In the annals (various reviews, Reviews, Substacks, pop-lit rags, &c.) the wending large-scale current of discussion has for some years now battened around the term-flotsam “autofiction.” I like most the definition arranged by Christian Lorentzen a while back. As a habit or pattern of art in somewhat-widespread use in buzzy relatively-recent novels, or least by the types of artists I admire, it seems to be somewhat on the wane (though what’s taking place within the marketing department is beyond me). The time constraints of this daily dispatch leave me hardly able to amass enough thoughts to rub together into flame, let alone to comment cogently on this subject.
What I can (maybe, perhaps) attempt to do is to share several observations on one pervasive way these types of works seem to be read by readers, both by myself and others, that is, on the somewhat solipsistic mildly comparison-inflected mode of attention. While I am sure that one exists I do not have a pithy term for it apart from “mimetic.”
In writing technique, “mimesis” is an attempting to represent the world, or representing aspects of other art. In reading, the mimetic is a mode of reading that is governed by mimetic impulses— that is, desire, comparison, and rivalry.
Girard originates the concept of mimetic desire in his study of, amongst other books, The Red and the Black (a book which contains several very funny asides from the narrator’s voice commenting on the proceedings, eg., “But although I do wish to spend two hundred pages telling you about the provinces, I shall not be uncivilized enough to subject you to the long-windedness and deliberately roundabout ways of a provincial dialogue.”1) In cases of mimetic desire, what is being imitated is not a separate external representation or qualities, but the desire itself, ie. I want something because someone else wants it.
In Frye’s wonderful and diagrammatically adroit Anatomy of Criticism, the five fictional modes (drawn from the second paragraph of Aristotle’s Poetics which calls characters either “heavier” or “lighter” in relation to the audience), mode three and four are “high mimesis” and “low mimesis,” classified by the hero’s power of action. Part of the passage is worth quoting at length, emphasis mine:
3. If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.
4. If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience. This gives us the hero of the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction.2
I would submit that both “subjecting to social criticism” and “evaluating by the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience” are key aspects of the mimetic interpretive lens.
A mimetic urge, or mode, or lens on books (or any “content” for that matter) is one that chronically, half-consciously, is also seeking out desire, is relentlessly evaluating, is comparing. In a world where so much of what we absorb, passively or otherwise, is designed to compel us to want, the habit of wanting intrudes everywhere. Rants against information control and advertising aside— what is compelling for the modern spectator/reader, beyond comparison or example, is the reason behind, the “how it happened,” the “how it’s made.” The backstage and behind the scenes are more compelling, in many respects, than whatever worked image is constructed for appreciation. Maybe when “the reading of the book” is part of the subject of art, impulses of mimetic desire creep in.
In much of the good fiction I’ve recently read that I like, most enjoyable is a voice that offers excellent commentary on the proceedings: The Red and the Black (eg. the passage above, very funny!), Fake Accounts, The Book of Numbers, Mating are all books like this. These are excellent examples of fiction that judo-throws the evaluating impulse.
At the end of the day, eavesdropping is the greatest pleasure. Many of the books that so artfully skewer and thwart the mimetic impulse are perhaps better described as a form of eavesdropping. Best not to condemn or overthink the desire for decent gossip.
It’s in the spirit of hot goss I first enjoyed Norman Rush’s Mating— that of overhearing dictation I shouldn’t, delivered by someone in an eerily emotionally-analogous position to one I’d once found myself in. Also, the language of specific discipline is a magnet for me— medicine and anthropology have a particular fascination but, truly, I will take anything (even/especially “vigorous joystick” authors eg. McCarthy). Listening in to what’s being confided, hovering at the periphery of a story at a party, catching a hushed judgment in passing— the obligation of text becomes an addiction to secret knowledge (isn’t the spectator urge why you’re all addicted to Twitter, after all?)
I wonder if this mimetic mode is a protective carapace extruded against the relentless onslaught of media, opinion, and “content” that characterizes conscious life today. In every waking moment the eye is abused by reams of text which the brain involuntarily parses. This is, after all, the most literate society in history, even presently setting itself aspin over a language model that can “write” (albeit in torturously narrow modes).
At any rate, lately I am drawn to stories that are not looking for patterns or secret truths. Or else where the pattern is latent but only a device. Or Ovid.
One last quote from Frye:
Our survey of fictional modes has also shown us that the mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle’s word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. That is, it is a tendency to tell a story which is in origin a story about characters who can do anything, and only gradually becomes attracted toward a tendency to tell a plausible or credible story.3
Stendhal, The Red and the Black. Oxford World Classic ed. translated by Catherine Starr.
Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1957)
ibid.