On the Autoportrait: A New and Necessary Form

photo provided by the author

“If I have in mind an idea for a piece, and it turns out already to exist, I don’t abandon it, the piece is not the idea. I can’t read a stolen book.”

            —Edouard Levé, Autoportrait

One summer day in December 2017 on John Grisham’s Mississippi estate, the thirty-nine-year-old absurdist author Jesse Ball wrote a book, a thirty-some thousand word paragraph called Autoportrait. Five years later, it was published by Catapult with a short foreword sandwiched between Ball’s dedication to the writer Catherine Lacey and the title page.

I read Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait and found I admire its approach to biography. It is an approach that does not raise one fact above another, but lets the facts stand together in a fruitless clump, like a life.

Over an uncertain period of time in 2004, the thirty-nine year old French photographer and writer Édouard Levé wrote a thirty-some thousand word book called Autoportrait. The book, a 115-page paragraph of declarative sentences touching on the author’s own biography, personality, preferences, anecdotes, beliefs and memories was called at the time “pointillist” and a work of “literary cubism.” Here is Levé’s take on literary genre as it appears in his Autoportrait, sandwiched between a sentence listing all the motorcycles he’s owned and a declaration that he cannot remember stories he reads in the news:

I do not write memoirs. I do not write novels. I do not write short stories. I do not write plays. I do not write poems. I do not write mysteries. I do not write science fiction. I write fragments…[and then 10 pages later] Everything I write is true, but so what? (Levé, page 96, 106)

The two books are a form if not a genre unto themselves. Besides the fact Catapult published Ball’s in a hardcover, and Dalkey Archive’s 2012 edition of Leve’s book was (correctly) softcover, they look and feel identical. There’s very little front or back matter; the only colors are cream and black. The prose has the same bare-necessity aesthetic, beautiful without being explicitly lyrical, operating less off of sentence variation and more off the momentum created by how similarly constructed sentences follow (or don’t) one another, utilizing comma splices whenever one idea feeds naturally into the next, giving the text these particularly riveting bursts of energy. Upon first encountering either book, a reader might balk at the way a single page will jump subjects, how topics are picked up and let go in sometimes single, staccato declaration. Though Ball’s book has a slightly more patient approach, on average sticking to two or three subjects per page, allowing successive sentences to accrue and slightly flesh out an idea or memory, Leve tends to be more whiplashy, which is an adjective I would only say was true of my reading experience for the first few pages of either work. Like any good book, the author teaches you how to read it.

The impression of being materially damaged by the work one is doing—it is amazing to me that it is an impression one can get used to, a feeling that becomes invisible. When I see people jackhammering without hearing protection, it turns my stomach. I am gentle now, years ago I was not; once, I took a train trip with the sole purpose of punching someone out. In the years 1986-1987, I cut down a tree. I did it with a very dull knife. (Ball, page 78)

Once I learned that the swerve was a feature, not a bug of the cadence, I was locked in, and never wanted either book to end. In fact, my desire to write this review is to encourage other writers to create works in this same genre (as Chelsea Hodson has since done), the genre of the autoportait, which is neither novel or memoir. ‘Collage’ comes closer. The autoportait is a text that represents a life without the shape of a story. To the contrary of Ball’s foreword, I find nothing fruitless about either of the ‘clumps’ of facts that make up a literary autoportrait. To me, it’s all fruit. Reading these books felt like eating candy. Maybe that sounds like a stomachache, but the books are short enough that I wouldn’t worry. I find both books to be some of the most honest autobiographical writing I’ve ever come across (even given that authorial distortion, protective omission, and artful exaggeration are surely baked in to that honesty) because they do not so much as gesture toward narrative arc or make even loose connections (which is, to quote Ball, like a life.) In this way, the autoportait succeeds at what so many writers working in adjacent yet different modes (the prose poem, the monologue) ultimately fail to do, which is to inhabit one human being’s specific now.

There is in each book a shortlist of topical motifs (how one lives, what one eats, wears, does for pleasure, for work, to the process of making art, navigating depression, probing past traumas) that echo again and again. These bits simply collect rather than stack. Ball’s family’s dissolution or his decidedly monkish lifestyle, Leve’s girlfriend’s abortion or his mental illness—these topics come more clearly into focus each time they’re touched, but they do not function as components of a structure larger than themselves, no attempt to be more than sentences. It’s this intentional quality of the autoportait as a composition that makes reading it so active, arresting, and rewarding.

