All Auto- All the Time:

Artwork, Art Work, and the University

Today I’m going to talk about the novelistic category of autofiction, a rather hazily defined genre—indeed, some ask, isn’t the blurring of author and narrator just another way of describing fiction as such? Well, sure, but I think we can and should grasp more precisely what autofiction is and what it stands for. My talk is a narrative about where it comes from and why it might matter to us—if not always as art then at least as sociological evidence. The first thing you need to know is that autofiction is very specifically a phenomenon of the past 15 years. Fifteen years also happens to be the amount of time I have spent in institutions of higher education, from my undergraduate to graduate degrees to my current postdoctoral position. These parallel timelines, of autofiction and my own education, are not unrelated. If this sounds self-aggrandizingly autotheoretical, I want to just note that almost every idea I’ve ever had about literature comes from my time spent in universities.

For me, and perhaps you as well, my undergraduate education was nothing short of transformative. As a first-generation student, all I knew was that you needed college to do anything in life. By contrast, things I didn’t know included how to write an essay, how to go to office hours, how an ad hoc assemblage of humanities courses would amount to a degree. Majoring in English, as I ultimately did, was an accident. I had never read a novel or story or poem with the notion that I could learn something else about the world. Encountering this radical notion was how I first became hooked on the “cruel optimism” that we here probably all suffer, the vague idea that not only could I study literature, but study it for a living and lead a glamorous life as a professor. I graduated with first class honors, but unlike my more worldly peers, I had waffled about graduate school applications and missed the deadlines. I took a year off after graduation, not knowing what to do next. After working in a chain bookstore for a few months—trying desperately to remain as close to books as I could—I wondered, “Is this all you get?” Where is the real world? This was just an anti-climactic segue into “life.” Most important, where was the mobility that college had promised? What do I do now: go to law school?

Whatever my successes as an undergraduate, I was still an underprepared student in a sense that I didn’t know how to leverage those successes—or didn’t have the people to leverage them for me.

After several months away from university, I wanted, needed, to be back. To be among scholars, to read and learn things. I wanted to mainline thinking. Because it felt like I had to make up for the twenty years it was kept from me. In my first year of my English graduate program, a professor asked me during their office hours why I had come to grad school. I said, “It kicks the shit out of working”—because it absolutely did. Of course, teaching technical writing and introductory literature to undergraduates is work. But it didn’t feel like it (this is, more broadly speaking, a big part of academics’ problems). Instead, it felt to me like freedom. My shitty graduate student stipend ($14,000, before our grad union battled it up to $16K) was still more money than I had ever made, and I felt like I was doing something personally and socially meaningful.

My evolving ideas about the importance of art, literature, and culture—and about their potential to resist power, oppression, and the mentally stultifying effects of capitalism—had much to do with this modicum of freedom, this tiny little refuge from everything else, that was required to have those ideas and dispositions in the first place. UF gave me six years of funding, and I had support from some wonderful faculty who helped me patch together teaching appointments, fellowships, dissertation completion scholarships, and research assistantships into nine years of funding. (Without a job offer from somewhere willing to sponsor my visa, I was tethered to my university and whatever funding it would provide.) I had a wonderful partner with a stable job (and still do!). And the thing is: none of this was enough. Because academia runs on manufactured scarcity. At the same time I was doing everything right—conferencing, networking, publishing, teaching—I was also writing hundreds of soul-sucking applications for academic jobs, none of which panned out.

This situation—personal, institutional, socio-political—is one of both privilege and dispossession. By telling you a bit about it, I’m trying to be more sober about what art, and the novel in particular, is good for, who it’s good for, and why we should remain interested in it if we ever want to expand that small freedom to more people. Against the degradation of academic labor, and capitalist immiseration in general, I really want to believe that art and literature are important realms in which to make thinkable alternate, radically utopian realities. Because it feels like all the biggest life-choices I’ve ever made depend on that being true.

After three grueling years on the “job market,” I have found employment at a fancy-pants university. I like the teaching, my students, my colleagues, my city, the space my job gives me to breathe and have a life. But I remain, in the end, precarious. I don’t think I should lose sight of the fact that my appointment is a time bomb. Whatever I do, the institution, as they say, will not love me back.

I have such a strong attachment to literature and this profession because of that taste of freedom it gave me 15 years ago and has continued to dose me with, always just enough to keep me hooked. But let me turn now to the parallel narrative, about autofiction, gestating along with me, and lots of you, 15 years ago, circa 2007.

