While the fourth thesis focuses
on the author and the effects of the text on their life, the fifth considers the effects that autofictional texts have on the reader. Drawing on Philippe Lejeune’s notion of the “autobiographical pact” (1975),Footnote 8 Doubrovsky called his books “neither autobiographies nor completely novels, caught in the turnstile, the in-between of the genres, subscribing at the same time and contradictorily to the autobiographical pact and the novelistic pact, perhaps in order to abolish their limits or limitations” (1993, 210; my translation).Footnote 9
The turnstile imagery is reminiscent of Paul de Man’s image of the revolving door, which he uses to describe the rhetoricity of language. People enter revolving doors when they want to get inside a building or a closed area. However, the revolving door, at the same time and in the same movement, guides them outward again (De Man 1979, 921). Some critics doubt that one can subscribe to the autobiographical and the fictional pact at the same time; Arnaud Schmitt, for example, asks, “Can one really understand a textual segment as being both referential and fictional?” (2010, 128). Schmitt answers that it would be cognitively impossible to adhere to the autofictional and the fictional pact simultaneously. With reference to Philippe Gasparini, who struggled with the same problem, he contemplates that “simultaneous” could probably be understood as “ceaselessly alternating” between referential and fictional readings (Schmitt 2010, 128; see also Gasparini 2004, 13, who speaks of “a simultaneous double reading”; my translation), yet he doubts the practicality of this ceaseless movement in the concrete act of reading. However, he also concedes that this confused state between autobiography and fiction could be received as an aesthetic pleasure. Zipfel, in his third definition of autofiction, allows the two Lejeunian pacts to oscillate. One can conceive how, in the practical act of reading, this may indeed be a challenge that results in the reader’s confusion and/or aesthetic pleasure. Seen as a model of autofiction, however, it gets right to the heart of the matter, namely, the being in-between or, alternatively, both autobiographical and fictional. This intriguing oscillatory movement is compatible with the strange loop figure introduced in the previous section; the oscillation between fact and fiction imperceptibly twists the real and the fictional. Thus, slippery autofiction presents itself as a dynamic and versatile mental concept which alternately brings one or the other dimension into the foreground while still allowing the other to permanently resonate.
In German-language literature, authors from the first decade of this millennium have made extensive use of this principle of oscillation. Thomas Glavinic’s Das bin doch ich (translatable
—albeit inadequately—as “That’s me, isn’t it?”), published in 2007, tells the story of an Austrian author named Thomas Glavinic, who wrote a book titled Die Arbeit der Nacht which had come out the previous year. Das bin doch ich deals with, among other topics, the marketing process of Die Arbeit der Nacht. The book is a somewhat satirical depiction of the literary market. The title, Das bin doch ich, refers to an episode in the text where the protagonist reads a feuilleton review. The author of this review praises Daniel Kehlmann, a very successful German writer who has won many literary prizes, as “Germany’s best writer of his generation.” “Das bin doch ich” (41)—alternatively translated as “What? No, that’s me!”—is the spontaneous and indignant reaction of Glavinic’s protagonist, who is a good friend of Daniel Kehlmann’s in both the book and in reality (Jensen and Tamm 2013). The bemusing autofictional clou is located in the seemingly harmless colloquial wording of the title: Das bin doch ich, with doch being virtually untranslatable into English. It indicates the speaker’s defiant and indignant claim that, surely, nobody other than himself could be Germany’s best writer of his generation. At the same time, the wording of “Das bin doch ich” performs an act of comic self-identification or self-assertion as a reaction to an obvious feeling about the protagonist’s uncertainty about who or what he is. Thus, this is a simultaneously funny and serious reflection of the first-person speaker’s hybrid autofictional status; readers may ask themselves whether Glavinic’s book is an autobiographical confession or a fictional joke.
Glavinic’s
book has been labeled “metafiction,” which, of course, it is. However, “metafiction” as a label is not precise enough. It does not address the fact that the protagonist seems to be recognizable as the author, that he bears the same name as the author, and that he has written the same book as the author. These parallels do offer an autobiographical pact according to Lejeune. There are other characters in the book who seem to be real-world persons, too. In addition to the aforementioned Kehlmann, real-life author Jonathan Safran Foer makes an appearance at the beginning of the book when the protagonist attends a reading by him. Therefore, the question of how autobiographical the book is arises again and again—and yet the reader continually doubts. The narrator’s somewhat mocking tone and the all too frank disclosure of politically incorrect thoughts and embarrassing personal weaknesses arouse suspicion. On the one hand, these features of the book connect with confession and self-exploration as traditional characteristics of the genre of autobiography, and on the other hand, they ironically counteract these exact same genre features.
