• 1 An originary moment that is identified with Doubrovsky’s coining the term autofiction on the cove (...)
• 2 Indeed, this impersonal stance tips over into the aggressively anti-personal, if we take seriousl (...)
• 3 François Dosse describes transitive writing as responding to a writerly “désir d’être-au-monde”. (...)

1Contemporary French literature is marked by a dramatic turn away from fictionality, which we can trace back to the 1970s, to Serge Doubrovsky’s inauguration of autofiction as a mode of writing1, and to the waning of the New Novel’s revolt against conventional Balzacian realism. The New Novel can be considered the apogee of the twentieth-century literary quest for the impersonal with its systematic evacuation of the reassuringly solid narrators and characters that give literary personhood its most legible and familiar form2. Indeed, the New Novel can be seen as the last concerted effort in French literature to expand the boundaries of fictionality from within the fictional in a project that could not but pass through the impersonal. While impersonality and fictionality are not synonymous with each other, they are tethered insofar as the adoption of an impersonal stance takes the author more outside of themself than is the case with personal modes of writing such as autofiction, where it is the self that serves as the interface between the author and the “real” world, the nonfictional world. The self opens onto the referential, such that the personal is more closely tethered to the referential than the impersonal is, where the referential is closely tied to factuality (that is, to the nonfictional), as a fact is necessarily something that can be referred to as something that can be confirmed. Since the 1970s, the post-New Novel moment has seen French literature, under the auspices of fiction, become increasingly dominated by a writing of the real (i.e. the referential), which responds to a both writerly and readerly desire for what has been referred to as a “transitive” writing – a writing that has purchase on a world outside the text, taking the real world, real experience, as its object3. There is, however, a specificity to the referentiality toward which contemporary French literature has turned in its move away from fictionality, insofar as the referentiality that contemporary authors, operating in the age of the Internet, have dipped into continuously is largely auto/biographical – the author’s (or someone else’s) self serving as a concrete repertoire of experience that has occurred IRL, “in real life,” which can be mined for its literary potential.

• 4 Some notable examples are Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski (Gallimard, 2009), Laurent Binet’s HHhH (Gr (...)
• 5 The manifesto minces no words, starting off with a searing critique: “Depuis plusieurs années, et (...)

2This self-writing has proliferated like an algal bloom over the decades following Doubrovsky’s incursion, producing a contemporary literary field that is dominated by autofiction – by a tricked out literary display of some kind of self – and, more recently in the twenty-first century, by exofiction, which, like autofiction, blurs the boundary between the fictional and the factual, while taking not the autos as the site of such blurring, but rather real historical persons who are then transformed into characters4. If autofiction can be crudely described as fictionalized autobiography, then exofiction is fictionalized biography. As a 2018 manifesto signed by 16 authors and published in Le Monde bemoaned, contemporary French literature has authors suffocating between autofiction and exofiction, the lucrative nature of selling either narratives of oneself or of History via others’ selves taking up all the air in the literary room and preventing writers from inventing new forms and expressing a contemporary sensibility5.

• 6 Toril Moi, “It Isn’t Your Home”, London Review of Books, vol. 42, n° 7, 10 September 2020, URL: h (...)
• 7 Here, we can look to Michel Foucault’s work in the first volume of his Histoire de la sexualité, (...)

3This turn toward the real has given rise to scholarly work that has attempted to elucidate the elusive boundary between fact and fiction, as with Françoise Lavocat’s magistral work of the same name, Fait et fiction: pour une frontière (Seuil, 2016), or work that has explored the relation between archive and literature, Histoire with a capital H – history – and histoire with a lowercase h – story – as with Alison James’s The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature: Writing with Facts (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Ivan Jablonka’s manifesto, L’histoire est une littérature contemporaine (Seuil, 2014). What this essay takes up is not these big definitional questions, which grapple with the vexed boundary between fiction and the real, but rather the self that is the site in which this negotiation between fact and fiction occurs for the reader, who consumes these autofictional texts because of “a new craving for reality in literature, a new demand for emotional identification and an immersion in the world proposed by a novel”6, as Toril Moi has described it. In particular, I want to focus on Christine Angot and Édouard Louis – two of the most prominent contemporary authors associated with autofiction in France today – for the way they deploy confession, the mode of self-revelation and the dominant mode of autofictional writing, as complaint. Both confession and complaint are forms of discourse closely associated with the real in its form as “truth” – the truth of the self7 – but Angot and Louis have, in ways that distinguish them from other autofictional practitioners, systematically adopted confession-complaint as a discursive mode that gives their work a sharp political edge that is not a given in autofiction. Complaint assumes an adversarial stance. Their work’s adversarial force, however, itself becomes commodified, co-opted by the very machine Angot and Louis see their writing working against.

