Is auto-fiction closer to the truth than non-fiction?
“I was studying the matter closely, hanging bat-wise from the bars with my feet, my back turned to the room, and I was examining the bars on all sides, from all angles, when someone jumped on me.”
The truth of the matter, the truth of any matter is ephemeral, and more often than not depends solely on perspective; one only need look through any history book to understand this. Philosophers since the dawn of philosophy have been pre-occupied with understanding this condition; in which humanity’s survival, our evolution depends on our ability to work together. Yet, each and everyone of us has a unique perspective on our collective reality. It is why art is so critical for understanding. It removes the burden of comprehension from facts, and places it on a shared recognition of experience.
Auto-biography, and memoirs are written by the most unreliable narrator; our own ideas about the events in our lives may be the most clouded perspective, certainly the most biased. When I was reading Down Below I was fascinated with how much I related with Carrington’s account of her time in an asylum in war-time Madrid. I have never been committed, and consider my self to be one of the sanest people I know but in reading Down Below I experienced the subjectivity of my own ‘sanity’. What is relatable in Down Below is not ‘facts’, it is Carrington’s ability to communicate the truth of her experience through imagery.
“I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940 – for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the universe?”
Leonora Carrington, Down Below written 1937, published 1972
I had never heard of the ‘genre’ auto-fiction before fishing around for references to subjective documentaries. Autofiction is a genre that combines fiction and autobiography. The Oxford English Dictionary defines autofiction as a genre of fiction based on (a part of) the author’s life, often presented as a first-person narrative in the style of a novel. The term was apparently coined in the mid-seventies but the concept is much older, dating back as far as Sappho (630-570 BCE).
Carrington’s metaphorical expression of reality did not appear after her involuntary stay in the asylum. It was always part of her vision. ‘Inn of the Dawn Horse’ is her self-portrait painted in 1939. Look at the rocking horse on the wall, feeling as if it will jump through the window to join the horse outside, or perhaps it already has… the breasty hyena, and Carrington’s own wild hair.
Perhaps all autobiography should fall under autofiction; is objectivity even possible, in art or in science? We always have a perspective, a bias. There is an honesty in Down Below that conveys a shared experience of vulnerability to ‘the powers that be’, a collective that determines ‘reality’, ‘sanity’, ‘memory’, ‘history’. There isn’t necessarily a ‘them’, but there is an ‘us’ that is complicit in the society and culture we are co-creating. Honesty feels like an important skill worth cultivating, but maybe ‘truth’ is over-rated.
“My stomach was the seat of that society, but also the place in which I was united with all the elements of the earth. It was the mirror of the earth, the reflection of which is just as real as the person reflected.”
Leonora Carrington, Down Below written 1937, published 1972
References: