Autofiction

Miguel de Unamuno

As Wikipedia explains, the term autofiction was coined by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky to describe works of literary fiction in which the author appears—under their own name—as one of the characters. While the term itself is relatively modern, the literary device is much older, though it became particularly prevalent in the 20th century. Let us look at some authors who inserted themselves into their own works:

·         Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy (1300–1321) recounts Dante’s descent into Hell and his subsequent ascent through Purgatory and into Heaven. In Hell and Purgatory, he is guided by the Roman poet Virgil. In Heaven, his guide is his beloved Beatrice Portinari.

·         Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla (1914). At the end of the novel, the author engages in a dialogue with his own character, who confronts him about all the suffering he has been made to endure.

·         In his series of adventure novels set on Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs claims to be the nephew of the protagonist, John Carter. He acts as an intermediary who brings these accounts to the public—either by discovering manuscripts left behind by his uncle or by receiving radio transmissions directly from Mars.

C.S. Lewis

·         C.S. Lewis: In Perelandra (1943), second book of his Cosmic Trilogy, the first-person narrator is identified as an Oxford professor named Lewis. In the two opening chapters, this character, Lewis, visits his friend, the philologist Elwin Ransom (a figure inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien), helps him board a space capsule, and later transcribes the story of Ransom’s journey to Venus.

·         Jorge Luis Borges: In El Aleph (1949)—perhaps his most famous short story—the narrator is named Borges. In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Ficciones, 1944), the narrator is unnamed, but he cites Bioy Casares as his collaborator on an investigation—from which one can infer that the narrator is Borges himself. In El otro (El libro de arena, 1975), the narrator is an elderly Borges who encounters his younger self.

·         Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944). On the book’s first page, the author claims that he has invented nothing. The character who guides us through the story is Somerset Maugham; he travels through Paris, London, and Chicago, dines with high society, and frequently crosses paths with the protagonist, Larry Darrell—a young man in search of spiritual enlightenment. Maugham serves as a confessor to several characters, who share their most intimate secrets with him.

Somerset Maugham

·         Robert A. Heinlein, The Number of the Beast (1980): In this science-fiction novel involving travel across additional dimensions, the characters discover that they can journey through fictional universes. Heinlein is mentioned, though he does not appear in the narrative.

·         Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy: City of Glass (1985): A fictional private investigator named Quinn receives a phone call from someone looking for a detective named Paul Auster. Quinn decides to assume Auster’s identity to solve the case, eventually visiting the real-life writer Paul Auster at his apartment in Brooklyn.

·         Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (1993): The protagonist and narrator of this novel is a writer named Philip Roth. The plot begins when the protagonist discovers that someone in Israel is posing as Philip Roth to promote a controversial political ideology.

·         Stephen King, The Dark Tower series, volumes VI, Song of Susannah, and VII, The Dark Tower (2004): The protagonists of his fantasy saga (Roland and his companions) travel to our world and encounter an author named Stephen King in Maine. They discover that King is the creator of their universe and that, should he die or stop writing, their world would collapse. King does not invent this world; rather, he acts as a kind of cosmic antenna, tuning into that reality in order to write it down. The protagonists must convince King not to abandon the series, for if he stops writing or dies—an allusion to the real-life accident King suffered in 1999, in which he nearly lost his life—the entire multiverse and the Dark Tower itself would crumble.

J.R.R. Tolkien

·   In my novel Historias en la oscuridad (Stories in darkness), the narrator, who is not named, is myself, and makes reference to some things that really happened to me.

Creation (the universe) is often compared to a literary work—a novel or a play—in which each of us is a character. Drawing on this parallel, Christians maintain that God entered His own work as a character when He became incarnate in Jesus Christ, who died and rose again to bring us with Him into the afterlife.

In a famous essay (On Fairy-Stories, 1939), J.R.R. Tolkien proposed that human authors are sub-creators—imitators of the divine creation—as God is the only true, primordial author. Viewed in this light, God would be the first author to have inserted Himself into His own work.

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Manuel Alfonseca