• 9 For a compelling discussion of autofiction that treats it not as a new genre but rather an extens (...)
• 10 See Philippe Vilain, L’autofiction en théorie, Paris, Éditions de la Transparence, 2009. Arnaud S (...)

5Building off Bakhtin’s observation, we can treat autofiction as the contemporary exemplar of the novel’s specificity as a mode of writing, as the sharpest manifestation of le propre du roman9. What makes autofiction seem new, then, is not particularly its much-vaunted hybridity10, but rather its capitalization on the capacity for representations of the self to bring said hybridity into relief as a primary selling point of the text. In other words, the novel has always been hybrid, always blurring boundaries and combining and integrating all kinds of discourses, but it’s in autofiction that we get a kind of breaking of the fourth wall, where the text signals, very self-consciously, that this is what it is doing, and that this is something that the reader should be drawn to.

• 11 This quote is taken from Édouard Louis’s no longer updated blog, from an entry entitled “La vérit (...)
• 12 Louis is a verified Instagram user with nearly 66K followers and a regular guest on radio and tel (...)

6Angot and Louis participate in this from opposite directions, with Angot insisting on sowing doubt in her autofictions, her narrators announcing their own unreliability, and Louis insisting on the veracity of his writing, which he describes as animated by “cette volonté de dire le vrai”11, a position he has reinforced through publishing his later works – Qui a tué mon père (2018), Combats et métamorphoses d’une femme (2021), Changer: méthode (2021) – without the generic label of roman which was affixed to his first two works, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (2014) and Histoire de la violence (2016). But despite antipodal positions vis-à-vis veracity and fiction, both authors turn to confession as a discursive form in order to turn it into another kind of discourse, the complaint, which is itself also non-fictional and veridical, and, like confession, also embedded in the juridical. As mentioned earlier, this intersection with the juridical is what gives their work such a political edge, as Angot and Louis occupy the position of not just victim, but plaintiff, in order to hold society accountable. They combine textual performances of victimhood – aiming to transcend the personal by transforming individual experience into a kind of agora of collective, shared grievance – with the crafting of highly mediatized personae12, which has proven to be a formula for commercial success and an extraordinary amount of visibility in the contemporary French literary scene (rare is the reader who is not familiar with either Angot or Louis). In examining Angot and Louis’s mobilization of confession-complaint, I am not trying to claim that they are representative of autofiction, which is incredibly heterogeneous and comprises a diversity of forms, styles, and intentions. Instead, I am taking them as case studies that allow for us to bring into clearer focus the way autofiction commodifies the self, the autos transformed into a brand, a product to be consumed, just as the political has itself become commodified in the age of social media, the increasingly compulsory staking out of political positions uncannily resembling brand loyalty (it is not a coincidence that the contemporary dynamic of so-called cancel culture is effectively modeled on the economic action of boycott). In a moment where our individual identities are bound up intimately with the compulsory announcement and performance of the “truth” of our political positions, looking to Angot and Louis’s confession-complaints, I cannot help but think that autofiction, in this particular vein at least, might be in fact the most accurate expression of our contemporary sensibility, if only as a symptom.

• 13 For an examination of the way contemporary authors such as Angot and Louis have used autofiction (...)

7Both Angot and Louis are authors who come from humble backgrounds in Northern France (that part of France associated with white trash, with Louis coming from more abject poverty than Angot) and scrabbled their way into the Parisian literary and cultural scene through the publication of confessional, intimate autofictional texts that reveal to the reader the author/narrator’s traumatic past – the trauma of father-daughter incest in Angot’s case, and the trauma of growing up homosexual and poor in Louis’s case13. As persons who came from the have-nots even though they are now bourgeois Parisians, who identify with the dominated rather than with the dominators, their oeuvres roil with anger against the ruling class, against a social order that allowed them to be victimized in the ways they were. Even as their texts operate confessionally, their self-revelations have an edge – they are confessions that are turned against the assumed bourgeois readership, the horrific nature of their experiences evidence of the comfortable reader’s complicity in sustaining a rotten social order that produces the kind of victims of which Angot and Louis are but two named and notable examples against the backdrop of the countless nameless victims who suffer from incest, misogyny, poverty, homophobia etc.:

• 16 Alison James, in a personal communication, has incisively commented on the question of positional (...)

