Stijn Vervaet
Literature makes you feel and it can get you thinking too. But how do you move from signs on the page to thoughts and feelings? And why does fiction sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Stijn Vervaet and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition, and Emotions project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the weeks to come. Today's guest is Alexandra Effe, a postdoctoral fellow at LCE doing research on the intersection of fictional and autobiographical writing, which is also the topic of our conversation today. Thank you for joining us, Alexandra.
Alexandra Effe
It's a pleasure to be here.
Stijn Vervaet
I'd like to start by mentioning that you work on autofiction and how literary narratives blur the boundary between art and life. Could you briefly say something about the concept of autofiction? Where does it come from? What does it cover, or how should we understand it? What is new about the term, and why do we actually need a new term? For example, compared to the already established notions of life writing, autobiographical writing, or autobiography?
Alexandra Effe
Sure… it was Serge Dubrowsky, the autobiographer and critic, who first came up with the term in 1977, and it appears first on the back cover of his book, Fils. The term is problematic and possibly flawed, as many have pointed out since then, which may be because it was an ad hoc coinage on Dubrowski’s side. So, broad definitions designate all text to be autofiction that declare themselves to be novels, while one can trace parallels between author and character. One might think of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, or Joyce’s A portrait of the artist as a young man, but in such broad definitions one also thinks of all texts as autofiction that fill in gaps of autobiographical memory with detailed descriptions or quoted conversation. In a narrow definition, on the other hand, one considers as fictions only texts that explicitly demand a dual attitude of reception. And most critics subscribe to these kinds of more narrow understandings of autofiction, I think. So they think of autofictional texts as texts that are characterised by an explicit and intentional interplay of autobiographical and fictional modes. One might say, and people have said, that we don't need the term, that it is enough to say, life-writing, perhaps experimental life writing. But if one does so, the specific kind of hybridity and experimentalism of autofictional texts gets lost, I think at least. So the term autofiction provides a conceptual focus, despite all its problems, is my opinion.
Stijn Vervaet
We'll get back to the issue of hybridity that you just mentioned in a minute, but before we do so, I'd like to ask you, why is studying auto fiction so timely or so relevant today? Is it just a literary trend that deserves scholarly attention? I'm thinking here of the boom in autofiction and more broadly in reality narratives that is perhaps, if only partly, related to social media, which on the one hand foster and facilitate the individual creation of certain forms of life narratives, but on the other hand, perhaps also saturate our lives with reality narratives.
Alexandra Effe
I agree the topic is timely for all the reasons you mention. We're surrounded by narratives more than ever. We find it more difficult than ever, perhaps, to delineate between what is real and what is story or imagination. And there are more opportunities for more people to author their life stories and to make them public on a daily basis. Also, to change them on a daily basis, but also and perhaps more importantly, it is more and more recognised also now scientifically, for example, in memory research, that we do not really, perhaps cannot, differentiate between what is reality and what merely, in brackets, our perception or creatively reconstructed memory. But actually part of the aim of my research is also to show not only how timely the topic is, but that autofiction is a centuries old phenomenon that has always had relevance.
Stijn Vervaet
So there are actually more than enough reasons why autofiction deserves our attention. When you mention that autofiction is a centuries old phenomenon, one issue that comes to mind is the debate around fictionality and recent insights, that readers react in a different way to factual and fictional texts. Could you perhaps say something more about this? For example, can reader’s different reactions be explained by the different genre expectations with which readers approach a specific text, and this in turn by the way in which the text is framed or presented to the reader? Or aren't the things so simple as I am presenting them here?
