The autobiographical moment that obtrudes into [Kafka’s Beckett’s and Blanchot’s] texts does so in a way that, in its extremity and ungraspability, demands fiction, that finds itself forced and torqued into scenes and figures, despite the impossibility of such a narrative localization. Blanchot’s own use of the phrase “a primal scene” in The Writing of the Disaster is perhaps the best indication of this […] a use that is hedged with parentheses and a question mark (he writes: “(A primal scene?)”), but that nonetheless compulsively turns and tropes through the contours of a scene cast simultaneously as an eternal and irresistible autobiographical return and as mere fictive “supposition”. Fictive figuration, then, as a necessary compromise formation, under duress of extreme strangeness and radical depersonalization.

[…] If this resembles a traumatic structure, it is not because there is a barred or repressed narrative, but because the breach or fault to which telling returns, eternally and again, continually defies the figural compulsion that commands it. As such, it is a mere disappearing point, and a necessarily empty one—but this is the very structure of the imperative in its defaulting force.

The situation can thus be summarized in the following terms: the only story that can be told is one that has been invented, but every invented story—and the more radically invented, the more abyssally will this be demonstrated—betrays the contingency, the temporal, topographical and idiomatic embeddedness, of its imperative’s imprint, the initial impact of its unaccountable preinscription. (Such an imprint could also be considered in terms of style—another term for autobiography as displaced remnant.)

[…] fiction in extremis is intimately bound up with an autobiographical dimension of writing that pursues the writer into the far reaches of radical depersonalization: writing’s curved trajectory leads back, eternally and again, to the obtrusive stuff  of a life that, in the logic of these leavings, really ought to have been left behind. Faute de quoi—failing this—and in default of such a permanent and absolute leave-taking, what is left is in fact a dense residue that bears witness to a compulsion arising from the breach that writing opens in a life, which it leaves there.

Jeff Fort, The Imperative To Write