8Their writing is political, and it is pointed, meant to draw blood on behalf of the victimized and the oppressed with whom they identify and make common cause. Their works say, effectively, in joining confession to complaint, that if the reader is to satisfy their desire for access to an author’s intimate past and self, to be able to become a consumer of trauma porn, that said reader must be forced to pay the price, to be held accountable as a representative of a culpable social order. The work becomes a kind of tribunal, where the reader is called on to assume a position, be it that of defendant/accomplice, witness, or plaintiff – neutrality is off the table, and one is interpellated in terms either of solidarity or of complicity16.

• 19 The name Marie-Christine obviously embeds Angot’s own name, so that the lover is a kind of narcis (...)

11Some have viewed the acerbity and self-loathing with which Angot recounts her three-month love affair with Marie-Christine19 as internalized homophobia and have been troubled by the parallel drawn between homosexuality and AIDS, with homosexuality being treated as a mortal, pathological illness. I think the Guibertian framing is getting at something else, which has to do with why Angot chooses to defer the narrative of incest to the last forty pages, the first hundred-forty pages or so dedicated instead to narrating this brief homosexual relationship. AIDS is a differed disease, appearing years after the acute infection with HIV, and the way the incest narrative is differed establishes a direct parallel between AIDS and incest, with the explicit narrative only able to appear after an earlier acute infection with… what?

• 20 Elise Bidoit, the ex-wife of Angot’s ex, Charly Clovis, who twice sued Angot for violation of her (...)
• 21 bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Boston, South End Press, 1984, p. 36.

13Angot is deeply critical of the social order as a manifestation of patriarchy and her critique of patriarchal violence, the violence that allows for the young girl that Christine was to be victimized by her father, extends to a critique of the institution of the nuclear family as is evident in the betrayal Angot experiences when her lover, Marie-Christine, chooses to spend Christmas with her nuclear family rather than with Christine and Christine’s daughter, Léonore, valorizing the so-called natural family over the queer form of kinship Angot proposes in its stead. What Angot puts on trial, then, is, as with Guibert, the social order, but it is an accusation that targets the structure of the family that makes possible incest to begin with. Part of Angot’s strategy for airing out not her dirty laundry but society’s dirty laundry looks a lot like airing out not just her dirty laundry but that of her family members and various social relations: her partners (ex and current) figure extensively in her work, and by extension, so do the people who are close to them20. To turn literature into a tribunal, to weaponize confession, comes at the expense of the family, which, as bell hooks has argued, is the first line for the reproduction of patriarchal social norms, and is where domination is taught21.

• 23 Louis describes his compulsion to repeat the same story as follows: “On m’a dit que la littératur (...)
• 24 For more on the real world consequences of Histoire de la violence, see Cécile Bouanchaud, “Affai (...)

17Given that Louis’s whole oeuvre charges the social order for the way it is founded on exclusion – the exclusion of persons such as himself (the economically marginalized, the sexually marginalized) and persons such as Reda (the racially and sexually marginalized) – we can read this passage as a description of Louis’s entire literary project: to reclaim, from the ruling class and state structures of domination, his right to narrate himself while narrating against these violent entities – a narrative imperative from which Louis cannot withdraw, as is evident in the way he produces text after text compulsively revisiting the originary violence of his exclusion from the world of the bourgeois haves23. But this passage is more than a description of Louis’s literary project, it is the troubling metaleptic hinge that connects the extratextual world of the police and the law to the textual world of this rape and its consequences, which are the stuff of a text explicitly identified as a novel. In the real, extratextual world, this story did indeed become the property of the law: Riadh, the real person for whom Reda was an alias, was arrested for a different crime than the rape and robbery of Louis, but because Louis had filed a police report that launched an investigation in which Riadh’s DNA had been sampled and entered into the system, Riadh was brought to trial for the charges Louis was making against him. And in the court proceedings, the distinction between fact and fiction was further blurred when Louis’s lawyer tried to have the novel, Histoire de la violence, admitted as evidence, stripping it of whatever fictionality the generic status of novel accorded to it. Riadh was imprisoned for nearly a year leading up to the trial and was found guilty of aggravated robbery but not of rape, and, following Louis’s appeal, was retried, at which point he was further disculpated, his guilty charge being demoted from that of aggravated robbery to simple, non-violent robbery. Riadh left France, in part, according to his lawyers at least, because of the way the success of the novel and the mediatization of the trial had led to his being deprived of the presumption of innocence so that he would always be unable to rid himself of the stigma of guilt for the rape Louis accused him of, despite being officially exonerated by the law. For Riadh and his lawyers, Louis’s novel-as-complaint, then, was responsible for the ruining of his life24.