Alexandra Effe
It's a very complex question. I'll try to answer as best as I can, also, within the relatively short time frame that we have here. So the answer first hinges on how you define fictionality, and the concept is probably even more debated than that of autofiction. I won't go into differences in existing approaches and definitions in detail, but let me merely say that the most productive understanding of fictionality, for an interest in autofiction, I think, is a cognitive one. Empirical studies on textual processing and on brain activation patterns, indeed let us deduce something like fictional and factual reading modes. Studies show, for example, that if a text is read as factual, we pay more attention to causal relations between events and to situational information. Readers are interested in how actions lead to outcomes and in what happened, and readers are more interested in checking and verifying information for accuracy and plausibility. Also, in a self-relevant reading mode, which often arises from factuality, but does not depend on it necessarily, regions of the brain linked to the default mode network — those are the areas responsible for self-referential thinking and autobiographical memory retrieval — are activated to a stronger degree. And brain activation patterns also indicate higher affective or emotional involvement. On the other hand, when a text is read as fictional, readers pay more attention on average to linguistic formal dimensions and to abstract and thematic meaning. Readers are more interested in motifs behind an action, which also means in the actor’s mind. Moreover, in a fictional reading mode, readers are more open to polyvalent interpretations and to looking at texts through alternative frames of reference. And lastly, more personal memories — these are called remindings — in which the reader is active as an agent, tend to be evoked in such texts. So on the basis of such insights, I think fictionality can helpfully be defined as a quality of texts that is assigned by readers and cued by textual, and also paratextual characteristics, which are linked to learned generic cognitive frames that elicit distinct modes of processing. And in this understanding, it's important to note that fictionality does not necessarily mean invention. It can also mean merely textual shaping, and it is not a characteristic inherent in the text alone, but one that comes into being in a way only in the interaction with the reader. So in a sense, yes, fictionality is central. There are strong indicators showing that we react differently to, and process differently, text that we take to be fictional than those that we take to be factual. But interestingly, and perhaps seemingly paradoxically, there are also fairly recent insights into the workings of the brain, from research on cognitive projections, often in the context of research on the brains default mode network—We've heard about this actually in other episodes of this podcast— and these insights show, that what happens in our brain is the same, or at least very similar, whether we project into past, the future or hypothetical states or into a fictional story world. Now I take these insights in combination to suggest that what we imagine, remember, and encounter in stories, be they imaginary or not, is phenomenologically not always clearly distinct, and that there are cross influences between these cognitive acts. And if we combine this knowledge with our recognition that texts that we take to be fictional, affect us differently from text that we take to be factual, we can form a hypothesis about autofictional modes. So my basic argument about autofictional texts is that we have a bit of both worlds. We have the real world relevance and the effective engagement of the factual and the creative thinking and loosened cognitive patterns of the fictional. And therefore I think the autofictional modes have high potential to transform also our real world and autobiographical thinking.
Stijn Vervaet
In your forthcoming publications, you posit that autofiction begs us to take a new holistic view on the relationship and interaction between author, text and reader. Why is it important to revisit this triad when discussing autofiction? I used to the term revisit, because wasn't this already present in older theories as well, such as in Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact. So what was actually missing from older accounts of autofiction?
Alexandra Effe
So most existing accounts, that I know of at least, focus either on the text or on the reader’s experience, sometimes also on these two elements in combination, or on the author’s creative process — this less frequently. And I think that autofiction is always best considered as a triad of all three. It is too slippery a phenomenon to adhere only in one of these elements, I think. It is not enough, in other words, if an author intends a text to be autobiography or fiction or autofiction, indeed, not even if he or she says so explicitly in a preface, perhaps, or on the title page. We all know that readers may read differently. Neither, I think, is it productive to say that the reader simply decides how to read a text and which genre it belongs to. This may be so, but more interesting is, on the basis of which textual signals and extra textual elements, for example, knowledge about the author, the reader draws these conclusions. Lejeune does talk about a pact between author and reader, yes, and my approach is indebted to this idea that readers sort of look for how a text was written, but Lejeune is not really interested in how authors signal genre affiliation and in what happens if there are no signals, as is often the case, or contradictory signals, which is often the case in autofictional texts. So therefore I propose, also in a forthcoming publication, that you referred to, with Allison Gibbons, that it is necessary, or at least very fruitful to approach autofiction holistically. And by this, we mean to consider the triad — to think not solely of autofiction as a genre, but of autofictional texts and of other fictional modes of writing and reading.
Stijn Vervaet
Could you perhaps elaborate a bit more on these two modes so the autofictional mode of writing and the autofictional mode of reading, and how we can study them and how, perhaps, in this way, we can arrive at a kind of a new working definition of autofiction?
