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Issue 19. Autofiction and/in Image - Autofiction visuelle

Foreword

Author: Anneleen Masschelein
Published: November 2007

This is the first volume of a double issue of Image and Narrative, devoted to "autofiction". We intend to make a double gesture. On the one hand, we want to bring together two traditions of thinking about contemporary forms of autobiography: the specifically French debate initiated by the work of Serge Doubrovsky, and the Anglo-American debate concerning life writing and self-representation. Or, more narrowly, the pivot of the two volumes is the genre for which the French tradition has coined the neologism "autofiction". On the other hand, we want to offer a broad range of autofictions and open up different ways of analysing them. This double gesture proceeds from the fact that, paradoxically, it is precisely the erosion of the Western, Cartesian, rational subject by all kinds of "theory" (structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, postcolonialism…) which has coincided with a massive return of the repressed (which was obviously never gone from the scene): the authorial subject manifesting in autobiographical narratives or memoirs, reconstituting itself, but in an overtly fragmentary or fictional form.

"Autofiction" as a modus rather than a literary genre is a widespread phenomenon at the end of the 20 th and early 21 st century in various national and linguistic traditions. It borrows its forms from formalism, modernism, postmodernism or other avant-garde literary traditions: autobiographical narratives are cunningly undermined by fictional elements, memoirs are presented as fragments (often arranged by the alphabet or keywords, i.e. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes). Most importantly, the boundaries of different media are conflated, especially by mixing narrative and images (photographs, comics or cinema). Finally, the phenomenon also oscillates on the verge of art and popular culture - television and the internet - where public confession, reality TV, docudrama, "true fictions" and avatars are extremely popular.

One of our aims was to link the literary phenomenon in the strict sense (which is often tackled from the vantage point of a generic discussion) to concurrent, similar tendencies within contemporary visual art and culture. But where does literature end and where does art begin - and vice versa? How to untangle criticism, theory, philosophy and conceptual art? Both in literature and in contemporary art, autofiction must be examined both in terms of the conceptual framework that resuscitates the artistic subject by its permanent mode of self-questioning on the one hand, and in terms of traditional genres as autobiography, selfportrait and documentary on the other hand. Hence our double title: autofiction and/in image, but also: visual autofiction as a trend in contemporary culture.

The notion of "visual autofiction" is carefully outlined by Joost de Bloois in his introduction, as a specific form of self-reflexivity within contemporary art, which is both a consequence of and a possibility for conceptual art. A comparison with the literary debate on autofiction may open up new ways to examine the phenomenon within contemporary art historical discourse. The articles by Aurore Chestier and Arnaud Genon and Guillaume Ertaud subsequently examine works from key figures within the autofictional tradition: Serge Doubrovsky, who explicitly introduced the term "autofiction" in French critical discourse in 1977 (it had been used earlier by Jerzy Kosinski) with his novel Fils, and Hervé Guibert, who gave a new impulse to the genre of the photo-novel. Chestier examines the notion of the fragment as a structuring principle in Doubrovsky's haunting novel Le livre brisé, which is constituted on the remainders of a fragmented subject and of a prematurely interrupted collaboration, after his wife's suicide. Genon and Ertaud examine how the oeuvre of Guibert has always already been marked by autofiction, long before his acclaimed "Aids-trilogy". Anna Khimasia looks at a famous autofictional collaboration by two authors who have been playing with autobiography and fiction throughout their work: Paul Auster and Sophie Calle who turn the tables on each other in Leviathan and Double Game.

Mireille Brioude investigates the oeuvre of Agnès Varda, who has consistenty tried to elaborate an autobiographical position both in her documentary cinema and in her installations. Diya Abdo meticulously analyses the function of photographs in Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Tresspass. The ambiguous, foreign paratext continuously interacts with the narrative, turning it into a subtle, yet effective critique of both Arab and Western oppressive discourses of femininity. A reflection on the interaction between subjectivity and history is found in the literary work of W.G. Sebald. Colin Dickey examines the way in which Sebald uses the passport photographs as both a fictional marker of identity and an instrument of state control as a paradoxical image for Sebald's author-function-under-erasure in Vertigo.

Adair Roundwaithe looks at the work of American artist Kara Walker who tries to open up a space for mourning in her autofictional dialogues with the oppressive history that shapes her as a subject. Anneleen Masschelein on the other hand explores the way in which Sophie Calle turns the intensely private experience of trauma into a public event, while transforming therapeutical narrative into artistic fiction throughout different installations of the project "Douleur exquise". Finally, Heidi Peeters opens up the notion of "autofiction" by using it as a conceptual tool to analyse utopian subjectivation processes on the immensely popular MySpace.

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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