• 25 For an interesting discussion of the way Angot’s continued writing of the real exposes her juridi (...)
• 26 We can see in the court’s decision a different convergence of the literary with the juridical than (...)

18That there is collateral damage to real persons is of little consequence to either Angot or Louis. Angot, as mentioned earlier, wasn’t content with being sued once by Élise Bidoit (her ex’s ex) and paying damages; she went on to do it again, showing absolutely no remorse25. Louis, after decrying the violence of the carceral system, appealed the court’s decision to find Riadh not guilty of rape, demanding that the very system that he has built a career repudiating punish, which is to say, imprison, Riadh. The eventual double-exculpation of Riadh, which effectively rejected Louis’s Histoire de la violence to claim that it was in fact an histoire de la non-violence26, casts this sentence by Louis in a different light: “Ma guérison est venue de cette possibilité de nier la réalité” (HV 209). The context of this sentence is one where Louis cites Hannah Arendt as asserting that “la négation délibérée de la réalité – la capacité de mentir – et la possibilité de nier les faits – celle d’agir – sont intimement liées” (HV 209), so that Louis is casting his denying the reality of his rape as the means to act, to retain agency. The intertwining of healing and the denial of reality is provocative: if the publication of Histoire de la violence constituted a kind of talking cure for Louis, one that allowed him to reintegrate a shattered world, was it at the price of passing off as real something that wasn’t? Did the capacity to act become elided with the capacity to lie?

• 27 Michel Foucault, op. cit., p. 81.

19Angot and Louis’s autofictions shift from confession – from the position of being coerced into speech (by the law, by a psychoanalyst, by what Foucault refers to as “cette ruse interne de l’aveu”27 – that illusory belief that confession is a source of freedom) – to that of complaint (not being coerced into speech but coercing others to listen by leveraging the weight of the factual and the real). By producing confessions that double as complaints, they effectively invert the logic of confession, which, as Foucault has demonstrated in La volonté de savoir, is at the core of external validation. The complaint flips the script so that the complainant is no longer looking for external validation but rather claims for themselves that power to validate. How are Angot and Louis, in the position of complainant or plaintiff, able to seize this power for themselves?

• 28 Rey Chow, A Face Drawn in the Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present, New York, Col (...)

20Here, Rey Chow’s reading of Foucault against the backdrop of (social) media and the contemporary attention economy in her latest book, A Face Drawn in the Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present (2020), is instructive. Chow underlines the ecclesiastical framework of Foucault’s theorization of confession and looks to the Chinese cultural revolution as a moment that effectively secularized confession, so that it is no longer to God that one confesses for that external validation, but, in the case of China, the Communist party, which instated a regime of totalitarian confession. Chow describes the effect of this totalitarian confession in China as one where Chinese peasants quickly learned that “one can top from the bottom, seizing the moral high ground by occupying the downtrodden position”28 and Chow goes on to suggest that “some of these totalitarian confessional dynamics have long found their way into late capitalist society” by means of a

• 31 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senel (...)
• 32 Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet (9 December 1852), Préface à la vie d’écrivain, ou E (...)

21Chow describes this shift in Foucault’s terms as one in which the late capitalist subject has become “an entrepreneur of himself” – “being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings”31. This is a rather canny description of Angot and Louis, whose literary projects can be described in effect as a means of casting blame on a society that they have been able to profit from quite literally through the commodification of their selves and their injuries: Angot and Louis are both spectacularly mediatized authors and seemingly at ease in those mediatic spaces, which reinforce the link between their biographical selves and their narrative selves by making it easier for readers/viewers to tether the experiences they recount in their texts to the person on the screen. And indeed, it is of vital importance that the injuries, the complaints, that they write are theirs, as it is that one-to-one correspondence between extratextual and textual reality that compels readers to buy and consume their writing. Angot and Louis are authors who understand that in a secular moment such as ours, which is dominated by a profane mass media that routinely transforms reality and suffering into clickbait, ratings, and profit, that the recipe for literary success lies not in a Flaubertian quest for impersonality, as embodied in his ideal narrator who would be “comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout et visible nulle part”32, but rather in its opposite: a compulsive, compulsory personality embodied in a narrator who is hypervisible, hyperpresent. Who needs a God-like literary presence when you can have the self – Angot’s self, Louis’s self?

