James Joyce Already Solved The Autofiction "Problem"

Thesis...antithesis...synthesis

Dear Republic,

What a joy it is to get you all exercised over topics that in the grand scheme of things … really don’t matter all that much. There’s something about literary magazines that makes autofiction an inexhaustible subject. We’ve already had two strong pieces on autofiction, with more getting sent in — and Patrick Cavanaugh Koroly convincingly argues here that the fiction/autofiction divide is largely imaginary and was, in any case, solved over a century ago.

-ROL

JAMES JOYCE ALREADY SOLVED THE AUTOFICTION “PROBLEM”

The autofiction war seems to me to be rooted not so much in any particular sentiment towards autofiction itself as in an existential fear about the future of literature. It’s not so much a discussion of the merits of the “genre” (which so few of the debaters bother to read anyways) as it is a question of what sort of novel can even survive into the near future: can literary fiction reclaim its status as a lively and significant part of the culture or have we reached a post-literacy world where new novels are culturally irrelevant and all we can do is rehash the old and scapegoat MFAs? Autofiction is the stand-in for the lifeless and isolated world of literary fiction that, to many, seems incapable of producing anything that people actually read.

Recently, there’s been some strong critical defense of autofiction. Derek Neal described autofiction in a recent piece as thematically defined by “an emphasis on ‘the real’ and a concern with articulating this in language.” Exemplars of the genre such as Knausgaard and Cusk argue that the traditional “fictional” novel abstracts away from the real human experiences that birth them and, in the process, lose the energy and authenticity that these problems demand. Knausgaard, for example, asks whether there’s any merit to writing about an abstract father and a son instead of he himself and his own father. Inevitably, the work will simply recount this personal experience. Why bother with the mediation of invented characters?

Elsewhere, Justin Smith-Ruiu has argued that all fiction is autofiction—and, in turn, that the human self is created and mediated by fiction. In the age of social media, we are all enabled to constantly write and perform the digital persona that is in some sense an abstraction of the real self yet also the most substantial form that any of us may take on. All fiction and all life has this element of self-construction, and any attempt to neatly divide writing into different boxes is ignoring the vital energy of writing: labeling writing in precise terms of reality and verisimilitude is an attempt to “make sense within its own radically empiricist social epistemology, while failing to recognize that a writer becomes a writer in struggling to break free of this epistemology.”

The core thesis of the “all fiction is autofiction” crowd seems to me to be something like, “There is no way to meaningfully escape your experience.” Everything you write must be an expression of your perspective on the world: it’s either simply an expression of your own experience that’s best presented as such (à la Knausgaard) or it is the act of turning your experience and self into a delimited and comprehensible self (à la Smith-Ruiu).

In contrast, the thesis of the critics seems to be that autofiction is an unambitious and narrow-minded surrender to the difficulty of escaping yourself that ignores the real force needed to go beyond it. Joyce Carol Oates generated plenty of controversy by describing autofictional novels as “wan little husks” in contrast to the ambitious projects of yesteryear’s greats. Autofiction is the weak breath of a writer who has found nothing in the world worth real devotion.

What emerges is a battle between the “novel of self-expression” and the “novel of ideas.” I don’t think the advocates of either are so naïve as to think that these are entirely distinct and separable forms. Rather, it’s a question of the power and purpose of fiction: can (and ought) a writer create something that speaks to a whole world of which her perspective is just one small part, or can she only present a blurry image of her own self and world?

Between these two extremes, I still believe there’s a path for autofiction to become this literature of ideas, reaching beyond and through itself to achieve something beyond mere self-expression. The clearest statement of this idea I’ve ever seen comes a writer who embodied it in his own work: James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Portrait began its life as a treatise on aesthetics that nobody was willing to publish before it transformed into its final fictional/autobiographical form via a long, painful writing process, including more than a few fits of rage and a failed attempt at burning the manuscript. Already, we see a marriage between the novel of ideas and autofiction: Joyce recognized that the best way to communicate these abstract theoretical notions was to tell a story about his own life and development.