***

Marjorie Worthington’s The Story of “Me” appears to be the first and only book-length study on autofiction in the post-45 American context. In this taxonomizing work, Worthington attributes the term “autofiction” to French author Serge Doubrovsky, for whom it “refers to a particular type of narrative that exhibits elements of both fiction and autobiography. The primary defining trait of autofiction… is the inclusion of a characterized version of the author, usually as the protagonist.”[1] A little more specifically, Worthington says, autofiction proliferates today because of “the diminishing cultural authority of the novel and of authors in general and the white male author in particular.”[2] This is a common enough narrative, but not one that I think adequately explains autofiction. The waning cultural importance of the novel and its white male author are simply not things.[3] What else can account for the autofictional trend? Dan Sinykin offers a richer understanding. Situating autofiction in the rise of literary conglomeration, Sinykin observes how literary business becomes increasingly important to literary aesthetics, as “autofiction takes on particular formal and thematic characteristics that express conglomeration.” Sinykin adds, “In both its reality hunger and its depiction of its milieu autofiction expresses the conditions of its production and negotiates those conditions to pry from them symbolic and financial capital. Like metafiction, autofiction is a technique by which writers accumulate symbolic capital, in this case by expressing the contemporary pressures of authorship.”[4] Similarly, Lee Konstantinou emphasizes how autofiction not only addresses these pressures of authorship but how its authors are compelled under neoliberalism to “internaliz[e]” to a degree like never before, “the functions of writer, publisher, and marketer within [their] own corporate person.” For autofiction authors like Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and Tao Lin, Konstantinou says, “managing their career is central to the content of their being as writers.”[5] And in an unpublished book that I am very excited for, Anna Kornbluh situates the explosion of literary and critical “self-emanation” within neoliberal developments like deindustrialization, the privatization of (former) state functions, and the deskilling of labor, including very much the labor of criticism itself.[6] Such economic considerations give us a much stronger grip on the contemporary premium on personalization.

So, it’s the neoliberalism, to no one’s surprise. Rachel Greenwald Smith and Mitchum Huehls have already covered this territory for me: beginning around the 1980s, “Culture absorbs and diffuses neoliberalism’s bottom-line values, saturating our daily lives with for-profit rationalities of commerce and consumerism, eventually shifting neoliberalism from political ideology to normative common sense.”[7] Neoliberalism—understood as an ideology[8]—is like that fungus that turns ants into zombies, seizing control of its hosts’ brains to reproduce its fungus world. In common accounts of neoliberalism, it entails the becoming economic of the previously non-economic—in thrall to the brain fungus, we reproduce the world that is parasitic on our commodified labor—that is, when we’re not being expelled from the wage relation to create unemployment.

This is what autofiction is ultimately about too. But how so? Yes, it’s capitalism, but for a more granular account of what autofiction is and why people care about it, we need to look autofiction’s texts and, just as important, its authors. For Worthington, “some authors of American autofiction parody the memoir form in order to appeal to the prurient interests of the contemporary American reading public who have a seemingly insatiable appetite for ripped-from-the-headlines stories about prominent or otherwise interesting people.”[9] But why should an author’s career make for good or even compelling novelistic content? But just who the hell are these people who could possibly find the lives of academics, creative writing professors, and other literary elites who populate autofiction interesting, let alone “ripped-from-the-headlines”?[10]

This question about audience gets us much closer to the heart of the contemporary auto-tendency. I would like to argue that autofiction’s outsized representation in post-45 literary studies can be attributed to the status and possibility of literary culture, criticism, and the state of the humanities and the neoliberal university since 2007 and the global financial crisis. So, we need to look at some autofiction now.

***

Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot (2017), is set in 1995, during the freshman year of Harvard student Selin Karadağ, an avatar of Harvard student Elif Batuman.[11] The Idiot offers a spirited defense of literature’s great uselessness, or useless greatness, which appears to be a simple matter of embracing the possibility that one can and should just write one’s life, that one should be idiotic (in the sense of idios). This notion becomes even more plausible when we read Batuman’s own criticism.

In a polemic against the overweening craft of the contemporary creative writing program, Batuman proclaims, “American novelists are ashamed to find their own lives interesting.”[12] By contrast, The Idiot is determined to find everything about Selin/Batuman’s life interesting. The opening vignette of the novel, for instance, focuses on Selin’s encounter with email, at the time a novel invention:

Insofar as I’d had any idea of it at all, I had imagined that email would be like faxing, would involve a printer. There was another world. You could access it through certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there… was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn’t know, all in the same letters, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary…; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people’s brains.[13]

Presaging the joys of future autofictional effusions, Selin’s fixation on the instantaneity of thought encapsulates in snippet form an aesthetic mandate for the would-be novelist. In an interview, Batuman expresses a deep interest in self-making and the personal effusion made possible by technologies like email and, moreover, frames these as matters of literary craft:

