The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (19 page)

In writing this essay I consciously include my subjective reactions
and partialities as part of the process and lay no claim to either objectivity or authority. This is, to put it mildly, not how I was taught to write at Harvard in the forties. To me it seems perfectly appropriate to what I am doing, which is mostly speculation and opinion (as were most of the authoritatively phrased and apparently egoless papers produced at Harvard in the forties).

If, however, I were an eyewitness journalist charged with describing an event, if I were writing a biography, or an autobiography, could I not claim a genuine authority, based not only on knowledge (research), perceptivity, and inclusiveness but also on a strenuous attempt to be objective?

When scientists come out and state that they
cannot
achieve objectivity, and historians follow suit, a certain demoralisation may follow. Objectivity was an ideal to journalists, too. If the scientists abandon it, why should a poor stiff working part-time for the local foreign-corporation-owned rag even try for it?

Yet most journalists still profess the ideal of objective reporting, even when it comes to highly subjective matters. No proper journalist has ever admitted that anybody who does or suffers anything that brings them into public attention, intentionally or not, has any right to privacy. But in practice, journalists respect privacy when they describe objective actions and speech, leaving subjective motives, thoughts, and feelings to be deduced from the description; and outside the tabloids, most journalists do that. Serious journalism defines itself by the avoidance of speculation presented as fact.

Though they may have abandoned the claim to objectivity, serious history and biography define themselves in the same way. As soon as the writer tells us what Napoleon murmured to Josephine in bed and how Josephine’s heart went pitpat, we know we’re nearer Oz than Paris.

Many readers, of course, want Oz, not Paris. They’re reading for the story, and don’t care if the story is inaccurate or if the characters make a travesty of the historical figures they’re based on.

Why, then, are they reading history rather than a novel? Is it because they distrust the novel as being “made up,” while the narrative that calls itself history or biography, however dishonest, is “real”?

Such a bias, reflecting the Puritan judgmentalism so common in American minds, turns up in many and unlikely places. I hear a ring of such absolutism in both the
New York Times Book Review
quotations above, with their emphasis on “theatricality” and “conjuring.” You can’t tell the whole truth; nothing less will do; so you fake it.

But it’s equally possible that many or most American readers are genuinely indifferent to the distinction of fiction from nonfiction. These categories mean little or nothing in preliterate cultures, and even now, when the written word is the word that counts, ever more so as we increasingly communicate via electronic media, perhaps they are not generally seen as carrying any great intellectual or ethical significance.

This perception may be in part connected to the increasing electronicisation of writing. In so far as writing becomes electronic, surely its categories and genres will change. So far, the new technology has influenced fiction only by opening to the novelist the garden of forking paths accessible through hypertext. Genuinely interactive fiction, where the reader would control the text equally with the writer, remains hype or a promise (or, to some, a threat). As for nonfiction, it seems that scant care for accuracy and fact checking, along with wide tolerance of hearsay and opinion, characterise a lot of what passes for information on the Internet. The transitory nature of Net communication encourages a freedom like that of private conversation. Rumormongering, gossip, pontification, unverified quotation, and backchat all flow freely through cyberspace, shortcutting the skills and/or self-restraints of both fiction and factual writing. The pseudo-oral, pseudonymous, transitory character of electronic writing encourages an easy abdication of the responsibility that accrues to print. But that responsibility may be truly out of place in the Net. A new form of writing has to develop its own aesthetic and ethic. That’s to come. In this
essay I’m talking about print, the essence of which is that it gives writing reproducible permanence. All permanence in human terms involves responsibility.

A group I belong to that gives annual awards to writers got a letter recently asking us to divide our nonfiction prize into two—one for historical nonfiction and one for creative nonfiction. The first term was new to me, the second was familiar.

Writing workshops and programs all over the country now offer courses in “creative nonfiction.” The arts of scientific, historical, and biographical narrative are rarely if ever taught in such programs (or anywhere else). Autobiography, however, has been increasingly popular in the writing programs. It may be taught as journal writing or as therapy through self-expression. When it has more literary goals, it is called creative nonfiction, personal essay, and memoir.

The writer of a memoir, like the responsible biographer, ethnographer, or journalist, used to describe what other people did and said, leaving what they may have felt and thought as implications to be drawn by the reader or as authorial speculation identified as such. The autobiographer limited her account to her own memory of how her uncle Fred looked as he ate the grommet, what she heard him say when he’d swallowed it, and what she thought about it. The only sensations and emotions she described were her own.

