“Reality is under no obligation to be interesting—neither is memory—while literature is. I can’t seem to clear enough room in my memories to make space for mystery and surprise. True, I could shuffle them around, but doing so would be untruthful in its own way.”
—Munir Hachemi, Living Things
This is the warning with which the narrator of Munir Hachemi’s Living Things presents a diary of a summer spent with three friends off to pick grapes in the south of France. Upon arrival, the four young Spaniards find torrential rain has wiped out the grape harvest, but rather than returning home to Madrid they accept the work that’s available: a punishing routine of precarious agricultural labor accompanied by the endless stench of factory-farmed chicken. The summer was supposed to provide the raw material for a novel, or at least the worldly education that would make the narrator into a novelist. Instead, the dull horror of agricultural shift work dashes his literary dreams. As the narrator writes in one of his many interpolations among the book’s “unedited” diary entries, he had to wait six years for “the corpse of fiction—which has been rotting inside me ever since those long months in the south of France—to turn to dust before I could tell the story of what really happened” (22).
Published in Spanish in 2018 and translated into English by Julia Sanches, Living Things is Hachemi’s first novel. A tale of disenchantment connecting a young writer’s naïve hopes with his older self’s jaded refusal of fiction as a whole, the novel tries to mark the end of a particular fantasy of literature’s relationship to that “volatile, hazy, ill-defined thing that we coined in the word experience” (18). This fantasy, which is what drew the narrator-diarist to the south of France in the first place, defines experience as “the real” of which fiction is always a less visceral, less interesting copy; the primary task of the would-be writer is to live and to accumulate the “literary capital” of experience’s excitement and mystery (18). In this logic, all experience contains the inimitable subtlety of literary significance. And yet writers must still go out of their way to live the kind of experience that’s “literary” enough to produce compelling fiction. Confronted with this contradiction, Hachemi’s narrator-editor realizes that the ideology of “experience” necessarily implies that “certain experiences are more valuable than others” (21). And what’s more, that the “people with the worst lives are the poor, who spend less and therefore barely move the machine of experience, who are always deader, greyer, harder to understand, less human” (23).
Thus, while commenting on his diary claiming to inoculate the reader against his younger self’s naïveté, the narrator develops a critique of “experience,” as well as the literature and literary marketplace that grow out of it. He sees an aesthetic contradiction in writing pretending that any experience contains the same universal strangeness or profundity as any other, while nevertheless requiring writers to seek out exceptional experiences that are somehow more “real,” for instance by picking grapes. Working as a farm laborer carries him to a further contradiction: the desire to accumulate experience drives forward an extractive frontier that can never dignify, recognize, or even accurately portray the lives of the narrator’s coworkers, because mundane suffering contains neither “mystery” nor “surprise,” has no titillating narrative obligations, and thus, in the larger economy of fiction, remains “deader, greyer, harder to understand, less human.”
Of course, Hachemi is far from the first writer to confront the aesthetic contradictions of class stratification in the twenty-first century. Such problems are central to a wide array of contemporary novels, not least the kind the anglophone world has debated under the sign of “autofiction.”[1] By many definitions, Living Things should count as autofiction: the narrator shares a name and many biographical details with the author, and the narrative he presents is ostensibly—although one senses a playful distance from—autobiography.[2] However, as Lee Konstantinou has remarked, the term autofiction might be best understood as “an aesthetic gesture or practice or mode… at the intersection of genre and marketing”—it can be applied, almost as a brand, to a set of novels otherwise too heterogeneous to stand as a genre or school.[3] While Hachemi’s literary genealogy is indifferent to the (parochial) developments of anglophone literature, it is a testament to his critique that the contradictions of experience he outlines seem to be the strongest link between the novels the narrator reads (especially Roberto Bolaño and Cristina Morales) and the work of, say, Ben Lerner or Sheila Heti.
So far, Living Things might sound more like an autotheoretical essay than an autofictional novel. Yet the book is a novel, one that does not just make a case against a particular kind of autofictional novel but claims, quite clearly, that the autofictional novel is dead: its magic gone, its moment passed, and as the “corpse of fiction” is decomposed, it’s time for “the story of what really happened.” Living Things is an experiment with this undead form. Can the “story” of the group’s summer in Aire-sur-l’Adour be told, and can it be told in a compelling way despite its künstlerromanische failure? Can its telling amount to anything besides literary fiction?
