Autofiction’s celebrated practitioners actively reject character, form, and fictionality itself

Evidence

So many critics’ darlings openly urge this stifling. Rachel Cusk frankly assesses Knausgaard’s visceral “crisis of narrative’s distance from reality,” testifying that fiction is “fake and embarrassing … the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things seems utterly ridiculous.” … For these and countless other successful and revered writers, the streaming consciousness of open spread continually conjures a revolt against character, form, and fictionality itself, after which liquesces the truth and the real. No bonds, no cuts, no distinctions: only the deluging flow, always and, always all. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 121

Categorization

• XREF: Directly names the luminaries—Cusk, Vuong, Lin, Heti, Boyle, Folarin—of the phenomenon the reader must be able to identify in real works; Folarin’s ‘the and’ doctrine is a precise stylistic fingerprint of immediacy.