This is a new essay, built on the smouldering ruins of various earlier attempts to write about autobiography dating back some twenty years or so.
I continued to question the world's limit, seeing the wretchedness of anyone who is content with it, and I couldn't bear the facility of fiction for long: I demanded its reality, I became mad.
– Georges Bataille, from "Oresteia," trans. Robert Hurley, 1945
By playing with my blood and shit and death, I'm controlling my life. Since I'm frigid, you hurt me only when you sexually penetrate me. The iciness of my blood which is my galloping horse proves that memories of past events have and are shaping me. Rather than being autistic dumb feelingless ice, I would like the whole apparatus – family and memory – to go to hell.
I will be mad.
– Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless, 1988
[In Nadja] Breton the poet, pushes the whole controversy to its limits here. The man of vision, the realist, the poet, the man of action – if today he follows his instincts he must be incarcerated as "insane". I like this cleavage between sanity and insanity far more than the ordinary one of the individual versus collective. Here there is no begging the question.
– Henry Miller, letter to Herbert Read, October 1935
Ohh ...,
Can anybody see the light,
Where the morn meets the dew,
And the tide rises,
Did you realise no one can see inside your view,
Did you realise forwhy this sight belongs to you.
– lyrics by Beth Gibbons of Portishead, from "Strangers," 1994
For a brief time in the early 1990s, I wrote what I call 'straight fiction'. That is, I invented characters, plots, and themes, and certain literary magazine editors were delighted to publish these consciously constructed short stories. But I found I was not delighted, and worse, I became cynical regarding what passed for literature in English-speaking North America. The craft of fiction seemed to require slicing off all the unsightly bits of human existence, rendering it into a neat, bloodless, plastic-wrapped package featuring no more than a handful of clockwork characters who bumble about in their little boxes and circuits (like soap opera characters, like members of political parties, like employees in workplaces …), constrained by the structure of the narrative to do whatever their author determines they ought to be doing.
I was not delighted, because ten years before this I had located my own delight in autobiographical fiction. It was an encounter with Jack Kerouac's On The Road, in a university English 'option' taught by poet and author Stan Dragland, that gave me the template for a personal revolution – a way to conceive of my writing practice, not as a potential money-making vehicle, but as a vehicle for self-discovery. Kerouac himself had walked away from a career as a 'straight fiction' writer to follow a tradition which he learned from French authors like Céline and Jean Genet – who, in their turn had antecedents in Proust and Rimbaud. Having discovered Kerouac, it was simply a matter of slowly, painfully unearthing all the branches of this particular artistic geneology. Paradoxically, I seemed to find myself by reading about the specificities of the lives of these authors of autobiographical fiction.
My early experience of autobiographically-based work wasn't specifically literary. It was through the then 'underground' output of the nascent punk rock movement in England and New York. When I first heard the Sex Pistols hollering, "I'm a lazy sod!" on a cassette tape a friend bootlegged from a show on CKCU FM, I discovered that I wasn't the only person in the known universe being consumed by his own rage. I felt a lifting of the heart and an opening of the mind that was as undeniable as it was real. The first-person-singular fury of Johnny Rotten, scribe and voice of the Sex Pistols, cut through years of listening to music that had no relationship to my own life. Suddenly I knew I wasn't Jon Anderson, nor was I Olias of Sunhillow. I wasn't Bob Seger with silver in my beard lamenting the loss of my youth – I was only seventeen! I wasn't Bruce Springsteen roaring down Thunder Road with my gal in the passenger seat – I didn't have a car, I didn't even have (or want) a license, and I sure didn't have a gal. I wasn't Bryan Ferry in a tuxedo crooning about his latest femme fatale – I was a pimple-faced know-nothing punk.
I'd heard the clarion call of artistic rebellion, but I didn't choose to become a rock musician. By then, I'd already been practicing my chosen craft of writing for nearly a decade – I was a writer, not a rock star. It was by reading On The Road in 1982 that I discovered a poignancy, a depth, and a kind of truth that I have never found accessible in 'straight fiction'. By then, I'd already been writing genre stories for ten years – fantasy fiction, science fiction, and horror. Once I'd read Kerouac, I immediately began writing autobiography as literature – at first in epistolary form, and then, in the summer of 1983, I wrote a short autobiographical fiction novel for the Anvil Press three day writing contest. Autobiography has remained a constant in my writing practice since then.
