Guilty Style: Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and E.M. Forster’s Legacy in the Age of Autofiction

Abstract

This essay provides an example of Forster’s contemporary literary legacy beyond explicit re-workings of his texts and life. Building on existing scholarship, it adopts the concepts of spectral legacy and dialogue as a framework for thinking of legacies that are not a matter of straight descent, but of a later work standing in a more oblique relation to its precursor. The essay reads Lauren Oyler’s recent novel Fake Accounts (2021) as participating in such a spectral dialogue with Howards End. Forster’s conflicted liberal humanism – committed to the ameliorative potential of culture, on the one hand, and painfully aware of the limited social and political efficacy of this commitment, on the other – offers a framework for understanding the formal qualities of autofiction, one of the most visible trends in contemporary literature. The essay posits guilt, one of the primary qualities of liberal thinking both in Forster’s time and the present moment, as the core of this particular Forsterian legacy.

Keywords

• e. m. forster
• howards end
• liberalism
• style
• lauren oyler
• autofiction