Foreign Correspondence IX
An essay on autofiction
Dear friends,
Late last year, I received a bewildering invitation: the editors of Studies in the Novel, an academic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press, wanted me to contribute an essay for a special issue of their publication, which would be dedicated to dispelling “received truths about the novel that we recognize, from a more specialized perspective, to be untrue.”
I wrote back saying that I was honored, but also that I was in no way a specialist. I’d gotten an MFA—a “fake degree,” as Elif Batuman might say—rather than a doctorate; the last academic paper I’d written was my undergraduate thesis. The editors replied that my lack of credentials was itself a credential: the journal was making an effort to combat the insular nature of scholarly criticism by including writers from outside the academy, and since they’d enjoyed my essays in The Nation and n+1, they’d decided to reach out. Was there a truism about the novel that had always bothered me? Here was an opportunity to set the record straight.
I shouldn’t have taken the assignment: I was rushing through the speak-now-or-be-silent-forever round of corrections on the final proofs of my first novel, América del Norte (a-side) and running on Ritalin fumes to edit the Nexos special issue on the 30th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (b-side). But I’ve never been able to resist the temptation to pick a nerd-fight, so I wrote to the editors and said I’d love to write a piece about so-called autofiction.
The term had become a dirty word, if not a straight-up insult. At the Iowa program as in New York and Mexico City, I heard writers groan when someone used it to describe their work, even or especially when their novels were obviously autobiographical. But I had no such scruples. I was about to publish a 500-page tome about a character who resembled me so much that the dust-jacket copy describing the plot was all but identical to the author bio on the opposite flap. To pretend that I’d written something other than autofiction would have been ridiculous.
But there’s a catch, and ignoring it betrays an interpretative error so widespread that it passes for common sense, but in truth evinces such a dearth of readerly sophistication as to induce despair for the future of literature. I mean, of course, that my book isn’t a memoir masquerading as a novel, but a novel masquerading as a memoir. To think the resemblance between narrator and author-function means that the book is about me is to miss the point by several miles.1 I wasn’t interested in confession or in eliciting sympathy, much less in writing a salacious tell-all. I was interested in the undecidability of the First Person, or rather of language as a whole; in the ironic instability that always lurks behind our words—even when we write in a literal (nonfictional) rather than a figurative (fictional) register—but comes to the fore most clearly when fiction and nonfiction become impossible to tell apart.
Such was the “truism about the novel” that Your Correspondent tried to dispel in his Very First Academic Article, which you can read in full below. I generally only include excerpts of the pieces I share here, and instead direct you to the website of the publication—but since it would be unconscionable to passive-aggressively goad you into subscribing to an academic journal, I’ve made an exception. If you prefer podcasts to scholarship by dilettantes, you can check out this episode of my genius-friends Jo Livingstone and Charlotte Shane’s podcast, Reading Writers, where I deliver a version of my argument.
That’s all for now, friends. I hope you enjoy the holidays and that 2025 brings you, if not joy, then at least ordinary unhappiness. I remain, as always, Your Most Foreign Correspondent,
NMMP
SECONDHAND BORGES: BEN LERNER, ROBERTO BOLAÑO, AND AUTOFICTION AS DEFACEMENT
For John D’Agata
I
Nobody seems to agree on what it is, or rather was, let alone on whether it amounted to an exciting development in the history of literature or evidence of cultural decline.
It was a brave attempt to raise the stakes of the novel, to renounce irony as the refuge of the timid and gather the courage to say what one meant; or it was a cowardly retreat into the private, Werther reheated in the microwave.
It was a cynical commodification of bourgeois subjectivity, the aesthetic detritus of the neoliberal gentrification of the mind; or it was an effort to test the consequences of the proposition that the personal is political, to transform experience into exemplar and testify on the age one had been blessed to witness.
It was a thought experiment in moral philosophy, the dialogues of Rousseau and Diderot reborn as a conversation with friends; or it was a bundle of bad feelings repackaged as righteousness, the final stage of the Closing of the American Mind.