I have nothing to confess. I have trouble believing that France will go to war in my lifetime. I like to say thank you. I cannot perceive the delay in mirrors. I don’t like narrative movies and more than I like the novel. “I do not like the novel” doesn’t mean I do not like literature, “I don’t like narrative movies” doesn’t mean I don’t like movies. Art that unfolds over time gives me less pleasure than art that stops it. The second time I walk the same route, I pay less attention to the view and walk faster. … I have let several friends copy from me in class. (Levé, page 26)

Levé’s book came out around the birth of modern social media (the invention of Facebook), and Ball’s was released shortly after its death (Facebook’s rebranding to Meta), and though neither writer is or was a user of these platforms, their books read the way my Twitter archive does, though far more pleasurably. I downloaded my decade of Twitter data before I disabled my account in November of 2022, finding Musk’s takeover not so much deplorable as the easy excuse I finally needed to leave. (Levé: “I don’t know how to leave naturally. I often wonder what people say about me right after I leave: maybe nothing.”). I think of the autoportrait as ‘twitter-like’ because of its fragmentation, its nonfiction-ness, and the way quotidian observations give way to personal and cultural insight, the way little grievances are abutted by grand statements, true comedy, and, in those wee-hour tweets, pitiful and sobering confessions.

When I can find shirts with long sleeves, I will wear those, but I have had trouble finding appropriately long-sleeved t-shirts in recent years. When I was in high school, I used to think constantly about whether I should unplug my brother from life support. I wrote out my reasons for and against again and again… (Ball, page 94)

I put an ellipsis on the end of the above quote because Ball goes on for seven consecutive sentences (in this book, a marathon) exploring this single moment from his teenaged years. It comes near the final third of the book, where the author’s stated preferences become more anodyne while his memories and anecdotes become more breath-taking and consequential. If there’s any ‘arc’ to either book, it’s that by about the ninetieth page, you can feel the writers running out of room to hide. It’s exhilarating. Ball’s trauma from childhood, though never labeled as such, is heavy stuff, but he doesn’t linger or wallow or blame or defend himself—he simply lets each detail become both fact and moment. In a recursive tell, Levé at four different moments in the book writes about the abortion his partner had, wrestling each time only briefly with the subject whose pinning-down is elusive, frustrating, and clearly a hinge-point in his life. Levé writes, “There is no single word, only circumlocutions, to describe a situation in which I found myself: the woman I was seeing got pregnant by me, then…” (P 87)

Though Ball does at times address the subject (“The middle of the day is my enemy. If I kill myself, it will be then.”), it is Levé who truly meditates on suicide. His book opens with the notion of suicide, giving the reader a lens with which to read deeper into otherwise more casual admissions throughout. He explores his depression, hypochondria, litany of analysts, and the question of sanity.  

As an artist and writer, I could go crazy without noticing…it would take awhile for people around me to notice if I’d gone around a bend…I don’t know if what I do is art or art therapy…I don’t have time to tell long stories….Only once can I say “I’m dying” without telling a lie. The best days of my life may already be behind me. (Levé, various)

It is a fact that three years after writing Autoportait, just days after releasing his next book, titled Suicide, Levé took his own life. He wrote four books, published three books of photographs, and painted hundreds of canvases that he burned the year I was born, 1991.

With all of that said, I would not describe feelings of hopelessness or despair reading either of these autoportraits. What I feel reading them is the absolute fullness of life. As a writer, I find these books instructive about how to ‘deal with’ or ‘put down’ the facts of life. I so often have things happen in my daily life which I swear, as I’m furiously pecking the notes into my iPhone, that I will ‘find a way to use in my writing’. The anxiety these ever unused moments, anecdotes, reflections, jokes causes is sometime crushing for me. When I was a more active (addicted) social media user, I could turn these notes into tweets and gain from them some imaginary style points. However, it began to feel equal to throwing these pieces of my life away. Some mornings I wake up thinking about these notes, how I’m already late getting to them, how the pile will grow today and I will feel tomorrow even more burdened by their weight—but if I let them go, they’ll be gone, and my life will accrue no meaning. The autoportait as a form gives me hope and a model: the important moments in my life can exist as fragmented snapshots: single, standalone, unadorned sentences. The moments do not need to be made sweepingly beautiful by metaphor, nor made functional by smushing them into the building blocks of plot—they can simply come out as they are, the way they feel, all mixed-up and broken and perfect and dull. They’re not lost because they’re in me somewhere. Which is why I can’t wait to turn thirty-nine and write my own autoportrait. I might start later today.