“People don’t become writers because they love having spontaneous real world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time… Email was very appealing to me. I thought of the self as something that is best expressed through careful crafting.” Coming of age is filled with absurdity (say, judging a male beauty competition) and loss (the theft of a beloved pea coat, still smelling of her mother’s perfume), and it’s up to each of us to wrest meaning from it all. “If you didn’t have some kind of story going on,’ Selin reflects, ‘how would you know who you were when you woke up in the morning?”[14]

Batuman’s interviewer continues, before again quoting Batuman: “The result, at this new dawn of auto-fiction, is the kind of voice— unruly, open-hearted, anti-cynical—we feel lucky to have accompanying us into our so-called adulthood, one that expands, in a very Proustian sense, our understanding of what the novel do[es]… ‘That’s how we experience the world,’ says Batuman. ‘When you walk around, you have all this stuff rattling around in your head, things that have happened to you, things you have read. Life is just life, and you get what you get out of it.’”[15]

You get what you get. The Idiot’s ambitions for itself parallel a recently renewed investment in aesthetic autonomy—attention to which is more urgent than ever under neoliberalism’s “real subsumption” of the artwork under capital, according to Nicholas Brown.[16] As a kind of portrait of its artist, The Idiot, and maybe autofiction writ large, could maybe be said to take on a project of resisting such subsumption. Selin is firmly convinced of one of art’s long-running and governing myths, that of the lone genius. Not only could she be a writer; she is somehow innately so. Selin thinks, “Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some ways I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine myself writing anything, that I thought anyone would like the read.”[17]

Understanding that The Idiot is in fact the novel that Selin/Batuman will go on to write one day, being unable to imagine a readable work of fiction is never an issue to overcome. The Idiot’s meandering, 400-page first-person account of Selin’s freshman year, her innermost thoughts, and her thoughts about those thoughts never do make for exciting reading material—at least not to me—but that’s my problem as the reader, not Batuman’s as an autho. You get what you get.

That The Idiot appeals to this renewed interest in the possibility of autonomous artwork—a novel that doesn’t care about what people want to read and hence, supposedly, doesn’t care about the market either—is made clearer when we make the metaleptic leap that autofiction solicits and read the novel by the lights of its author’s words. Batuman writes a rather ungenerous review of Mark McGurl’s landmark book The Program Era, a book whose signature disappointment was to remind people that fiction isn’t blithely untethered from the real world. In her review, Batuman sets her sights on McGurl’s concluding remarks about the postwar creative writing program. He writes:

. . . do we not bear daily witness to a surfeit of literary excellence, an embarrassment of riches? Is there not more excellent fiction being produced now than anyone has time to read?

What kind of traitor to the mission of mass higher education would you have to be to think otherwise?[18]

In her review, Batuman writes, referring to the passage I just quoted:

The continual production of ‘more excellent fiction… than anyone has time to read’ is the essence of the problem. That’s the torture of walking into a bookshop these days: it’s not that you think the books will all be terrible; it’s that you know they’ll all have a certain degree of competent workmanship, that most will have about three genuinely beautiful or interesting sentences and no really bad ones, that many will have at least one convincing, well-observed character, and that nearly all will be bound up in a story that you can’t bring yourself to care about. All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! Who, indeed, has time to read them?

Batuman then concludes: “When ‘great literature’ is replaced by ‘excellent fiction’, that’s the real betrayal of higher education.”[19] Against this caricature of McGurl’s program era, of mere fiction, The Idiot self-designates as a properly literary antidote; it is an anti-program program statement that believes the most un-programmatic thing one can do is write a literary novel about oneself.

Let me recap the following scene from The Idiot in full. Selin begins her writing career by deciding to write a short story for class:

Like all the stories I wrote at that time, it was based on an unusual atmosphere that had impressed me in real life. I thought that was the point of writing stories: to make up a chain of events that would somehow account for a certain mood—for how it came about and for what it led to.

The atmosphere I wanted to write about had arisen a few years earlier, when my mother and I had gone on vacation to Mexico. Something went wrong with the chartered bus that was supposed to take us back to the airport, and it left us instead in the pink-tiled courtyard of a strange hotel, where Albinoni’s Adagio was playing on speakers, and something fell onto our arms, and we looked up and it was ashes. I was reading Camus’s The Plague—that was my beach reading—and it seemed to me that we would always be there, in the pink courtyard, unable to leave.

