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Issue 22. Autofiction and/in Image - Autofiction visuelle II

Foreword

Author: Anneleen Masschelein
Published: May 2008

This is the second volume of our exploration of "autofiction" and the visual in the broadest sense of the word. It continues the investigation started in the first part of this project (see Image and Narrative #19) in which we set out to offer insight into the broad spectrum of the autobiographical modus in the post-poststructuralist era. Paradoxically, the "subjectless" theories of structuralism and poststructuralism coincide with a return of the subject and the subjective in the artistic and cultural domain. This trend in turn also affects theory: witness the boom of identity, memory and affect in theoretical discourses. The narrative of the self has far from disappeared from our culture, on the contrary, it seems to have returned with a vengeance. And yet, this return of the subject is not a return of the same old subject. The subject that presents itself is fragmented, affected and penetrated by the media-saturated environment in which it is situated. This split subject is constructing sense out of scraps, scratches and echoes from a personal (or familial) history, from the history of its chosen medium that is self-reflexively doubled by theoretical awareness in the artwork. It is embedded in a socio-political context and reveals flashes of a future that is being constituted through words, images, colours, objects and events.

We feel that the notion of "autofiction", borrowed from a specific literary and narratological debate, captures the specific sense of construction, deconstruction and self-reflection that characterizes many artistic autobiographical projects in the twentieth- and twenty-first century. In this volume of Autofiction and/in Image - Autofiction Visuelle we further examine aspects of autofiction in contemporary art, literature and popular culture and trace back the phenomenon to its modernist roots. One of the aspects that is foregrounded is the notion of medium as a pathway for channelling subjectivity, or the autobiographical drive, but also as a metonymic extension of the subject. This is very clear in Francisco Serra-Lopes' discussion of IKB (International Klein Blue) and Yves Klein's monochromes as autofictional. The texture, the method of impregnation and Klein's ownership of "IKB" lay bare the autofictional drive in the microscopic, metonymic procedure of the Peintures. Klein's combination of theory and of practice coincides with an evolution in his work towards pure self-expression, most evident in his performances. Other important features in autobiography and autofiction are memory, memoir and legacy. Andrew McNamara looks at Félix Gonzales-Torres's installations in these terms. As an "artist-spy", Gonzales-Torres is insidiously present in the interstices of the "legitimate" (white) art world, perpetually dispersing and multiplying himself in his anonymous, untitled installations, which are at the same time deeply individual and personal. The best possible response to Gonzales-Torres's work, McNamara suggests, is "apprehension": captivation, arrest and a subtle but nonetheless profound internal modification resulting from the gentle, always belated, untimely collision of fragments of artist and audience.

Giulia Lamoni examines the ironical displacement between private and public, between autobiography and fiction in the work of Tracy Emin, who forever seeks out and transgresses the limits of artistic self-representation. Reading Emin's "blankets", Lamoni discusses the tactile qualities of the work on the one hand and the writing on the other hand in Emin's appropriation of the feminine technique of quilting as a way of exposing and suturing different personae and realms (interior and exterior) of the subject. The ensuing examination and redefinition of authenticity and intersubjectivity reveals her autofiction as both a quest and an address of and to the self and others. Joost de Bloois analyses the work of another contemporary female artist, Sam Taylor-Wood, focussing on the intertextual use of narrative and visual procedures borrowed from art history and hagiography. The result is an effect of autobiographical illumination that negatively lights up in Taylor-Wood's wry, humorous self-portraits. Like her other works, the self-portraits are staged photographical comments on art history that seem hardly autobiographical at all. If Yves Klein could still proceed by metonymy, Sam Taylor-Wood works by displacement and by a negation that is both ironic and painful. It is precisely the difficulty of facile allegorical reading in her staged and self-referential self-portraits that constitutes the autofictional impulse in its negativity.

The autobiographical modus has found fruitful grounds in comics and in the bande dessinée. Justine Simon examines the technical means used by Manu Larcenet in his popular BD, Le Combat ordinaire. By narratological standards, the series cannot be called an autofiction, because the protagonist and author are not identical. Yet, the visuals of the comic strip combined with extratextual information suggest a strong autobiographical tendency. Hence, Simon uses the concept of "autofiction visuelle" to examine the "axio-linguistic" perspective of the comic. In the tension between what is said, shown and what is not said, the complex quest for identity that includes a social and historical reveals itself as an "ordinary battle". In a similar way, Truffaut "grafts" his life onto his films, as Sarah Gaspari convincingly argues. Truffauts presence is autofictional because the autobiographical mode is reworked through cinematic language. Gaspari explores two procedures of this grafting in Truffaut's work - insertion and identification - and traces back the "real" in Truffaut's films to a complex relation between life, cinema and the feminine.

David Beronä looks at David Wojnarowicz's graphic novel Seven Miles a Second and examines in what way the comic is an autofictional reworking of his memoir Close to the Knives. As was the case in Simon's discussion of Larcenet's project, Beronä demonstrates how this autofiction focuses on memory and a recovery or construction of meaning from fragments of the past, but also adds a political dimension. Seven Miles a Second is not just an autobiography. Dying with AIDS, the memoir is also a testament, posthumously finished by Wojnarowicz's beloved and a forceful message from a queer subject that has always existed on the edge. In his essay on Sebald's The Emigrants Todd Heidt also addresses the question of memory in relation to autofiction. He shows how Sebald's work continuously problematizes referentiality, especially in his use of photography and the first person narrator. The Emigrants explores and questions the boundary between media, fiction and memory. Thus, Heidt argues, Sebald makes a noteworthy contribution to theories concerning media as memory or history. It is Homi Bhabha's work on postcolonial literature that, surprisingly, proves to be most useful in understanding Sebald's multimedial and autofictional texts.

Jannah Loontjens adopts a different perspective on autofiction, when she examines the notion of "authorship" in JT Leroy's fiction, which was presented as autobiographical but was in fact a hoax. Here, the fictional aspect resides on a different level: as the author turns out to be a fictional creation, the autobiographical pact is violated, while the novels themselves already foreground the problem of gender identity. Loontjens examines how these types of scandals are rooted in contemporary culture and how they affect the relation between reader and text in the poststructuralist age. Jan Hein Hoogstad, finally, adds a new dimension to the issue, by returning to Ralph Ellison's story 'Living with Music' via Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Thus, he reveals how in this autobiographical story, a subject is formed by a plurality of synchronous media, resulting in a subjectivity that is not so much fragmented as pluriform, layered and multidimensional.

Anneleen Masschelein is a postdoctoral researcher of the FWO Vlaanderen and lecturer literary theory at the K.U.Leuven. She has published on literary theory, W.G. Sebald, D.H. Lawrence and Deleuze and Guattari. Her book, The Unconcept. The Conceptualization of the Freudian Uncanny in Late 20 th century 'Theory' will appear in 2008 with SUNY Buffalo UP.

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