoners to escape and the other ascari mercenaries desert the
Italians, enabling the Abyssinians to defeat them. Fucelli dies in the
battle, as does Kidane, and although Hirut does not fulfil her vow to
kill him as revenge for raping her, she does hold him as he dies. In
some reports, Aster is described as the great warrior hero of the battle;
in others Hirut herself is described this way. These contradictory re-
ports convey the feeling of semantic uncertainty produced by conflict
and underline the importance of searching for truth. Such a search
finally entails constructing the novel itself as a form of counter-
hegemonic archive to produce that truth as an explicit alternative to
the Fascist accounts of an easy and painless conquest. It is thus an
example of how the fictions of memory discussed in Chapter 1 ‘may
symbolically empower the culturally marginalized or forgotten and
thus figure as an imaginative counter-discourse’ (Neumann 2010: 341).
When Ettore comes face to face with Hirut again in 1974, she has
recovered the box he buried and thinks about withholding it from him
as revenge for the humiliating pictures he took of her. These two sets
of material – the photographs he took of her, and those he had kept of
his own family – thus illustrate the conflict over different kinds of
archive and different kinds of truth that the novel dramatises. But the
point about fictions of memory is not only to bring together different
versions of the collective past and how it might be remembered, it is
also to ‘link the hegemonic discourse to the unrealized and in-
expressible possibilities of the past’ so that ‘they can become a force of
continual innovation and cultural self-renewal’ (Neumann 2010: 341).
Hirut is a fictional character but the life of Mengiste’s great-
grandmother Getey is not a fiction. In the counter-hegemonic archive
that the novel constructs, her life and that of others like her pass into
cultural memory by combining the factual evidence of the counter-
archive with the powerful emotional resonance of fiction. Although the
story is not Mengiste’s story, the history is her history, so that the text
can be seen as a specific form of autofiction in which the self is not only
narrated, but actively situated within the extended temporal structures
of adjacent generations. Or to put it another way, it raises the possi-
bility of a form of autofiction existing now at fully three removes from
its author. By this point, the passage of autofiction into cultural
memory may be considered complete.
Conclusion
Having started by suggesting that a small number of researchers have

gestured towards the convergence of autofiction and cultural memory
without exploring it in full, this book has taken up that task. Chapter 1
explored potential connections between the two fields at the theoretical
level in order to apply that theoretical insight to discussion of literary
texts in subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 argued that although Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Colette’s Break of Day
(1928) and Winterson’s Oranges are not the only fruit (1985) can
meaningfully be identified as precursors to autofiction, and although
there are instances of counter-hegemonic thinking in these texts, they
also privilege narratives of individual development over those of social
commitment and so the opportunity for using autofictional techniques
to develop properly collective forms of cultural memory is not yet
taken in their work. Similarly, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Siri
Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014) can be seen as works of auto-
fiction in the precise sense that they generate narratives of authorial
coming into being in what I called the How the Author Became genre.
But although these texts hint at possible connections to themes and
concerns that are social rather than individual, the collective elements
are again downplayed so that the texts accord with a Western concept
of individualism in their positioning of both authorship and ownership
of narrative. It is this sense of individualism, the chapter concluded,
that prevented the potentially rich linkages between autofiction and
cultural memory from being fulfilled.
By contrast, Chapter 3 showed how a variety of writers outside the
West have used the techniques of autofiction in a different way, pla-
cing themselves on the side lines of their own stories in order to affirm
forms of commitment and solidarity with a number of different social
and cultural struggles which, in the final instance, are struggles against
DOI: 10.4324/9781003313465-7
102 Conclusion
forms of imperialism and tyranny. Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia
and the Scriptwriter (1977), Carlos Fuentes’s Distant Relations (1980),
Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2002) and Jeet Thayil’s Book of Chocolate
Saints (2017) each use the approach of positioning the author as a
minor character within a wider narrative trajectory from which they
are able to contribute to resisting the dominant ideologies of their
societies through the construction of new forms of cultural memory.
Chapter 4 analysed Nina Bouraoui’s All Men Want to Know (2018)
and Dany Laferrière’s The Enigma of the Return (2009) to show
that such struggles are particularly common among writers in exile,
and Chapter 5 showed with regard to Renato Cisneros’s The
Distance Between Us (2018), Maryse Condé’s Victoire: My Mother’s
Mother (2006) and Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019) that
since the life story of the writer necessarily includes the life story of
his or her forebears – without whom he or she would not exist – the
concept of autofiction can be extended over one or more genera-
tional removes.
The overall arguments of this book can therefore be summarised as
follows: First, that autofiction is a form of literature that developed
during the late twentieth century in the context of specific historical and
cultural conditions prevalent at the time, including quite centrally the
history of decolonisation and subsequent postcolonial processes.
Second, that because autofiction treats memory as a central object of
literary exploration it is a literary form that is quite appropriate for
remembering and bearing witness to cultural and political struggles
during the colonial period (conflicts which, if they were not remembered
in this way, would be in danger of lapsing out of widespread historical
consciousness). Third, that in the process described above, the writers
discussed throughout the book instantiate a shift in the conceptualisa-
tion of memory, from treating it mainly as something that is individually
held to something that is collectively shared. Finally, that owing to this
shift, autofiction has the capacity to contribute to new forms of cultural
memory.
In other words, I have sought to make a sustained connection between
autofiction and cultural memory in the light of the distinction drawn at
the start between treating autofiction as a mainly stylistic innovation on
the part of the individual author and autofiction as a form of testament
to social commitments. To the extent that the emergence of autofiction is
related to technical developments in the genre of autobiography, it can
be seen as a specific form of literature that relates to the particular
cultural conditions and historical developments of the late twentieth and
Conclusion 103
early twenty-first centuries. These are the legacy of Western imperialism,
its ongoing reverberations and its impact on forms of cultural produc-
tion today, and most significantly of all, the opportunity autofiction
affords writers to testify to the injustices of the colonial period in order
to challenge and transform how that period is thought about in the
collective memories of the societies in question.
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Index
9/11 64 Colette 2, 23, 28–32, 48, 101