Alexandra Effe
So my attempt at definitions actually goes right to those modes, and I would say that to read in an autofictional mode means to answer to a text’s invitations to approach it as simultaneously fictional and autobiographical. This entails the combination of or an oscillation between learned processing modes required for factual and fictional texts. This means to, on the one hand, approach the text for information on the real world, in particular on the real author, and to evaluate the relevance of this information for oneself and for one's own life. But it means also to approach the text for diversion for aesthetic pleasure, for indirect knowledge, for general truth and for thematic meanings, it means to refrain from applying standards of empirical verification or falsification and from forming expectations for propositional truth. Neurocognitively, autofictional reading is likely to be characterised by activation of brain areas linked to the default network and responsible for acts of self-projection and autobiographical memory, possibly even in combination with the relaxation of connecting threads between brain networks, as in states of dreaming. Fictional reading would be characterised by activation of the same areas, but empirical data suggests that autobiographical and factual texts might create higher personal relevance and affective engagement. Only fictional and autofictional modes in turn are likely to be characterised by more relaxed connecting threads between networks. And the last point is that often, but not necessarily, autofictional reading also means to be aware of and devote cognitive energy to the interplay between factual and fictional modes, and to experience uncertainty about communicated intention and ontology of textual elements. So these are my suspicions about an autofictional reading mode.
Stijn Vervaet
And would this be a mode that readers use kind of automatically, or do you think it's more kind of a normative framework, that scholars studying autofictional works should try to apply?
Alexandra Effe
I think that if someone reads in the autofictional mode, this is what is taking place roughly. I don't think this is something that one consciously, uh, adopts, that one can put oneself in that mind frame. But of course, not all readers will respond to the texts invitations and adopt that mode.
Stijn Vervaet
I see… and could you also say something about the auto fictional mode of writing then?
Alexandra Effe
So some parts of that mode would be parallel, would map onto the reading mode. Roughly in an autofictional writing mode, an author, I think, starts out from aims to represent him or herself, or dimension of the self, and intends also for readers to receive the text as such. But the author also intentionally and purposefully takes creative liberties in the act of self-narration, and intends for readers to pay attention to the texts craftedness and to its style as well. So autofictional texts aim at a form of self-presentation, but at other things too, one might say. Autofictional writing may include a relaxed, intentional stance and openness for imaginative experiment and exploration, also on the author’s side.
Stijn Vervaet
In your work, you also claim that auto fictional modes of writing and reading with a whole array of potential affordances and affects on the side of the author, and of the reader. Could you elaborate a bit on this and perhaps illustrate this claim with some examples? And would these affordances and affects roughly be the same for all authors and readers? And finally, how do these affordances relate to your triad of author, text and reader?
Alexandra Effe
So yes, as you say, I distinguish three affordances, which can also be understood as three dimensions or levels of the dynamics surrounding autofictional modes. They roughly map onto the triad of author, text and reader, although there are overlaps. So first, autofictional modes can destabilise self-representation and generic and cognitive frames. This is actually the only dimension that is really visible at the textual level alone. We can describe pronoun shifts, for example, play with perspective and play with genre markers. Second, and here we enter the contextual realm of author and reader, in the first instance, that of the author, autofictional writing can afford creative thinking, self-exploration, self-understanding and self-transformation. We can explain this dimension through, amongst other things, theories of the extended mind and knowledge of the workings of memory. Authors also frequently speak about insights they gained through the process of writing, about how working with autobiographical material creatively allows them to see aspects of themselves and their lives differently. There are even studies on creative writing in classroom contexts that confirm that this is a possible effect. And for readers too, I believe, similar ways of creative thinking can be enabled through engagement with the text. This links to research on mind wandering which we heard about in another episode of this podcast too. And third, autofictional modes, I think, can facilitate empathy, affect changes in how we think about self and other, and perhaps even spark action. There are autofictional texts with a political and ethical agenda, sometimes in the context of testimony, where fictionalisation can help to speak for a collective, to implicate the reader and to address him or her directly. Now, whether texts, not autofictional ones specifically, can lead to pro-social behaviour is much debated and difficult to test, but I think one can definitely see how autofictional texts have a high potential for creating reader engagement. And the holistic approach, that I want to adopt, allows us to see these potential affordances and effects, and to see how they are enabled by particular elements in the text, but only in combination with context. You asked, are they the same for all authors and readers? And I would say the affordances, yes, in other words autofictional texts and autofictional modes of writing and reading have a certain potential and that potential is there for all. But the effects, no, they will be different for everyone. Surely they will depend on personal background on many other faculties.