It was the temper tantrum of a generation raised on therapy, the result of treating trauma as a credential; or else the cri-de-coeur of a cohort condemned to mental illness by the precarity of the Great Recession, the violence of racism and misogyny, and the terrors of climate change.
It was High Art or lowbrow entertainment, or High Art as lowbrow entertainment, or lowbrow entertainment as High Art; the contemporary expression of timeless concerns or a passing fashion; proof that so-called Millennials were capable of genius or evidence that, actually, we couldn’t write for shit.
Whatever it was (or perhaps still is), there’s no denying that “autofiction” was (or is) one of the central categories with which people who think about literature sought to understand the Anglophone novel of the early twenty-first century. That, at least, is what it seems to have been for my peers: the literary lingua franca of our generation, a model for how to write not just about but also in the Spirit of the Times.
But for me, and perhaps only for me, autofiction was also something stranger: a bridge between North and Latin America. Over the course of my decade-long tour of duty as one of the United States’s ten million aspiring writers, I embraced autobiographical literature, mostly because it was legible to my American friends, who were obsessed with the question of “identity.” Along the way, however, I discovered that Anglophone autofiction’s insistence that the border between literature and life is not a wall but a membrane echoed a tradition closer to my hometown of Mexico City: the metaliterary lineage of Miguel de Cervantes, who beget Jorge Luis Borges, who beget Roberto Bolaño.
Hence the central thesis of this essay: the claim that Bolaño also beget Ben Lerner. The proposition is debatable in philological terms, but I’m convinced that approaching these novels as if they had been written in Spanish allows for more interesting readings than the litany of commonplaces to which I just subjected you. If we resist the historicist temptation to trace the genealogy of such authors as Sally Rooney and Teju Cole to 1970s France, and instead search for their origins in a tradition enamored of metaphysics rather than confession, we might finally get rid of the received idea that clouds our interpretations of many contemporary novels: the notion that autofiction is a way of writing about the self that calls itself fiction so the author may be sincere, when in truth it is a way of reading certain works of literature that meditate on the fictional nature of the self, feigning sincerity so the author may disappear into the ironic ambiguity at the heart of language.
II
I promise we’ll soon get to Bolaño and Borges. Before we go on, though, we need to address the question that triggered this essay: What is (or was) autofiction? The difficulty in answering suggests that there’s a logically-anterior question at hand: Why is it so hard to say what we mean when we use that word?
Part of the problem stems from the fact that the term operates in the liminal space between three discourses-about-literature that are often at odds but exist on a continuum: literary scholarship (theory, philology), cultural journalism (book reviews, interviews with authors), and book-marketing (blurbs, ad-copy). Each of these discourses occurs in a specific institutional context (the university, the magazine, the sales office) and serves a different function (to educate readers, to evaluate writers, to sell books). What complicates the picture is that, in one way or another, literary scholars, cultural journalists, and book-marketers are all in the business of deciding which books are “good literature.” The stage is set for the sort of misunderstandings that arise when speakers of languages that belong to the same family but have long diverged become convinced that they can follow what the other is saying.
A literary scholar, for instance, might use “autofiction” in a historical sense: as a term coined in 1977 by the French novelist-critic Serge Doubrovsky, an inheritor of Duras and a contemporary of Ernaux, who wanted to differentiate his own First Person writing (concerned with the quotidian, unafraid of the banal, shameless to the point of exhibitionism, often smutty, mostly boring) from both the class-coded limitations of the traditional memoir (“that privilege reserved for the important people of this world at the end of their lives,” as Doubrovsky called it on the dust jacket of the first edition of his novel Fils) and the legalistic strictures that the theorist Philippe Lejeune christened as “the autobiographical contract” (the agreement between the writer and the reader of a memoir in which the former swears to tell the truth about the “history of [their] personality” [14]). Autofiction would then be the name of a form (a set of rules for how to make art) grounded on a novelistic (as opposed to nonfictional) epistemology and justified on political grounds: First Person writing by normal people who reserved the right to do violence to the so-called facts of their lives.2
By contrast, a cultural journalist commissioned to write an essay-review on three recent books (say: Tao Lin’s Taipei, Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose, and Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga) might use “autofiction” as a taxonomical term that links together a set of novels that are in truth quite different but share protagonists who resemble their authors. Autofiction then becomes the name of a genre defined not by its formal procedures but by its content: There’s such a thing as “the novel of ideas,” so surely there must be something like “the novel of the self.” The result is the diametrical opposite of the scholar’s analytic narrowing: a synthetic expansion so capacious that all of a sudden Proust (and therefore Knausgaard) becomes a writer of autofiction; even though the Proustian (and therefore the Knausgaardian) project is not so much a meditation on the self-that-writes as an attempt to convey the texture of consciousness in writing.