   I wanted to write a story that created just that mood—a pink hotel, Albinoni, ashes, and being unable to leave—in an exigent and dignified way. In real life, we had been in that courtyard only three hours. I was an American teenager, the world’s least interesting and dignified kind of person, brought there by my mother. It was the very definition of a nonevent: some Americans had experienced a flight delay. In my story the characters would be stuck there for a long time, for a real, legitimate reason—like a sickness. The hotel would be somewhere far away, like Japan. The hotel management would be sorry that Albinoni’s Adagio was piped into the halls and lobby for such a long time, but it would be a deep-rooted technical problem and difficult to fix.[20]

This is not the story itself, but rather a sketch of a prototypical MFA-style short story. But framed as juvenilia and subsumed within the more mature work of the novel, Selin’s story conditions us to understand The Idiot as a counterpoint to what Batuman elsewhere describes as an “indiscriminate premium…on the particular” and on the “‘lean,’ ‘tight,’ ‘well-honed’ prose” that characterizes contemporary creative writing program literature.[21]

What I find illuminating about all this, about Batuman’s brand of autofiction, about the brand Elif Batuman™, is that the anti-institutional trajectory of her career is the product of an even more perfect institutionality. Batuman has been fully entrenched within a privileged, nepotistic academy and publishing world from the very beginning of her “career” which we could say begins not with The Idiot but from her enrollment at Harvard. (And to be clear, this is a description of a literary situation, not an assessment or ethical evaluation of Batuman’s writing itself, in which I often find much aesthetic enjoyment, especially in her 2022 novel Either/Or). In a profile piece in Stanford Magazine, we learn that “Keith Gessen, editor of the magazine n+1, saw work [Batuman] had published in the Harvard Advocate and asked her to contribute. ‘Babel in California,’ about a conference at Stanford, appeared in the second issue of n+1 in the spring of 2005. It caught the attention of David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who soon had Batuman writing a piece on Thai kickboxing.”[22] At this time, too, Batuman would first formalize in n+1 her thoughts about programmatic prose later featured in the McGurl review.

Selin, like Batuman, navigates university courses, roommates, and romance, a summer abroad teaching English in Hungary, and ends her year with a vacation with her mother to visit family in Turkey. In the epiphanic ending, mirroring Batuman’s own education, Selin thinks, “When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn’t take any more classes in the philosophy or psychology of language. They had let me down. I hadn’t learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn’t learned anything at all.”[23] But if Selin learns nothing about how language works, Batuman has learned at least one important thing about how literary fiction works: a Harvard student who believes she is a writer can muster the gumption to transmute her undergraduate experience into the raw materials of a Pulitzer-nominated novel.

I think about The Idiot often and with bitter resentment. I think about which readers value it and what they value in it. I think about how my experiences as student look nothing like Batuman’s. I imagine that her audience is composed of a highly niche group of university-educated readers with the time, disposition, and training to read a 400-page novel—or they are aspirational dark-academia types like me. Yet the freedoms of literary pursuit and the enrichments one extracts from it are premised on other freedoms—freedoms that are inextricable from a reader’s inclinations and attachments to literature. As Sarah Brouillette writes, high literary culture is

a site of identification, style of cultural activity, and form of education [that] tends to mask the character of the primary social relations that are necessary to its own flourishing. These relations include relatively high levels of wealth, a well-funded publishing infrastructure, a forceful national copyright regime, and an accessible, state-backed educational infrastructure. High literary culture is inseparable from these social conditions. It is enabled by them and it is a form of inculcation of and engagement with the mores that they occasion.[24]

But under neoliberalism, Brouillette goes on, “[t]he foundation for this sociolect. . . appears no longer to be in place, leaving literature with a far less assured role to play in the inculcation of dominant values. What we have now, perhaps, is the unraveling and beleaguerment of the bourgeois sociolect.”[25] Where does this literary sociolect, and the class cohesion it helps buttress, take refuge today? For one, in the ever-tightening circles of academia, where, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò reminds us, “[a]s you get higher and higher forms of education, social experiences narrow.”[26] And even though The Idiot’s self-skewering title suggests that diagnosing the privilege of what is basically a new courtly culture of the elite reading class is maybe the point—though I don’t think it even is—without any viable opposition to those structures of inequality that benefit the would-be autofiction authors of the world, it’s just not a very gratifying point.

So, a key site of the reproduction of autofiction’s profusion of self is the university. Let’s zoom out from Batuman and look at this sampling of autofiction authors (Figure 1). In this depiction, I want to account for the overblown status of autofiction in contemporary literary criticism. It begins with our canon, granted institutional recognition and heft by people in rooms like this one (but at better schools with more money). These authors are treated with outsize significance by the literary critical establishment; by major magazines like the New Yorker and Harper’s, by a suite of lofty little magazines like n+1, The Drift, and their ilk; and by the field of post-45 literature. All these authors have become high literary sensations; except for Knausgård, all attended at least one U.S. News top-30 “global university”; all the American universities listed here are private schools; and, lastly, many of these authors have found employment at lauded creative writing programs or prestigious magazines. And this is what I would argue The Idiot is finally “about.” Its key contribution to our understanding of contemporary literature is to tell us, unequivocally, the meaning of Harvard. This is the sense in which all autofiction is also a campus novel.

