The Author Disappearing? Authorial “Surrogates” and Contemporary Self/Other-Writing in Selected Works by Annie Ernaux, Édouard Louis, and Rachel Cusk

Avant, Vol. XII, No. 1, https://doi.org/10.26913/avant.2021.01.09
published under license CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Robert Kusek orcid-id
Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Institute of English Studies
Jagiellonian University in Kraków
robert.kusek@uj.edu.pl

Received 18 March 2021; accepted 9 September 2021; published 20 September 2021.
Download full text


Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate various diegetic gestures of deliberate and insistent self-erasure – quite conspicuous in the age of the authors’ glorious “return” and their hyper-visibility – which the essay wishes to identify as testifying to some countertendencies in present-day auto/biographical writing. The return of the author, officially acknowledged in the final decade of the twentieth century, resulted in contemporary writers unanimously and abundantly engaging themselves in narrating their real life stories – the phenomenon which prompted an unprecedented emergence of writers’ auto/biographical narratives at the turn of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, in recent years this authorial resurrection has also led to the rise of some new forms of self-writing which might be seen not only as a means of expressing one’s dissatisfaction with the present-day auto/biographical boom but also a manifestation of the crisis of both the auto/biographical self and form. These new self-narratives consciously play with the idea of authorship and question the principles of straightforward representation of the historical author in their literary production. The paper will analyse selected contemporary self-narratives (i.e. Annie Ernaux’s Les Années [2008], Édouard Louis’s En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule [2014], and Rachel Cusk’s “Fay” trilogy, which comprises Outline [2014], Transit [2016], and Kudos [2018]) so as to investigate the authors’ “surrogates” and thus the emergence of a new poetics of self/other-writing.

Keywords: author surrogate; autofiction; self/other-writing; Annie Ernaux; Édouard Louis; Rachel Cusk