Finally, a publicist tasked with convincing some thousand members of the American reading public that they should pre-order an exophonic Mexican writer’s debut (a rather long and not especially accessible essay-novel about “whiteness, power, immigration, and the history of Mexican literature”) might reach for the term “autofiction” to facilitate a comparison between the book in question (which, you guessed it, is my first novel)3 and Teju Cole’s Open City. That the Mexican writer’s debut doesn’t really resemble Cole’s frankly superior revival of the tropes of nineteenth-century flânerie doesn’t matter. The point of promotional copy is not to interpret literature but to sell it, and comparing an aggressively foreign novel to a more legible work accomplishes that goal. This strategy, however, has an unintended consequence: according to this logic, autofiction is not a form or a genre but a category of consumer preference: If you liked this book, you might also like this other book.
Hence the incompatible judgments about autofiction I satirized at the start of this essay: more often than not, differences of opinion about these novels are the result of using the same word to mean different things. Like all evocative terms, “autofiction” is a shapeshifter: its denotations mutate depending on whether it appears in Publishers Weekly, the New York Review of Books, or Studies in the Novel.
III
But the slipperiness of autofiction has a deeper set of roots that have little to do with semantics. Autofiction proves difficult to define, let alone evaluate, because autobiographical writing lays bare the fundamental ambiguity of language. At the very moment when a work of fiction begins to refer to its writer, the tacit pact that grounds literature as a form of communication breaks down. If you can’t tell whether the protagonist is in fact the author—whether I’ve made my stand-in more or less lovable than I actually am, whether I’m confessing sincerely or lying through my teeth—how could you ever be sure that I mean what I say?
Soon we are forced to conclude that there’s no outside-the-text, no “real world” against which one could compare the novel’s truth-claims and thus verify their accuracy (or, to put it in terms more germane to our discussion: their sincerity). The text does not represent the world, much less the self; every book is an iteration of the self-referential labyrinth that Jorge Luis Borges (or rather “Jorge Luis Borges”) discovered when he tried to find the source of a quotation lifted from a bad translation of the Encyclopedia Britannica: “Mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men.” So with autobiographical literature: a language-mirror that conjures a double of the author. Even if it insists on its value as “testimony,” it cannot be anything else than a work of deception.
These are unfashionable ideas, I know. What can I tell you? The seminars I attended as an undergraduate made a deep impression on me. Here, for instance, is my teachers’ teacher, the unforgivable Paul de Man:
The distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but that it is undecidable....The interest of autobiography is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and totalization. (920)
The key to a reading of autofiction that doesn’t fall prey to semantic confusion or culture-war banality is to remember, with de Man, that autobiography “is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading” (921). The joke is that the origins of this notion are not to be found in New Haven or on the Rue d’Ulm, but in the National Library of Buenos Aires. It’s not a coincidence that both Derrida and Foucault (the former in La pharmacie de Platon, the latter in Les mots et les choses) cite Borges as a source of inspiration, nor that one of de Man’s first critical essays in English is a rave review of an early translation of Borges. To read autofiction in a post-structuralist key, then, amounts to reading it as Hispanophone literature.4
IV
But why, the Idle Reader asks, did this fool decide to bring up his own book? My only defense is that the insights I hope to share here didn’t originate in my work as an occasional critic, but in my practice as a novelist. Asking me to write a critical essay about autofiction is a bit like asking a chimpanzee to produce a paper on primatology: a fun exercise, but one bound to be messy, and perhaps a little embarrassing.
