“What’s the self, huh?”: (Anti)Narrativity and Queer Becoming in Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X

Abstract

Abstract:Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X (2023) dramatizes the relationship between selfhood and narrativity central to both existentialism and philosophy of mind. I read the Biography as formally underscoring how one’s selfhood is indelibly contoured by and borrowed from others. This formalized sense of subjectivity- through-relationality also amplifies the novel’s greatest thematic tension: the collision between two distinct conceptions of selfhood. On the one hand, X claims a discontinuous, iterative, and nonlinear understanding of the self. On the other hand, Biography of X relays this antinarrativity through C. M.’s avowedly narrativist biography, which attempts to corral the different scenes, moments, and selves of X’s life within a coherent, sense-making story. These contrapuntal impulses provoke a crisis between aesthetics and relationality that stylizes the queer possibilities of becoming even as it underscores the ethical risks of refusing to apprehend others on the same terms as they understand themselves.