Nonfiction as Genre

In “Living to Tell the Tale,” Lynn Z. Bloom writes of what might be called the ethical imperative of CNF: “Writers of creative nonfiction live—and die—by a single ethical standard, to render faithfully, as Joan Didion says in ‘On Keeping a Notebook,’ ‘how it felt to me,’ their understanding of both the literal and the larger Truth. That standard, and that alone, is the writer’s ethic of creative nonfiction” (278). Embedded within Bloom’s statement is a definition of the genre of CNF: unlike fiction, which strives to tell “the larger Truth,” CNF, no matter how creative, must also tell the “literal” truth. Bloom’s discussion of what it means to tell the truth—her single “standard” or foundation for the ethics of nonfiction—is admittedly complex: is it okay to change the names of “characters,” should the author self-censor, should the “real” people who form “characters” in nonfiction be allowed to read drafts, and should secrets be revealed, even when it might harm others?

While acknowledging that these are important issues, I want to argue that they present a limited view of the ethics of CNF because they evolve from a limited definition of the genre. Traditionally, nonfiction is defined as a genre that tells stories that actually happened. In contrast, fiction is, in part or whole, a fabrication. We accept this definition even though, as sophisticated readers, we know the simple dichotomy often dissolves. On the verso of the dedication page of Hemingway’s In Our Time is the following note: “In view of a recent tendency to identify characters in fiction with real people, it seems proper to state that there are no real people in this volume: both the characters and their names are fictitious. If the name of any living person has been used, the use was purely accidental.” I don’t know if the note was written by Hemingway, his editor, or his lawyer, but, whoever the author, it is as much of an admission as it is a denial. The “tendency” mentioned in the note may come from naïve readers, but it comes also, to some degree, from Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway himself creating characters that are rather close to their friends, many of whom were known to readers of the day. The “tendency” also points to a bleed between fiction and nonfiction. As a recent example, Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, a novel in six volumes, some 3,600 pages, is labeled on the back cover as fiction, even though the central character is Karl Ove Knausgård. It has been called a “nonfictive novel.” The last volume (I haven’t gotten to it yet and may not before I die) reportedly deals with the reactions of Knausgård’s relatives and friends to what he wrote about them in earlier volumes. If we accept the possibility of a “nonfictive novel,” might we also accept the possibility of a “fictive memoir”? I’ll come back to this, but let me first look at what this “tendency” and “bleed” say about our definitions of fiction and nonfiction.

To define nonfiction as true stories is to define an entire genre on content alone—rarely the truth of character, history, or culture; typically, only the limited focus of truth as adherence to the facts, with the assumption that facts are objectively knowable. If Knausgård’s My Struggle is a novel that is reportedly an accurate telling of the facts of Knausgård’s life and the lives of those around him—at least, as accurate as is the typical memoir—and if we accept that it is not a memoir, then our definition needs to include something about form as well as content. To expand the definition further, we might include the author’s intent as well as the author’s bond with the reader as well as the author’s concern for those who form his or her characters. If the author of CNF intends to write the truth, which means more than getting the facts right, the author also should not assume what Bakhtin calls an excess of seeing, the knowledge of a complete and finished life. The very form of how the author tells a story respects an implied bond with the reader, an understanding that the reader expects the story to be true, even in details, which Bakhtin calls addressivity. If the author acknowledges that his or her characters on the page, even when they are minor players, are merely placeholders, come from and return to embodied human beings, then the author should be as concerned with how art affects life as he or she is with now life has affected art, which Bakhtin calls answerability.

Bakhtin and Dialogism

In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin argues against abstract Kantian ethics and for an ethics that is inextricable from embodied experience, an individual living a once-occurring event. He writes: “It is an unfortunate misunderstanding (a legacy of rationalism) to think that truth [pravda] can only be the truth [istina] that is composed of universal moments; that the truth of a situation is precisely that which is repeatable and constant in it” (Bakhtin, Toward 37). To explain how this embodied ethics would work, Bakhtin analyzes Pushkin’s “Parting,” a lyric poem about the separation of two lovers. While many readers might react to one voice, the speaker of the poem, Bakhtin sees three voices—three conscious beings, each with his or her “value-context.” He calls the speaker of the poem, the male lover, the author-hero. The voice of the female lover is present, even though she does not speak. The words of the author-hero are addressed to her, and so her voice, which, we should assume, will eventually answer the poem, shapes the author-hero’s words, even in advance of the act of her speaking. The third voice is the author-creator, the embodied Pushkin who, in a particular moment in time, with its “value-context,” brings aesthetic wholeness to the experience of these two lovers. The ethics of this poem is enmeshed in how these voices answer each other. For a work to be dialogic, Bakhtin believes these voices must remain independent: “The consciousness of a character is given as someone else’s consciousness, another consciousness, yet at the same time it is not turned into an object, is not closed, does not become a simple object of the author’s consciousness” (Problems 7).

