Do readers agree on the literary character of a text? To answer this question, we have studied the reception of six recent works of Latin American autofiction on Goodreads by assessing reader reviews. To quantify our findings, we have assigned each review an “index of literariness.” Our results suggest that autofiction, as a reading strategy, is uncommon: the most intermediate mean values (the most statistically “autofictional” position) present the highest standard deviation, demonstrating that many reviewers choose between a fundamentally factual reading or a fundamentally literary reading of autofictional texts.
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How to Cite
Ceballos-Viro, Álvaro, & Vanden-Berghe , K. (2024). Autofiction in practice. Non-professional readings of texts of ambivalent ontological status. Ocnos. Journal of reading research, 23(2). https://doi.org/10.18239/ocnos_2024.23.2.446
Ceballos-Viro and Vanden-Berghe: Autofiction in practice. A study in reader response
Introduction
Autofiction has undergone extensive theoretical development and its narratological
features have been thoroughly dealt with. Due to the unresolved nature of these debates,
Gasparini has gone so far as to refer to autofiction as a point of “viscosidad semántica”
(). However, there is some consensus regarding the characteristics of this genre, or
generic mode: the authors of autofictional texts, for example, often inject fictional
elements into their own lives, or projects themselves onto fiction. In the Spanish
speaking world, definition, which coincides quite closely with that of , has been particularly well received. For them, autofiction simply involves the meeting
of two narratological characteristics: the shared onomastic identity between narrator,
character and author, alongside the presentation of the text as fictional. The first
feature suggests an autobiographical text based on a referential relationship to veracity,
while the second suggests the opposite. Alberca called this unusual intersection of
two distinct reading contracts an ambiguous pact. This concept has gained notable
popularity among academics and continues to be the subject of intense debate, leading
to a vast corpus of critical texts (for the Spanish-speaking world, see ; ; ; ). Additionally, an alternative approach has been put forward by , who posits that autofiction, as a semantic category, stems not from the text itself,
but from the construction of an authorial image.
However, there is a lack of empirical analysis about the reception of these texts.
What do non-specialised readers – those commonly known as “lay readers” – think of
autofictional works? This paper seeks to empirically study the reception of a few
autofictional texts and discover whether the reactions of non-specialised readers
confirm the hypotheses of Alberca and the academic community regarding the ambiguous
pact and a form of reading that delights in the dubious ontological status of the
text.
The fundamental question of this study can be formulated simply: when people read
autofiction outside an academic context, how do they regard it? Do most readers consider
it to be a sub-genre of the novel? Do they react, as Alberca foresees, by doubting
its status? Or do they tend to take it at face value and read it as a referential
text through an autobiographical lens?
In order to find reading testimonials from outside the academic sphere, we have turned
to the digital social network Goodreads. We have selected a corpus of six works that
academic critics have deemed autofiction and that, at the same time, have inspired
a large number of reviews on Goodreads. For each work, we have analysed the textual
and paratextual characteristics that could have an impact on reader response. Finally,
we have studied the reviews available through the end of October 2019 in detail in
order to determine whether each reader perceived the work as [+literary] or [+factual].
Theoretical framework
The definition of literature in contemporary times could be (and is) the subject of
many lengthy volumes of criticism. For the sake of brevity, we will provide only a
short description of what we consider to be an agreed-upon feature of literature,
namely, that certain texts are neither unambiguous nor falsifiable. This definition
exists in many European languages – not only in Romance languages – that contain terms
derived from the Latin word littera.
Literary texts are pragmatically free from the requirement of veracity (; ; ), and this privilege is made evident through a series of both paratextual markers
(title, subtitle, book series…), and linguistic ones, such as psycho-narration, paradoxical
temporal adverbs and free indirect discourse (; ; ).
Most literature is verbal fiction, according to Schaeffer’s definition of fiction
as a shared ludic pretense (feintise partagée). Beyond fiction, but within the contemporary notion of literature, lies Genette’s
diction or, more precisely, diction de régime constitutif, which encompasses lyric texts that resist fulfilling a function in an objective
or realistic context (). This is summarised below in figure 1.