The good news is that the awkwardness I’ve induced in the Idle Reader— or at least in myself—illustrates an important point: the affect of autofiction is embarrassment. The devices of these novels are best understood as attempts to negotiate the feelings of shame and discomfort that arise when we read or write about the life of the novelist. Consider the Hispanophone text that I believe catalyzed contemporary English-language autofiction: The Savage Detectives. The poets who populate Bolaño’s masterpiece are ridiculous, at once self-aggrandizing and unselfaware—cringe, as the kids say these days. Bolaño reaches for irony and metaliterature because to write about his youth in a more earnest tone would be unbearably embarrassing.
What’s funny is that the Chilean’s runaway popularity in the English-speaking world was often predicated on misreadings of his autobiographical novel, which many in the United States took not as a conversation with Borges, but as a Spanish-language homage to the Beat Generation. Some American readers I’ve met seem to think that the visceral realists are heroes: the best minds of their generation, destroyed by madness. They’re only half-wrong: Bolaño’s characters are indeed heroic—but only in a Cervantine way. Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano are neither Romantic geniuses ostracized by a philistine society nor modern holymen who found sainthood in the margins, but close relatives of Don Quixote: fools driven mad by books, losers caught in the gap between the life they’ve imagined through reading and the one they’ve been offered by the world. The paradox at the core of The Savage Detectives is that it presents a detailed historical record of people who accomplished nothing worthy of memory. The beauty of the gesture resides in the absurdity of granting a place in literary history to people who left their great books unwritten.
The Beat Generation’s interest in self-mythologizing, by contrast, strikes me as infinitely more sincere and naive than the self-parodic spirit that animates Bolaño. Where On the Road is concerned with producing a “realistic” representation of the “real” lives of writers, Detectives is interested in the ways in which writing and reading give form to life, or rather deform it. The origins of Bolaño’s approach to autobiography are not to be found in benzedrine-fueled hagiographies of hitch-hiking mystics, but in Borges’s postmodern refashioning of the metafictional procedures of the Spanish Baroque: an era that cultivated irony with a devotion that remains unmatched.
Hence the interpretative potential of the Hispanophone reading of Anglophone autofiction that I’m proposing. A novelistic tradition that traces its heritage to Ficciones is infinitely more self-reflexive than one that traces its lineage to The Dharma Bums: the latter, like My Struggle, is a naive attempt to represent reality in language; the former, a meditation on the impossibility of accessing “reality” through language. As evidence, consider the difference in the ways in which Kerouac and Bolaño treat their characters’ habits of reading and writing. Beyond a few stray mentions of Nietzsche and occasional references to Buddhist texts, the Beats rarely talk about books. They don’t seem to read very much—they are too busy living. By contrast, the visceral realists spend most of their time arguing about the writers they admire or despise. Like Borges, they are readers first and writers second: writers who know that all writing is reading, that literature is never about life and always about literature.5
V
The same, I’d like to suggest, is true of the best Anglophone autofiction, which pretends to be concerned with the biography of the writer, but secretly knows that the graphia always precedes and outlasts the bio. While I don’t know for a fact whether the writers of what one might call The Anglophone Autofictional Canon had a transformative encounter with Borges, there’s at least one central figure of American autofiction who was from the start received as a disciple of Bolaño: Ben Lerner, a novelist whose profound influence on my own work causes me a great deal of anxiety. Consider two passages from rave reviews of his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press, 2011), that his publisher repurposed as promotional burbs:
Perhaps it’s because there’s so much skepticism surrounding the novel-by-poet that, when it’s successful, it’s such a cause for celebration. Some prime examples of monumental novels by poets and about poets (but not just for poets) are Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago [and] Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.... (Akhtiorskaya)
If Bolaño was yesterday’s drug of choice—deluding us with youth, intoxicating us with a sense of literature’s wilder, life-altering capacities—Lerner could be, should be, tomorrow’s homegrown equivalent.... (Cohen)
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it: Lerner’s first narrative effort is a work of metaliterature about a poet-loser from the Americas who moves to Spain in hopes of becoming a writer, has a number of hilarious misadventures in which he comes off as a fool, thinks about his place in a genealogy of poets, and behaves sub-optimally around the women who care about him—only to have his life interrupted by History. Replace John Ashbery with Manuel Maples Arce, the Fulbright Committee with Octavio Paz, the terrorist attacks that shook Madrid in 2005 with the traumas of 1968 in Mexico and 1973 in Chile, and Atocha reveals itself as a translation of Detectives. The fascinating corollary is that it’s also a translation of Borges, which in turn means that the relationship between Adam Gordon (the protagonist) and Ben Lerner (the author) poses more interesting problems than the banal question that framed much of the early reception of Atocha: Is he really that insufferable?