Another example that demonstrates the oscillation of pacts is Felicitas Hoppe’s previously mentioned Hoppe. In Hoppe, two telling paratexts attract attention right at the beginning of the book. The reminder “The spoken word holds for family members!”Footnote 10 is inserted between the main title and the table of contents. Yet, no matter how one reads this sentence, whether as the author distancing herself from the written text or merely from its fictitious factuality, it seems to refer to binding extratextual oral conversations with family members. As only the text is accessible for literary analysis, this preamble, which sounds authentically personal, places the book in a hard to define, but clearly marked, relationship with the biography of the author. Immediately after the table of contents, the reader finds as chapter “0. Felicitas Hoppe, *22.12.1960 in Hameln, is a German writer. Wikipedia.” Wikipedia is often used to find information quickly, although it is not generally held to be an entirely reliable source. Furthermore, it is equally clear that many personal entries in Wikipedia are authored by the persons whose lives and achievements are presented themselves—which makes the Wikipedia entries in question autobiographical texts. This is, however, not the case with the entry for Felicitas Hoppe (personal communication, April 8, 2020).Footnote 11 Surely, the Wikipedia reference is an ironic comment on which sources people consult and the questionable reliability of these sources. Thus, the fact that the book cites the Wikipedia entry constitutes a play with the relationship between fiction and facts. Hoppe not only incorporates the so-called factual into the text, but, by doing so, extends the textual story world into the realm of the factual—even if Wikipedia is an ambivalent source for facts, whatever we consider facts
to be.
Included right at the beginning of the book, these two paratexts signal real-world referentiality which they question at the same time. The first two sentences of the current German Wikipedia entry are as follows: “Felicitas Hoppe (* 22. Dezember 1960 in Hameln) ist eine deutsche Schriftstellerin. Sie ist Trägerin des Georg-Büchner-Preises 2012” (“Felicitas Hoppe [* 22 December 1960 in Hameln] is a German writer. She is the winner of the Georg Büchner Prize 2012”; my translation). The entry further reports that Hoppe was born the third of five children in Hameln, where she also went to school. This could mean that the four brothers and sisters mentioned in the book do actually exist in Hoppe’s real life, even though the book confronts us with the sentence “The Hameln childhood is pure invention” (Hoppe 2012, 14; my translation). Incidentally, the English version of Wikipedia does not mention the siblings. It begins with the information that “Felicitas Hoppe (born 22 December 1960 in Hamelin, Lower Saxony) is a German writer” and that she “was born in Hamelin, Lower Saxony, and grew up there.” Certainly, the text is not simply to be read in terms of what is factual and what is fictional—yet Hoppe provokes this reading in order to make fun of it at the same time (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2018). By mixing factual and invented information, Hoppe makes the factual appear fictional and the fictional appear factual and makes the reader oscillate between the two modes.
Five theses on autofiction—are they just isolated observations or is there a deeper connection between them? The first thesis justifies the term “autofiction”: its frequent and ongoing use indicates an obvious epistemological need. The term is most useful, this chapter claims, not as a strict genre denominator but as a flexible concept with scalable parameters. The second thesis recognizes that autofiction is an inherent dimension of autobiography in general and argues against autofiction as a separate genre. Thesis three highlights imagination and even the supernatural as a potential feature of autofiction that in no ways speaks against (auto-)biographical relevance. Thesis four reinforces this point through the claim that the fictional element (which may include imagination, the fantastical, and the supernatural) has real-life effects and may produce what it narrates. Finally, the fifth thesis argues for understanding autofiction as oscillating between fictionality and factuality, that is, for a dynamic mode, in order to reflect on the fictionality of the factual and the factuality of fiction. In how the autofictional is conceptualized in this chapter, these five aspects work together. Autofiction may flexibly bring one or other aspect to the foreground while all of them, to varying extents, resonate together in texts that can be qualified as autofictional.