In the ‘Freedom of Self-Consciousness’ chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit, which follows the better-known parable about the master and the slave, Hegel considers two schools of ancient philosophy: stoicism and scepticism. Stoicism, he says, begins as the slave’s rationalization of its own powerlessness. The slave’s consciousness withdraws from the external world into the self, where at least it has control over what it thinks. Scepticism attempts to actualize this freedom by negating the independence of the external world altogether, leaving the thinking self as the sole remaining real entity. The result is self-defeating. When the world is reduced to the perceiving subject, the sceptical consciousness inevitably negates that too, in a ‘giddy whorl of perpetually self-creating disorder’. The self becomes doubled and divided – it is at once master and slave, the being with the power to negate reality and the being whose reality is negated. Hegel describes its actions as ‘miserable and insignificant, its enjoyment pain.’ He calls this poor, alienated soul the Unhappy Consciousness.

Might an analogous dynamic be playing itself out in twenty-first-century writing? The sceptic is the easiest to identify: it is the memoirist, and, to a lesser extent, the simulation of the memoiristic position in fiction, which, as Anna Kornbluh observes in Immediacy, Or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), has become an increasingly popular choice for contemporary novelists. What draws readers to memoir is not merely prurience. It is also authenticity, an illusion sustained on the production side by the ethical-cum-epistemic creed that one must write what one knows, and that the only knowable being is oneself. The memoirist’s Other is somewhat harder to determine. It is not, I think, the writer of other kinds of nonfiction or of realist fiction narrated in the third person, both of which presume some degree of mind-independent knowledge. Nor is it the writer of the various forms of fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, romance) whose genre codes permit significant departures from verisimilitude. Rather, it is the ghostwriter.

Like the first-person narrator, the ghostwriter is hardly a new phenomenon. But their contemporary prevalence remains underdiscussed for obvious reasons. Whether produced on the ‘floor’ of a bestseller factory, such as the one run by James Patterson, or in close collaboration with the politician or celebrity who is its subject, the ghostwritten book represents both the greatest overlap between commerce and literature as well as the greatest distance between the labour of writing and the prestige of authorship. The withdrawal of the ghostwriter’s name from the language they have produced is as total as that of the stoic from the external world, and, moreover, is enforced by contract law. The name that ultimately appears on the cover of the ghostwritten book is less the name of a self than a brand whose proprietary features, including biographical data, have been licensed to the publishing company. Let’s not forget that by the Roman Empire – a time, not unlike our own, of ‘universal fear and bondage’, as Hegel put it – stoicism had become an ideology for masters and slaves alike.

Who, then, is the unhappy consciousness in our analogy? I would suggest it is the writer of autofiction. In a 2014 essay describing the emerging popularity of autofiction in Anglophone writing, Jonathan Sturgeon lists three defining features of the genre: conscious play with the factual and the fictional; the belief in the immanently fictional character of the self; and a narrative that accounts for its own production, usually by telling us how the author-narrator came to be the self who wrote and published it. According to Frank Guan and Christian Lorentzen, what distinguishes this genre from earlier Künstlerromane are the economic conditions of twenty-first-century publishing. In this interpretation, autofiction is ‘a sort of aesthetic edition of careerism’ (Guan), a symptom of the fact that a writer’s job ‘has ceased to be distinguished from self-promotion’ (Lorenzten). Autofiction writers, in other words, are memoirists who have had to become their own ghostwriters. The prevailing affects on display in the genre are akin to those that Hegel delineated for the unhappy consciousness: anomie, impotence, masochism, anhedonia.

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It is therefore fitting, even logical, that Life of M, the new novel by Rachel Cusk, one of the authors most associated with the Anglophone autofiction boom, should be narrated by a would-be ghostwriter. In Life of M, the autofictional ‘game or conceit’ is announced straight out of the gate. The first paragraph reads, in full: ‘A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.’ Bookended by a chapter describing the genesis of this ‘project’ and one describing its ultimate failure, most of Cusk’s novel toggles between what appear to be scenes from M’s life and what appear to be scenes from that of the narrator. Cusk gives each of these sections its own focalization. The first and last chapters are narrated in the first-person singular, M’s chapters are narrated in the close third person and – picking up from where she left off in her previous novel Parade (2024) – Cusk narrates the remaining chapters in the first-person plural. With the exception of the final scene, in which the ghostwriter shows M what they have written, the drama of the novel arises from the question of how much overlap exists between the ‘I’ narrator and the ‘we’ narrator – and how reliable their descriptions of M actually are.

