Autofiction and the Ethics of Life Writing in Contemporary Literature

Abstract

The Swedish Academy gave the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature to Annie Ernaux for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. The award consecrated a mode of writing that had spent four decades on the margins of literary respectability. This article examines autofiction, the term Serge Doubrovsky coined for his 1977 novel Fils, as the dominant serious prose form of the present century, and asks what its dominance costs the people who appear in it without consenting to. The discussion works through four cases in which the cost became visible: the legal threats from Karl Ove Knausgaard's relatives, the Norwegian reality literature controversy in which a novelist's sister published a rebuttal novel, the reception of Edouard Louis in the village he described, and the critical treatment of Rachel Cusk after she wrote about her divorce. The article argues that the standard defences of the form, aesthetic autonomy and the instability of the self, are answers to a question about representation rather than to the question actually being asked, which concerns power. It proposes that the ethics of autofiction be assessed by asking who can answer back.