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Taken on their own, without the narrator-editor’s commentary, the events of the diary would form a post-graduation Bildungsroman set in a particular moment of mid-2000s Spanish social history. The friends—four middle-or upper-but-pretending-to-be-middle-class madrileños—ostensibly choose to pick grapes to earn money: but “let me just stress,” the narrator warns, “that none of us were travelling for money, hence our insistence that money was our only reason for travelling” (24). They want experience: middle-class credibility, and in the narrator’s case, literary materia prima. They take up residence in a campground in Aire-sur-l’Adour, populated by northern European tourists, and work cleaning chicken barns, collecting eggs, and vaccinating the animals against the pathogenic conditions in which they’re kept.
The work is miserable. The narrator-diarist writes:
On the third cage I broke one of the chicken’s wings. I cried. Thankfully the headpiece hid my tears (I don’t want Michel to know I am weak). It suddenly dawned on me that some are cut out for this work and some aren’t. Then I realized that that wasn’t a factual statement but a kind of classism that justified my sense of superiority. I have a degree and will eventually find a job—a precarious one for sure, but definitely better than this one—where I won’t have to torture living beings or be tortured for money. If experiencing life in order to write means working as a guard at a camping in Barcelona or even as an army nurse, then sign me up. But this is beyond me. (74)
The double epiphany in this passage is the novel’s typical move.[4] The narrator’s first thought, gleaned from experience (that “some are cut out for this work and some aren’t”), is superseded by a second, implicitly “more real” perspective, in which he “realize[s]” that his earlier reaction was made from a specific class position, that his relationship to torturing chickens is voluntary—that his desire for experience is at best a class particularity, and at worst a self-defeating fantasy, built on the romantic self-styling of literary texts that purport to merely transcribe the world. Epiphany is no longer a vehicle for the world to transcribe itself onto the page. In the very moment of its production, epiphany reflects back only his dashed expectations, defined as they are by “a kind of classism,” and reveals his literary pursuit to be no different from the kind of tourism that the narrator and his friends are vehemently not doing with their summer of labor. All the narrator realizes, in other words, is that he is facing the Alps, and wishes they looked a little more like they do in the guidebook—or more precisely, that the scene of labor looked a little more like it did in the books he was reading, the books he wishes he had written.
The narrator’s stay in a “camping” implicitly refers to the most obvious model for Hachemi’s narrator’s fantasy of (and disillusionment with) experience: Roberto Bolaño. For the literature of experience, the narrator-editor writes, “reading Bolaño [was] one of the unwritten commandments” (18). In Bolaño’s work, perhaps the clearest statement of the deceptive allure of experience comes in the introduction he wrote for his long-unpublished first novel, Amberes (2002) (in English as Antwerp, 2010). Much like Hachemi’s narrator, Bolaño reflects years after the fact on the earlier fragments which make up the text:
In those days, if memory serves, I lived exposed to the elements, without my papers, the way other people live in castles. […] Naturally, I met interesting people, some of them the product of my own hallucinations. […] The scorn I felt for so-called official literature was great, though only a little greater than my scorn for marginal literature. But I believed in literature: or rather, I didn’t believe in arrivisme or opportunism or the whispering of sycophants.
Experience in Bolaño’s articulation is structured by standpoint: he accumulates literary experience that is unavailable to literary institutions. A successful Künstlerroman, Amberes articulates a kind of still-undomesticated experience which becomes the basis, as scholars like Jonathan Monroe have argued, for Bolaño’s more conventional fictional output.[6] And in Hachemi’s narrator’s reading of Bolaño, the writer is above all an intrepid and faithful scribe of the “real world.” Much like Hachemi’s narrator, the Bolaño of this introduction writes with an awareness of the same contradictions of fictionality by which he constructed Antwerp—here, specifically, the firm belief in “literature” found in the precarity he lived in “like a castle.” The crucial difference is that Bolaño looks back at the world described in—and in which he wrote—his first novel (a condition he refers to as “total anarchy”) and does not disown its central romantic illusions of a non-commodified literariness that permeates experience—which, if they are illusions, are justified by the fiction they can produce. Hachemi’s narrator-diarist would agree; the narrator-editor (the one retrospectively framing the book) would not. Bolaño maintains a careful ambiguity between the perspectives of his recallers/narrators and those of his recalled/protagonists, and we are to understand they are both “right” about art and the world as much as they are “wrong.” Hachemi’s narrator-editor, however, refuses to cede an inch to the narrator-diarist, whose naïveté remains available to the reader only because the diary requires presentation as evidence of and for his conversion after the crisis of experience.
