Me minus me: Self-Effacement in Autofiction by Christopher Isherwood, Rachel Cusk and J. M. Coetzee

Abstract

Autofiction is one of the most popular genres in contemporary Anglophone literature. Yet the self-fashioning, outwardly hybrid genre merging autobiography with fiction is also the object of frequent contestation and derision, the source of which is nearly singularly rooted in authors’ perceived self-absorption. Yet there are noteworthy exceptions to this kind of autofiction. This essay turns its attention towards one alternative mode of autofiction: the self-effacing autofiction. The essay looks at three different works of autofiction, Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939), Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, and J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009), united by a paradoxical decision on behalf of the authors to obscure their main characters. In various ways, the three place their fictional doubles firmly in the background, a strategy and disavowal distinguishing them within a genre in which writers readily give their creativity over to analyses of the self. The aim of this essay is to understand why the authors reject self-involvement and what ends they pursue in its place. The essay suggests that the authors do not wholly forsake the key characteristic of autofiction that is self-exploration. Rather, in what constitutes a radical break with the genre’s conventions, they engage questions of selfhood and identity by allowing other characters or events to take center stage. By looking at the works through a theoretical framework informed by, for instance, dialogism and psychoanalysis, the essay suggests that the multiplicity of voices filling self-effacing autofiction, something which can be compared to the monological structure of conventional autofiction, contribute to the circumvention of self absorption without losing the genre’s inquiring qualities. By taking some of the weight from the topic of their personal selfhood the authors become free to approach a multitude of topics equally important to the construction of identity. These topics range from the concrete like sexuality or gender, on one hand, to abstract concepts like truth and literary authority on the other. However, the essay also suggests that these are only a few subjects through which the prism of selfhood can be explored and widened to include other individuals (characters and readers) than the author and his or her double. This outward facing autofiction thus expands the genre’s possibilities.