By Ida M. Olsen
There are several examples of the autobiographical author, several versions of reality culture, blurred boundaries between what is real and what is imaginary. The fact that we most likely live in a reality culture and crave its art forms was already manifested some time ago by literary critics, perhaps most notably Serge Doubrovsky who coined the term ‘autofiction’ in his book Fils from 1977. This type of autobiographical fiction has always been present, yet disguised, from Montaigne to Robinson Crusoe to Tolstoy’s Levin walking the land with reverberating traces of his creator’s own life. What is real? What is fiction? Why is it even relevant? As Atle Kittang states in ‘Art and Reality’, ‘Fiction is there to serve reality […] the novel is a mirror… [it] observes what is real, but does so in constant movement’ (Kittang 369-370, my translation). Does a boundary exist at all? In this essay, I seek to examine what effect it has upon a fictional text when its author, in my example case Norwegian author Gaute Heivoll, chooses to embed it with his own life story. In doing so I will also allow myself to reflect on the question of why authors desire to write about themselves and what they achieve by doing so. I will not bring into focus whether Heivoll is ethically responsible for his portrayals of other people, although it poses an interesting question.
Gaute Heivoll writes a novel about Gaute Heivoll. The story is set in the same forestry, ash coated small town where Heivoll grew up, the same spatiotemporal universe. But although it is author Heivoll who narrates the story, the perspective shifts back and forth from Heivoll’s present and past, and to the true story of a series of fires caused by an arsonist’s work that took place when Heivoll was a baby. Pausing the arsonist’s story at the most suspense-brimmed moments, Heivoll exploits the tension to tell the story of how he became an author. Our thoughts immediately jump to other perhaps more famous Scandinavian names, Knausgaard, the now world famous attempt at boldly writing one’s own struggle. The trial? The ethical responsibility (naturally, our thoughts around this new fashion immediately jump to indignity rather than reflection and wonder)? Because what happens in the turbulence of questions that follows, when the so-called novels have been put down, after the escape from celebrity magazine covers in kiosks of trafficy streets, putting ones feet up at the end of the day to catch the latest Big Brother episode and concluding it all in a neat status on Facebook or Twitter or perhaps even a blog? Today we show ourselves, whether spotlessly or ironically pathetic, and thus the issue of the self acquires a whole new freshness, realities away from the travel descriptions of the 18th century.
A definition of terms is needed. Not only recent times have introduced contemplators on the distinction between the real and the imaginary in art. French academic Philippe Lejeune introduced a theory on autobiography in his work On Autobiography, expressing already in 1975 a frustration caused by ‘the endless repetition of arguments, the vagueness that surrounds the vocabulary that is used’ (Lejeune 3) on the undefined relations between biography and autobiography, autobiography and the novel. Alongside Lejeune and Doubrovsky and numerous other examples of French criticism, fictionalized autobiography has flourished in France for some time, long before reaching Scandinavia. Like Doubrovsky, I will use the term ‘autofiction’ to characterize Heivoll’s novel in this essay, as I hardly think autobiography could concisely describe a novel in which the primary focus is split between author’s life and a partly fictionalized crime story. Autofiction, used in this sense as a form of novel which fuses the boundaries between fiction and the author’s life, has primarily one effect, I would argue. When we are confronted by the haze of these boundaries, the complicating rather than clarifying, we are forced to interpret and ask questions in the process of reading. In this way, perhaps autofiction has an even greater effect in engaging the reader than ‘ordinary’ fiction.
Again, Gaute Heivoll writes a novel about Gaute Heivoll. In doing so, he braids in the story of an arsonist roaming his home village in rural southern Norway. Still, the transitions from author’s life to arsonist’s life are smooth for this very reason; they are linked together by the same realm, characters and places they both know, the small town ambience. When thirty years after the last ashes have settled, Heivoll brings the reader along to his gathering of story material, interviews, reminiscence, old documents, news clips. It is almost as if he is terrified of not being believed in his narration of the fire stories. Yes. The effect of the author’s presence has primarily one vital effect – it feeds authenticity to the story. This is a consistent pattern throughout, not only caused by Heivoll’s presence, but also by the inclusion of details that create validity: references to the village song, the World Cup in Argentina, Heivoll’s own christening timed aptly with the last fire, Grandma’s diaries, real people – details that two month old Heivoll can know very little about, but their credibility is still highly contagious. Can it be that fiction is more entertaining this way? When Heivoll clearly establishes the ‘reality’ in his work, does it become more unpredictable and gripping? In my opinion, there can be no doubt that this is the case.