Excess of Seeing

In “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Bakhtin is responding to naïve autobiographical criticism. Rather than explore the correspondence of facts between the author’s and the hero’s lives, Bakhtin wants to move beyond the claim that the author is the hero, which is essentially the claim that all fiction—all art—is crude nonfiction. He begins, as he often does, with a simple proposition, an explanation of how the author is different than the hero: the author is still living and changing; the hero is finished off or consummated. Even if a novel covers only a portion of the hero’s life, the author knows—or sees—the entire horizon of the hero’s life:

The author, with an excess of seeing, can aestheticize the hero and assign a value, an ethical judgment, to a whole life, which is not possible with living human beings. This is but a starting point, more true, we learn as we continue through this extended essay, of bad novels than Dostoevsky, not true at all for some genres.

Bakhtin wrote, for example, that with confessional self-accounting, there is no author and hero. With genres that emerge from the confession (diatribe, soliloquy, symposium, autobiography, and memoir), authors (Epictetus, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, and Augustine) create a hero “through an active dialogic approach to one’s self,” which is destabilizing: “A dialogic approach to oneself breaks down the outer shell of the self’s image, that shell which exists for other people, determining the external assessment of a person (in the eyes of others) and dimming the purity of self-consciousness” (Problems 120).

Scott Russell Sanders’ “Mountain Music” is an essay about a trip to Colorado with his son Jesse, which Sanders hoped would heal a rift in their relationship. At the time of the story, Sanders is forty-nine and Jesse is seventeen. Sanders writes that he and Jesse had been quarreling for about a year. Some of the tension comes, no doubt, from a common developmental stage between a father, who wants to protect and hold onto his son, and the son, who wants to take risks and be independent. Between this father and son, however, is the additional strain of what Jesse views as his father’s dark view of life.

As they are driving to a rafting trip on the Cache la Poudre, the conflict comes to a head. Before Sanders recounts the dialogue of the fight, he writes:

In this preface to the dialogue representing the argument, we see the emergence of the author-creator (Sanders as the writer of the story) from behind the mask of the author-hero (Sanders as a character in the story) to a degree that rarely occurs in fiction—at least, good fiction. The author-creator comes into the foreground to embrace his fallibility. By admitting that he cannot “recall the exact words,” the author-creator acknowledges that the account is likely to be inaccurate, at least in some details. Phillip Lopate says that it is part of the ethos of the personal essay to “scrape away illusions” in a “struggle for honesty.” If this is done well, we trust the narrator to be honest about himself and others. If the narrator fakes “a vulnerable tone,” the “skilled reader will turn away in disgust” (Lopate xxv-xxvi). This is ethos, as Lopate describes it, because it has an impact on how the writer builds trust with readers, but it is also ethics. Even though Sanders repeats the words of his son, he admits that he might have his son’s words wrong. He is, in a sense, inviting his son to disagree with him. A novel might be dialogic in the sense that characters seem to represent different consciousnesses. With a novel, however, we cannot expect a character to respond to the author and say, “That is not what I said.”

As the argument progresses, Jesse accuses his father of being too absorbed in his concern for sustainability and the environment, of hating “everything that’s fun”—cars, malls, TV, fast food, the Internet. Sanders responds:

It is impossible for the reader to know if this dialogue is accurate. We could say the same for Sanders and Jesse, for they would have trouble remembering their own words, even if the argument happened recently (Karr 1-7). However, I would argue that, if we asked Lopate’s “skilled reader” to read this passage out of context, that reader might assume that Jesse is the wise father and Sanders is the idealistic, morose teenager, except for, perhaps, the tell-tale slang: “You bum me out.” Even if the words would not exactly match with the words on a recorder, had the dialogue been recorded, this seems to be a dialogue between two clearly distinct individuals, each of whom makes valid points. It is not monologic. It is dialogic. Sanders (as author-creator) has not allowed Sanders (as author-hero) to dominate—define—Jesse. The inversion of roles that happens in this passage, a deference to the other, simply cannot happen in fiction because it is a deference that extends beyond the frame of the essay to the relationship between the embodied Scott and the real Jesse.