The clear statement of Joyce’s aesthetic project comes late as Stephen lectures on his own perspective on art. He himself believes a man is naturally trapped by three “nets” of his culture: “nationality, language, [and] religion.” Dedalus speaks of his intention “to fly by those nets” in his own aesthetic undertakings. How is this possible?

This begins an extended aesthetic reflection, where Stephen speaks of true art as that which is static and “raise[s] the mind above desire and loathing” in contrast to the “pornographical or didactic” arts that improperly excite the emotions. Beauty, he argues, is apprehended in multiple phases: the aesthetic object is identified as an individual thing, the observer grasps the “quidditas, the whatness of the thing,” and then for a moment the mind is consumed by the beauty of the thing in “luminous silent stasis” when its wholeness and harmony are recognized.

Just as all beauty is apprehended in phases, Stephen argues that art is divided into three forms that progress from one to another: the lyrical, epical, and dramatic. The first is “the artist present[ing] his image in immediate relationship to himself;” the second “his image in mediate relationship to himself and to others;” and the last “his image in immediate relation to others.” (Stephen says little on the dramatic and I don’t believe it’s necessary to say much further here.)

The lyrical form, the reflection upon an individual experience and a writer’s own world, is not an isolated retreat into the self. Stephen argues that it’s in the lyrical that the epical—the mediation of oneself with the world—becomes real: the “simplest epical form…emerg[es] out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the center of an epical event…till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others.” Stephen offers the example of the ballad “Turpin Hero,” beginning in the first person and ending in the third: out of one narrator’s experience, a new untethered perspective may emerge.

In this way, lyrical art escapes itself through itself. The author moves from monologue to dialogue, creating a self-image that is no longer restricted to her own biography. Perhaps literature must begin as self-expression—in the creation of a coherent image and self—but this is not its boundary nor its fulfillment.

Joyce would offer an example of this precise method in Ulysses. Stephen, returning from Portrait, laments the nets that he has failed to escape: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” as he famously puts it. Try as he might, he seems trapped within his own mind, bound by the “ineluctable [i.e., inescapable] modality of the visible” with no means of reaching out of the sensual and into the universal. Dedalus, like Joyce, is hard of vision: the world is experienced as “thought through [his] eyes” yet he himself cannot even properly encounter the world in this mode.

Yet Stephen still finds a path forward. Ulysses fulfills Portrait’s promised transcendence from lyrical to epical: beginning with the novel’s first episodes of Dedalus (introduced as a parallel to Telemachus of the Odyssey, the son in wait for a father whom he never knew past infancy), we are presented with the life of Dublin transformed into the epical event that Stephen once searched for in the lyrical. In the totalizing presentation of the interior lives of two men—Stephen and Leopold Bloom—the entire life of a city, a nation, and humanity is revealed.

Autobiographical fiction fails not in total interiority but in incomplete interiority that fails to create a self-image that achieves universality. As Joyce puts it, the lyrical form transcends itself when the “personality of the artist…finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak.” The lyrical exists so that we might escape ourselves: the writer’s experience is transmuted into a form that anyone can access and understand.

In the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses, Buck Mulligan (of stateliness and plumpness fame) remarks, “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.” This is the ideal of self-expression in fiction: self-reflection with such an intensity that we reach into the primordial source of these experiences, the spirit that drives us to aesthetic and philosophical pursuits.

We’re caught up in a battle between the novel of personal experience and the novel of ideas. Perhaps it’s a self-imposed and unnecessary battle. But the answer isn’t to give up on escaping the self or to abstract away from the self into a realm of universality. It’s to craft a link between these two, where the writer can move from “the smithy of my soul” to “the uncreated conscience.” In the consciousness of one, we can find the conscience of all.

Patrick Cavanaugh Koroly is a Pittsburgh-based writer. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Convivium, Paris Lit Up, and The Savage Collective. He co-founded The Vocation Project, an education company working to make philosophical ideas accessible and applicable to working life.