The Author Disappearing? Authorial “Surrogates” and Contemporary Self/Other-Writing in Selected Works by Annie Ernaux, Édouard Louis, and Rachel Cusk

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate various diegetic gestures of deliberate and insistent selferasure – quite conspicuous in the age of the authors’ glorious “return” and their hyper-visibility – which the essay wishes to identify as testifying to some countertendencies in presentday auto/biographical writing. The return of the author, officially acknowledged in the final decade of the twentieth century, resulted in contemporary writers unanimously and abundantly engaging themselves in narrating their real life stories – the phenomenon which prompted an unprecedented emergence of writers’ auto/biographical narratives at the turn of the twentyfirst century. Nevertheless, in recent years this authorial resurrection has also led to the rise of some new forms of self-writing which might be seen not only as a means of expressing one’s dissatisfaction with the present-day auto/biographical boom but also a manifestation of the crisis of both the auto/biographical self and form. These new self-narratives consciously play with the idea of authorship and question the principles of straightforward representation of the historical author in their literary production. The paper will analyse selected contemporary self-narratives (i.e. Annie Ernaux’s Les Années [2008], Édouard Louis’s En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule [2014], and Rachel Cusk’s “Fay” trilogy, which comprises Outline [2014], Transit [2016], and Kudos [2018]) so as to investigate the authors’ “surrogates” and thus the emergence of a new poetics of self/other-writing.