I’ve highlighted these rows in blue to note a generational trend as well, one that coincides with the decline of literary jobs in academia (Figure 2). These authors all graduate and publish their debuts in the early years of the new millennium. Moreover, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, and Batuman together highlight the concurrence of autofiction’s rise and the drastic plummeting of job prospects in higher education. Batuman’s time at Harvard precisely coincides with a steady increase in English and foreign language jobs, while her time at Stanford is coterminous with their leveling out at about 1,800 per year. Batuman then graduates in 2007, right before the fall. Whatever the merits of individual works of autofiction—we always have to read case by case—when we zoom out, we see that its story is told from a very niche position within higher education: that of the last generation to slide across home plate and find gainful and non-precarious employment in their fields. The nosedive in academic jobs has not begun to be remediated since. University austerity has only ramped up, decimating programs in the humanities, despite how cheap they are to run and how successful they are at filling seats.

So, autofiction is not a big literary sea change; it is a small niche within the slightly less small niche of distinctly literary fiction. However, it is a very vocal and well-promoted niche, at least within literary critical circles. One reason its academic boosters are keen to amplify the autofictional voice through their criticism and teaching is, I would argue, however unconsciously, that autofiction offers a comfortable narrative about what universities are supposed to do: produce educated, successful, upwardly mobile, white-collar neoliberal subjects.[27] But universities do not produce such people. Or, if they do, it’s incidental—except perhaps at Harvard. Universities do not produce human capital; they produce debt.

So, what’s true of autofiction is what’s true of fiction in general. It is written mainly by writers with access to elite education. In a much more rigorous data analysis than mine, Juliana Spahr, Claire Grossman, and Stephanie Young demonstrate the extent to which award committee nepotism and institutions of higher learning and mentorship have, against perceptions of literature’s diversification, actually decreased literary plurality: “even as there is more literature than ever before, only that written by an increasingly narrow demographic and published by an equally narrow group of publishers is let into the room called dialogue, which is increasingly the same room as the [literary] prize. Literature’s tenuous relationship with democratization is more tenuous than ever before.”[28]

Autofiction is emblematic of the project of what Batuman calls “great literature”: to amplify the voice of the highly educated—which is to say, to amplify the lived experience of the global bourgeoisie or reading class and to reduce literature to the effusion of immediate personal experience. Autofiction may be about the self, but it’s also, because of that, about the collective—the collective my undergraduate self was so deeply drawn to, the collective I still very often wish to join, even if trying to makes me feel grimier than it once did. In the name of a more literary literature, autofiction indulges neoliberalism’s greatest fantasies: the individual is all that matters; the inner life of the bourgeois subject is the source of all aesthetic value and meaning. Institutions will not love you. You get what you get.

***

Against the hyper-personal horizon of autofiction, I want to transition now, all to quickly, to genre fiction—genre in the more pejorative sense. At least in the American novel, it seems to me that genre is where you go when you want access to all the things abrogated by autofiction. Rather than the latter’s “reality hunger,” the work of genre fiction still cares about things like narration, plot, world-building, and speculation—all the things that offer some alterity to the psychologically minimalist and mundane passage of a contemplative life.

Let me turn to another author whose corpus of work might well be considered autofiction but, to my knowledge, hasn’t been. Possibly, this is because Percival Everett is black, and one thing autofiction has been good at is erasing black authors and other authors of color from the scene of contemporary literary fiction. His 2001 novel Erasure (2001) is narrated by novelist, UCLA English professor, and veiled Everett figure, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. Erasure treats the seeming upsurge in African American fiction in the 1990s. Monk considers himself a serious artist and, as a serious artist, is angered by the commercial and critical success of black author who capitalizes on her gritty and terribly racist depiction of the “real” stories of Black Americans. The author herself is from Ohio; Oberlin-educated; employed at a New York publishing house. Monk writes his own gritty, parodical, and racist novel under a pen name. He gets a $600,000 advance from Random House. Monk retitles the novel Fuck. He wins a prestigious prize.

This gloss of Everett’s most well-known novel is to help us grasp Everett’s long-time investment in writing about art, but I actually want to speak on Everett’s latest novel, 2021’s The Trees. In this novel, it is not just the publishing world that is bankrupt, but academia. The Trees is a detective story set in Money, Mississippi. The crimes are a series of brutal murders. The victims, all white descendants of the killers of Emmett Till, are found bloodied, castrated, and with barbed wire around their necks. At each murder scene, the detectives find the same body of a black man, long dead with indiscernible facial features, holding the testicles of a murdered white man.