There could be another very simple reason for why Heivoll chooses to write himself into his work. Who do we see when we see ourselves? Heivoll asks, thematising one of the novel’s many issues regarding identity. Regardless of whether one finds Heivoll’s story credible, there is one element that cannot be neglected: the parallel lives of the author and the arsonist – what lead one to become the criminal and the other to become the author writing the story of the criminal? The death of an arsonist and the birth of an authorship. It could have been me, is the thought that seems echo in Heivoll’s writing, almost sentimentally at times – they are both outsiders, clever in school, only-children. The similarities between Heivoll and the arsonist are by no doubt interesting enough to give Heivoll a legitimate reason to write himself into the story. But there is another issue of identity that is being presented, not uncommon in literature. Arne Melberg, in his book on autofiction Selvskrevet, brings up the issue of the self and crises. ‘Most self-portrayals oscillate between the completed position and the uncompleted so that it coordinates with the doubling of the self. The writing self is usually the finished self, while the written self is the unfinished: but the description leads to discoveries, changes, problems of interpretation, adjustments of all preconceptions and all the stories we tell about ourselves’ (Melberg 16, my translation). This is precisely the case with Heivoll, who goes through a crisis, particularly exemplified when lying to his dying father and childishly escaping to Denmark, but also in the process of his increasing desire to become an author. This desire, which culminates in Heivoll’s writing of the novel, eventually establishes his identity and resolves the old one – a confession that allows him to rid himself of the previous, false identity and fully enter the new and actual self: the author Heivoll.
This, I think, justifies him. Heivoll wants to establish his identity as an author. The balance between showing some parts of his life and leaving out others is what allows him to do so. Heivoll’s true being and potential of being is described and enacted in the text. When presented with autofictional texts, there are of course varieties of ways to read the author character. The reading I am basing this essay on presupposes the author’s inseparability with Heivoll, the fictional character, and Heivoll, the narrator – a heteronomous reading. Of course, the novel also opens for an autonomous reading, separating author and fictional character. However, I would argue that such a reading depletes Heivoll’s project of identity. It would eliminate all of his authority as author and extinguish the meaningful relations between Heivoll and Heivoll, fiction and reality. In this way the poststructuralist view, such as Foucault’s rejections of the author’s figure and context in his article ‘What is an author?’ require a complete reversal. The author’s life is here of utmost relevance. When Michel Foucault famously asks ‘what matter who’s speaking?’ (Foucault 1636), it clearly now makes all the difference.
What Heivoll here takes part in through his mixed self-portrayal, cannot be described as anything but a trend that has escalated in modern literature. Autofiction seems to be thriving particularly in Scandinavia, several authors among its literary ranks: Knausgaard and the subsequent turmoil, I have already mentioned, Dag Solstad, Espen Haavardsholm, Tomas Espedal. Are these writers, Heivoll included, merely victims? Seizing opportunities for self-portrayal and the endorphins that portrayal undoubtedly must release (everyone loves to talk about themselves), like photoshopping a Facebook profile picture? As I have shown, the trend overshadows all of society. Fiction has surely never been autonomous of that – it is a reflection, critical, explorational. What are the causes, the roots of self-portrayal in all its general forms? A point to note is that genres such as fantasy and crime also have far more popularity than ever. Reality, however, is unpredictable, real, available, vulnerable. Could it be a response to postmodernism’s identity dissolution and fragmentation of the self? With the death of the author declared long ago by Barthes and Foucault, one might speculate on whether the age of the impersonal has resulted in a nostalgic longing for public author personas. Is autofiction an endeavour to explore the literary institutions that are deeply rooted in us: the work, the author, the reception, then a blurring of those boundaries? In that case, I would argue that Heivoll has demonstrated this exploration masterly in his novel, orchestrating the forces of the characters, the work and the author writing the work to a perfect tumult. Conclusively, I believe that all in all autofiction is merely an attempt at exploring the question we are all intrigued by and which we cannot blame even authors of fiction for asking: who am I? Or in the case of Heivoll, who was I then, who am I now?
Bibliography
Foucault, Michel. ‘What is an author?’ in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W Norton & Company, 2001. 1622-1636. Print.
Heivoll, Gaute. Before I Burn. London: Atlantic Books, 2013. Print.
Kittang, Atle. ‘Kunsten og det røynlege’/’Art and Reality’. Edda Vol 110(04) (2010): 368-386. Print.
Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Print.
Melberg, Arne. Selvskrevet: Om selvframstilling i litteraturen. Oslo: Spartacus Forlag, 2007. Print.
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