Margot Singer | March/April 2013

NOTES

1.

For many years now, the conversation about creative nonfiction has focused almost exclusively on questions of definition and legitimacy. What is this thing we’re writing? We can’t even settle comfortably on a name. Tacking the word “creative” or “literary” or “narrative” in front of “nonfiction” feels defensive or pretentious or redundant or all three. “Essay” conjures the specter of the term paper, “article” connotes journalism, “belles-lettres” is lovely but no one can pronounce it, “memoir” is too limiting, and plain “nonfiction” is too big. And the trouble of nomenclature is only a symptom of a larger problem: where to draw the borders of this Thing-That-Cannot-Be-Named? Every phony-memoir scandal prompts a fresh boundary skirmish. Journalists and essayists face off. Some of us duck behind parked cars.

We love creative nonfiction, of course, because of its blurry borders, the way it toggles back and forth between fact and the imagination, between expository and lyric modes. We love its ability to blend scene, description, meditation, raw fact, speculation, and reportage. Creative nonfiction is a shape-shifter. It casts aside journalism’s formulaic “five W’s” and inverted pyramid structure and neutral third person invisibility for a vast array of forms. This plasticity, of course, makes some people nervous. If a piece of nonfiction reads like fiction or poetry, how can you tell it’s true? And truth matters. We all know that something crucial happens to how we read a story when we understand that its events really occurred, that the people and places exist in the real world. We’ve all experienced the special intimacy that comes from identifying the voice of an essay or memoir as the author’s, from listening to that author think and wonder, reminisce, confess, reflect. And most of us, if we discover we’ve been lied to, feel betrayed.

Unfortunately, the ongoing fracas over the ethics of nonfiction has sidelined important questions of literary form. What makes creative nonfiction distinctive as a genre, I propose, is not only the truth-value of the writing. It’s the way in which the raw material of “reality” is transformed into literary art. And yet, despite its long roots stretching back to Seneca and St. Augustine, creative nonfiction has garnered surprisingly scant attention from literary scholars, critics, and theorists.¹ While recent work in autobiography/life writing studies, narratology, and even neuroscience has made important interdisciplinary contributions to our understanding of the meaning and function of nonfiction storytelling, from a critical perspective, creative nonfiction remains virtually unexplored. It’s time, I think, to move beyond the endless arguments over truth-telling toward a more sophisticated discussion of the genre’s possibilities and forms. How does creative nonfiction “work”? How does it build on and transform other genres? What distinguishes it from other kinds of literary prose?

2.

Creative nonfiction is commonly defined as fact-based writing that uses the techniques of fiction to bring true stories to life. As Lee Gutkind has put it: “Ultimately, the primary goal of the creative nonfiction writer is to communicate information, just like a reporter, but to shape it in a way that reads like fiction.”² Like fiction, creative nonfiction strives to “show, not tell,” to appeal not just to readers’ intellects but to their hearts and senses through detail, image, description, dialogue, and scene. Yet Gutkind’s definition seems too limited. Surely the goal of creative nonfiction is not just to “communicate information,” but to bring the reader on a journey of discovery as we explore our selves and our experience of the world. How can this definition accommodate the wide range of essays whose emphasis is on idea rather than story, on lyricism rather than exposition, on meditation and imagination rather than reportage? And does creative nonfiction really “read like fiction,” or is something else going on?

We organize our textbooks and courses into tidy generic categories, but literary genres are notoriously difficult to theorize or define. We think of genres as fixed and clearly bounded when in fact transgression is the norm. Indeed, there is no such thing as nonhybrid genre. Certainly poems typically have line breaks and prose does not and plays are made of dialogue. But the categories are not mutually exclusive. Prose, like drama, is grounded in dialogue and scene. Poems can be narrative; essays can be lyrical; novels can be written in verse. Novels and stories may in general rely more heavily on narrative, essays on exposition, poetry on the lyric, and plays on dramatization, but ultimately narration and exposition and lyricism and dramatization are rhetorical modes employed by every literary genre.³ To say, as Gutkind does, that creative nonfiction “communicates information” but “reads like fiction” is a description, not a definition. It doesn’t tell us anything about what makes creative nonfiction unique.

