nathan’s Reviews > Authority: Essays > Status Update

We want reading to free the mind; we do not want it to free the reader. For my part, I am with the old hidalgo. When he rode full tilt at that giant in disguise, he was acting on the correct assumption that reading was not enough. This, it seems to me, is the only way to do without authority: to go out and do it.

This is why we cling to authority: it guarantees our freedom while relieving us of the burden of exercising it, turning it into something fine and handsome and altogether useless, like an old suit of armor.

Not, I should say, “freedom of thought” as the liberal understands it—that is, the freedom to entertain every idea and commit to none. This is not true freedom; it is merely license, and always depends on the approval of some authority.

Let thought starve. The only criticism worth doing, for my money, is not the kind that claims to improve society in general; it is, as the late John Berger once wrote, the kind that helps to destroy this particular one. To be clear, I do not wish to overvalue the business.

Smith never asked too much of her unlikely people. They hit their marks, said their lines, and disappeared, check in hand, back into the crowd. You could tell they had better things to do than be furniture in someone’s novel.

It asks me to care about people I do not know and will never meet, people who might as well not exist as far as my own life is concerned but whose destinies are nonetheless obscurely intertwined with mine.

But the humanist’s mistake is to suppose that politics is just lots and lots of ethics. Ethics asks us to recognize that the other has a soul; politics asks us to reject the soul as a precondition for moral interest. In this sense, fiction has always been an exercise in political consciousness.

This, too, is form—as Lin has said, his focus in autobiographical fiction is “still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality.”

My point is that what makes a piece of writing autofiction is not, in the first place, the self-consciousness suggested by that ponderous moniker but, rather, at least in Tao Lin’s case, the brazenness of its self-concealment. In other kinds of fiction, the author hides behind plot, character, or style; in autofiction, the author hides behind his own life.

all fiction is autofiction; every novel is a record of an author’s attempt to transcribe themselves. I don’t just mean that all fiction is, intentionally or not, autobiographical. I also mean that all novels refract the veiled subjectivity of their authors.