Literary and factual are well-defined - even discrete - categories (an entire book
by Lavocat calls for a clear boundary between the two), which adult readers tend to
differentiate quickly and easily (; ). Similarly, it is just as easy to find dubious cases, namely, ambiguous texts –
often of considerable stylistic sophistication – that could be ascribed to factual
genres, such as autobiography, diary or the journalistic chronicle. However, these
texts often contain a peculiarity that puts into question the text’s relationship
to the real world. This is the case for the six works selected for this study, which
seeks to understand how non-specialist readers resolve the dilemma of texts with an
ambiguous ontological status.
Figure 1The Ontological Status of Contemporary Narratives (Summary Table)
Works under analysis
1. In Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel’s El cuerpo en que nací (hereafter CN, ), there are few signposts of fiction. In some passages (), there seems to be an internal focus on someone other than the narrator, but several
of these could be considered logical inferences. The narrator’s visions of insects
can also rationally be explained as a symptom of psychopathy, which is how the narrator
herself sees them (). It is the presence of a narratee, Dr. Sazlavski, that prevents us from reading
CN as a life story, autobiography or memoir. However, this narratee does not necessarily
bring the text into the realm of literature. The text abounds with contradictory allusions
to its own pragmatic contract: “Estoy escribiendo una novela sobre mi infancia, una
autobiografía,” says the narrator (), and later, “Será un relato sencillo y corto. No contaré nada en lo que no crea”
(). Additionally, this story is, for the main character’s mother, a novel (), while for her brother, it is an autobiography ().
2. Many critics analyze Nettel’s work alongside Sangre en el ojo (hereafter SO, ), published a year later by the Chilean writer Lina Meruane. In the numerous academic
articles on this text, the autofiction label is recurrent and seems to be an object
of consensus (see in particular ). The back cover presents SO as a “[m]ezcla de memorias y ficción” and provides blurbs that identify it as a novel.
Among the linguistic indicators of fiction that this work contains are anaphora with
no referent and free direct discourse (; see also 53, 122 and 132-133 and, for more information on this topic, see ). The chapters have cryptic titles, such as “el lugar del norte,” “piyamas viejos”
and “matarse un poco,” and each consists of a single long paragraph. It is the only
work in our corpus that contains an overtly fictional element, that is, one that contradicts
the empirical world: the narrator and the character of Dr. Lekz discuss a complete
eye transplant, a procedure that is not currently possible.
3. In Formas de volver a casa (hereinafter FV, ) by the Chilean author Alejandro Zambra, one of the clearest indicators of fiction
is typographical: the absence of dialogue markers (quotation marks, dashes), which
gives the text an abrupt, direct style. It is a fragmentary text, punctuated by metafictional
comments and ample internal narration.
The critics who have taken an interest in this work by Zambra usually place it in
the broader corpus of filiation stories, thus accounting for its atypical character,
which is somewhere between the fictional and the factual. Amaro-Castro writes that
“[s]e trata, en su mayoría, de relatos definidos como ficcionales, aunque con indudables
elementos referenciales (en varios de ellos incluso coinciden el nombre del narrador,
el protagonista y el autor)” (). According to Franken-Osorio, it is Zambra himself who contradictorily aspires to
“articular –en la ficción– los imaginarios de infancia que establezcan y expliquen
sus actuales posiciones sociales, intelectuales y afectivas” ().
4. La casa de los conejos, by the French-Argentine writer Laura Alcoba, was originally published in French
(; hereinafter abbreviated CC). Just from looking at the titles of the critical texts devoted to it, we have noticed
that CC has been read through a hybrid lens (; ; ). This work abounds with examples of what Cohn calls the “fictional present” (); the repetition of the adverb “today” could lead readers to think they are dealing
with a diary, were it not for the fact that no dates are ever mentioned.