Condé, Maryse 3, 80, 81, 87–95, 102
Abyssinia, invasion of 81, 95, 97, Cosmopolitanism 13
98, 99 Cusk, Rachel 47
Alexis, Jacques Stephen 76
Algerian War of Independence 69, Delacroix, Eugè ne 71
70, 75, 95 Dhasal, Namdeo 63
Ancient Egypt 12 Djebar, Assia 71
Anthropocene 39, 40, 43 Doubrovsky, Serge 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 20,
Arab Spring 42 23, 24, 37, 61, 66, 68, 89
Argilius, Dernier 90, 91, 93, 94
Assmann, Jan 9–12, 13, 15, 17, 32, Easton Ellis, Brett 47
37, 96 Ezekiel, Nissim 63
Back to the Future 40 First World War 1

Baldwin, James 8 Foster Wallace, David 47
Barthes, Roland 19 French Revolution 1, 77
Belaúnde, Fernando 84, 86 Fuentes, Carlos 2, 48, 53–58, 102
Bergson, Henri 8 Fujimori, Alberto 86
Berlin Wall 17
Bible 32, 35 Gay marriage 34
Black Jacobins 77 Gouraige, Ghislain 76
Bouraoui, Nina 3, 67, 68–75, 80, 95, 102
Boyle, Megan 47 Haile Selassie 95, 96
British India 62, 98 Halbwachs, Maurice 9, 10
Heidelberg University 9, 15, 16
Capote, Truman 19 Henry VIII 1, 33
Caruth, Cathy 73, 74 Heti, Sheila 47
Cé saire, Aimé 77, 78, 79 Hindu nationalism 63, 64, 65
Challenger Space Shuttle 38, 41, 42 Holocaust 82
Chitre, Dilip 63 Homosexuality 20, 34, 35, 37, 43, 53,
Cisneros, Renato 3, 80, 81–87, 102 54, 68, 71, 72
Climate emergency 38, 39, 40, 41, 43 Hughes, Ted 23
Cold War 41 Hustvedt, Siri 2, 24, 43–47, 48, 101
Index 111
Industrial revolution 12, 32 Orientalism 71
Intertextuality 15, 28 Ottoman Empire 59
Joyce, James 2, 23, 24–28, 48, 101 Pamuk, Orhan 2, 48, 58–61, 102
Jussawalla, Adil 63 Papa Doc (Franç ois Duvalier) 75, 78
Perez de Cuellar, Javier 86
Kennedy, John F. 41 Picasso, Pablo 71
Kipling, Rudyard 23 Pinochet, Augusto 84
Kissinger, Henry 84 Pol Pot (Cambodia) 37
Kolatkar, Arun 63 Princess Diana 33
Kosinski, Jerzy 23
Roth, Philip 47
Labuchin, Rassoul 76 Russian Empire 59
Laferrière, Dany 3, 67, 75–79, 80, 102
Lancashire witch trials 35 Said, Edward 24
Lé gitimus, Jean-Hé gé sippe 93 Second World War 1, 55, 68, 69, 70
Lerner, Ben 2, 24, 37–43, 48, 101 Self, Will 47
Llosa, Mario Vargas 2, 48, Shining Path 86, 87
49–53, 102 Slavery 56, 67, 79, 90, 93
Lorde, Audre 8 Soap opera genre 49, 50, 51, 52
Louverture, Toussaint 77–78 Spanish Armada 1
Magical realism 52, 57 Thayil, Jeet 2, 48, 62–66, 102