VI
The Hispanophone approach to autofiction, then, consists in taking it not as “sincere” writing about life, nor as a genre or a form or a marketing niche, but as a way of reading attuned to the phantasmagoric nature of the First Person, which some (but not all) autobiographical novels demand from their readers. This is why I believe that the most autofictional passages of Atocha are those where Adam Gordon confronts the fact that he isn’t living a nonfictional life, but rather crafting the fiction of a life:
When I had dried myself off and dressed, I lit the spliff, poured the rest of the espresso and, if I’d finished a translation in the park, typed it up on my laptop and emailed it to Cyrus. Although I had internet access in my apartment, I claimed in my emails to be writing from an internet café and that my time was very limited. I tried my best not to respond to most of the emails I received, as though this would create the impression I was offline, busy accumulating experience... (18–19)
The self-deprecating humor becomes metaphysical vertigo when we realize that, even if Adam Gordon didn’t spend much of his time in Spain online (which is to say reading: in Atocha the virtual is a figuration of literature), he still wouldn’t be living but “accumulating experience.” The economic metaphor is telling: experience is a commodity that one can hoard. A kind of capital. A raw material—but for what? For literature, of course. De Man again:
We assume that life produces autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life, and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium? (920)
Lerner’s first novel, like The Savage Detectives and Don Quixote, is an account of living-for-the-sake-of-literature and in the process discovering that there is no such thing as “life” but only literature; that the First Person is a grammatical fiction. In this sense, Atocha couldn’t be more different from My Struggle. Knausgaard’s text derives a great deal of its power from the naivete with which it insists that its extraordinarily contrived narration is the unmediated record of a life that takes place outside the text. This is why I believe that, if the term “autofiction” means anything, it applies to Lerner but not to Knausgaard: the former invites interpretations that keep an eye out for the impossibility of representing the self; the latter goes out of his way to assert that his novels are totalizing self-portraits.
VII
Which brings me, finally, to Borges. His metaphysical conceits often make us forget that many of his stories, essays, and poems are narrated by a First Person that shares a great deal with its author: the profession of librarian, the Argentine nationality, a melancholic disposition, an affection for Schopenhauer, blindness, and the name “Jorge Luis Borges”—but also, and perhaps most importantly, an agonizing consciousness of his own tendency to sentimentality.
Consider, for example, “The Aleph,” a canonical story about a miraculous object that allows an insufferable poet (a brutal satire of Neruda) to see the world in a grain of sand, but which is also, as Roberto González Echevarría has pointed out, a rather sappy account of the embarrassing attachment that “Jorge Luis Borges” still feels for a woman he loved desperately, and who died without giving him the time of day. That her name is Beatriz is meant to distract us: Borges (or “Borges”) would have us believe he’s writing about Dante, but can we ever be sure that “Borges” isn’t writing about Borges and his feelings? Better still: could it be that “Borges’s” lovesickness is itself a product of Borges’s reading of Dante, because there’s no self outside of literature, no life beyond the text, no experience unmediated by reading?