However, Alcoba’s work lacks indicators of literariness such as free indirect discourse
or internal focalisation. At the beginning of the text, the narrator is presented
as an adult who is about to recall her childhood, but thereinafter, the style mimics
a young girl’s point of view. The sentences are short and paratactic, and there is
a special sensitivity to detail which is often dense, almost lyric.
5. There is no doubt that Patricio Pron was aware of the critical literature on autofiction
when he wrote his novel El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (; abbreviated EE). In his epilogue, he wrote, “Aunque los hechos narrados en este libro son principalmente
verdaderos, algunos son producto de las necesidades del relato de ficción, cuyas reglas
son diferentes de las de géneros como el testimonio y la autobiografía” (). It is also significant that the author’s blog mentions his father’s comments on
the novel, which point to errors and inaccuracies he believes his son has made. Some
critics compare this work to La casa de los conejos, because these two texts, in the words of Casas, “utilizan la modulación autoficcional
para repensar la identidad individual y colectiva bajo coordenadas históricas conflictivas,
ligadas al pasado dictatorial” ().
Pron’s text is marked by signs of doubt: the narrator constantly underscores his own
unreliability, questioning even the possibility of composing the story he has set
out to write (). According to Tala, “[u]na de las consecuencias más relevantes, literariamente,
que esto trae consigo, es el hecho narrativo de la constante destrucción (o al menos
desestabilización) del contrato de ficción” (). In addition, the chapters are identified by non-consecutive numbers, as if the
text were incomplete. Pron’s text shares the fragmentary nature of Formas de volver a casa, as well as the tendency to reflect constantly on the act of writing the text itself.
6. Of the six texts analysed, El olvido que seremos (, OS), by the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince, is undoubtedly the one that comes
closest to what Schmitt calls “autonarration,” that is, “une autobiographie présentée
sous forme littéraire” (), although it can also be considered an alter-autofiction in that it constructs the
image of a self through the portrait of another person (the father).
Critics have sometimes underlined the poetic character of this work: “ [l]a confección
cuidadosa del texto y la dosificación ordenadora hecha por el narrador funcionan como
un recordatorio abierto al lector de que toda memoria es obra de ficción, no necesariamente en el sentido de fingir sino en el sentido etimológico del latín
fingere, forjar” (). For those who have read other works by Abad Faciolince, the constructed nature
of is characters will be even more obvious due to the clear intertextual relationships
of is works. For example, there is a great deal of coincidences between the father
and the son in El olvido que seremos and certain fictional characters in the novels Angosta and La Oculta.
In reviewing articles on this book, we observed that many critics are unsure of how
to classify it. Fanta-Castro speaks of “el texto,” of “este libro,” of “el relato”
(); for Castañón it is an “testimonio autobiográfico” that “puede leerse como una novela
o un poema trágico” (); Escobar-Mesa refers to the narrator but then states that it is an autobiography
that begins as a biography (), while for Mario Vargas Llosa it is “una historia verdadera que es asimismo una
soberbia ficción por la manera como está escrita y construida” ().
Methodology
In order to determine the extent to which the idea of literariness is agreed upon
and the ways in which this concept is problematised by autofiction, we analyzed a
corpus of lay-reader reviews from the social platform Goodreads. Each of these reviews
is identified by the date of publication, preceded by the abbreviation of the work
in question.. We will not dwell here on the history or functionalities of Goodreads
because it is public information and this platform has already been discussed in detail
(; ).
This study was carried out as part of a research seminar at the University of Liège
with the help of six master’s students.. After several partial analyses and preliminary
discussions, we identified a set of eight discursive tropes that, for different reasons,
indicate a [+literary] reading of a work:
1. Assuming that the plot is chosen by the author, e.g., criticising the ending, describing
characters as forced or writing techniques as unoriginal (FV 26/08/16), calling the work hackneyed (FV 29/01/15) or saying it lacks humour (FV 26/11/17).
2. Comparing the work with more canonical literary works, such as Ensaio sobre a cegueira by José Saramago (SO 24/01/13) or an Agatha Christie novel (EE 09/10/15).
