Who, then, is the unhappy consciousness in our analogy? I would suggest it is the writer of autofiction. In a 2014 essay describing the emerging popularity of autofiction in Anglophone writing, Jonathan Sturgeon lists three defining features of the genre: conscious play with the factual and the fictional; the belief in the immanently fictional character of the self; and a narrative that accounts for its own production, usually by telling us how the author-narrator came to be the self who wrote and published it. According to Frank Guan and Christian Lorentzen, what distinguishes this genre from earlier Künstlerromane are the economic conditions of twenty-first-century publishing. In this interpretation, autofiction is ‘a sort of aesthetic edition of careerism’ (Guan), a symptom of the fact that a writer’s job ‘has ceased to be distinguished from self-promotion’ (Lorenzten). Autofiction writers, in other words, are memoirists who have had to become their own ghostwriters. The prevailing affects on display in the genre are akin to those that Hegel delineated for the unhappy consciousness: anomie, impotence, masochism, anhedonia.
It is therefore fitting, even logical, that Life of M, the new novel by Rachel Cusk, one of the authors most associated with the Anglophone autofiction boom, should be narrated by a would-be ghostwriter. In Life of M, the autofictional ‘game or conceit’ is announced straight out of the gate. The first paragraph reads, in full: ‘A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.’ Bookended by a chapter describing the genesis of this ‘project’ and one describing its ultimate failure, most of Cusk’s novel toggles between what appear to be scenes from M’s life and what appear to be scenes from that of the narrator. Cusk gives each of these sections its own focalization. The first and last chapters are narrated in the first-person singular, M’s chapters are narrated in the close third person and – picking up from where she left off in her previous novel Parade (2024) – Cusk narrates the remaining chapters in the first-person plural. With the exception of the final scene, in which the ghostwriter shows M what they have written, the drama of the novel arises from the question of how much overlap exists between the ‘I’ narrator and the ‘we’ narrator – and how reliable their descriptions of M actually are.
Hegel and ‘Life of M’
Ryan Ruby in the NLR
