On Autofiction

An excellent essay on Autofiction and its value to a creative life:

"How to Read Autofiction"
A Wesleyan University Honors Thesis by Sarah Pitcher McDonough

http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1695&context=etd_hon_theses

The autobiographer writes on his own life. The autofictionalist writes 
with it. The use of fiction gives him total liberty[…] Autofiction is an 
experimental genre. In all of the senses of the term. It is a laboratory. 
Not the recording of facts with a novelistic sauce. A real laboratory. Of 
writing and of life.


--Chloé Delaume

Apocalypse Now

Today marks the end of the Mayan calendar, which for the ancient Mayans simply meant it was time to find some fresh stone and chisel out a new calendar, but for the rest of us unsophisticated sots, it signifies how low we stoop to honor our own ignorance and the need to justify the end to the means of our existence. Apocalypse, old friend, you have always been with us; the night to our day, the end to our road, the very reason for putting one step before the other. Or not.

What do I have to write this morning? Just that I'm disappointed that for over two weeks I haven't been writing and I feel all cobby headed again. There have been at least two events lately that have been weighing heavily on my mind. One, a shooting at Clackamas Towne Center that left two people dead, and a shooting at an elementary school in New Town, Connecticut that left twenty-seven dead, including 20 children under the age of seven and seven staff. In both shootings the shooter took his own life. In both shootings the shooter was a male in his early twenties. In both shootings, each loss of life is an immeasurable los for the world.

The New Town shooting is more disturbing to me for the terror that these children had to undergo, and for the sheer insanity of the act of opening up on little kids with targeted intent. Juxtapose this to the mall shooter, who seemed solely intent on scaring people with his ridiculous hockey mask, shooting aimlessly into a crowd. In a larger sense, so inclined was Adam Lanza, the New Town shooter. His mother was trying to commit him to a psychiatric hospital, and this, combined with his perception that she cared more for the kids she helped at the school as a volunteer, likely brought him to the edge. In the end, however, I believe he was aiming at himself, the child within him, screaming for attention and love.

Was he the wild hare born to make this statement, this wretched, sadistic mark on our world? Or is Lanza one of us, the perpetual adolescent inside crying and lashing out to be heard, to be relevant? To say this person was "evil" is straying from the mark. The word "evil" is a blanket abstraction we like to use to characterize extreme deviations from our ethical standards or morality. Depending on who we are, the word is tossed about liberally to explain any devient behavior; a vestige of our Judaic-Christian construct. Adam Lanza was a deeply disturbed individual, perhaps fatally confused, perhaps mortally wounded in spirit.

But was Lanza, himself, evil? I would argue that the evil here is in the social soup in which he grew up. New Town, the quiet upper-middle class neighborhood like many others across the country, has proven to be just as vulnerable to inadequate mental health care as any other community. We are suffering an apocalypse, alright. Slow, unnerving, psychic devastation: clear symptoms of violence-laden society.

The world ends every day in utterly unpredictable ways for hundreds of thousands of people. It also begins, relentlessly and just as surprisingly. Terror or Joy? The choice, or rather the drama of it, is the great catastrophe of our lives.

Play within Play

One of the big problems that I see in Drum is the fact that Jade spends so much time alone. She wallows in her wine at her apartment, she ventures out alone, always alone to the store, work, Kauai and sites therein, and finally Lopez Island, where she may or may not be discovering her life partner.

I believe this impulse to show Jade alone so much of the time is based on my own proclivity to be alone with myself. I am someone who spends large parts of my day completely alone; I'm quite comfortable being alone and perhaps this has rubbed off on Jade. Perhaps she is just a little too comfortable, sitting in her apartment, occasionally taking a call, a visitor, but never seeking out companionship. This, I now think, is one of Jade's critical failures as a person, and because of this, I think it's important not to limit her time alone in the book, but to emphasize it.

By heightening her reclusive nature, (and it dawns on me now to bring back Cordelia's mother, Francine, who is agoraphobic) she can be seen to be trapped within herself and her gradual realization of this contributes to her fear. Jade fears herself, fears what she might do or say in the world, for it is against the archetypical symbol of her lost brother that she compares herself. She feels that she can in way measure up to the standard that he represents.

The problem, then becomes how to emphasize this fear, how to show it to be the debilitating factor of her life. I believe this question is linked, and necessarily so, to the other critical question: how is Jade's fiction to be introduced? This is more a technical question than it is of plot. Jade spends all this time alone because she is writing a book, stories to sort out the mystery, but the story we see is her unfolding alongside; this is the ironic resonation of Drum.

I think there are contemporary models out there for introducing this fiction within the fiction. I'm thinking, though, of the play within the play in Hamlet in which a certain logic is posited for the benefit of the reader. Through the play, we can deduce Hamlet's struggle--see it more clearly--and alas, this is the reason for it. In similar fashion, Jade's fiction must serve the story--her story. I have everything she writes. I just need to "insert" it, without it feeling like an insertion. "Sailing South" the story that opened the first Drum, for example needs to find a home, an inevitable home, in the plot, preferably near the beginning.

The challenge is to introduce Jade's imagined scenario without disrupting the flow of her own story. OR, maybe the challenge is to introduce Jade's imagined scenario for the purpose of disrupting the flow of her own story. Hmm.

Time to go to work and mull this about a bit.