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Becoming Autotheory Ralph Clare Becoming Autotheory Ralph Clare Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 76, Number 1, Spring 2020, pp. 85-107 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2020.0003 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754798 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Ralph Clare Becoming Autotheory he impact of the recent boom in what U.S. critics Tand publishers are increasingly calling autofiction is a notable, if curious, phenomenon. Authors such as Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Rachel Cusk, as well as the wildly success- ful translations of works by Karl Ove Knausgård and Elena Ferrante, have gained both readerly and critical accolades. In various ways, aut- ofictional works collapse fiction, nonfiction, and autobiography into texts that, as Marjorie Worthington writes, “constantly play with read- erly expectations about memoir and fiction, thwarting both and thereby forcing a recognition that . the line is at times rather permeable” (149). While something about these authors’ works seems radically new, however, several critics have put this boom into historical and cultural perspective. Autofiction, it turns out, has a notable literary and historical lineage.1 Yet within this swath of autofiction, something truly new is emerg- ing: autotheory. Autotheory constitutes something related to yet en- tirely distinct from autofiction. Whereas autofiction responds primarily to the post-postmodern literary scene and the rise of the anyperson memoir, autotheory responds more so to the institutionalization and the so-called death of theory. Whether educated or struggling to learn their art during the heyday of theory in the academy, the authors of autotheoretical texts incorporate critical theory’s terminologies and methodologies into their work in order to transform both its form and content. Chris Kraus (b. 1955) and Maggie Nelson (b. 1973), for ex- ample, represent different generations of writers whose autotheoretical texts engage with theory’s rise and supposed fall. Kraus’s I Love Dick (1996) and Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) each employ critical theory to similar and different ends that nevertheless expand upon the possi- bilities of both autofiction and theory itself. Taken together, these texts suggest that in autotheory, theory is not employed merely to deconstruct the self or fragment the “I,” though Arizona Quarterly Volume 76, Number 1, Spring 2020 • issn 0004-1610 Copyright © 2020 by Arizona Board of Regents 86 Ralph Clare it may well do so, but to self-consciously and practically construct an ethical or sincere self in a critical manner. If much contemporary Amer- ican autofiction aims to establish an honest or open dialogic with the reader (Sturgeon; Nicol 257), then autotheory’s sincerity lies in the exposure of a vulnerable self that recognizes its contingency and social/ linguistic constructedness while nevertheless insisting upon the “real- ity” and value of lived experience. Thus autotheory avoids the charge of essentialism that haunts identity politics by countering it with a notion of embodied experience that underscores the malleability of identity itself. In autotheory, then, it is not so much that the personal must become political, but that the personal must first become theoretical. Generation Theory and the Theory of Exhaustion In his mildly polemical “The Theory Generation,” Nicholas Dames attempts to take stock of the effects of High or capital-T Theory on a recent generation of American writers who came of intellectual age in the 1980s or thereabouts, during the “the institutionalization of Theory” when “universities began to house and pay significant European think- ers at the moment their influence in their native lands began to wane” (162).2 According to Dames’ reading of “more or less realist novel[s]” by Teju Cole, Lorrie Moore, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ben Lerner, Sam Lip- syte, and Jennifer Egan, Theory Novels are often ambivalent, ironic, or flat-out scathing in assessing the pedagogical and practical value of Theory. For the characters in (and by extension the authors of) such novels, Theory becomes “a seductive phase of education that is finally too cultish and self-enclosed to make sense of the world’s upheavals” (161). The enlightenment that Theory inspires in its questioning of Enlightenment ideals brings, in the end, a disillusionment of its own. At the very least, it is “no longer the key to all the world’s things, but rather just another thing-in-the-world” (163–64). Like Dames, Mitchum Huelhs, in “The Post-Theory Theory Novel,” reflects upon the institutionalization of theory and its implications for thinking about contemporary American literature (284). Yet whereas Dames, like the characters in the novels he reads, remains pessimis- tic about theory’s place in literature or the world, Huehls, exploring not-so “realistic” novels (including works by Jeffrey Eugenides, Salva- dor Plascencia, Ben Marcus, and Percival Everett), is optimistic