Autofiction Meets Stream of Consciousness
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            The essay “A Quite Natural Desire” provides the framework for the recent re-release of Nicolas Pages, originally released in 1999, for which he won the Prix de Flore. The novel, recently re-released by Semiotext(e), follows Dustan’s failed romance with Swiss artist and writer Nicolas Pages, with whom he goes on a brief book tour.

            Nicolas Pages is a love story told in stream-of-consciousness prose, fictional stories (“The Story of Rabbit” and “Little Bear: A Novel”), lists, and poems. Admissions like “Actually that’s not how it happened” contribute to the structureless architecture of desire that Dustan constructs, a sporadic movement characterized by a compulsive desire to act, to perform. From thoughts of sleeping with other people while in bed with his boyfriend to more self-effacing admissions of sexual prowess (“Phoneable = fuckable. My phone rings”), Dustan takes advantage of the freedom of limitless interiority that shapes autofiction. “This is the value of all the whole apparently narcissistic tendency in contemporary art,” he explains, “to take oneself as one’s subject is also to explode the stupid dichotomy between the artist and nonartist.”

      In this way, Nicolas Pages is a love story made successful in its failure. The failure is in the structure, the compulsive thought that maintains its place within commas, parentheses, and fleeting thoughts characterized by their lack of punctuation. The downfall of a relationship becomes the unraveling of the self: “And then things fell apart (that is to say, improved),” Dustan writes. At the end of the book is a term glossary outlining the novel’s cast of characters and popular locales, as well as Dustan’s many aliases: “Guillaume Dustan: Me*”; “Psyggy (or Miss Psyggy): Me!”; and, later, “Fag: would take too long to explain. See also Me*.” 

            Dustan plays with himself, and in doing so destabilizes the relationship between fact and fiction, between desire and its complications. Nicolas Pages demonstrates how desire can manifest itself in physical and linguistic structures: run-on sentences, shopping lists, poetry, the body. The novel posits the white, gay cisgender male body as a site for experimentation. Such a focus on subjectivity amplifies Dustan’s experience without universalizing its consequences. While the genre of autofiction allows the author to evade somewhat the structural issues of privilege in race, class, and gender, Dustan plays into the genre’s narcissism by making the self, his self, a spectacle. Where Carmichael uses humor, Dustan uses punctuation (or lack thereof) both to call attention to the genre in which he is performing and to underscore the role of performance in the story of self-discovery. Nicholas Pages is about the structureless structure to which we all belong: the body.