21st Century Autofiction

Autofiction – blurring the lines between an author’s real-life experiences and invention – is an example of a frequently intermedial and interartistic practice that has particularly flourished in recent years. It has experienced a surge in popularity in contemporary literature from across the world, and this is no less true of Italy, where it has been employed by writers such as Giuseppe Genna, Helena Janeczek, Babsi Jones, Walter Siti or even Roberto Saviano, some of whom also work across media. Genna’s 2007 autofictional text Medium, for example, can be downloaded free of charge in line with “copyleft” principles, complete with hypertext references to extra material from Genna’s blog and elsewhere, and recordings of the author reading sections can also be accessed online, as well as a no-profit printed version of the text being available to buy here. Autofiction has been employed by recent film-makers too, such as Alina Marazzi, or beyond Italy’s borders Sarah Polley, in work that could be termed docufiction.

It is worth considering to what extent increased interest in such hybrid mixtures of fiction and non-fiction exploring the self might be connected to wider cultural changes in the Digital Age. How has the advent of social media influenced the construction of identity, and how has this spilled over into artistic production? The widespread use of autofiction today should not necessarily be seen as part of what David Shields has described as Reality Hunger (2010), or what a recent debate in Italy termed a return to reality. Rather, these are experimentations with the porous boundaries between lived experience and fiction, between the embodied and the constructed self in what Zygmunt Bauman has termed Liquid Modernity (2000). Nonetheless, the fact that the term autofiction was first coined by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky in the 1970s suggests that, whilst new technologies may have crystallised some of the issues surrounding identity and shifted them in new directions, this divided self is connected to an existing postmodern cultural climate too.

Autofiction raises important questions about how recent cultural changes may have influenced not only selfhood and subjectivity, but also memory and testimony, as it may intermingle different personal and national memories of the past, reflecting on historiography and cultural memory. However, artistic production of this kind also raises ethical questions due to its strange and unclear configurations of fiction and non-fiction, as can be seen in the controversies surrounding Saviano’s 2006 exposé of the Neapolitan mafia Gomorra, which he embellished with details from his own life and with invented elements, and which he has subsequently helped to develop into a fictional film and television series. Autofictional texts thus merit further attention when exploring boundary crossing and hybrid cultural objects, both in the Italian context and from a comparative perspective.