3. Assigning the work to a fictional genre, such as horror (SO 30/01/18) or crime fiction (EE 10/10/15).
4. Comparing the text with works from other artistic disciplines (SO 18/03/17).
5. Reading the work as if it were a puzzle: “[j]usto cuando creí que ya había entendido
la novela […]” (FV 04/02/22, previously 31/05/11).
6. Describing the narrative in terms of narrator and characters. In the case of El cuerpo en que nací, the presence of an explicit narratee was identified by some readers as crucial for
determining the ontological status of the text (CN 17/11/17).
7. Assuming that the reader participates in the construction of meaning, which suggests
that the meaning is neither unambiguous nor immanent (SO 08/03/17).
8. Although it may sound counterintuitive, we believe that, in some specific cases,
speaking of an autobiographical tone (ES 17/09/16) means transforming the contract of veracity inherent in a factual genre,
such as autobiography, into a mere stylistic option.
Comparably, a [+factual] reading may be claimed in the following cases:
1. When the plot is not considered to be a choice made by the author: “No es culpa
suya, obviamente, el orden de los acontecimientos de la historia” (CC 29/07/15)
2. When the work is compared with factual texts.
3. Classifying the work as belonging to a factual genre such as the chronicle (EE 19/03/15) or autobiography (CC 22/01/16). Although not decisive, the use of terms with a strong autobiographical
connotation such as confession, memory, document, etc. also suggests a factual reading.
4. Judging the narrative in terms of honesty or dishonesty, sincerity or insincerity,
thus subjecting it to a contract of veracity.
5. When characters of an uncertain status (those who are not clearly historical characters)
are treated as if they existed on the same ontological level as the readers, for example,
by saying that the text pays them tribute (OS 23/08/18 and 29/10/18, among others) or that it aspires to see justice done to them
(OS 27/02/17).
Finally, there are issues that make it difficult to assign a particular review to
either mode of reading:
1. The validity of the realist paradigm, in which the spatiotemporal context is easily
recognisable: references to real people and places abound, the recreation of the socio-political
milieu is accurate, but what comes to the fore in the narrative is a fabricated story.
2. The challenge of recognising the referent of certain pronouns, omitted subjects
and even proper nouns used in the reviews, when character and author are homonymous:
for example, do “los sucesos en la vida de esta mujer” (CN 03/07/19) refer to the events in the life of the author or in the life of the main
character?
3. Whenever the focus is on the stylistic elaboration of experiences, regardless of
whether they are considered true or not.
4. Refraining from defining the autobiographical dimension of the text. Many readers
give a rather literary reading of the text, though they may sense there are autobiographical
elements.
As we can see, there are more possible indicators of a literary reading than a factual
reading. One could even argue that, in our study, a factual reading is one that simply
lacks the indicators of a literary reading.
We did not consider Goodreads reviews that did not provide enough information for
us to make a judgement on the reception of the text. These reviews included ones that
were too short, too vague or comments that simply transcribed passages from the book.
These rejections were particularly frequent among the reader testimonies of OS, which is, as we shall see, the text in our corpus that was read as the most factual:
we could only make a judgement on 158 of the 307 comments initially collected.
A preliminary analysis of Goodreads reviews about texts that are undoubtedly factual
(such as scientific essays or historical monographs) reveals a similar lack of indicators.
This forced us to abandon the idea of a control corpus, which would have consisted
of lay-reader reviews of texts defined paratextually and pragmatically as factual;
we would have had to discard the vast majority of them as inconclusive.
Once we had identified the main indicators, taking into account these reservations
and the considerations mentioned above, we assessed the ontological status that each
reviewer assigned to the work read and allocated a score according to the following
scale:
0 – completely factual
1 – factual with some reservations
2 – reading presents information that is obviously contradictory
3 – literary with some reservations
4 – completely literary
As in other studies on cognitive competences (see ), we used the method of human attribution of valence. Each review was read and analyzed
independently by three people, two of which made their evaluations at an intermediate
stage in order to compare and test their assessment criteria; adding up each person’s
rating yielded a number between 0 and 12 which represents the final estimate for each
Goodreads review. A 0 means that all three evaluators unanimously considered that
the reader understood the work to be factual; a 12 means that, for all the evaluators,
the reader read the work as a literary text; the intermediate values reflect more
ambiguous statuses, which logically also point to disagreement among the evaluators.