As the story progresses, Sanders is the one who changes, or, at least, changes first. As he gains insight into his son and moderates his position, Jesse feels he has less emotional ground to defend, so he changes as well. In the following passage, Sanders reflects on the argument:

Sanders (as author-creator) is empathically imaging Jesse’s thought process, including Jesse’s view of his father, Sanders (as author-hero). It is intriguing that Sanders uses “his father” rather than “me.” Yet, Sanders has not disappeared behind the third-person reference. Sanders (as author-creator) is not saying he believes Jesse is right, at least about everything. He is saying that now, after their argument, he understands more fully. Lopate writes, “The conscience of the personal essay arises from the author’s examination of his or her prejudices” (xxxi). This occurs, in part, by creating a character on the page who can be viewed as another human being, as if in a separate body. While the authors of fiction certainly create characters, readers do not tend to recognize this as a decentering, an examination of the self of the author-creator.

After a risky raft trip down the Poudre, during which Sanders catches glances of his son’s “beaming” face, he reflects:

An unskilled reader might see this as self-pity. A skilled reader, I believe, will see a number of moves in this passage, from a father’s view of his son, to his son’s view of the father, to the father’s view of his father, to his son’s view of children yet unborn, and back to the father. Four generations of time pass in this one paragraph. Through these passings between fathers and sons, Sanders comes to accept his current role as father, which has been deepened by moving through four generations of thought. This is the kind of reflection that is crucial to the personal essay and so much of creative nonfiction. It is a reflection that begins with our limited understanding of those we love. It is out of this reflection that the altered self emerges.

Addressivity

In contrast to Russian formalism, Bakhtin views form as emerging dialogically, as the author anticipates a response from listeners or readers:

Genres have a form because listeners and readers have habitual responses, and so the anticipated response of the audience shapes a work, even in advance of their reading. With CNF, as authors write about real people, unconsummated living people, addressivity has the potential to become more specific, concrete, and overt.

Jill Christman begins “Burned Images,” the initial and focal chapter of Darkroom, with this sentence: “On December 7, 1998, I mailed a letter to my father, asking him what happened on the day that my brother was burned” (1). This is a memoir that begins with a family trauma. Christman’s father is on the phone. Ian, Christman’s brother—then, thirteen months old—climbs into the tub, turns on the water, and is scalded. Her father turns off the water, picks up his son. His son’s skin comes off in his hands.

In this chapter, as she attempts to find the story, Christman loops through the event, interrogating the “shared family memory,” more like memories collected—constructed—from her father’s letter, from talks with her mother, and from her brother’s body. The looping represents a series of attempts to build a complete story of an event that seems beyond knowing, yet needs to be understood, because it has shaped so much of her family’s history.

If Christman were writing fiction, she could fill in gaps of memory and consummate the story, but this is memoir. Christman has an implied bond with her readers to tell the truth as well as she can, but they also, as if they were readers of fiction, want to know what happened. Christman, who was not yet born when her brother was burned, must move beyond the memories of those who were there. The reliability of memories that form memoirs has been questioned at least since Mary McCarthy pulled together a series of magazine articles to form Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, published in 1957, adding commentary on each story in italics. She begins one of her commentaries by writing, “This account is highly fictionalized” (McCarthy 97).

While a “shared family memory,” given the limits of memory, resists finalization, the story that Christman tells reaches a certain level of completeness, in part, through her research, more often through Christman’s imagination. This is how Christman narrates the moment when her mother, working as a waitress that night, learns about the accident:

Is this fiction, or imagined nonfiction? I would argue that it is imagined nonfiction, which Christman makes clear to the reader. In that bond with her readers, Christman offers a compromise: She provides the kind of details readers expect in a story, but she also places borders around what she knows and what she has supplied. Readers have something like a whole story, but I would argue that this kind of imagined nonfiction is less consummated, less finished off, less certain, than fiction, and the uncertainly is created with the phrase: “This is how I see my mother. . . .” If this kind of phrase were spoken by a character in a novel, it would not have the same effect of creating a boundary between the real and the imagined.