To state the obvious: it is not an autobiography if someone else writes it, nor is it one if it is made up, even if Gertrude Stein once managed to pull off the former, and countless frauds have attempted to pass off the latter. ‘Actor’ is also something of an understatement. M is a bona fide movie star. Judging by the descriptions the we-narrator provides of three of the films she stars in, which are easily identified as The Professional, Black Swan and Vox Lux, her character is less-than-loosely based on Natalie Portman. (Googling ‘Rachel Cusk Natalie Portman’ brings up a link to a 2024 post on Portman’s Instagram page praising Parade, and a link to a 2022 video of Portman and Cusk discussing Second Place (2021) in ‘Natalie’s Book Club’.) M’s love of books, part of the famous actor’s own ‘project’ of cultivating ‘normality’, helps Cusk smooth over potential doubts about the likelihood of a movie star meeting and befriending an author of literary fiction, however well-regarded. The existence of celebrity book clubs, and indeed ghostwritten books, may be evidence that the prestige of the written word has not yet been totally extinguished, but whatever returns writers receive from the cultural capital they loan to celebrities in such exchanges will never be enough to cover the gap in social prominence between them. In any event, it does not seem like an extraneous detail to me that the only named book we see M reading is the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Insofar as you agree that autofiction overestimates the reader’s investment in the facts about the life of the author relative to their investment in the writer’s abilities to imagine people who do not exist and events that never occurred, the genre starts off with a low ceiling and is subject to diminishing returns from one book to the next. In a Guardian profile that has become obligatory to quote, Cusk told an interviewer that she was certain that ‘autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts. Description, character – these are dead or dying in reality as well as in art’. Made in the context of promoting the release of Outline (2014) – a novel in which a conspicuously inconspicuous narrator collects and relays other people’s stories as she performs all the extra-literary tasks required of today’s moderately successful writer – Cusk’s comment has always struck me as personal exhaustion with her chosen form masquerading as aesthetic principle.

Twelve years and five novels later, a negation of the negation seems to have taken place. Far from being dead or dying, description and character are more central to Life of M than Cusk’s winks and nods to her own biography, though the choice of a movie star as her protagonist does provide plenty of opportunities for commentary on the ‘separation between being and seeming’ and the differences between ‘the rules of representation and the rules of reality’ at the heart of the autofictional game. Scene, it is true, is deemphasized relative to scenery, giving Life of M the halting pace of a walk around an art gallery rather than the causal flow we tend to associate with narrative. Yet the novel’s strongest prose can be found in the nouveau-romanesque sections that begin ‘it is’, where ‘it’ is the townhouse where M lives; the offices, hotel rooms and sets where she works; the trailer where she goes between takes; the airplanes and limousines that take her to and from her various obligations; the luxury spa, schooner and island vacation home where she spends her leisure time; and the bookstores, art galleries, restaurants and friends’ houses where she socializes.

These settings are described with a meticulousness that is the child of covetousness and repulsion. In the pages devoted to the room where M meets with her team of personal assistants, for example, Cusk tells us about the quality of light that comes through the three windows, the contemporary art that hangs on the white walls, the materials out of which the furniture and the other objects in the room are made, their shapes, the precise distance maintained between each of them by the staff. The only warm and creaturely items in this ‘severe’ environment are the ‘large and succulent-looking pastries’ whose ‘doughy whirls’ glisten with butter and sugar. The ‘alluring’ pastries have an ‘almost flesh-like appearance’ and are heaped on two platters on the ‘glowing’ sideboard ‘in a manner suggesting generosity’. ‘Obviously’, the narrator adds in a dagger-strike a few paragraphs later, it is ‘forbidden to touch’ them.

Although Cusk is a reliably effective technician, Life of M is less a work of art in the honorific sense than it is an artwork in the ethnographic sense. Its primary value, like so many novels these days, is symptomatic rather than aesthetic. Where Life of M is at its most interesting is in its acerbic portrayal of the we-narrator, which seems to be composed of the would-be ghostwriter and their partner, about whom we learn only that they have recently been hospitalized for a life-threatening illness. Collective narrators are generally used to signal representativeness and genericness; here they are also a comment on the inherently recognitive structure of subjectivity. They are Hegel’s famous formula about ‘the I that is We and the We that is I’ from the Phenomenology turned into a focalizing agent. Admittedly, the person who speaks on behalf of this ‘we’ in Life of M is not the unitary individual we have come to expect from the realist novel. It is itself a multiplicity: the doubled and divided unhappy consciousness.