Mailer, Norman 19 Tudors 1
Marclay, Christian 40
Mengiste, Maaza 3, 80, 81, Urquidi, Julia 50
95–100, 102
Mexican Revolution 53 Victor, Gary 76
Moraes, Dom 63 Voodoo 79
Morrison, Toni 14
Mumbai 62, 65 Walcott, Derek 76
West, Paul 6, 23
Né gritude 77 White, Edmund 6, 19, 20
Neo-colonialism 62, 67, 79, 89, 93 Williams, Raymond 12
Neoliberalism 7, 65 Winterson, Jeanette 2, 24, 32–37,
Nora, Pierre 9, 10 48, 101
Nünning, Ansgar 16 Woolf, Virginia 35

(New Literary Theory) Hywel Dix - Autofiction and Cultural Memory-Routledge (2022)

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(New Literary Theory) Hywel Dix - Autofiction and Cultural Memory-Routledge (2022)

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ROUTLEDGE FOCUS

‘Reversing the polarity of autofiction from individual to society,

Autofiction and Cultural Memory breaks new ground in autofiction

Hywel Dix is Professor of English at Bournemouth University. His

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-032-32223-0 (hbk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

1 On Autofiction and Cultural Memory 4

2 How the Author Became: Precursors and

3 The Author as Minor Character: Alternative

4 The Poetics of Exile and Return 67

5 Autofiction Once, Twice, Three Times Removed 80

I first started thinking about the relationship between autofiction

As suggested in the introduction, bringing autofiction and cultural

The Rise of Autofiction

1 onomastic identity of the author and hero-narrator;

In other words, autofiction is initially defined as a form of fiction based

would appear very different were critics to include earlier [African-

Her identification of a potentially alternative tradition in autofiction,

Origins of Cultural Memory

in a dynamic culture which is constantly changing, the contest

This information, however, is not committed to everyday com-

Memory is knowledge with an identity-index, it is knowledge

Kultur, in this view, unfolds as a dense fabric of writings before the

Towards an Autofiction of Cultural Memory

she is in a place where she is remembering, certainly; but what she

privileging of the I in Caribbean prose literature is one direct

The specific ways in which autofiction affords Caribbean writers the

Rather than giving us direct access to unmediated memory, what

This turn, coinciding with the increasingly auto/biographic turn in

Here at last in a discussion ostensibly about forms of cultural memory

For a vivid example, fictional in every sense, I turn to a novel by

Unlike Saunders’s counter-cultural forms of life writing, Burke’s fic-

As was suggested in the previous chapter, although it has been common

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as Precursor and

Authorial Presence as Puzzle and Tactic in Break of Day

Why do men – writers or so-called writers – still show surprise that

To some extent these lines can be read as a historical defence of wo-

These involuntary conquests have nothing to do with a time of

Through the means of disavowing the association of author with

By trying to remember her earlier, desiring self she puts herself in

strokes, swallow-like interweavings, plant-like convolutions – all

Cultural Memory as Heteronormativity in Oranges are

This distinction between history and story is figured as part of

Autofiction Versus Cultural Memory in Ben Lerner’s

After the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, for instance,

Autofictional authors activate the readers by disclosing their own

Avatars of Avatars in Siri Hustvedt’s Blazing World

The previous chapter concluded that although important works by

The Postcolonial Inferiority Complex in Aunt Julia and

Free Indirect Discourse in Distant Relations

Every novel is in a way incomplete, but, as well, contiguous with

Despite the apparent identification of the narrator with the author

Imagine; what would have happened if you had returned to Mexico

Since this is approximately what did happen to the real Carlos

Speculative Autofiction in Pamuk’s Snow

The Autofictional Mode in The Book of Chocolate Saints

If an upturn in autobiography research was one context for the devel-

Trauma and Repetition in All Men Want to Know

‘The chamber of the winds’, as my sister and I call it, in the

The repetitions of the traumatic events which remain unavailable

The impossibility of understanding a traumatic experience in direct

it is here, in the equally widespread and bewildering encounter with

The history that Caruth describes is non-referential because it refers to