Two black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are sent to investigate the crimes. They delve into the Trump-era South, encountering rednecks and Klansmen, but also a small group of black Money residents, including a mixed-race woman named Dixie, who works in the local diner, and her grandmother, a matriarchal figure named Mama Z. In her house, Mama Z has assembled an archive documenting nearly every lynching to ever be committed in the United States. Dixie cajoles her old college friend, a university professor named Damon Thruff, to visit and encounter this archive for himself, and he soon becomes enthralled by it. Later, a 10-page chapter of the novel is almost entirely composed of a running list of names of African and Asian Americans who have been lynched, transcribed by Damon in pencil. “When I write the names, they become real, not just statistics. When I write the names, they become real again. It’s almost like they get a few more seconds here. Do you know what I mean? I would never be able to make up so many names. The names have to be real. They have to be real. Don’t they?”[29] “When I’m done,” Damon says, “I’m going to erase every name, set them free.”[30]

This act of erasure or protest, if that’s what it is, is a sympathetic but hollow centrist gesture, the kind of thing you might encounter on the quad of a university campus—which is not to trivialize the importance of such gestures either. Of Erasure, Greenwald Smith writes, the novel offers a critique of art’s complicity with the market by giving us a story “in which writers increasingly find no room to take dissenting positions. In which one can speak of the reality of political injustice only through the language of the market, and in which the language of the market, in turn, produces further racial stereotypes.”[31] So too in the corporate university. Academia is no less susceptible to compromise with the market, whose horizons of social and racial justice are private, reflective. Our fields and disciplines, too, are commoditized offerings, extensions of our personal brands; critical thinking is, as Steven Salaita puts it, a “rhetorical commodity,” “hopelessly intertwined with professional rewards and public relations.”[32] Critical thinking cannot be performed sincerely from within the compromised site of the university, at least not without inviting scorn, punishment, or harassment. Damon is very much compromised by this academic environment, and Everett’s outstanding description is worth repeating here in its entirety:

Damon Nathan Thruff was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. He held a PhD in molecular biology from Harvard, a PhD in psychobiology from Yale, and a PhD in Eastern philosophy from Columbia. He was 27 years old period he had published three books on cellular regeneration, all issued by Cambridge University Press, and a two-volume work on the biological and philosophical origins of racial violence in the United States published by Harvard University Press. On this particular day he was sitting at the desk in his tiny university office in the department of ethnic studies (because they didn't know where to put him), trying to compile a list of names of people who might write letters in support of his tenure bid. He had been denied tenure the year before but was being given a second chance, what the university administration was calling an affirmative reconsideration. The reason given for this denial of tenure was his productivity. The Dean told him, flatly, that no one really believed that he was capable of so much work of such quality so quickly. And so he was stuck with a one year appointment called the Phillis Wheatley chair in remedial studies. Part of his second (gift) bid for tenure required that he not publish anything for a year. Such restraint from active scholarship might show the proper commitment to his proper place, was what the dean told him.[33]

Damon’s scholarly overperformance captures several key characteristics of contemporary academic labor, including the university’s commitment to “diversity” and its simultaneous eradication of things that would actually ensure more diversity, let alone equity; the hyper-competition of the academic job market that requires graduate students to do the same labor of TT professors, competition that sunders solidarity, and the transition from a publish or perish profession to a publish and perish profession.

So, as I’m sure you saw coming, the list of names Damon derives from Mama Z’s archive has to do with the murders, and with this realization the novel shifts into straight up horror, in the vein of this renaissance we are in that Sheri-Marie Harrison calls the “New Black Gothic” and that includes works like Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Us, and Nope; Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country; and Donald Glover’s Atlanta. We learn that the black man at each crime scene is a new revival of Till, instantiated into vengeful life when Mama Z or Dixie writes his name. As Damon begins writing the long list of names of the legions of murdered Black and Asian people in the U.S., they, too, “become real.” Across the U.S., the victims of racial terror are resurrected to take their revenge:

Some called it a throng. A reporter on the scene used the word horde… Whatever it was called, it was at least five hundred bodies strong and growing and had abandoned all stealth. It made a noise. A moan that filled the air. Rise, it said, Rise. It left towns torn apart. Families grieved. Families assessed their histories. It was weather. Rise. It was a cloud. It was a front, a front of dead air. Survivors reported that the air felt thick and heavy in its wake, sitting near the ground like the mist of dry ice. There were clouds in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, everywhere it seemed. The clouds merged into bigger clouds, the sounds of their moans growing louder with every step, every death. Rise.[34]

It is unclear here if “every death” refers to each lynching or to each killing of a descendant or a lyncher.

At this point in the novel, rather than writing and erasing, Damon is now typing out a ream of names with a typewriter. No more erasure:

Damon snatched a page from the typewriter laid it on a thick stack to the right, rolled a blank sheer from a pile on the left, and continued to type.