According to those who defend the use of fictional devices and elements in nonfiction, the memoirist is justified in telling us how, as he swallowed it, Fred vividly recalled the slightly oily taste of the first grommet he ever ate, fifty years ago in Indiana, and how bittersweet the memory was to him.

Many writers and readers of creative nonfiction hold that such ascription of inward thought or feeling, if it’s based on a knowledge of Fred’s character, is legitimate. It does no harm to Fred (who died in 1980 of a surfeit of grommets), and no harm to the reader, who after
all will almost certainly know Fred only in and through the story, just as if he were a character in a novel.

But who is to certify the writer’s knowledge of her uncle’s character as accurate, unbiased, reliable? Possibly her aunt, but we’re not likely to have the chance to consult her aunt. The memoirist’s responsibility seems to me to be exactly that of the ethnographer: not to pretend to objectivity, but also not to pretend to be able to speak for anybody but oneself. To assign oneself the power to tell us what another person thought or felt is, to my mind, co-optation of a voice: an act of extreme disrespect. The reader who accepts the tactic colludes in the disrespect.

Characters “come alive” in a story, fictive or factual, they “seem real,” not, of course, through the mere report of their actions and words, but by selection, suppression, rearrangement, and interpretation of that material. I take it this is what Mr. Di Piero, quoted above, meant by “Remembering is an act of the imagination.” (It may be what Genly Ai, in my novel
The Left Hand of Darkness
, meant by saying that he was taught on his home world that “Truth is a matter of the imagination”; but Genly, of course, wasn’t real.)

The most cogent argument in support of the use of invention in nonfiction is, then: as fiction involves the arrangement, manipulation, and interpretation of inventions, so creative nonfiction involves the arrangement, manipulation, and interpretation of actual events. A short story is an invention, a memoir is a reinvention, and the difference between them is negligible.

I accept the terms, but the conclusion makes me uneasy.

It’s not just that many readers evidently don’t know whether a story they just read is factual, invented, or a mixture, and don’t care. They do care, in the sense that I discussed above: American readers tend to value factuality over invention, reality over imagination. They’re uncomfortable with the fictivity of fiction.

Perhaps this is why they beg novelists to tell them, “Where do you get your ideas from?” The only honest answer is of course “I make them up,” but that’s not the answer they want. They want specific sources. In my experience, most readers vastly exaggerate the dependence of fiction on research and immediate experience. They assume that characters in a story are “taken” from somebody the author knows, “based on” a specific person used as “copy,” and believe that a story or novel is necessarily preceded by “research.”

(This latter illusion may rise from the necessity most writers are under of writing applications for grants. You can’t tell the guys with the money that you don’t actually need to spend six months in the Library of Congress doing research for your novel. You’ve been drawing maps of Glonggo ever since you were ten, you worked out the curious mores and social structure of the Glonggovians when you were twenty, the plot and characters of
Thunder-Lords of Glonggo
are ready and waiting in your mind, and all you need is the six months to write the story and some peanut butter to live on. But peanut butter and made-up stories aren’t what grants are given for. Grants are for serious things, like research.)

The notion that fictional characters are all portraits of actual people probably arises from natural vanity and paranoia, and is encouraged by the power fantasies of some fiction writers (you’re nothing to me but copy). Tracing back elements of great novel characters—Jane Eyre, Natasha, Mrs. Dalloway—to this or that element of real people the writer knew is an entertaining and sometimes revealing criticobiographical game. But involved in all such searches for the nonfiction in the fiction is, I suspect, a distrust of the fictive, a resistance to admitting that novelists
make it up
—that fiction is not reproduction, but invention.

If invention is so much distrusted, why is it admitted where it doesn’t belong?

Maybe this insistence that fiction is “really” not made up but derived immediately from fact is what has established the confusion of
modes that, as if reciprocally, permits the entry of fictional data into purported nonfiction.

Nothing comes from nothing. The novelist’s “ideas” do come from somewhere. The poet Gary Snyder’s finely unpoetic image of composting is useful here. Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day every day, a lot of garbage, leftovers, dead leaves, eyes of potatoes, artichoke stems, forests, streets, rooms in slums, mountain ranges, voices, screams, dreams, whispers, smells, blows, eyes, gaits, gestures, the touch of a hand, a whistle in the night, the slant of light on the wall of a child’s room, a fin in a waste of waters. All this stuff goes down into the novelist’s personal compost bin, where it combines, recombines, changes; gets dark, mulchy, fertile, turns into ground. A seed falls into it, the ground nourishes the seed with the richness that went into it, and something grows. But what grows isn’t an artichoke stem and a potato eye and a gesture. It’s a new thing, a new whole. It’s
made up
.