There are several things to consider when making an evaluation of a review: pronouns
with unclear referents, polysemic terms, inconsistencies in genre attribution, etc.
We are aware that, despite the consensus reached on a number of criteria, the overall
qualitative classification is subjective and, therefore, cannot claim to be exact.
Our objective, and this can never be stressed enough, is not to arrive at irrefutable
conclusions, but rather to attain a reasonable level of certainty regarding the general
trends within a representative body of work. As in any statistical study, biases and
overrepresentations decrease as the population under consideration increases.
Let us look in a little more detail at how this evaluation was carried out, taking
as an example two reviews relating to the same work that obtained scores of 10 and
0 respectively:
Formas de volver a casa fue la primera novela que leí de Zambra, y mi favorita. Perfectamente escrito, toca
temas como la nostalgia y la familia en lo que el protagonista rememora su niñez durante
la dictadura de Pinochet (FV 08/16/18).
Un libro para visitar de nuevo la infancia perdida de muchos Chilenos [sic] que se criaron en la etapa final de Pinochet. Zambra cuenta tres historias: su relación
distanciada un poco con sus papas [sic], su matrimonio que fracasó, y un[a] amistad que formó de niño cuando espiaba a un
tipo para impresionar a una posible “polola”.
La verdad, no soy súper fan de “soy escritor... estoy escribiendo x por y”, pero los
capítulos acerca de la vida del escritor son cortos por lo menos. Además, la prosa
de Zambra siempre fluye y usa la frase o la palabra perfecta para cualquier situación
o sentimiento (FV 28/01/19).
The first review labels the text as a novel and nominally separates the author from
the main character; the second one identifies the author with the narrator and underscores
the relationship of the style to the narrated material. As we shall show below, the
discursive gesture with which the latter testimony opens, which relates the narrator’s
experience to a broader context, is not unusual for a [+factual] reading.
Results
We evaluated a total of 287 reviews, all of them in Spanish (table 1).
Table 1Sample Size and Percent Agreement in Assigning Literary Values
Relevant Comments
Agreement
La casa de los conejos
21
71.4%
El cuerpo en que nací
33
48.4%
El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia
9
55.5%
Formas de volver a casa
48
41.6%
El olvido que seremos
158
48.7%
Sangre en el ojo
18
72%
The level of agreement refers to the percentage of reviews that were given the same
rating by all three evaluators. More complex, or less coherent, reviews typically
led to more disagreement. However, none of the scores were diametrically opposed to
one another, but rather weighed certain caveats and exceptions differently.
The following graphs represent absolute data distributed over time. Only a few dates
have been included as a guide. The R2 coefficient, which distills the degree of interdependence of the variables studied
into a value from 0 to 1, has, in almost all cases, extremely low values (with maxima
in polynomial functions: CC: 0.2401; CN: 0.1519; FV: 0.1963; SO: 0.2428; OS: 0.0388). A relative exception is EE (R2 = 0.3425) but the data for this work are too sparse for this statistic to be relevant.
There is, therefore, no correlation between our index of literariness and the passing
of time, which means that the testimonies stored in Goodreads do not engage in dialogue
with each other and do not build consensual interpretations. A very factual review
on CC written by a relative of Laura Alcoba (16/05/17) could have influenced the perception
of other readers, but the R2 value of the reception of this work, although higher than others, remains low and
does not allow us to affirm the relationship between the variables.
Figure 2Indexes of Literariness
In four of the six cases, the standard deviation (, table 2 and figure 3) is very high, indicating a large dispersion of data. This means that a trend in
the readers’ assessment of the fictional or factual status of these works cannot be
clearly defined.