The mirrors and encyclopedias are just that: smoke and mirrors, red herrings. Borges’s philosophical labyrinths serve a similar purpose as Lerner’s disquisitions on poetics: to keep us from realizing that the First Person is cringe. The proof that Borges, too, was interested in inviting autofictional readings resides in the palpable contradiction between the two impulses that animated his work, and which he was wise enough to heighten: the drive to confession and the pulsion to conceal, the desire for a coherent self that could be put into words and the terrible certainty that there was no self beyond the words. Nowhere is this tension more evident than in a prose poem (or is it a short story—or, God forbid, a personal essay?) that appeared in one of his late books: “Borges and I.” Here are a few fragments in James E. Irby’s translation:
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to...I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me....Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things....I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others...I do not know which of us has written this page. (246–47)
There you have it—at long last!—a definition: Autofiction is a way of reading that insists on the impossibility of knowing who has written this page. The challenge for both readers and writers of fiction about the First Person is to hold onto Borges’s ironic question: Who is speaking here? And so I’d like to conclude by once again making it all about me (if it is true that I am someone) and issuing an embarrassing request. Were you to come across my novel, Idle Reader, grant me the indulgence of approaching it as autofiction: with the understanding that the First Person never represents anyone—least of all the writer.
Nicolás Medina Mora. Independent scholar.
WORKS CITED
Akhtiorskaya, Yelena. “Writing Poetically About Spain and Desire.” The Jewish Daily Forward. https://forward.com. Sept. 28, 2011. Accessed Jan. 2024.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Borges and I.” Labyrinths. Trans. James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1962. 246–47
Cohen, Joshua. “Avant-Slackerism at its Best.” The Faster Times. Oct. 13, 2011. Wayback Machine, Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org. Accessed Jan. 2024.
Doubrovsky, Serge. Fils. Paris: Galilée, 1977.
Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2011. 18–19.
Man, Paul de. “Autobiography as Defacement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 Comparative Literature (1979): 920.
Ah, la Jacket Copy! Il n'y a pas de hors-texte, bien sûr, mais il est tout aussi sûr que la fonction-auteur “Nicolás Medina Mora” n'a pas écrit les mots de cette copy. À mes yeux, ce qui apporte evidence pour mon these. Mais, hélas! Cette distinction, j'ai découvert il y a quelques mois, s'est avérée trop subtile pour le bande de belles âmes analphabètes de ce qu'on appelle “Mexican Literary Twitter”, si occupés à défendre leur droit de détester les livres qu'ils n'ont pas lus, qu'ils simplement n'ont tout pas le temps de jeter un coup d'œil à la page Wikipédia de Mme. Spivak. IYKYK; IYDKYDK, etc, etc. Et non, mon client ne répondra pas aux questions, les allégations sont sans fondement, cette conférence de presse est terminée, merci bien pour votre attention.
For an overview of Francophone autofiction and its dialogue with Lejeune, see: Gronemann, Claudia. “Autofiction.” Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019.
Medina Mora, Nicolás. América del Norte. New York: Soho Press, 2024. See especially 91–92: “‘I’m just trying it out? I mean, yeah, it’s in the first person, but it’s not, like, a memoir. It’s about... capitalism? And colonialism! It’s auto-ethnography, auto-theory, auto...’ Charlie scoffed. ‘You mean autofiction?’ She finished her drink and stood up. ‘I need a refill. You can’t possibly expect me to raw dog reality after this treason.’”
For de Man’s early reflections on Borges, see: “A Modern Master: Jorge Luís Borges (1964).” Critical Writings, 1953–1978. Ed. Lindsay Waters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 123–29. For an account of Borges’s influence on French poststructuralism, see: González Echevarría, Roberto. “BdeORridaGES (Borges y Derrida)”. Isla a su vuelo fugitiva: ensayos críticos sobre literatura hispanoamericana. Madrid: J. P. Turanzas, 1983. 205–215.
Jeffrey Lawrence reaches similar conclusions in the course of his exploration of the twentieth-century dialogue between North and Latin American literature, which he respectively associates with “experience” and “reading.” See Anxieties of Experience: The Literature of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).