Mechanisms of Loss by Michel Fais

Author:Michel Fais
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

AFTERWORD

The fiction of Michel Faïs leads us into a particularly idiosyncratic area of the self: that of autobiography, which in his case constantly converses with biography. Autobiographical writing, even if fictional, as is the case with Faïs, immediately introduces a fine line between the author-autobiographer and his narrator, as it does not present a single self limited to speaking in the first-person singular. The autobiographical character (whom we encountered as far back as the Confessions of Saint Augustine at the end of the fourth century) is from the outset pluralistic, and from this point of view the terms of his self-determination cannot but verge on the borders of illusion. In such a context, every autobiography is related by definition to something or to someone else—even if the correlation is only to emphasize the difference between them. In addition, we should remember that in reconstructing a personal past, autobiography will invariably be connected to the memories and experiences of others, reminding us that the past, however we look at it, constitutes a kind of collective experience. Nevertheless, autobiography basically remains a self-narrative, whose historical recounting fully retains its individual tone, seeking always a core of inner truth. Biography, for its part, is the story of a person recounted by a first-person or third-person narrator, who, even if fictional, as is again the case with Faïs, will include dialogue, characters, and plot, all clamoring to be recorded in the collective background of the person whose biography it is. Nevertheless, biography, too, will keep intact the stronghold of its personal realm, as it has done since at least the late eighteenth century, when it became established as a genre (though it was born in the early post-Byzantine years, drawing on certain elements from antiquity). And this is because, however things developed, what biography will never cease to convey is an intimate picture of its protagonist.

It is precisely on this borderline that the postmodern writing of Faïs moves, operating in an area where the inner truth of autobiography and the intimate picture of biography interact. The novellas Aegypius monachus (2001; rev. 2013) and Lady Cortisol (2016), which make up the present volume, represent two different yet extremely characteristic phases in the writer’s work, from his early and mature periods, revealing the ways in which autobiography and biography come together at the center of it. In order to explain how this takes place, we will have to examine them (obviously not exhaustively) in relation to his other writings published both before and afterward.

Let us look first at the constituents that gave rise to Aegypius monachus. Faïs’s first work and first novel, The Autobiography of a Book (1994), which immediately established him in the Greek literary scene and earned widespread critical acceptance (it should be noted that his work has constantly been the subject of both literary and scholarly criticism from the mid-1990s to the present), is a twofold story: the story of a man that will be transformed into the story of a book or

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