“He’s typing names,” Mama Z said. “One name at a time. On name at a time. Every name.”

“Names,” Ed said.

“Shall I stop him?” Mama Z asked.

Jim looked at Ed, then Hind. Gertrude [Dixie] was clearly confused. They were confused, yet not.

“Shall I stop him?” the old woman asked again.

Outside, in the distance, through the night air, the muffled cry came through, Rise. Rise.

“Shall I stop him?”[35]

The novel ends with this dangling question. We are asked to consider the ramifications of justice by zombie hoard meted out against, if not the direct perpetrators of racial terror, then the beneficiaries of the racist order it was instrumental in building.

The Trees is a novel about research and writing that involves the realization of collective consciousness. Unlike literary fiction’s devotion to a privileged subjectivity incubated in elite universities, the fictional list of real names hungers for a reality different from the one we already have. And it hungers for more from our universities and the consequences of our research. Unlike autofiction’s reduction to the personal, to affect, to self-contemplation, The Trees insists that objective situations exist, that critical categories like race and class matter when confronting and describing those situations and when producing critical vocabularies needed to supplant them. Let me put it a different way: Damon’s list of names is the ultimate piece of quit lit.

Another genre that surely has interesting links with this period of autofiction we’re living through, quit lit certainly has its cynical qualities. If I had a similar power to Damon, I can’t say I wouldn’t summon a zombie horde to cleanse academia of its bloated administrative class and, to be sure, the anti-worker ranks among its professoriate too. Often, though some may be loath to admit it, reactionaries have a far better grasp of the power of the moral dimensions of things. While the left writes quit lit, the right founds the University of Austin. On this model, the university will continue to work for who it works for, rendering the rest of us shambling hordes—students, TAs, adjuncts, the precariously employed of all stripes, who can hope only to survive. But, ever the utopian, I don’t think quit lit is just a cynical capitalization on one’s precarity. It strikes me also as a genuine longing to put to use the skills one learns in university toward something besides reaffirming class privilege.

***

Now, I don’t have a proposal to institute a Marxist University of Austin—although, why not? Let me conclude, instead, with a minor antidote to the anti-narrative, anti-fictional, pro-”literary” tendencies at work in autofiction and in the anti-critical thinking in our universities that attends it. Let me talk for a moment about teaching and genre fiction. In the fall, I taught a course titled How to Build a World. It was a 200-level class designed with the intention of showing students that literature isn’t just “open to interpretation.” It is open to critique, which, following Fredric Jameson, is necessarily and simultaneously a diagnostic and speculative act. In our current situation, the speculations of genre fiction are horrifying because they contravene the sanctification of the personal and the excision of the collective.

I know my work will never spark a revolution or do much at all to contribute to the takedown of the neoliberal order. The chances are slim indeed, and it’s even more gutting to recognize that, while students hunger for this type of education drawn from genre fiction, jobs for people who could teach them things like horror, science fiction, utopian studies and so much more, are never approved or advertised. But what I know from my teaching is that I still do meaningful work for some of my students. At Emory, where I now work, many of my students are looking to transfer to Harvard. Maybe some of them will even go on to write autofiction. Many more are keenly set on business school. But a handful of them understand the bleak situation in their university and beyond. They want to destroy capitalism. Or at least they know that that needs to happen one way or another. In How to Build a World, we read novels like Never Let Me Go, The Underground Railroad, The Fifth Season, and The Ministry for the Future, all novels that speculate, novels that demand attention to the formation of collective subjectivities and critical categories like class (Figure 3). These novels advance plot, they give us moral visions of good guys and bad guys, they believe in novelistic form as a counter-voice to the bourgeois individual’s and a counter-logic to the anti-narrative, autofictional registers of its elites. 

Jameson argues that Marxism’s continued relevance lies with the fact that it “has yet to invent a working ideology on the global level to replace the discredited options of social democracy and the party-state.”[36] Similarly, as Anna Kornbluh puts it, “Marxism announces the rootedness of thought in the material problems of human production and reproduction, while it simultaneously elaborates the condition of possibility for uprooting thought: for revolutionary transformations that would entail revolutions in thought and for ideas as pivotal agents of such transformations.”[37] The university may not be where those ideas come from today—that is the neoliberal dream anyway. That’s why most of us are composition instructors now, if we’re lucky enough to be anything. Except in small pockets like our classrooms and graduate unions, our Marxist Reading Groups, and other movements led by the present and future precariat and unemployed. These things are not sufficient, but they are vital to whatever comes next. In the meantime, Jameson insists on the vitality of reading, “that ultimate human agency.” We are human, and so we make art, we narrate, we speculate.[38]

Notes

[1] Marjorie Worthington, The Story of ‘Me’: Contemporary American Autofiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 2.