As readers we distinguish one genre from another on the basis of formal attributes above all. The conventions of journalism—third person voice, neutral tone, declarative sentences, “inverted pyramid” structure, etc.—signal a news story grounded in reported facts. A poem (with its line breaks, lyrical language, emphasis on image, etc.) may be as fact-based as any newspaper account, yet we still don’t read it as “nonfiction” (curious though we may be as to which bits are true). Memoirs may read like novels, as Gutkind says, but novels read like memoirs too. Indeed, since its earliest days, the novel has created verisimilitude by appropriating nonfiction’s forms (think of Aphra Behn and Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novels, or that first faux autobiography, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe). Genres are not fixed categories with clear-cut boundaries, but constellations of rhetorical modes and structures grounded in varying degrees of fact.

3.

Creative nonfiction, some say, is defined by a lack of established conventions.⁴ But I would suggest that what’s going on is more complicated than that. Creative nonfiction may be polymorphous, and may resist easy categorization, but it’s rooted in convention all the same. It may be obvious, but perhaps worth repeating, that all writing is conventional. Not “conventional” in the pejorative sense of “unoriginal” or “trite,” of course, but meaning a customary way of doing things or having a set of norms. Convention is what we talk about when we talk about craft. As every creative writing student knows, it’s conventional to fill one’s prose with sensory imagery and concrete, significant detail. It’s conventional to shape dialogue in zippy bursts, to portray scenes from a specific point of view, to “show, not tell.” We tend to talk about these elements of craft as givens—laws of nature, almost—but they’re not. They’re simply the familiar attributes of one particular type of narrative, one that is used, to varying degrees, by historians and scientists and journalists as well as by fiction and nonfiction writers to tell stories that feel “true” and “real.”

Often misconceived as techniques “borrowed” from fiction, the conventions of narrative realism underpin any kind of writing that seeks to portray the world as it “really” is. These conventions, quite simply, help us feel, deep in our guts and in our bones, that we are “there” in a way that exposition can’t, and we feel this because of the artfulness (the artifice) of narrative, which for better or for worse operates independently of the inherent truthfulness, or lack thereof, of any given text. Creative nonfiction both builds on the conventions of narrative realism and at times bends and reinvents them, and it is the tension between these dynamics, I propose, that distinguishes creative nonfiction from other literary genres.⁵

As the scholar Doug Hesse has rightly pointed out, narrative feels realistic or lifelike not because it is lifelike but because it’s “storylike.”⁶ But realistic narrative has a way of naturalizing the operation of its conventions so that we forget they’re there. As Tsvetan Todorov has written, realism (what he calls the vraisembable) “is the mask which conceals the text’s own laws and which we are supposed to take for a relation with reality.”⁷ In other words, we tend to forget that we’re reading a linguistic representation, and imagine instead that the narrative is literally holding up a mirror to the world.

This naturalizing effect is, I think, especially strong in creative nonfiction. Never mind that the dialogue presented in a memoir is obviously not a transcription of actual speech. Never mind that the order of presentation in a narrative is rarely linear, that time is dilated or compressed. Never mind that the myriad details of experience must be selected, filtered, ordered, and re-presented in a way that imposes meaning onto what would otherwise be chaos. We tend to accept the conventions of narrative realism as indicative of the truthfulness of a piece of writing, when in fact they are what makes it art.

4.

In shifting the emphasis from exposition to story, from summary to scenes rich in dialogue and descriptive detail, creative nonfiction creates an artful illusion of the real. Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, for example, plunges us into the murky depths of Florida’s Fakahatchee swamp, slogging away beside Orlean as she searches for elusive bromeliads. No one would mistake the following passage for a newspaper article, but we trust nevertheless that journalist Orlean’s account is true—and, even more importantly, we feel that it is true—because of its vivid, sensory detail:

The fact is that the swamp is so grabby that even though I was covered from neck to foot I felt stark naked. The water was freezing cold and mosquitoes sneaked in and out of my shirt by way of my collar and sleeves, and every plant with prickers snatched at my leggings, and the gritty sinkhole muck passed right through my socks and sneakers and stained my ankles and toes. I had mosquito bites on my stomach and face, and toward the end of that first hike I got so nervous and exhausted that I broke out in hives for the first time in my life.⁸

Orlean’s prose puts the reader “there.” The long string of coordinating conjunctions replicates the endlessness of the hike, and the repeated consonance of hard “k” sounds (“neck,” “stark naked,” “cold,” “mosquitoes,” “sneaked,” “prickers,” “sinkhole muck,” “socks and sneakers,” “ankles,” “stomach,” “hike,” “broke”) mimics the insects’ and thorns’ relentless pricks. Do we believe that’s what it feels like to slog through the Fakahatchee swamp? You bet.