Stijn Vervaet
Do you think, when you mention actually that, uhm, for authors, auto fictional writing can afford creative thinking, self-exploration… So would you agree that auto fictional writing would have a kind of therapeutic effect on authors who’re practising it? Or have you had any discussions with living writers about this and what their views are about it?
Alexandra Effe
So I think this is a potential in autofictional texts and… I've not talked about it so much with living authors, but I've looked a little bit at letters, for example, or comments and diaries, where we don't have authors saying, this autofictional text sort of changed my life in that direction, but where we have authors think about different forms of self-writing. For example, the diary format or these sort of more traditional autobiography format, and where they do talk about, things being enabled by working creatively with material, and sometimes when one traces manuscript revisions, which is possible for some authors, luckily, you might even find comments where somebody perceives sort of an insight that has been gained by a particular passage. So you also mentioned how we can study these things, and this is one way of going about it. It might be possible to conduct empirical studies, such as those in creative writing programmes. But I don't know how insightful it would be because there are so many parameters that that cannot be controlled. So the way I go about it, in the first instance at least is I start from theoretically substantiated speculation and I draw on theories of reading, theories of text processing, psychological studies, etc. And we can gain access, as I mentioned to the authors side, for example, through what authors say, it can be an interview, it can be in their texts themselves, in paratexts. Of course we can never be sure how honest they are, and moreover, how much they themselves know about the process. Some of it may be unconscious rather than conscious. But into some unconscious elements of the creative process, we might get a glimpse, for example through manuscripts. So this is how one can approach the side of the author to an extent and the side of the reader can be approached, apart from trying to form models for studies, through reviews, which too of course will not express all that a reader experienced, no unconscious, and not even all conscious effects, because they may be written with a certain purpose. But it is a good starting point, I think, and for example, just now I'm evaluating reviews on Goodreads together with a research assistant, for some contemporary text,, and this is a great resource too.
Stijn Vervaet
Thank you for giving us some insight in your approach and how we will tackle these questions from a methodological point of view. At the beginning of our talk we also mentioned the relatively recent boom in auto fictional literature. But in your account autofiction is not just a current fashion, but a genre with a long tradition, and you've also mentioned already the study of manuscripts, but in your ongoing book project you go for a decidedly historical approach. Why, is this to outline a kind of genealogy, a kind of a long term development of auto fictional modes of writing? Or does your historical outline suggest a kind of linear development of autofiction from early beginnings, or metaphorically speaking, childhood in the 18th century to maturity or adulthood in the 21st?
Alexandra Effe
So I've got two main reasons for adopting the historical approach. The first is it's simply lacking. The really vibrant discussion of autofiction mainly focuses on texts from the second half of the 20th century onwards. It's understandable that this is the case, since the coinage of the term is a recent one, and since there has been a boom of autofictional texts in recent years, which we also talked about a little bit. And in recent years only we find authors who have written consciously under the label or against it, indeed. However, with an interest in the phenomenon of the autofictional, there is really no good reason, I think, to limit the discussion to this time frame. Also since, within research on autofiction from this time frame there is general agreement that texts can be labelled and read as autofictional, whose authors do not present them as such. And others have explored autofiction outside of the second half of the 20th century, but not a lot and not going back very far, often. The second reason is that while we might say that extending the term risks losing focus, that one risks labelling just anything autofiction in trying to do so, I think that rather expanding the concept of autofiction provides a very useful theoretical lens that shows us something about life writing experiments from other centuries that has so far not been fully seen. So autofiction as a lens allows us to see some texts anew. It is certainly true that, say, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne did not think of themselves as reading autofiction. But, exploring the autofictional dimension of their texts allows us to see their practise a little differently. You also asked whether I sort of trace a linear development.
Stijn Vervaet
That was a provocative question.
