Style interminable: the auto-fictional object of the Humanities in works by Brigid Brophy and Ben Lerner

Abstract

Style emerged into discursive prominence in nineteenth century Europe at the same time as the classical symptoms of hysteria were given new impetus by neurologists and psychoanalysts. Later, when the Post-War architecture of late capitalism seemed to spell the end of style, ‘in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the individual brushstroke’ (Fredric Jameson), hysteria started to disappear as a psychiatric diagnosis. To explore how style’s structural affinity with hysteria remains current, even as the professionalisation of the Humanities ensures it is disavowed, this essay redeploys D. W. Winnicott’s idea of ‘transitional phenomena’. I describe the hysterical predicament of the Humanities scholar who is unable to make or find an object of knowledge sufficient to end the distress of their interests. The second part of the essay demonstrates how autobiographic fictions foreground the hysteria of style. Here I place Brigid Brophy, writing in the 1960s and 1970s, and Ben Lerner, writing in the first decades of this millennium, in genealogical relation. I observe how the historical swing from 1970s ‘metafiction’ to contemporary ‘autofiction’ registers the interminable predicament of style. Style displaces the object of literary study and preserves its vulnerability through a structure of communicative reticence.