regard- ing theory’s lasting effects on literature and its potential to transform Becoming Autotheory 87 both words and worlds. Such optimism comes, in part, because Huehls, unlike Dames, does not see the inarguable seduction of theory as merely leading to slavish literary mimicry or mindless devotion to the Mas- ters. For Huehls, this generation of creative writers are always creative readers, and the translated texts that found their way belatedly into the Anglo-American academic scene were responded to in nuanced, not mechanical or fearful, fashion. Huelhs can therefore distinguish what he dubs “the post-theory theory novel” from both Dames’ Theory Novel and Judith Ryan’s version of the theory novel in The Novel After Theory, a book that explores how an earlier generation of mostly postmodern writers responded directly (and positively) to theory.3 It is, for Huehls, the reflexiveness on/of thought itself in the post-theory theory novel that distinguishes it from novels that somehow “do” theory (285–6). Moreover, Huehls points out that a main drawback of Dame’s argument is that it focuses almost exclusively on theory as content (via allusions, jokes, character dialogue, etc.), which might be found in any novel that “simply incorporates theory into a generally realist representational mode” (282). Expanding upon Dames’ ideas, Hue- hls demonstrates the ways in which the “post-theory theory novel” embraces experimentalism and/or metafiction primarily in its form and has thereby seized “the theory novel’s flattened caricature of theory and repurposed it, even revitalized it, for newly aesthetic ends” (306). Authors of such novels “use the well-known tropes of poststructural theory as the tools and building blocks for various forms of unreal real- ism, for speculative fictions that contribute to the composition rather than the deconstruction of the world” (283). Indeed, theory, for Dames, is still spelled with a capital T. It’s imposing, teetering over us, an almost-Cross-to-bear. But Huelhs’ small t theory makes it the mundane and changeable function (use-value) that it has more properly become after much, yet not all, of its hipness (symbolic exchange-value) has worn away. Ultimately, Huelhs contends, “rather than emphasizing the word’s inevitable mediation of the world—a mediation that in theory novels indicates our insuperable alienation from the real—post-theory theory novels incorporate the word into the world, using language to build new, idiosyncratic notions of the real” (288). Thus, “these texts use theory’s concepts to build, rather than undermine, the world” (288). Exploring theory’s effects on the contemporary novel is all well and good, but what does it mean for autotheoretical texts that trouble 88 Ralph Clare the very genre of the novel itself, largely resemble autofictions and/or memoirs, and often employ theory unashamedly in both their form and content (that is, they are also still doing theory)? Indeed, autotheory’s development has less to do with the tradition of the novel so much as it does with that of philosophy and critical theory itself—and particu- larly the kinds of writing that meld personal experience with reflections upon philosophy and theory. In Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson provide a more fitting lineage for auto- theory when they identify the works of Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, and Gloria Anzaldúa as examples of what they dub “autocritique,” writ- ing in which “the boundary between criticizing and writing life narra- tive has been deliberately blurred in critical practice” (155–59). Surely, one could establish a through line from Montaigne or even St. Augus- tine to autotheory, but since autotheory as a genre is formed in direct response to the rise, institutionalization, and generational transmission of critical theory, the authors appearing in and under the banner of Theory are more apt to be influential in this case. Thus, certainly the cultural materialist writings of Walter Benjamin, as well as the person- ally reflective analyses of Freud (both authors are standard readings in many theory courses), may provide a better touchstone for autotheo- ry’s forerunners. Benjamin’s ability to mix memoir with philosophy, to turn his ramblings and personal reflections in “A Berlin Chronicle” into critical meditations on time and consciousness that are similar to those in his most famous essays on Proust, Kafka, and Baudelaire, suggest an early model for autotheory. Benjamin’s nuanced version of dialectical materialism always remains grounded in the lived experience of the observer and is never reducible to pure Marxist polemic. Yet even this lineage does not fully account for the specific dilemma of the theory generation and its relation to contemporary American writing. Gloria Anzaldúa, then, stands as a more proper forerunner of the kind of text increasingly taken to be autotheory. The widely read Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), for example, is a pow- erful mélange of memoir, critical theory, and poetry.
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