In Living Things, the crisis of experience unfolds in stages. There is the horror of the work they do, for which they are deeply unprepared physically and logistically. There is the hopeless economics of working in chicken farms and living on a tourist campground which forces them to severely limit their diet, relying on soup kitchens in order to still make a profit. As things sour—the work growing more sinister, the conditions more toxic—the diary tracks the narrator’s journey of disillusionment by how it strays from its original purpose as a novelist’s sketchbook, at a certain point acknowledging that he’s not sure who the audience of this journal is: “it pains me to admit that the intended audience of this journal—which is not against the idea of being published in the future—is that nebulous thing people call ‘the market,’ so I may as well say that the intended audience is you, diary, who have no concept of time and therefore cannot write or be written for a future version of yourself” (70). He does not write for himself “in any case, and… [not] for a particular reader.”[7] He goes on to try to describe the horror of a chicken barn through a sustained comparison of the barns to supermarket shelves (“except all the shelves […] have been cleaned out and filled with tiny cages you’d never in your life have thought could hold twenty chickens”) (71). The point of writing is no longer about making literary fiction; it’s both an urgent need to articulate the realities of animal (human and non-human) suffering and an attempt to convince his friends that he has grounds for his decision, as much corporeal as mental, never to eat meat again.
Eventually, the deaths of co-workers—which appear in the diary told out of order, always beginning with a kind of eulogistic blazon followed by an account of what is known about how they died—move the narrative into its final stages. In an effort to unmask the systems of violence in which they are enmeshed, Hachemi’s friend group attempts to trace the network of farmers, work agencies, and collaborating workers who are either killing or letting precarized immigrant workers die. They uncover—or imagine, or convince each other of—a conspiracy between the corn growers and chicken farmers, the genetic engineering labs and the labor bosses, killing off workers who learn too much.
The novel’s turn toward anti-corporate espionage represents a potential off-ramp for literature after the contradictions of “experience,” empiricism, and autofiction have been exposed. Namely, “the crew”’s investigations approximate what Fredric Jameson has called a cognitive map: the subject’s necessary attempt to “to figure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us.”[8] Yet Hachemi carefully constructs this “whodunnit” to leave many characters as possible killers, and many sensational tales to make sense of the facts. The deaths of the coworkers are real, but the evidence “the crew” uncovers is only circumstantial. On the whole, this section is characterized by unbelievably potent circumstances, those elements “stranger than fiction” which autofiction would assign to experience and not artifice. It just so happens that the man who appears in a Porsche SUV outside the house of a worker killed on the job (who they just happen to see outside the worker’s house) is the same sleazy boss at their worksite for the next week, a GMO corn outfit that employs, strangely, only orphans. “None of it made sense,” the narrator reflects, “but we had to make it make sense, […] we had to make the facts tell Story B,” Story B being the “implied” story lurking beneath the story that the narrator tells (128). It is a part of life: “This text—which is not a short story—does not have to fit this theory, while our life—a story we constantly tell ourselves—does” (16).
Story B does, in a sense, work as a cognitive map: it dramatizes the relationships between the agents that keep a precarious labor population torturing animals and extracting profits. But in the final view the novel suggests that, at least if it is as narrative, cognitive mapping cannot address the basic mundanity of systems like the food industry, the same mundanity that is impossible to transcribe and render into compelling literary fiction. “In short,” the narrator-diarist writes, “we had invented a Story B that wound up as a cover for Story C, which is the real story”—one that “turned out to be far less surprising but also infinitely worse, because horror is a soft, sticky thing—never effusive, never a bang. There was no mystery, no case, and therefore no novel” (133).
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Alongside its abortive attempt at cognitive mapping, Living Things responds to its own ethical and aesthetic contradictions with two gestures of renunciation enacted on two different narrative levels. After a particularly nasty evening with “les poulets,” the narrator-diarist becomes vegan; the parallel choice for the narrator-editor is to stop writing “as a writer.” Meanwhile, he carries out his disavowal of (auto)fiction by doubling down on the idea of the narrative as a transcription. “As I’ve said before,” he emphasizes near the novel’s end, “there is no metaphor in these pages, nor any intention. I’m not your average narrator; I don’t arrange things or order them, I reveal myself. I don’t create characters, I transcribe people (the four of us) and shadows, which is how we tend to view other people; I simply am […] a necessary vehicle for language to be able to tell what really happened” (128). This passage and others like it underscore the failure of reconciliation between experience, writing, and living, and in this way Hachemi seeks to demonstrate the failure of fiction as such. But what exactly does this gesture achieve?