• 33 Thangam Ravindranathan, “House of Reading”, Romanic Review, vol. 114, n° 3, 2023, p. 594.
• 34 Ibid., p. 594.
• 35 Ibid., p. 597.

22I’m not saying that fiction shouldn’t be the site of complaint, but that things get messy when the kind of “real” fiction that Angot and Louis produce, anchored in the confessional mode that puts forward the self as an anchor in the real, becomes the site of complaint. Fiction, when it is operating in an impersonal mode, is better able to operate that critique, than when it is passing through a personal writing where the author and the narrator align. This is because a more impersonal fiction, a non-self writing (what Thangam Ravindranathan refers to as “self-difference”33), is free from the self-commodifying logic that inheres in autofiction and able to avoid the conflicts of self-interest to present us with an outward-turned, more universal and portable critique. Ravindranathan puts it eloquently: “For me, however unfashionably, reading as an experience of strangeness and self-difference continues to be – is more urgently than ever – the most vital capacity and commitment that we should transmit”34. Her call for a selfdifferent reading is “no more and no less than a call to read, to undertake difficult – but also imaginative, solidary, reclamatory, emancipatory, expansive, utopian – readings and rereadings, which alone will allow us to live in this world rather than destroy it or flee from it”35. It is, in short, in a literary experience that deviates or departs from the self, that we can find literature’s political purchase.

• 37 For examples of contemporary French authors who operate in this more impersonal vein, we can look (...)

24This aspiration to transform the autofictional self into a site of alterity collapses when the authorial self finds themself in an actual courtroom, required by law to accept their identification with their narrative self. But even if we assent to autofiction as a form of writing that reveals the ways in which the self is a construction, a fiction, and thus makes the self strange, a site of alterity for the author, this authorial alterity is still undone in the way the vast majority of readers read autofiction, which, as Moi had argued, is in order to immerse oneself in the real and to identify with the author. Identification effectively annuls the distancing work of alterity that might be effected by the textual construction of an autos, as identification consolidates the narrative self to make it possible for the reader to immerse oneself in the emotions that derive from the authorial self, which animates the narrative self. To speak of the self can certainly be a way of speaking of others, but it’s a way of speaking of selves that are selfsame, rather than selfdifferent. Identification stabilizes; impersonality ruptures, opening up the “imaginative, solidary, reclamatory, emancipatory, expansive, utopian” spaces in which our relation to the real can be questioned and refashioned37.

• 38 One notable exception is Anne Garréta’s “Autofiction: la Ford intérieure et le self roman”, in Je (...)

28My critique of the political potential of the autofictional self thus has nothing to do with the common critique of autofiction as navel-gazing, narcissistic. The “narcissism” that autofiction is charged with is distinct from the critique I am making here. Self-celebration, self-investment, self-love, self-obsession: I do not find these things inherently problematic when they are attributed to a third-person or a fictive first-person self-absorbed narrator. It is the correspondence between narrator and author that poses a problem in the way it invites readerly identification – identifying the author as well as identifying with the author – even as it is the reason why autofiction is celebrated. However, the critical and scholarly accounts of autofiction do not reflect the fundamental change in the self that has taken place38.

• 39 I would like to thank Margaret Cohen for her invitation to present an early version of this artic (...)

29Twenty-first-century discussions of autofiction continue to treat the autos behind autofiction as if it were the same self of the pre-Internet age, when we were not compelled to inhabit the world as packets of data to be mined by voracious companies, as entrepreneurs of the self exquisitely attuned to our existence as virtual representations that are tied up in a 24/7 market (even, or perhaps especially in the so-called marketplace of ideas). Just as we can’t operate in the Anthropocene as if climate collapse hasn’t already arrived, we cannot operate literarily as if the internet hasn’t melded with late capitalism in such a way as to fundamentally alter our conception of the self. Just as there is no way, barring sudden and massive extinction, that we are going to return to sub-400 ppm levels of CO2, we aren’t able to go back to a pre-social media experience of the self, which has been completely coopted by a logic of consumption. In our monstrous epoch, there is no ethical way to be perceived anymore as a self. While we cannot avoid being entrepreneurs of the self in our day to day lives under late capitalism – confessing and complaining autofictionalists, all of us – there is no reason we need to cede literature to that traffic in the self as yet another thing to be extracted and traded, mined and discarded. Autofiction’s displacement of fiction has revealed the way in which literature has become extractivist and consumerist, suggesting that rather than continuing to feed our resources into the incredibly productive and still-growing autofictional factory, we might be better off recycling older modes of creating and inhabiting fiction instead.39