Similarly, one of the most moving scenes in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks occurs when Skloot and Lacks’s adult children visit the Johns Hopkins laboratory where the HeLa cancer cells, taken decades earlier from their mother’s body, are cultured and kept:

Christoph leaned over the microscope again and began moving the cells quickly around the screen until he shrieked, “Look there! See that cell?” He pointed to the center of the monitor. “See how it has a big nucleus that looks like it’s almost pinched in half in the middle? That cell is dividing into two cells right before our eyes! And both of those cells will have your mother’s DNA in them.”

“Lord have mercy,” Deborah whispered, covering her mouth with her hand…. Deborah and Zakariyya stared at the screen like they’d gone into a trance, mouths open, cheeks sagging. It was the closest they’d come to seeing their mother alive since they were babies.⁹

This five-page scene, narrated in a dramatic third person (except for the first and last sentences, which subtly indicate Skloot’s presence in the lab), puts the reader, like Skloot, in the position of bearing witness to an emotional event.

Even though Orlean’s and Skloot’s narratives may read as vividly as fiction, we never forget that they are not fictional, and one of the reasons for that is voice. Voice, I propose, is one of the few formal conventions that distinguishes creative nonfiction from other kinds of prose. Since the heyday of the New Journalism in the 1960s and ’70s, writers of creative nonfiction have adopted an intimate, reflective, self-reflexive narrative voice, in marked contrast to the “omniscient” third person of the news story or history book. I call this point of view the “Naked I”: “Naked” because the “I” is a pronoun with a concrete referent, the living body of the author, and not just a narrative construct. (Again, I don’t mean to imply that all creative nonfiction is narrated in the first person. Even in second or third person narratives, as we’ll see in a moment, the identity between narrator and the author crucially influences how we read the text.)

The “Naked I” places writers like Orlean and Skloot squarely on the page. They not only narrate, but participate in the stories they tell. As in science, the act of observing inevitably changes the nature of the thing observed. The Orchid Thief is as much about Orlean’s obsession with obsession as it is a profile of obsessive orchid dealer John Laroche. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks draws Skloot into the lives of Lacks’s family just as it draws them into her journalistic quest. As Skloot puts it: “Slowly, without realizing it, I’d become a character in [Deborah’s] story, and she in mine.”¹⁰ There is no pretense of objectivity here, no invisible “fourth wall.” Instead, the detail-rich, descriptive scenes of narrative realism blend with the limited, one-sided, fallible, fundamentally human perspective of the “Naked I.” There are both hubris and honesty in this technique, which is both contemporarily postmodern and the direct legacy of Montaigne.

5.

What happens, then, in creative nonfiction when the convention of the “Naked I” is cast aside in favor of an “omniscient” third person point of view? Truman Capote famously championed this approach as a way of heightening the vividness of the “nonfiction novel.” “My feeling,” he told George Plimpton in their famous 1966 interview, “is that… the author should not appear in the work. Ideally. Once the narrator does appear, he has to appear throughout, all the way down the line, and the I-I-I intrudes when it really shouldn’t.” ¹¹

The intrusive “I-I-I,” of course, is precisely what reporters and biographers and historians have long banished from the page. It’s when the hidden third person narrator slips beyond reported fact into the realm of the imagination—for example, dramatizing scenes that the author could not possibly have witnessed, recreating dialogue that the author could not possibly have overhead, clairvoyantly representing real-life characters’ most private feelings and thoughts—that the genres really blur. Again, what interests me is not so much the ethics of invention, but its effect on how we read and make meaning of the nonfiction text.

Take, for example, Sebastian Junger’s reconstruction in A Perfect Storm of the unknowable last days and hours of the Andrea Gail. The book may be “completely factual,”¹² as Junger insists, but it is also necessarily an act of the imagination. In Junger’s own words, “as complete an account as possible of something that can never be fully known.”¹³ Junger performs a deft balancing act of speculation, extrapolation, and invention in describing the ship’s last moments after it is struck by a rogue wave:

Whether the Andrea Gail rolls, pitch-poles, or gets driven down, she winds up, one way or another, in a position from which she cannot recover. There’s no time to put on survival suits or grab a life vest; the boat’s moving through the most extreme motion of her life and there isn’t even time to shout. The refrigerator comes out of the wall and crashes across the galley. Dirty dishes cascade out of the sink. The T.V., the washing machine, the VCR tapes, the men, all go flying. And, seconds later, water moves in.¹⁴

Notice how quickly Junger slides away from the equivocal “or” and “one way or another,” foregoing the conditional for a vivid, present-tense description of an utterly imaginary scene.