References

Ali, M. (2017, January). A room of her own: Risky, revolutionary new novel. The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review. Retrieved October 30, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/books/review/rachel-cusk-transit.html.
Attlee, A. (2019, May). Fiction of facts. The Times Literary Supplement. Retrieved October 30, 2019, from https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/autofiction-fiction-of-facts/.
Bacholle-Bošković, M. (2013). Annie Ernaux: de la perte au corps Glorieux. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.
Barthes, R. (1979). S/Z. (R. Miller, Trans.). London: Cape.
Bennett, A. (2005). The author. London and New York: Routledge.
Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London and New York: Verso.
Burke, S. (1992). The death and return of the author: Criticism and subjectivity in Barthes, Fou-cault and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Burke, S. (2003). Authorship: From Plato to the postmodern. A reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Clark, A. (2018, June). Drawn from life: Why have novelists stopped making things up? The Guardian. Retrieved October 30, 2019, from
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/23/drawn-from-life-why-have-novelists-stopped-making-things-up.
Coetzee, J. M. (1992). Interview. In D. Attwell (Ed.), J.M. Coetzee. Doubling the point: Essays and interviews (pp. 391-395). Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Colonna, V. (2004). Autofictions et autres mythomanies littéraires. Auch: Tristram.
Cusk, R. (2014). Outline. London: Faber and Faber.
Cusk, R. (2016). Transit. London: Jonathan Cape.
Cusk, R. (2018). Kudos. London: Faber and Faber.
Dix, H. (Ed.). (2018a). Autofiction in English. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89902-2
Dix, H. (2018b). Introduction: Autofiction in English: The story so far. In H. Dix (Ed.), Autofiction in English (pp. 1-23). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89902-2_1
Doubrovsky, S. (2001). Fils. Paris: Folio.
Elkin, L. (2018, October). Bad genre: Annie Ernaux, autofiction, and finding a voice. The Paris Review. Retrieved October 30, 2019, from https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/26/bad-genre-annie-ernaux-autofiction-and-finding-a-voice/.
Eribon, D. (2018). Returning to Reims (M. Lucey, Trans.). London: Alley Lane.
Fell, A. S., & Welch, E. (2009). Annie Ernaux: Socio-ethnographer of contemporary France: Intro-duction. Nottingham French Studies, 48(2), 1-5.
https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2009-2.001
Ferrante, E. (2012). My brilliant friend (A. Goldstein, Trans.). New York: Europa Editions. Kindle.
Ferreira-Meyers, K. (2015). Autobiography and autofiction: No need to fight for a place in the limelight, there is space enough for both of these concepts. In K. W. Shands, G. Grillo Mikrut, D. R. Pattanaik, K. Ferreira-Meyers (Eds.), Writing the self: Essays on autobiography and au-tofiction (pp. 203-218). Södertörns: Södertörns högskola.
Garcia, J. J. E. (1996). Texts: Ontological status, identity, author, audience. Albany: State Universi-ty of New York Press.
Gasparini, P. (2004). Est-il je? Roman autobiographique et autofiction. Paris: Seuil.
Gatti, C. (2016, October). Elene Ferrante: An answer? The New York Review of Books. Retrieved October 28, 2019, from https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/10/02/elena-ferrante-an-answer/.
Genette, G. (1993). Fiction and diction (C. Porter, Trans.). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Heti, S., & Cusk, R. (2018, October). Sheila Heti And Rachel Cusk on why memoir is a dead end [Audio podcast]. Canadaland. Retrieved October 30, 2019, from https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/sheila-heti-and-rachel-cusk-on-why-memoir-is-a-dead-end/.
Hix, H. L. (1991). Morte d’Author: An autopsy (Arts and their philosophies). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hughes, A. (1999). Heterographies: Sexual difference in French autobiography. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Hugueny-Léger, E. (2017). Broadcasting the self: Autofiction, television and representations of authorship in contemporary French literature. Life Writing, 14(1), 5-18.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2016.1219215
Hugueny-Léger, E. (2018). Annie Ernaux. French Studies: A Quarterly Review, 72(2), 256-269.
https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/kny014
Jameson, F. (2018, October). Itemised. London Review of Books. Retrieved November 1, 2019, from https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n21/fredric-jameson/itemised.
Jordan, S. (2011). Writing age: Annie Ernaux’s Les Années. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 47(2), 138-149.
https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqq080
Kusek, R. (2017). Through the looking glass: Writers’ memoirs at the turn of the 21st century. Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press.
Lejeune, P. (1989a). The autobiographical pact. In P. J. Eakin (Ed.), Philippe Lejeune: On autobi-ography (K. Leary, Trans.) (pp. 3-30). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lejeune, P. (1989b). Autobiography in the third person. In P. J. Eakin (Ed.), Philippe Lejeune: On autobiography (K. Leary, Trans.) (pp. 31-47). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Louis, É. (2017). The end of Eddy (M. Lucey, Trans.). London: Harvill Sacker.
Lowdon, C. (2018, August). Books: What’s autofiction all about? The Sunday Times. Retrieved October 30, 2019, from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/books-whats-autofiction-all-about-3vc50l2st.
McIlvanney, S. (2001). Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
https://doi.org/10.5949/UPO9781846312571
Nehamas, A. (2002). Writer, text, work, author. In: W. Irwin (Ed.), The death and resurrection of the author? (pp. 95-115). Westport: Greenwood Press.
Rak, J. (2013). Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Sánchez Hernández, Á. (2017). L’auto-socio-biographie d’Annie Ernaux, un genre à l’écart. Anales de Filología Francesa, 25, 187-205.
Saunders, M. (2010). Self impression: Life-writing, autobiografiction, and the forms of modern literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.001.0001
Savoy, J. (2018). Is Starnone really the author behind Ferrante? Digital Scholarship in the Humani-ties, 33(4), 902-918.
https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqy016
Schmitt, A. (2010). Making the case for self-narration against autofiction. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 25(1), 122-137.
https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2010.10815365
Schmitt, A., & Kjerkegaard, S. (2016). Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: A real life in a novel. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 31(3), 553-579.
https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2016.1184543
Thomas, L. (1999). Annie Ernaux: An introduction to the writer and her audience. Oxford: Berg.
Vilain, P. (2008). Autofiction (J. Herman, Trans.). In V. Gillet (Ed.), The novelist’s lexicon: Writers on the words that define their work (pp. 5-7). New York and Chichester: Columbia Univer-sity Press.
https://doi.org/10.7312/vill15080-006
Vilain, P. (2009). L’Autofiction en théorie. Chatou: Les Éditions de la Transparence.
Wade, F. (2015, July). Interview with Rachel Cusk. The White Review, 14. Retrieved October 30, 2019, from http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-rachel-cusk/.
Willging, J. (2007). Telling anxiety: Anxious narration in the work of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hébert. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of To-ronto Press.
https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442684850
Worthington, M. (2017). Fiction in the “post-truth” era: The ironic effects of autofiction. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 58(5), 471-483.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1331999

Comments are closed.