Table 2Standard Deviation in Assigned Literary Values
Average
Mode
La casa de los conejos
4,5
4,653
0
El cuerpo en que nací
4,69
4,348
0
El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia
9,11
3,444
12
Formas de volver a casa
6,7
3,1
6
El olvido que seremos
1,75
2,25
0
Sangre en el ojo
9,77
2,263
12
Figure 3Averages and Standard Deviations
The standard deviation of El olvido que seremos and Sangre en el ojo is substantially lower, which indicates a smaller disparity of opinions regarding
the works’ ontological status, albeit in opposite directions: most readers tend to
give Abad Faciolince’s work factual status, while Meruane’s work has been commonly
read as a novel.
Readers use a wide range of terms to refer to these six texts. Some of them (“ficción,”
“pieza”) immediately confer a literary status; theoretically – but we will return
to this later –, the same can be said when the chosen labels refer to established
and well-known literary genres: “novela,” “novela autobiográfica” or “policial.” At
the opposite end of the spectrum are lexemes typical of nonfiction: “autobiogr-,”
“biogr-,” “memori-,” “testimoni-,” “crónica,” “diario”; other terms, often somewhat
metaphorical, point to the same reading strategy: “radiografía,” “rememoración,” etc.
Logically, there is a third group of denominations that refer to verbal documents
in general, regardless of their relationship with the empirical world, and which allow
readers to refrain from specifying how they understand this relationship: “historia”
(meaning “story”), “lectura” (when it designates what has been read), “obra,” “relato,”
“texto,” “título,” “narración,” “narrativa” and, again, various metaphorical nouns
(“pincelazo,” “recorrido,” etc.). This third and last group is by no means irrelevant:
the widespread use of such terms can be interpreted as symptomatic of the bewilderment
or wariness of many readers when confronted with these texts.
It is difficult to single out instances of the term “historia” referring exclusively
to a text as a whole. In this study, we have tried to disregard instances in which
the word “historia” refers to a plot line or to the plot as an abstraction (“narra
la historia de…”), nor, logically, when the meaning in question refers to the political
or social events of a country (when “historia” means history). For this reason, the
data relating to this category are only an approximation. Something similar, although
to a lesser extent, can be said of “narrativa,” a word that readers use frequently
but only occasionally to designate the text as a whole (“es una narrativa,” “buena
narrativa”). The use of the tag “autoficción” or “autoficcional” is rare. In all,
we found only three occurrences: one in each of the CN, FV and OS subcorpora of reviews.
Figure 4Categories Assigned to Each Work
The labels used to talk about these books do not bear an exact relationship to their
estimated level of literariness, although the labels we associated with factual genres
tended to favour a [+factual] reading due to the relative scarcity of other distinctive
traits. There is a large degree of consensus among readers regarding the factual character
of OS, but other works in the corpus attract factual labels just as frequently, if not
more. Despite this consensus, Abad Faciolince’s work received more neutral labels
than any of the other works studied.
It cannot be ruled out that certain readers have interpreted the meanings of some
of these categories in personal and unconventional ways. For example, we suspect that
not everyone considers the novel to be a type of prose fiction. Although the dominant
position in literary historiography supports the idea of the novel as a work of fiction,
there are experts such as Javier Cercas who call for a broader definition (see ). Note, for example, the following comment, in which “novela” is contrasted with
“biografía,” with the apparent understanding that the latter focuses on the achievements
of a single person, while the former surpasses it in quality or complexity:
“El libro pareciera ser un relato biográfico de Héctor Abad Gómez […]. Sin embargo, el autor va más allá y hace una novela donde la vida de su padre es central, pero también su relación personal con él” (OS 26/12/16, our emphasis).