In his writings, Proust suggests that our memory is separate from us, residing in the ocean breeze or the smells of early autumn – things linked to the earth that recur periodically, confirming the permanence of mankind. For me and no doubt many of my contemporaries, memories are associated with ephemeral things such as a fashionable belt or a summer hit and therefore the act of remembering can do nothing to reaffirm my sense of identity or continuity. It can only confirm the fragmented nature of my life and the belief that I belong to history.
– Annie Ernaux, from Shame, trans. Tanya Leslie, 1997
These days, when I write stories based on actual events drawn from my life, they start as a hodge podge of memories. But as I cast about in the still, deep lake of past experience, as I ruminate on documentary fragments from the past – letters, diaries, photos, numinous personal objects, music, films – the more I focus, the more I recall, until what I am writing begins to take on a shape. The disconnected bits cohere into something resembling narrative, theme, characterization and even plot. None of these elements are sought after, nor envisioned. Rather, they come into being almost of their own accord, as does the story itself. And none of these elements are quite like their counterparts in 'straight fiction'.
My somewhat tongue-in-cheek label for what I write is 'autodocufiction'. It's deliberately messy, clunky and unmusical. Hopefully its unfamiliarity to readers will catch them up, make them pause and consider all elements of this unlovely moniker. 'Auto' because it's based on autobiography. 'Docu' because I map the whole structure of my work onto existing memory fragments, including earlier autobiographical attempts, unfinished manuscripts, newspapers, magazines, films, still photos, personal snapshots, letters, notes, notebooks, jottings, television shows, radio airchecks, personal audio recordings, drawings, sketches, paintings, old train schedules, theatre flyers, live music event posters, bootleg recordings, ‘ephemeral things’ ... the list is endless. The point is to create as close a simulacra as possible to what I can recall of experiences now forty years old or older. How did it smell, how did it taste? What were people wearing, what were they reading, listening to, saying? And finally, 'fiction', because by the time the story has been written, that is what it has become.
All of it’s an alibi. Because I am aware not so much that my own becoming a writer is a construction of sorts but more that there’s a kind of aesthetic experience I believe that precedes the work so that you kind of fail into it finding your style and content and opportunity all together at last and that’s happened enough times for me to believe that that’s my process and it exists and will occur again no matter how much suffering my work causes me and betrayal is so deeply a part of it because I’ll be sailing along thinking this is incredible and days later I’ll stop and some version of me that lives at a different pace reads what I’ve written and pronounces it bad and I return to it later and pick out pieces and surges and rearrange it so ultimately I’m talking about ease and how it is an utter fiction so I disbelieve all ideas about genre because it’s all such fabricated stuff, writing, art, music every bit of it is not so much lying but instead is perched in relation to this other thing which is living and however I am about it, doing this thing, in my case writing, makes that thing I think more beautiful. I have time for it. I am in it and I am relentlessly talking about time but I can feel it drumming, rarely am I really peaceful, no I’m happy but I’m digging this little hole right here which is really tearing a hole in the other thing, copying it somehow in a way I like and that lets me fall out and relax in a way that I hope is nothing like the writer drunk at dinner telling us her stuff.
– Eileen Myles on writing, from For Now, 2020
Like Eileen Myles says, "it's all such fabricated stuff". I'm throwing all I've got into this writing project of mine, and while I'm writing it it is teaching me that you never get to the real real. The real real is all around us all the time, we're swimming in it, or drowning in it, or just soaking in it. Writing is in and of itself fictive, transforming the primary ground of existence into a record, a document, a story. If that's the case, then why shouldn't I just totally make it up, write 'straight fiction'? I think it's because this autobiographical writing, call it what you will, creates an effect that throws the whole project of narrative fiction into question.
I've developed a sort of philosophy for my autobiographical writing, but I'm not sure if the philosophy determines the writing, or if the writing has given birth to the philosophy. It's about using autobiography as a means of illuminating reality in a somewhat different way. Rather than building something strictly from 'imagination' and projecting it as 'fiction', one applies imagination to what is in front of oneself, like a painter painting a portrait or a still life.
Mass culture – from Hollywood to Fundamentalist Christianity – seems to insist upon the fictional narrative, an intrinsically faked reality – a 'reality' made up of endless meticulously-constructed fictions that combine in an overwhelming deluge of endlessly reiterating bromides – courtship, romance, marriage, children, family; the nobility and efficacy of hard work; packaged forms of escape and entertainment; obedience to authority; a pervasive and compulsory nationalism. Life is plotless, sprawling, uncontainable – so goes the critique of autobiography. Culture functions in modern / postmodern capitalist society in order to erase, rather than affirm, our humanity, our agency. The pop music world conspires with the film world, which conspires with the literary realm to fake us out – conspires to frame us, force us into a mold, fit us into mass culture by hook or by crook. All the creative energy of this society goes toward the incessant refurbishing and renovation of these values – values absolutely essential to the maintenance of a mass culture.
