自我小說與當代文化中過剩的真實

Autofiction and Surplus Reality in the Contemporary Cultural Landscape

「自我小說」指的是作家自己成為作品敘述者兼主角，以自身人生為故事主體，但可能做某種虛構化／小說化安排的創作。本文主張，近二十餘年出現的北美自我小說，應被視為指認當代立即性轉向的重要指標；立即性意即倡議直接呈現或直接經驗真實事物的思維。當代自我小說被不少論者正向看待，讚許其自我證成甚至開啟新文類的嘗試。然本文的立場是，自我小說所揚舉的直接性，在許多面向上都與當前資本主義及當道數位媒介所奉持的「無遠弗屆」邏輯相應和，也因之容易削弱吾人的批判力。再者，自我小說作者對小說創作，提出了一種不斷堆疊真實指涉性的真實觀，曲解了虛構性與真實之間的關係，委屈了文學想像可能開發出的真相。本文分三大部分：第一部分簡介自我小說的發展；第二部分爬梳近期小說研究中三道重要的論辯路徑，探看它們與自我小說研究的共通點；第三部分則以美國作家克勞絲的《我愛迪克》及加拿大作家賀蒂的《如何為人？》為例，進行文本分析，並發展本文申論。

Autofiction is a mode of fictional writing in which the narrator-protagonist is the author herself. This article looks at contemporary autofiction from North America and argues that autofiction is a telling index to the contemporary turn to immediacy, that is, a tendency to valorize presenting or experiencing things unmediated. Autofiction has been received relatively positively among critics for its capacity to allow for the writer’s self-theorization or experiment with new genres. I argue that this wave of autofiction is amenable to the current capitalist logic as well as the logic of digital media, hence reducing our ability of self-critiquing. Moreover, autofiction is predicated on a peculiar understanding of what literature should do with“reality,”often resorting to authentic materials, transcribing letters, conversations, etc., as if this kind of referentiality were essential to fiction writing. This practice undermines the potential of fiction to proffer literary truth and the power of literary imagination in general. This article consists of three parts. In the first part, I give a brief overview of autofiction as a mode of writing. In the second part, I propose to look at three important threads of debates in recent novel studies, with a view to finding common ground between them and the discussion of autofiction. In the third part, I analyze two autofiction works—I Love Dick by American writer Chris Kraus and How Should a Person Be? by Canadian writer Sheila Heti—and make my case in detail.