[2] Ibid., 21.

[3] In Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, for instance, we see how novelistic writing has proliferated into ever more realms of daily life. And Richard Jean So’s data history of post-45 American fiction shows just how delusional the idea that publishing has ever been, or is, anything other than white actually is. See Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

[4] Dan Sinykin, “The Conglomerate Era: Publishing, Authorship, and Literary Form, 1965–2007,” Contemporary Literature 58, no. 4 (2017): 475. For Sinykin, the conglomerate age begins in 1965, when RCA purchased Random House, and ends in 2007 with the release of Amazon’s Kindle.

[5] Lee Konstantinou, “Autofiction and Autoreification,” Modern Language Association, January 2021. https://www.leekonstantinou.com/2021/02/06/autofiction-and-autoreification/.

[6] Matt Seybolt, Merve Emre, and Anna Kornbluh, “Bootstrapping across America: Autofiction, Autotheory, Autoeverything,” The American Vandal, The Center for Mark Twain Studies. February 14, 2021. Spotify.

[7] Rachel Greenwald Smith and Mitchum Huehls, “Four Phases of Neoliberalism and Literature,” in Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, edited by Rachel Greenwald Smith and Mitchum Huehls (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 8.

[8] By this, I follow Sarah Brouillette and Joshua Clover, who claim that “neoliberalism” is not a concerted program but an ad hoc aggregate of often-contradictory tactics united only in funneling wealth upward. “Neoliberalism,” for them, is the “ideological supplement” to this reality. See Brouillette and Clover, “On Artistic Autonomy as a Bourgeois Fetish” in Totality Inside Out: Rethinking Crisis and Conflict under Capital, edited by Kevin Floyd, Jen Hedler Phillis, and Sarika Chandra (Fordham University Press, 2022): 192 – 210.

[9] Worthington, 18.

[10] Sinykin touches on this quality too, calling autofiction “a prestige version of reality TV.” The important thing here, though, is the prestige, the distinction, the incredibly niche market for whom autofiction is entertaining.

[11] Selin’s year parallels certain events described in Batuman’s bibliomemoir, The Possessed (2010), which, notably in the context of autofiction, she had first envisioned as a novel about grad school.

[12] Elif Batuman, “Short Story & Novel,” n+1, no. 4 (2006), https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-4/essays/short-story-novel/.

[13] Batuman, The Idiot (New York: Penguin, 2017), 4.

[14] Batuman, “In The Idiot, Coming Of Age at Just The Right Time,” interview by Megan O’Grady, Vogue, March 10, 2017. https://www.vogue.com/article/elif-batuman-the-idiot.

[15] Ibid.

[16] See Nicholas Brown, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Subsumption under Capital,” nonsite, March 13, 2012. https://nonsite.org/the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-its-real-subsumption-under-capital/

[17] Batuman, The Idiot (New York: Penguin, 2017), 96.

[18] Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press, 2009), 410.

[19] Batuman, “The Invisible Vocation,” MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, ed. Chad Harbach (New York: n+1/Faber and Faber, 2014), 261.

[20] Ibid., 57 – 58.

[21] Batuman, “Short Story & Novel,” n+1, no. 4 (2006), https://nplusonemag.com/issue-4/essays/short-story-novel/.

[22] Batuman, “By Lit Possessed,” interview by Charles Matthews, Stanford Magazine, January/February 2010, https://stanfordmag.org/contents/by-lit-possessed#annotations:Kuc_9qI2EeyyuG_m28MsoQ.

[23] Batuman, The Idiot, 423.

[24] Sarah Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 5.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, “Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference,” The Philosopher, November 20, 2021. https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/profile/1baff8ad-d7c6-42e2-8110-c8e796cff756/profile.

[27] Here, see Annie McClanahan, “Becoming Non-Economic: Human Capital Theory and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos,” Theory & Event 20, no. 2 (2017): 510 – 519. McClanahan writes, “Precisely because the university is increasingly disconnected from the economy as a whole—because it is increasingly irrelevant to or superfluous within an economy that now needs fewer educated workers than ever before—the language of human capital and economic outcomes has emerged as a kind of defense mechanism against the potentially revolutionary political consequences of this reality.”

[28] Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young, “Literature’s Vexed Democratization,”

American Literary History 33, no. 2 (2021): 315 – 16.

[29] Percival Everett, The Trees (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2021), 190.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Rachel Greenwald Smith, On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2021), 131.

[32] Steven Salaita, “Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University,” https://stevesalaita.com/punishment-and-reward-in-the-corporate-university/.

[33] Everett, The Trees, 111.

[34] Ibid., 306

[35] Ibid., 308.

[36] Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), 25. 

[37] Anna Kornbluh, “We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 50, no. 3 (2017), 401.

[38] Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 532.