Because I want to read more autoportraits, I hope more writers take a note from Jesse Ball and allow themselves to copy this form, as Tara Stillions Whitehead does in miniature on “Self Portrait for the Late Éduoard Levé” (Gone Lawn, 2020), or as Chelsea Hodson does with an even closer hewing to source material in “I Could Live Without Speaking” (Hazlitt, 2019). Hodson’s process was to take every single Levé sentence as a prompt—each of her arresting lines shares some short string of words lifted from the original Autoportrait. Leve’s, “I archive” becomes in Hodson’s piece, “I shred old drafts in protest of a paper archive. His, “To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it,” to her, “It would take longer to describe my problems than it would to solve them.” I don’t recommend reading the Hodson (or any work made by sampling) in that comparative way. What I recommend is reading Hodson’s exhilarating 20,000 word take on the genre in one long sitting to see, because of the font’s hugeness, how you’re forced to read in a continuous scroll. That said, I look forward to the day this piece appears in print. It’s interesting that though Ball’s Autoportait was drafted in 2017, it was not published until three years after Hodson’s piece (she drafted hers in 2017 too, while working on her debut essay collection, unaware of Ball’s project), maybe more bright evidence that there are no new ideas. Thank God I no longer consider that a bad thing.

“When I copy things, I try to do the best I can,” writes Jesse Ball. And here’s Levé on the subject of copying: “When I write several postcards on the same day, I force myself not to describe the same events, as if the addressees might one day realize that I had written the same postcard several times over…I do not seek novelty, but rightness.” I would like for the form of the autoportait to be thought of like a postcard. You’re not a thief if you write a postcard just because others have written postcards in the past. Of course the content of your postcard (or your epistolary story, your sonnet, your memoir, your story told in the form of a resume, your autoportait) will differ from those written before, will be something only you could have written. As artists, we don’t allow one another to copy as easily as we should. Or we do, really, because we have no problem copying the form of the 250-page fiction story in which events unfold chapter by chapter as a cast of characters pursue their desires and come to surprising yet inevitable ends. That kind of book has been copied so endlessly over the last few centuries that we don’t think of it as copying—obviously each take is specific and new because they are written by different individuals. We only think of two works as the bad kind of copy, the theft kind of copy, if a bunch of the words within two books match sequentially, signaling intention. Prose writers should (as usual) look to poetry: poets steal forms from each other constantly, often adding the acknowledging “After X” or “for X” in the epigraph. There is a tendency to think that if a text-based prose work takes an unprecedented shape, it’s cheap for another artist to use that same once-unprecedented shape. Especially with the preponderance of artifact/“hermit-crab” forms over the last decade, we see a rush to turn every non-literary piece of writing (recipes, powerpoint, shopping lists, divorce papers, computer code) into a poem or flash fiction, and then the hackles going up when other writers try to build their own castles in the same sandbox.

What’s so special about this sandbox, though? The autoportait is a manifesto, a collage, a dramatic monologue, a social media feed, an ekphrasis of a smartphone’s photo roll, and a book-length prose-poem written as a list. It can be read in a single sitting. It relaxes the impulse of the writer to qualify facts, events, and feelings as either right or wrong, good or bad, or even some muddy middle. The facts, memories, and preferences that make up the autoportait sit still and speak for themselves. Mostly unadorned with figurative language, the bare sentences allow the reader to decipher if each is cause for embarrassment or celebration or attention at all. Of course, both books may well be full of lies, distortions, cover-ups, and omissions, and given that they serve as ‘portraits in words,’ I wonder if they wouldn’t be more dishonest without these subjectivities.

Reading an autoportait also feels like reading thinking happening. The stream of consciousness shows how thoughts gather and accrue, trail off and break. The end product is a scrapbook of the artists life and also a map of their brain. As I read I wonder how many of the memories and anecdotes Ball/Levé records are things they would not have remembered would it not have been for the writing of this project. My favorite moment in any generative workshop: “I had no idea that memory was even in me.”

I read these books the way I read the visual artist Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, that iconic list of unprovable but endlessly ponderable statements. My mind takes some (Labor is a life-destroying activity), and leaves others (Everyone’s work is equally important). I agree here, I turn my nose up there, I try to understand what my reactions say about me, how I can nod vigorously when Ball says, “I think it is important to read something and take it into your body and find yourself changed by its company,” but shake my head at the adjacent sentence: “I do not think it is important to read a lot or to read a great variety of things.” The autoportait is a form suited to our times, because the ever-present “I” in these sentences softens each assertion or preference, so whenever I balk at something, I can hear The Dude in me responding, “That’s just like, your opinion, man.”

Ball’s book is called a memoir by its jacket blurbs, but nowhere carries an actual Library of Congress genre categorization. Levé’s is labeled simply ‘literature’, and I like that answer to the question. I don’t find it evasive. Whatever we want to call them, it’s true I took both of these books into my body and was changed.

I hope the autoportrait can be seen as the manifesto of a moment, a declaration without a thesis. At a glance, it may seem like a cobbled-together monument to individuality, but at least in the case of these works by Levé, Ball, Hodson, and whoever takes the next swing, it shows how similar and still entirely alien each individual experience of humanness can be. And if there’s a story here at all, it’s one of intimacy and community being built across great distances of space and time by people who never knew each other, save through the words they put to page.