Elsewhere in the chapter, readers are shown that there is no single truth, no certainty, about this “shared family memory.” In the following passage, her mother’s words interrupt Christman’s memory of her mother’s memory, as Christman takes us into the process of writing the chapter:

Here, Christman’s mother circles Christman’s notes of her own memories with doubts. More than once, I have used this chapter in class. My students have never once said that Christman was tricking them. They see the boundaries that she establishes, the demarcations between the known and the imagined, and the messages she left for them, the cautions that this memoir cannot be and should not be read as fiction, that, as well, we cannot be absolutely certain about the facts. Christman is consciously addressing the future response of her readers, shaping their experience of her story in advance. What emerges from several levels of dialogue—Christman’s dialogue with her family as she was writing, part of which appears on the page, and her dialogue with future readers—creates the kind of form that was important to Bakhtin. It is a form that is less related to a structuralist map of the text and more related to how the text is created and experienced as the author anticipates the response of readers.

Answerability

Bakhtin believes that art, the aestheticizing of our lives, is important. Without art, we would not know who we are or how to interact ethically with others. Ethics, however, should not be abstracted or considered to be contained within a work of art. We live ethically, in part, by how we relate to art:

To answer art with how we live is not an option. Bakhtin says, “The answerable act or deed alone surmounts anything hypothetical, for the answerable act is, after all, the actualization of a decision—inescapably, irremediably, and irrevocably” (Toward 28). We answer our texts with how we live. With fiction, the author and readers answer. With CNF, an entire community answers.

In The Last Street Before Cleveland, a memoir about loss and redemption, Joe Mackall deals with the death of a boyhood friend, a relapse, the loss of faith, the search for meaning in his old neighborhood, and a recovery. When he hits bottom in the last chapter, he is emotionally exhausted, going through the motions with his teaching, not even caring if he is mean to his students, focused on finding more pills and hiding his relapse from family and friends. When his family is out of town, he comes down with a bad case of the flu, and this shocks his system enough that he can begin to wean himself from drugs. Early in this process, he is walking his dog on a snowy night, and he is struck by the beauty of an Amish horse-drawn carriage as it passes. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous would call this a spiritual experience. He begins to accept the love of God and is grateful for his life. His recovery has begun.

It would be easy to end the story here, with a happy and neat ending. Mackall doesn’t. In the Epilogue, he writes:

He ends, instead of wrapping up loose ends, by being honest with his readers about how, though he is recovering from his relapse, he still struggles with life and with the Catholic church:

Mackall ends his spiritual journey looking outward to the boys of his neighborhood but also to us, his readers. He ends unfinalized, his story unfinished, awaiting an answer.

Bakhtin would say that each text is an utterance, and the boundary of an utterance is marked where one speaker stops and another begins. All texts are answered, fiction and nonfiction alike. At the same time, CNF invites an answer more directly, both for the author-creator and the reader. As Mackall ends in a “brief window of the in between,” he announces how he intends to live his life. He also asks his boyhood friends and us, his readers, to join him.

Conclusion

I am going to begin my conclusion by returning to Bloom’s “Living to Tell the Tale,” a portion of her essay that is not her conclusion:

At various points in this essay, I have agreed with Bloom and disagreed with her. The disagreements, I hope, were respectful. Here, I wish to endorse her acknowledgement that an ethics of CNF cannot be Kantian because this ethics, these choices, need to be thought through and resolved on a “case-by-case basis.” If we agree to abandon Kant, I would argue that it is Hegel and Bakhtin we should adopt. The value of working through an interpersonal ethics in works of creative CNF is that we move from an abstract single dictum to a complex, nuanced event. In Hegel, we can find an ethics that is founded on our treatment of the Other (see Williams). In Bakhtin, we can find an ethics that is founded on narrative of a once-occurrent event, a dialogic ethics that listens to others speak and is changed by their words.

Finally, I would like to return to an earlier question: If we can conceive of a nonfictive novel, is it possible to have a fictive memoir? Has this possibility already been realized to some degree with first-person unreliable narration or novels like Memoirs of a Geisha that mimic the form of a memoir? I would argue that we can have nonfictive novels because the novel, as Bakhtin says, contains multiple genres and it is okay for novels to be factually true, in part or whole. Knausgård’s My Struggle might exist in some murky border between fiction and nonfiction, but the way that Knausgård problematizes that border also reinforces it. I read My Struggle as a novel, and I don’t wonder as I read, “Did this really happen in this way?” In the future, when I read volume six of My Struggle, I expect I will see how Knausgård has had to answer for his text. I suspect, however, that I will not read volume six in the same way that I read Sanders’ “Mountain Music,” Christman’s Darkroom, or Mackall’s The Last Street Before Cleveland. When an author says, “I am trying to understand myself and others, my place in the world, by telling this true story,” everything changes, including the very form of the story. It is this form that we need to understand as we explore the ethics of creative nonfiction.

Works Cited