Dave Eggers, that wunderkind of postmodernist self-reflexivity, also uses an “omniscient” third person narration in Zeitoun, his nonfiction account of an Arab-American family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina. In What Is The What, Eggers goes even further, using what you might call a ventriloquist’s first person as he channels the voice of the real-life Sudanese Lost Boy, Valentino Achak Deng. Sounding an awful lot like Capote, Eggers told an interviewer from Salon: “I don’t want my voice in this book. I don’t want to be a character.”¹⁵ The New York Times critic Timothy Egan called the result “an odd hybrid.”¹⁶ Eggers published What is the What as a novel and left it at that.

Like Junger, Eggers devotes a substantial amount of energy to explaining his methodology and defending the thoroughness and credibility of his reporting and research. And we buy it. Just as we believe Junger’s version of what it must have been like aboard the lost ship Andrea Gail, we’re sold on Egger’s rendition of Valentino’s experiences, feelings, and thoughts. But this use of third person omniscience raises questions. Ethical questions, maybe, but also questions of genre. We don’t read A Perfect Storm as fiction, even though it “reads like a novel,” even though we know Junger had to speculate. We don’t read What Is The What as a novel either, even though it claims to be one, despite the oddness of Eggers writing in Valentino’s voice. The unconventionality of the narrative voice doesn’t destroy our trust in these stories’ truth.

In his 1987 essay “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” Eric Heyne usefully distinguishes between the terms “factual status” and “factual adequacy.”¹⁷ “Factual status,” Heyne argues, is a matter of authorial intention: is the work intended to be read as fact-based or not? “Factual adequacy,” on the other hand, is a function of the reader’s judgment as to whether a “work is good or bad fact” according to the text’s own terms.¹⁸ In his analysis of In Cold Blood, Heyne rightly rejects John Hersey’s narrow dictum that “the journalist must not invent,” and applauds Capote’s use of innovative form.¹⁹ He also rejects the notion that the inaccuracies in Capote’s account mean that we should read the book as fiction.²⁰ Heyne’s reasoning rests on the book’s “factual status”—on the understanding that Capote intended his account of the Kansas killings to be read as true. In evaluating the literary merit of works of nonfiction, Heyne concludes, we must consider the nature of the specific “truth-claims” being made.²¹ Heyne, therefore, finds Capote guilty not of invention, or even of lying, but of “factual inadequacy”— of violating “his own rules.”²²

By breaking with convention, innovative works of creative nonfiction get at “reality” in powerful, new ways. The intrusive “I-I-I” of the first person narrator reaches for a deeper kind of truth by shattering the illusion of journalistic objectivity and putting the author’s subjective experience squarely on the page. Likewise, concealing the author’s presence behind a dramatic, third person narration works to create a camera-like illusion of unmediated reality. Neither approach is a guarantee of factual accuracy—you still have to take that on trust. Most importantly, both approaches serve to remind us that even the most scrupulously fact-based, truthful writing is always also an imaginative act, a work of art.

6.

Much has been written about “experimental” fictions that break narrative conventions in a way that shatters the illusion of reality. The metafictions of Robert Coover and John Barth, for example, call attention to their own fictionality and the artifice of form.²³ Other anti-mimetic fictions center on a dislocated narrator (Robbe-Grillet’s Jalousie), depict a physically or logically impossible space (Danielewski’s The House of Leaves), present contradictory storylines (Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Atwood’s “Happy Endings”), or illogical sequencing (Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Coover’s “The Babysitter”). But what about works of nonfiction that similarly transgress mimetic bounds? Creative nonfiction that’s not “realistic”? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?

When creative nonfiction messes with conventions of narrative level, presents an unreliable narrator, or breaks the narrative frame, something very different happens than when fiction plays such “games.” When in Martin Amis’s novel Money, for example, a character named Martin Amis walks into a bar, it jolts us out of the seemingly-realistic story world. (If you’re of a theoretical bent, you might call it a “metaleptic joke.”²⁴) But when Michael Martone publishes a series of “Contributors’ Notes” written in the third-person that present contradictory information about Martone, you get a joke that works in a completely different way. The character “Martin Amis” reveals the presence of the author, Martin Amis, pulling the puppet’s strings behind the text. In Michael Martone by Michael Martone, there are no puppet strings. Instead of reminding us that fiction writers invent imaginary characters, Martone reminds us that we are always creating and re-creating ourselves. The nonfiction text’s fictionality is a comment not on the nature of fiction-making, but on the nature of the truth.