Hegel scholars usually identify the unhappy consciousness with early Christianity, but the genus Cusk’s collective narrator represents in miniature is the upper-middle class, which I will define as the wealthiest segment of the population that still pays most of its taxes. Specifically, they belong to the more precarious part of this stratum that is engaged in creative professions, and as such they have the typical class background of both the producers of autofiction as well as its consumers. A pair of empty-nesters, they live with their dogs in a ‘compact’, ‘beautiful’ European capital. Although they chose to move to this ‘masterpiece of civilization’, they do not feel that they ‘belong’ there, and life is, for them, saturated with an ambience of imminent threat. As they have aged and become wealthier, they have found that the ‘intrusion of reality’, whether in the form of people, pigeons or events, ‘could only signify violence’ and come to ‘suspect that the news from now on will be bad.’ Any absence of the feeling of danger simply means that ‘there is no knowing from which direction the danger will come.’

Their fearfulness and pessimism are inseparable from class prejudice, and are often triggered by unwelcome proximity to the unhoused population in the ‘rougher’ patches of the city, who live beneath bridges or in tent encampments, shit and piss in the streets, are dressed in rags with holes in their pants showing their ‘genitalia’ and ‘shout at the empty air’. The narrators manage to concede the waste collectors on their street a ‘certain dignity’, thanks to the social utility of their profession, but then compare the appearance of their vehicle, with its ‘diabolical sound of shrieking’, to that of ‘the angel of death’. Also condescending is their attitude toward the part of the middle class who have less cultural capital than they do, namely the tourists who wander the city with a ‘mindless possessiveness’ like a ‘force of occupation’. On one occasion, they go to a museum, only to have to flee the tourists and their ‘shrieking’ children, finding refuge in a mercifully quiet exhibition. There they make the pleasant discovery of the work of a photographer who is less-than-loosely based on Francesca Woodman, an artist with whom one would expect people of their cultural pretensions to be familiar. On top of having a ‘dim and suspicious view of life’, they are also snobs.

Just as they moved to the city they aspired to live in only to feel alienated by living there, they chafe at any limitation on their personal freedom only to feel miserable and afraid when they have it (in this too they seem to be representative of contemporary upper-middle-class attitudes). They place a high premium on ‘concentration’, a mental faculty that ought not be confused with attention. Whereas attention draws people toward the external world, concentration for them is tantamount to blocking it out. Concentration, ‘the dissolution of all ties in the face of work’, may be essential, as work was for Hegel’s slave, to the freedom of self-creation, and this freedom may in turn be ‘the greatest, the final privilege’, but in their case at least the dissolution of ties to the external world is indistinguishable from self-absorption, if not outright solipsism. Their decision ‘to put their projects ahead of all other considerations’, has made them ‘cold-hearted’ toward others, including their children, whom they perceive as the ‘greatest possible threat’ to their concentration.

Worse still, from an artistic point of view, it has made them incurious. ‘It is hard for us to set aside our vigilance over ourselves’, the narrators admit, and thus it is also hard for them to ‘enter into the life and perception of someone else’, though this is surely just as important to the work of writing as the ability to concentrate. On a day trip to a forest outside the city, they briefly enjoy a sunset. ‘Presumably there were also sunsets’ in the suburb where they grew up, they reflect, ‘but if there were we neither noticed nor cared’. As in the museum scene, Cusk opens a gap here between herself and her narrator that at first glance appears more characteristic of the traditional novel than of autofiction. But the difference is crucial: it is that between irony and insincerity. Comments such as these, delivered with the same froideur as their observations about the tourists and the waste collectors, are at once too judgemental and too insensate to be taken at face value. They read less like genuine self-rebuke than they do masochistic self-flagellation, and even as a subtle way of affecting superiority: we may criticize ourselves, but at least we have chosen the best possible object of our criticism. In other words, exactly what you would expect from a sceptical consciousness that has turned its negation of the world back on itself.

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In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, who once characterized himself as a ‘Hegelian of the extreme left’, describes celebrities as ‘spectacular representations of human beings’ and ‘specialists in apparent life’. Their function is to ‘act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner’. In doing so, they serve as objects of identification and as compensatory mechanisms for those who spend their leisure time consuming images of and stories about them while being deprived of the power to lead free lives of their own. This, at any rate, is the function M serves for the narrator, despite their claiming to have never heard of her before they met at a bookstore. M is at once the narrator’s ego-ideal, an object of envy, and a screen on which to project the fantasy of living in a culture in which being a successful writer of literary fiction comes with the same privileges as being a successful actor. The we-narrator claims not to care about social recognition, but, then, they are unreliable.

