Autoaffection and Temporality in Friederike Mayröcker’s Night Train/Reise Durch die Nacht

Abstract

In this article I explore the links between autoaffection, time, and autofiction in Friederike Mayröcker’s Night Train. Mayröcker thematises the process of writing to display temporality as a fundamental structure of experience. Writing does not just take place in time but demonstrates how the self is temporal. This is not merely a split between experiencing and writing selves; rather, writing comes to symbolise the much wider issue of heterogeneity and non-identity. Mayröcker’s experimental text suggests a self that does not coincide with itself because of the jerky movements of time. This offers an image of the self as radically destabilised, which is accentuated by the images of the ageing female body. The materiality of the body appears as on a par with time, and both are fundamental to constituting, ungrounding and shaping the self. Autofiction in Mayröcker’s very experimental mode is able to express entanglements of time, space, matter, and bodies in ways which give voice to gendered differing within transcendental structures of experience. Autofiction is employed less to find an authentic self through writing but to dwell with the contradiction of a self that appears real and fictional at the same time.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Life Writing, 2026 · DOI ↗