At the beginning of this study, we took for granted that transferring the interpretation
of the work to other cultural contexts was a facet of literary reading, insofar as
literary texts are not linked to a single referent and, therefore, are characterised
by their ability to generate meaning in different times and places. We gathered 23
reviews of this type; others could certainly have been considered, but we ultimately
decided to exclude doubtful examples, or pars pro toto extrapolations that see the text as a representation of the society in the depicted
country as a whole (these follow the logic of literary realism, but they also originate
from a fairly common cognitive reflex and are, therefore, not very relevant). The
average literariness index of these 23 comments is 3.91: a value substantially lower
than the average of the averages (6.08). This result suggests that reading the text
in a personal context, beyond that of the work itself, is not evidence of a literary
reading. The fact that literary texts produce meaning in different contexts does not
mean that only literary texts produce meaning in different contexts.
Many of the reviews display explicit ambivalence. Although the label “autoficción”
is, as we have seen, sparingly used, many readers perceive a deliberate mixture of
fiction and biography in these works (FV 12/01/15, FV 23/02/15, FV 05/02/18), or of novel and memoir (CN 14/07/14); many qualify them as autobiographical novels (CN 18/10/16, CN 12/01/17, CN 08/02/19, CN 13/09/19) or novels with an “espíritu autobiográfico” (CN 13/09/16, CC 03/10/16); many struggle to discern which part is real and which is made-up (FV 22/09/14), “cuál es la parte de ficción, cuál el testimonio, cuál la autobiografía”
(EE 19/03/15); some of them wonder if it happened that way or not (SO 06/03/17); some of them notice how the boundaries between genres are blurring before
their very eyes (FV 19/03/19) and the fiction / reality dichotomy becomes empty of meaning (FV 21/04/14). In these hybridisations, they sometimes see either a metaliterary trick
(FV 30/07/18) or a desire to confuse the reader (CN 17/11/17).
Conclusions
The data show that these works, which have been labelled autofictional by academic
critics, are subject to very different reading contracts or pacts – and are, therefore,
not very contractual. The striking standard deviation in the assessments of the reviews
of La casa de los conejos and El cuerpo en que nací reveals the great variety of ways in which a single work can be assessed by readers.
But variability in reading strategy is also significant from one work to another,
from autofiction considered to be globally [+literary] – like Sangre en el ojo, El espíritu de mis padres – to the one work considered globally [+factual] – El olvido que seremos.
For Schmitt, autofiction exists only in an “purement utopique” () middle ground within this continuum. However, it is not entirely utopian: there
is a non-negligible percentage of readers who do seem willing to subscribe to that
ambiguous pact. One might say, as Gibbons claims, that for them, autofiction is a
reading strategy (). Nevertheless, the statistical models in our study are highly polarised, with two
of the three most intermediate averages (the statistically most autofictional rankings
we found with CC, CN and FV) also having the highest standard deviations. This suggests that most readers choose
between a primarily factual or a primarily literary reading, confirming the hypotheses
formulated by and . According to them, most readers of autofiction don’t seek to enjoy the uncertainty
of a text, preferring instead to assign it to one of these two statuses.
On an individual level, it could be said, with Saint-Jacques, that it is the reader
“qui tranche et reconnaît ou non le caractère littéraire d’un discours” (); or, in the words of Gasparini, that the reader’s response to autofictional texts
ultimately depends “de la interpretación que el lector haga de las marcas autobiográficas
y ficcionales que estos distribuyen tan generosamente como antes hacían las novelas
autobiográficas” (). It is worth noting that the work generally perceived as being the most literary
is Sangre en el ojo, which is indeed the title in our corpus that contains the most indicators of literariness,
including an episode that would be impossible in the real world.
Our corpus of reviews could be improved upon or expanded, but we believe that this
study allows us to assert that autofiction, defined as a genre that makes an ambiguous
pact, exists first as an analytical category rather than as a reading strategy. This,
of course, does not diminish the genre’s complexity or importance.
Founding
Published with the support of the Fondation Universitaire de Belgique
[1] Since we collected the data, changes in the platform and in the criteria for classifying
reviews have altered some of these dates (and may do so again in the future). We have
updated the dates for passages quoted or referred to in the body of the text.
[2] Sebastián Álvarez Posada, Lara Bertrand, Antoine Bruyère, Thomas Canève, Laura Digregorio
and Lola Dulon.
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