Nonfiction vs Autofiction cage match

Let's say for a moment that there was a conceptually or philosophically cromulent project in writing in first person, and that you were capable of manipulating reality in some way, manipulating the reality of your own life and the way you visualize it, the shape and impact of your memories, of what use is that to the rest of us, and I understand that people out there find the lives of others to be useful to contextualize their lives on earth. But what material difference does it make. What alchemical transformation is actually possible and for whom. 

(This "fi" combo needs a ligature)

I read, third-hand (I'm guessing) about a famed autofictioniste who said that the form was able to unsaddle writing from metaphor. I'm always incredulous about such strident/confident remarks. The excerpt attached to the essay, something about getting ready to eat breakfast maybe??? was absolutely able to be read metaphorically. There is no amount of artifice or fictiveness that can be stripped away from a writing practice that eliminates its capacity to be read metaphorically. That is the license of the reader. In fact all language is in essence a metaphor. If we believe metaphor to be the connecting of two disparate items through a magical tissue, that tissue being the reader or listener and their subjective interpretational faculties, subjective to such an extent that the mechanics of the tissue cannot, MUST NOT, be articulated, because that would be an analogy wouldn't it? If you can articulate what bearing a metaphier has on its dual, you are essentially pinning down the relationship (whether like, as, in contrast, because of, or any number of comparative situations). 

A word is a metaphier for the thing it refers to. We can do all manners of etymological analyses of the word but still only get within an impossible arm's reach between the word and the thing. Its relationship is asymptotic. It requires faith. The tissue of magic remains. So metaphor, in this sense and the more traditional or extended sense, is going nowhere. 

I have, because I read something offhanded about diminishing the role of analogy in Robbe-Grillet's Towards a New Novel, tried to limit my use of the device almost entirely. It is definitively something achievable. The impact of its absence as uncertain. My hope is that it strives for such a concrete reading lens that every aspect of the text can be read metaphorically. I would imagine at the time he was writing Towards a New Novel Robbe-Grillet did not see his work as highly metaphorical. Maybe (maybe?) in the 1970s. But my conjecture is that like the aforementioned autofictioniste, A R-G saw his work as being simply "writing", divorced from psychological or interpretive metaphoricity. 

What I'm trying to back myself into here is wondering about the form of nonfiction. Is that a type of writing that, and an invitation to readers that, no interpretive framework need to be brought to bear. Because it is true, objective, universal (I know that nonfiction is not objective so chill, baby), then it simply is what it is. I don't have a vested interested in shedding metaphor. As I said, I don't think it is technically possible. Even if something can be interpreted, the way it suggests its use to the reader can suppress the benefits of interpretation. I think this is the true power of the nonfiction form, to arrive at a txt that is simply looked at. Maybe that's the power of autofiction too, but I couldn't be arsed to find out.

Getting in your own way

It's hard to think or at least to mold thoughts productively--and when I write the word productively I mean transforming raw material, like an allusion or an observation, into something digested into a synthesized contribution that is, like a metaphor, something that juxtaposes the raw material with other first-person points or external precedents like works of art or other sociocultural situations--when peripherally watching a cartoon like Creature Cases or Youtube videos by someone like Jettkuso. In this case it is a faculty meeting. I feel like Pnin or Kohler or some other grouch who feels above it all but also is vitally dependent on the latent unprofessionalism of academia for their distracted sense of superiority. Or, for instance, cooking dinner, like now, while my children are screaming and bickering. For some reason, the desire to make some writing emerges, in a moment I know will be fruitless. I was reading about Isaac Newton earlier. It's pretty wild what kind of free time money and the patriarchy will give to certain privileged individuals. Was he intelligent? Most certainly. Was his daughter constantly pushing furniture around and ignoring the Gabby's Dollhouse movie she demanded while his son was moaning about messing up a Lego set. I'm just going to assume he didn't have children, or if he did he most likely foisted them on their mother. Along those lines I've often mused about how unlikely it is that any man in the U.S. congress has ever changed a diaper. Not they are doing anything important with the luxury of not spending time on quotidian mundanities. It's arguable whether I did anything important. I wrote a few books before having kids. I can say with some reasonable certainty that I didn't actively participate in making average peoples' lives shittier. But on the topic of simple cognitive freedom, without constant intrusion of bullshit, I rarely have the bandwidth to unspool some gray matter, so I think frenetically, generically, on vague and superficial aspects of current undertakings. 

A list of possible book titles:

  Reference Systems

  Fictional Reference Frame

  Reference Frame

  Fictitious Reference Frames

  Frame Indifference

  Objective Frame Indifference

  Material Frame Indifference

Back in Charlie's room listening to Beethoven.

"Simply put, the concept is the idea that constitutive laws describing the behaviour of a material (for example the relationship between stress and strain) should be independent of the frame of reference or the motion of the observer." How is this pertinent to literature? Well typically it is not. The subjectivity of the observer has been the crucial variable in fiction throughout its history. In poetry somewhat less. Even an instance of what we call an unreliable narrator is an assertion about the effect of the observer in the content/truth/reality of the situation. Is it simply because the observer (author) or their surrogate (even as a 3rd person cog delineated by a narrator) is placed into the text? Is that an admission that observing this particular situation was a choice and not simply the raw occurrence? Can a raw occurrence be embodied in text? Automatic writing you say? Some kind of digitally generative text? Perhaps yes to both of these, but it's really incumbent on the subject matter isn't it. Perhaps it's the prioritization of a POV, which seems to be inescapable in fiction, that doesn't support the principle of material frame indifference. Robbe-Grillet certainly argued for such distance from the text, but could not help himself from populating his books with sicko stand-ins for himself. Everywhere throughout literary history we've prioritized human subjectivity. Animal Farm, you say? You can't tart up a pig and call Napoleon and say it's not a human. Maybe the problem is earth in general. It's too familiar. But science fiction suffers from the same crippling predilections. Just look at the aliens in Star Trek. They're just all dudes with stupid heads. Even when an author strives to move beyond the scope of our experience they trick out the situation in the same hackneyed anthropomorphic societal claptraps (the Cheela who live on a neutron star in Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward for instance, are hokey af). Maybe we need to look outside fiction altogether. Nonfiction? Most nonfiction has some kind of editorial project associated with it. Hell, even scientific papers describe their methods. Could it be that we can't get out of our own way? No matter how hard we try, humans fuck everything up just by looking at it.