Unhiding

I stole a little time, a little space – ease is amiss; it is difficult to attain on the best of days, and those are long gone.

The novella is published now. I have turned pain into fiction, and it doesn’t matter what else may or may not happen – I am at peace, although, again, ease is missing.

I wonder about how pain transforms into fiction, whether it can ever truly be an act of making the real fictional, of setting aside what happened, reintegrating it.

There are two forms of writing: For one, I breathe life into characters that do not exist in this exact manner outside of my mind. For the other, I adjust what has happened into a beast of its own making.

This is what is commonly referred to as autofiction.

The act of writing, however, is never a singular act, but collaborative by nature. The comma errors in the first edition of the novella, one word that has been omitted – all of these errors are mine, but also that of editors and proofreaders who humoured me in my endeavour to write in English as well as German although the former is simply not native to them. So now there are some flaws in the text, minor to most, but glaringly obvious to me. These mistakes, however, are as collective in their making as the text itself, which I find comforting.

There is, in that sense, no such thing as autofiction, or the authorial. And yet the content, the movement of the novella is unmistakably mine.

bell hooks once wrote, »I came to theory because I was hurting,« and I came to writing for much the same reason. This hooks quote is the starting point of Teresa Carmody’s essay »On Theory and Autofiction: Staking Genre,« published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in September 2021.

In it, Carmody writes that »[w]hile an ›I‹ may be constructed performatively within either genre, the respective contracts between the implied authors and their audiences are distinct in important ways. Where autotheory declares this is true, autofiction suggests this may be true.«

This may be true. When truth becomes conditional, what does that ultimately mean? We live in a post-truth society, and we as artists have contributed to the deconstruction of reality. Now we live in unreality or parallel realities – what is real to me may not be real to you and vice versa.

In Germany, it is easier for someone to assault a person and then accuse their accuser of defamation than to be held accountable for their actions. It does not matter what is true if what is true cannot be proven. The very nature of most instances of assault obfuscates the lived reality of assault survivors. So this may be true, but it does not matter. The reliability of the narrator is automatically called into question.

As Carmody writes with regard to the difference between autotheory and autofiction, »[I]t follows, then, that there are different ethical considerations for each genre, both in terms of the reliability of one’s narrator and in the portrayal of the other ›characters‹ referenced in a text.«

The question becomes how one can blur these lines, move those parts of autofiction which belong to the realm of reality from a »may be true« to an »is true.«

My mind is a racing thing, my experience mirrored in a text I once had the pleasure of translating, Exposure by Olivia Sudjic. Sudjic speaks of the fear of exposure, the inability to go back to the safety of being hidden, or to even remain safe behind the label of fiction, once non-male writers have been published.

Exposure in that sense is terrifying, but it can be freeing as well. Writing down trauma, making it visible, makes it undeniable. It exposes the person traumatised, but also exposes the people responsible for that trauma. Why else do we continue writing books and making movies about the worst humanity has to offer? We believe that this form of exposure will perhaps lead to the justice that courts and criminal justice systems so often deny victims of war, of violence, of abuse.

Of course, this bears the danger of retraumatisation, but for artists it is perhaps a moral obligation to take any chance to right the wrongs of the world.

»Use the discursive nature of text,« a friend and fellow writer once told me, »to make yourself heard.«

To turn a hidden truth into a visible one, an unsure »maybe« into the reality that it is.