Individuality is a relative value. One cannot have real 'individuals' in a mass culture – one can only play out safe aspects of a pseudo-individuality within the intensely conformist and rigidly codified social structures demanded by a mass, hierarchal machine. (Cars might change their engines from infernal combustion to electric, but they remain cars – the essential structure of mass culture remains unchanged.) If one is completely deprived of the tools with which to become oneself – if one is endlessly bestowed with only the tools which will turn one into a smoothly functioning part of this social mechanism – if one wants to disengage oneself from the continuous process of manipulation and oppression that such a mechanism is predicated upon – then for those too fucked-up to follow the rules, the only recourse is the self. The rest of the universe might be locked up by the gatekeepers of knowledge, but the self remains accessible to those who are willing to take the risk.
In other respects Breton’s book illustrates well a number of the basic characteristics of this 'profane illumination.' He calls Nadja 'a book with banging door.' ... To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s own existence, once an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of petit-bourgeois parvenus. Nadja has achieved the true, creative synthesis between the art novel and the roman-a-clef.
– Walter Benjamin, from ‘Surrealism’, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 1929
The most essential aspect of autobiographical art is that it lends access to that which can be known – that which is not merely the manufactured 'truths' – ie. propaganda – of overarching hierarchal mass culture. The artist investigates all aspects of the self – including all the refractions and reflections of the wider world which pass through the self. In other words, the artist makes explicit what each and every human being experiences; the artist offers his or her own subjectivity as a possible reflection of what each person knows, or only suspects. It is a subversive art. It is an attempt to arm the spirit of each individual with the tools of self-discovery. It is in doing the work that this is revealed to me. One does it because to unpack oneself is to unfold the universe itself. Because the key to the general is in the specific. Because if I am to know You, I must know Me. Because as I proceed with my investigation I discover more and more layers, more and more aspects of myself, until my pain is All Pain, my joy is All Joy, my life is All Life.
The creation of fictions is a technology of social control, to create models of correct social behavior. All hierarchies depend upon fictions because the truth is too messy, too complicated to fit into the frame. The result is a society where we are raised to accept being told what to think. We gape like baby birds, waiting for the juicy worms that the author, God, Papa, Pere Ubu will shove down our hungry gullets. Given such a social scenario, it is always a short step from the paternalistic manipulation of the truth 'for the good of the people' by those in power, to reckless criminality, regardless of the covering ideology. The truth cannot convince the masses to continually act against their own interests, whereas lies have led us to our current impasse.
But one might imagine a world in which there are no authority figures: no gods, no governing bodies, no-one making claims on your autonomy. A world in which the only currency is one's subjective truth, one's own point-of-view. That is the world which you actually inhabit, once you lose your illusions, and autobiographical works of art point insistently in this direction. Their message is: "This is no longer a contest, a hierarchy." The voice of autobiographical fiction tilts the author-reader relationship away from one of authority and domination, toward a more 'level playing field'. The implied goal of autobiographical art is to undermine mass culture at its roots – to attack all forms of authority that depend on illusion: political, religious, and cultural. The implied goal of autobiographical art is to disillusion its audience.
Kitty calls herself a bastard because she never knew her father. Beloved Grandma Jo got pregnant with Kitty when she played piano in bars during the Depression. Grandma wrote the name Frank Harris on Kitty’s birth certificate as the father, but no one had ever heard of him. Grandma was also a bastard, daughter of an Irishwoman in Nova Scotia living with the Micmacs without a man. I’m the third bastard on my mother’s side, born when she wasn’t married. My father was in Korea at the time.
– Adele Bertei, from Twist: An American Girl, 2021
I don't even believe in education any more ... even high school. "Culture" (anthropologically) is the rigamarole surrounding what poor men have to do to eat, anywhere. History is people doing what their leaders tell them, and not doing what their prophets tell them. Life is that which gives you desires, but no right for the fulfillment of desires. It is all pretty mean – but you still can do what you want, and what you want is right, when you want honestly. Wanting money is wanting the dishonesty of wanting a servant. Money hates us, like a servant; because it is false. Henry Miller was right; Burroughs was right. Roll your own, I say.
– Jack Kerouac, in a letter to Allen Ginsberg, June 10, 1949