Alexandra Effe
I, I wouldn't say so. I don't think so, uh, a development towards what exactly one would have to ask. And as far as I've come in my work, we can of course, we can trace changes in dominant forms and functions. We can trace developments, but we also see elements that recur in variation in each period. I'll just mention one example of a development or of a change, at least. I said when we spoke about definitions that often, but not necessarily, autofictional reading means to be aware of and to devote cognitive energy to the interplay between factual and fictional modes, and to experience uncertainty about communicative intention and about ontology of textual elements. So this characteristic of autofictional reading is one that I think really only becomes dominant in the 20th century. But I would not, and perhaps in disagreement with some other scholars, take this to mean that the phenomenon of autofictional reading and writing did not exist before, not least because not all 20th and 21st century autofictional texts demand that one pay particular attention to this interplay. I wouldn't want to say that 21st century autofiction is necessarily more advanced than that of the 18th. It is different, yes, to an extent at least. But I'm hesitant to speak of linearity.
Stijn Vervaet
I see. To conclude I would like I would like to ask you for a reading recommendation for the listener, so that they maybe can help themselves to some autofiction.
Alexandra Effe
With pleasure, so I'll name two texts roughly three centuries apart. The first is probably not known to many of the listeners, but depends on which area they come from, of course. Delarivier Manley’s Adventures of Rivella. This is a text published at the beginning of the 18th century and written most likely to prevent someone else from writing a negative account of Manley’s life. The life was not in conformity with societal conventions of the times, one might say, and it is a third person account framed as a conversation between two gentlemen, both infatuated with Rivella/Manley. And a really clever way of defending her public image, of promoting herself as author and navigating politically. And then the second recommendation is Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the future which was published in 2019. This book interweaves the story of a first person narrator, who writes about a year of her life based on a diary she found that she kept for a year 30 years earlier. We have three strands of the narrative, excerpts from the diary, the present self-writing the book that we are reading, about the past self, based on the diary ,and excerpts from a novel that that person 30 years ago was writing then. And the book shows that Hustvedt is very knowledgeable in terms of psychology and cognitive science. It is a very interesting interplay between different versions of a self, and also a nuanced reflection on memory, imagination and autobiographical writing.
Stijn Vervaet
Could you perhaps read a fragment from one of those two books?
Alexandra Effe
I've brought Memories of the future so I'm happy to read a little passage from the book. It's fairly early on, and here we go.
“In this respect, we differ, my former self and I. It was impossible for me to know at twenty-three that the dreadful phrase “life is short” has meaning, that at sixty-one I know there is far less ahead of me than behind me, and that while she wasn't terribly curious about herself as herself, I have become curious about her as an incarnation of hopes and errors that had or seem to have had a determining effect on what I am now. While she was intent on rushing ahead on that imaginary timeline, the one that moves from left to right on the page and chronicles the evolution of organisms over millennia or Roman emperors or the life of Napoleon (as if time were space and not something wholly ineffable, an invisible motion so enigmatic that to think hard about it means to lose it altogether), I am interested in understanding how she and I are relatives, which means turning around and following the timeline in the other direction because I can't imagine time without spatial metaphors—without backward and forward, without roads behind me and ahead of me, as if I am walking through it—but then my space has only three grubby Euclidean dimensions. Time, the physicists tells us, is the fourth. In our plain old human world, the young woman who lifts her eyes when she hears the door open at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in September 1978 becomes the aging woman who sits here now in September 2016 in her study in a house in Brooklyn and types the sentence you are reading in your own present, one I cannot identify. But over there in Minkowski spacetime, the still girlish “I” and the much older “I” coexist, and in that startling 4D reality, the two of us can theoretically find each other and shake hands or converse together because in the block-universe time doesn't flow or dribble or leak, and it makes no difference whether you travel into the past or into the future. My husband, Walter, tells me the mathematics work out beautifully.”
— and here I skip a little bit —
“And in this particular book, the book you are reading now, the young person and the old person live side by side in the precarious truths of memory. Here I am free to dance over decades in the small white space between paragraphs or linger over one bright minute in my life for page after page or toy with tenses that point backward and forward. I am free to follow the earlier self with interruptions from the later self because the old lady has perspective the young person cannot have. I meet myself on the page, then, on the pages she rode years ago and the ones I am writing now.”
(Hustvedt 2019, pp. 28–32).
Stijn Vervaet
Thank you, and thank you for this very nice conversation today.
Alexandra Effe
It was my pleasure.