To satisfy the ethical demands the novel sets out for itself, we must more or less take the narrator at his word: he does not reshuffle, he does not embellish, and the narrator-editor’s interpolations do not let us forget that we are not to expect the familiar, nostalgic kinds of mystery that literary memoir trades in. Hachemi’s narrator is quick to acknowledge that many other writers have presented their work in similar terms, but indicates that he means to take his austere proscription of creativity to radical new heights. “More than a few writers,” says the narrator,
have dabbled in these sorts of gimmicks, convinced they were inventing literature anew when all they were doing was proving how little they cared about it. Paradoxically, I—who do not consider myself a writer (not any more)—will be the first to declare that the emperor has no clothes, the first to take the floor with the courage needed to flout the frills and artifice, the first to tell the story as it unfolded and nothing more. Time will banish the rest of them to the depths of history. (12)
Now, it is difficult to take the narrator-editor at face value when he claims to be “the first to take the floor with the courage needed to flout the frills and artifice”—his too is an ironic relation to our reality—but it is possible; it is not possible to believe that this novel is not a novel. It is impossible to read Living Things and encounter no settings, plots, or structures of narrative tension which are conspicuously formal and often allegorical—kinds of meaning the narrator has forbidden us. The campground in which the friends live for example stands out as an allegory of north-south relations in Europe: the young men from Spain are objects of fascination, desire, and disgust by the Belgian and French tourists who surround them; the tourists keep tidy and clean, and the friends, worn down by work, do not have this luxury. It’s Europe; it’s the bourgeois audience to which the novel will have to eventually return; it’s a conspicuously choreographed and formal “ending”; it’s all a little too perfect.
As an essay on the antinomies of autofiction—and those of its foundation, the literary economy of “experience”—Living Things is wry and incisive. A good reader and a funny writer, Hachemi is most successful in his presentation of this tension—naïve diary, vehement renunciation—as an experiment, and he doesn’t claim to know if it will work. But as a novel, the book’s solution to the problems the narrator identifies seems caught on the horns of irony and sincerity. Its gestures of refusal respond to both aesthetic and ethical demands, yet to satisfy one is to fail the other. Either we have a sincere text that, on ethical grounds, firmly renounces the novel founded on experience and asks us to pretend that the novel we’re reading is not a novel—or we have an ironic text that makes this gesture with a wink, retaining some literary ambiguity only to have us read another example of the kind of novel which it renounces in the first place. Hachemi has correctly assessed the impasse of the autofictional novel: he seems to suggest that we can have it both ways, but this would require the narrative’s failures to be as compelling as its successes.
Notes:
[1] The discourse around autofiction is not unique to the anglophone world. However, different literary traditions and genres are mobilized under that heading in different national and linguistic contexts. For a distant reading of the term’s global history, see Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor, “Rethinking Autofiction as a Global Practice: Trajectories of Anglophone Criticism from 2000 to 2020,” A/b: Auto/Biography Studies (May 2024): 1–33.
[2] Max Saunders, “Autofiction, Autobiografiction, Autofabrication, and Heteronymity: Differentiating Versions of the Autobiographical,” Biography 43, no. 4 (2020): 764.
[3] Lee Konstantinou, “Autofiction and Autoreification,” The Habit of Tlön (blog), February 6, 2021, https://www.leekonstantinou.com/2021/02/06/autofiction-and-autoreification/.
[4] The clumsiness of epiphany in Living Things (too soon, corrected, overcorrected, abandoned) belongs to a particular literary history which one could trace to the epiphanic modernism of James Joyce, whose words “We can’t change the world, but we can change the subject” form one of the book’s epigraphs. Here is a tradition that, if it takes anything from Joyce, takes the expectation that one is owed epiphany by experience—or rather, that sensitive openness to epiphany is one of the marks of a verifiably “literary” narrator.
[5] Roberto Bolaño. Antwerp, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: New Directions, 2002), ix-x.
[6] Jonathan Beck Monroe, Framing Roberto Bolaño: Poetry, Fiction, Literary History, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 23–35.
[7] The question of the genre of the diary again echoes Bolaño’s Antwerp preface: “I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can’t be sure of. For a long time these were just loose pages that I reread and maybe tinkered with, convinced I had no time. But time for what? I couldn’t say exactly. I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn’t the only thing that matters, time isn’t the only source of terror” (ix).
[8] Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 3.