The Absolute Self(ie): How Autofiction Writes the Relational

The Absolute Self(ie): How Autofiction Writes the Relational Chelsea Largent (bio) Her portrait is not represented in a still photograph nor in a painting. All along, you see her without actually seeing, actually having seen her. You do not see her yet. For the moment, you only see her traces. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Dictee In 1984, before the idea of a selfie existed as such, Marguerite Duras published a powerful autobiographical memoir The Lover (L'amant). The poetic memoir recounts her childhood in French Indochina and the wavering absence and presence of her impoverished family, all centred around the acts of a secretive love affair with a much older, wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese man. She begins her non-linear narrative with an idea of a photograph that has never been taken; one that she sees in her mind as she is looking at another photograph of her and her son. In one version of her typed manuscripts, she writes, "I know that if the absolute photo of my life had been taken, if it ever could have been taken of me, this would be it" (Duras, L'amant : Manuscrit 2ème Original).1 Beginning [End Page 113] with the idea of an absolute photograph of herself allows Duras to take us through a narrative as if she were flipping through a series of mismatched photographs in a forgotten box, searching for the right one. She errs in and out of several registers and scenes of a life, mimicking the wandering structure of our memories. The narrative of a self, composed of many selves, unfolds as a sort of exposure, as part of a photographic process and an uncovering that feels confessional. While many of these memories seem to come from a place of solitude, what grounds this text is an always unfulfilled longing to define a relational self. She writes that "the story of my life doesn't exist. There's never any center to it. No path. No line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true. There was no one" (The Lover 8). Here, Duras's narrator suggests an absence or an erasure of the self that is falsely pinned down by narrative or representation; nonetheless, the idea of no one self existing at the core of a life offers a freedom. The text mocks its own lofty ambitions. The absolute photo then, is our desire, which will always remain unfulfilled, to represent or to narrativize a self. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the term "absolute photo" drops out of the text in its final publication and changes from a "photo" to the more abstract and distant "image" (in French) and the "absolute" falls away completely.2 In a way, fueled by the desire to remember, the memoir is the failure to find an absolute centre, core, or truth of a memory and what is left in the excesses of the search is a representation of an intersubjective, multiple self. I use Duras's search for the unattainable absolute photo, taken or not, to argue that autofiction today is a way to write the experience of relationality. The idea of an absolute photo and the current selfie phenomenon are both modes of representation that force us to confront the experience of ever present, shifting relationality. Using Barthes's prominent idea of the punctum, the detail or the "prick" that becomes the meaning of the photograph, I argue that the narrative form of auto-fictive literature can mimic the instance of a selfie while also producing the desire in the reader to find this punctum from which endless stories of relationality can be told (Barthes 26–27). Ultimately, these experiences of relationality speak to a version of subjectivity that is multiple and complex and that may allow a reader or viewer to reconfigure themselves as well in the translation or understanding of this incoherence. [End Page 114] I focus on three texts that interrogate the self on the page while integrating and utilizing our current penchant for capturing and controlling versions of ourselves. I begin with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 1982 hybrid-genre text Dictee...