Recognition, they acknowledge, is not without difficulties and drawbacks. Strangers feel entitled to demand photographs with M, the details of her private life are public knowledge, her family members shamelessly hit her up for money, and her friends affect indifference toward her fame, which they treat as though it were a pitiable ‘illness or disability’. After filming a sex scene, sex, which elsewhere the narrator priggishly calls ‘intimate relations’, ‘feels like a chore’. Although M has a direct view of ‘the brutal peaks of concentrated power’ at the top of the class hierarchy, she is not in a position to exercise much of it herself; as an actor, she lacks ‘the fundamental power of choice that a creator has’. Despite her vaunted social status, she still has to endure condescension from people who have no greater claim on power than the possession of a penis. ‘Her life has not been her own’, she worries, but then, in the society of the spectacle, whose has? Debord: ‘The activities of these stars are not really free and they offer no real choices’.

On the whole, however, the narrator’s portrait of M did not strike me as unflattering, especially compared to the one the we-narrator paints of itself – to say nothing of the long list of actual people whose psyches have been mutilated by fame. Graceful and self-aware, M is shown to act with noblesse oblige toward those lower in the class hierarchy than she is. She foregoes certain conveniences – the fortified compound outside the city, the private jet, the closed circle of celebrity acquaintances, ignorance of the news – in order not to become totally isolated from others’ experiences. She mentors younger actors, is not imperious toward her staff, and, unlike most of the other mothers at the private school to which she sends her children, she picks them up herself, feeling more solidarity with the nannies who, like her, are workers, than with the housewives who have sent them in their place. M may be a ‘spectacular representation of a human being’, and compensated accordingly, but her character flaws humanize her more than their absence would. The capacity for cruelty the narrator attributes to her is nowhere in evidence – until, that is, the final chapter.

Predictably enough, M is not at all flattered when shown a draft of the ‘project’. She complains that she has been made identifiable (true) but unrecognizable (probably true), incapable of love (maybe true), and lacking in humanity (untrue). What M is experiencing is less painful recognition than the displeasure of seeing herself reflected in the distorting mirror of the unhappy consciousness. M forbids the narrator to use her name in connection with the project, despite the narrator’s protests that she has made everything up, as M had suggested. The narrator abjectly appeals to M’s pity. The narrator had tried ‘paying attention’ to themselves to deal with ‘the ugliness of experience’, but ‘abandoning’ this to ‘live in someone else’ had proved a better solution, as well as a means to cope with the near-death of their partner.

At first it might seem as though our unhappy consciousness has finally seen the error of its ways and come to Reason, by opening itself once more to the external world and the other minds in it. As rhetorical strategies go, however, this is obtuse: no one, famous or not, appreciates being the prosthesis of someone else’s personal growth, especially if it comes at their own expense. We are told that the narrator ‘takes in’ M’s interdiction ‘darkly’ – but why? If the real value of the ‘ghostwritten autobiography’ is in the narrator’s dialectical self-overcoming, then it shouldn’t matter whether M’s name is associated with it. But once again, their putative epiphany is insincere rather than ironic. One cannot help but suspect that in that ‘darkly’ is a vision of plummeting sales. (Not a problem I suspect Life of M is going to have.)

That is when M shows her teeth. In the novel’s final sentence, she asks the narrator a question that makes for an even more mean-spirited and baffling artistic choice than the concluding image of Kudos (2018), the third instalment of Cusk’s Outline trilogy. Not only does it force us to reevaluate what we’ve been told about M, it asks us to wonder whether M said it to get revenge on the narrator for her unflattering portrait or whether the narrator has attributed it to M to get revenge for her refusal to be associated with the project. The latter interpretration raises the uncomfortable possibility that this is ultimately Cusk’s revenge on the actress on whom M is based. The ‘fiction’ in autofiction ultimately makes the issue undecidable – but in my view the buck stops with Cusk, who, like many autofiction writers, wants to have her cake (the reader’s charitable presumption of difference between her worldview and that of her narrators) and eat it too (the reader’s association of her main character with a real person). After I finished the novel, I flipped to the ‘Acknowledgements’ where, for what it’s worth, the name ‘Natalie Portman’ does not appear. If this were a Cusk novel instead of a review of one, I would tell you that, much like reading Life of M, I found it ‘compromising’ or ‘contaminating’ to do so, and you would have to guess whether I was telling the truth.

Read on: Ryan Ruby, ‘Wikipedia and the Novel’, NLR 156.