When a fictional narrator is “unreliable,” we understand that the text is asking us to negotiate the gap between the world as we know it and the world as it’s presented through the narrator’s (skewed) eyes. So when a seemingly omniscient third person narrator turns out to be unreliable, as in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, we experience a kind of shock. The shock calls attention to the subjective and provisional nature of narrative, to authorial manipulations of all kinds. But when Lauren Slater opens Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, with the statement “I exaggerate”;²⁵ when she tells us that this is “a book in which in some cases I cannot and in other cases I will not say the facts,”²⁶ we experience an altogether different kind of shock. With an “unreliable” nonfiction narrator, there’s not only a gap between perceived realities, there’s no firm ground at all. And yet Slater’s project, infuriating as it may be, compels us to confront our desire to know the “truth,” and to consider whether “[using] invention to get at the heart of things” can be more powerful than even documented fact.²⁷

Creative nonfiction, to sum up, is far more than prose that feels like fiction with a special claim to truth. It’s a genre that, at least in its more innovative forms, exposes many of the unexamined expectations we bring to the so-called realistic text. It foregrounds the slipperiness of representation. It makes us ask fundamental questions about the nature of storytelling, memory, “reality” and “truth.” Building on the conventions of other prose forms, it bends and transforms those conventions to offer fresh perspectives on our experience of the world.            

  Margot Singer is the co-editor, with Nicole Walker, of Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction and the author of a collection of short stories, The Pale of Settlement, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She directs the creative writing program and the Reynolds Young Writers Workshop at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.

Notes

1. Efforts at developing a body of criticism and theory on creative nonfiction include John Hellman, Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Eric Heyne, “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 33.3 (1987): 479-90; Barbara Lounsberry, The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1990); Chris Anderson, ed., Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998).
2. Lee Gutkind, ed. The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1. (New York: Norton, 2007), xi.
3. On rhetorical modes vs. genres, see Robert Scholes, Carl H. Klaus, Nancy R. Comley, and Michael Silverman, eds., Elements of Literature, 4^th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), xxx. See also Gérard Genette, The Architext, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley: U. C. Berkeley, 1992), on the distinction between literary structures (such as novels or stories) and linguistic structures (such as narrative or exposition).
4. See Chris Anderson, Introduction, Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy, ed. Chris Anderson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), ix-xx.
5. This is not to claim that all creative nonfiction is narrative, or even realistic, of course, but only to acknowledge that mimetic prose narrative remains creative nonfiction’s dominant mode.
6. Douglas Hesse, “Stories in Essays, Essays as Stories,” in Anderson, 191.
7. Tsvetan Todorov, Introduction, Communications 11 (1968): 3, quoted in Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 139.
8. Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief (New York: Ballantine, 1998), 130.
9. Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Crown-Random House, 2006), 265.
10. Ibid., 7.
11. Truman Capote, interview with George Plimpton, “The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel,” the New York Times, January 16, 1966, accessed October 30, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-interview.html.
12. Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm (New York: Norton, 1997), xi.
13. Ibid., xii.
14. Ibid., 140.
15. Dave Eggers, interview with Sara Corbett, “Lost and Found,” Salon, November 13, 2006, accessed October 30, 2010, http://www.salon.com/2006/11/13/eggers_38/singleton/.
16. Timothy Egan, “After the Deluge,” New York Times, August 13, 2009, accessed October 30, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/books/review/Egan-t.html?pagewanted=all.
17. 17. Eric Heyne, “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 33.3 (1987): 480.
18. 18. Ibid.
19. 19. John Hersey, “The Legend on the License,” Yale Review 70 (Autumn 1980): 1-25.
20. 20. Heyne, 482.
21. 21. Ibid., 488.
22. 22. Ibid., 485.
23. 23. See, for example, Coover’s “The Babysitter” and “The Magic Poker,” in Pricksongs and Descants, 1969 (New York: Grove, 2000) and Barth’s Lost In The Funhouse (New York: Anchor, 1988).
24. 24. Suzanne Keen, Narrative Form (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 110-111.
25. 25. Lauren Slater, Lying (New York: Penguin, 2001), 3.
26. 26. Ibid., 219.
27. 27. Ibid.