The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (20 page)

That’s how I understand the process of using fact, experience, memory, in fictional narrative.

It seems to me the process of using fact, experience, memory in nonfiction is entirely different. In a memoir, the artichoke stem remains itself. The remembered light that slants across the wall can be placed and dated: a room in a house in Berkeley in 1936. These memories are immediate to the writer’s mind. They weren’t composted, but saved.

Memory is an active and imperfect process. Memories are shaped and selected, often profoundly, in that process. Like souls in heaven, they are saved, but changed. When the writer comes to make them into a coherent story, in the interests of clarity, comprehensibility, impetus, and other aims of narrative art, they’ll be selected from, emphasised, omitted, interpreted, and thoroughly worked over.

Nothing in these processes makes them fictional. They’re still, to the best of the author’s ability, genuine memories.

But if the remembered facts are deliberately changed or rearranged, they become false. If the artichoke stem is made a zinnia because the writer finds the zinnia more aesthetically effective, if the light falls aslant on the wall in 1944 because that date fits more conveniently into the narrative, they’re no longer facts or memories of facts. They are fictional elements in a piece that calls itself nonfiction. And when in reading a memoir I suspect or identify such elements, they cause me intense discomfort.

I’ll let Tolstoy tell me what Napoleon thought and felt, because, although his novel is full of well-researched historical facts, that’s not why I’m reading it. I’m reading it for the values proper to the novel, as a work of invention. If certain aspects of the author’s uncle Fred get into a short story where he’s called Cousin Jim and eats washers, I’ll accept their rubbery taste without a qualm, because it’s a story, and I take Cousin Jim to be a fictional character. It’s when I’m not quite sure what I’m reading that qualms arise.

It can happen even when there is a surfeit of fact in what calls itself fiction.

Reading for a jury for a fiction award, I fretted to a fellow juror about one of the books: was it really a novel? It read like a pure relation of the author’s boyhood, an honest, accurate, touching memoir barely disguised with a few name changes. How could we tell? “The author calls it a novel,” said my friend, “and so I read it as fiction and judge it as such.” Dealer’s call. If the writer calls it nonfiction, read it as fact; if the writer calls it a novel, read it as fiction.

I tried. I couldn’t do it. Fiction involves invention; fiction
is
invention. I can’t read a book in which nothing is invented as a novel. I couldn’t give a fiction award to a book that contains only facts. Any more than I could give a prize for journalism to
The Lord of the Rings
.

A real novel, an entirely fictive and imaginative tale, can contain vast amounts of fact without being any less fictional for it. Historical fic
tion and science fiction (which, by the way, often really does require research) may be full of solid, useful information concerning an era or a body of knowledge. The ploy of the whole realistic genre is to put invented characters into a framework of reproduced actuality—imaginary toads in a real garden, to twist Marianne Moore. All fiction serves later generations as descriptive evidence of its time, place, society; for keen observation and recording of ordinary people’s lives, very little ethnography has ever equalled the novel.

But it doesn’t work the other way. The historian, biographer, anthropologist, autobiographer, nature writer, have to use real gardens
and
real toads. Therein lies their proper creativity: not in inventing, but in making recalcitrant reality into a story without faking it.

Anything written contains an implicit contract, which can be honored or broken in the writing, or in the reading, or in the presentation by the publisher.

The first and most tenuous and intangible contract is between the writer and his or her conscience, and goes something like this: In this piece I will try to tell my story truly, using the means I find appropriate to the form, whether fiction or nonfiction.

Then there’s a more verifiable agreement between the writer and the reader, the terms of which vary immensely, depending, in the first place, on the sophistication of both. An experienced reader may follow a sophisticated writer through a whole gallery of tricks and illusions with perfect confidence that there will be no aesthetic betrayal. For more naive readers, however, the terms of the contract depend largely on how the writer—and publisher—present the work: as factual, imaginative, or a mixture of the two.

Reader as well as writer can twist the terms of this contract, reading a novel as if it were an account of actual events, or a piece of reportage as if it were pure invention.

Despite the great affinitie of fiction and beleefe, only the very innocent believe what novelists tell them. But an attitude of distrust towards
nonfiction may well be the result of experience. One has been disappointed so often.

For though a whole swarm of facts in a novel doesn’t in the least invalidate the invention as a whole, every fictive or even inaccurate element in a narrative that presents itself as factual puts the whole thing at risk. To pass a single invention off as a fact is to damage the credibility of the rest of the narrative. To keep doing so is to disauthenticate it entirely.

Lincoln’s aphorism about fooling people applies, as usual. The writer who reports inaccurately or presents invention as fact is, consciously or not, exploiting the reader’s ignorance. Only the informed reader is aware that the contract has been violated. If amused enough, this reader may privately rewrite the contract, reading the so-called nonfiction as mere entertainment, hokum—fiction in the OED’s fifth definition.

Perhaps the terms of the contract are currently being rewritten by the writers. Perhaps the whole idea of a contract is hopelessly prepostmodern, and readers are coming to accept false data in nonfiction as calmly as they accept factual information in fiction.

Certainly we’ve become so numbed by the quantity of unverifiable information poured out upon us that we admit factoids as more or less equivalent to facts. And with the same numbness, we’re generally acceptant of hype of all kinds—advertising, stories about celebrity figures, political “leaks,” patriotic and moralistic declarations, and so on—reading it without much caring if the material is credible or that we’re being treated as objects of manipulation.

If this nondistinction of the fictive and the factual is a general trend, maybe we should celebrate it as a victory of creativity over unimaginative, indiscriminate factualism. I worry about it, however, because it seems to me that by not distinguishing invention from lying it puts imagination itself at risk.

Whatever “creative” means, I don’t think the term can fairly be
applied to falsification of data and memories, whether intentional or “inevitable.”

Excellence in nonfiction lies in the writer’s skills in observing, organising, narrating, and interpreting facts—skills entirely dependent on imagination, used not to invent, but to connect and illuminate observation.

Writers of nonfictional narrative who “create” facts, introduce inventions, for the sake of aesthetic convenience, wishful thinking, spiritual solace, psychic healing, vengeance, profit, or anything else, aren’t using the imagination, but betraying it.

AWARD AND GENDER

This was given as a talk and a handout at the Seattle Book Fair in 1999.

In 1998 I was on a jury of three choosing a literary prize. From 104 novels, we selected a winner and four books for the shortlist, arriving at consensus with unusual ease and unanimity. We were three women, and the books we chose were all written by women. The eldest and wisest of us said, Ouch! If a jury of women picks only women finalists, people will call us a feminist cabal and dismiss our choices as prejudiced, and the winning book will suffer for it.

I said, But if we were men and picked all books by men, nobody would say a damn thing about it.

True, said our Wise Woman, but we want our winner to have credibility, and the only way three women can have credibility as a jury is to have some men on the short list.

Against my heart and will, I agreed. And so two women who should have been there got bumped from our shortlist, and the two men whose books we had placed sixth and seventh got on it.

Literary awards used to be essentially literary events. Though a prize such as the Pulitzer certainly influenced the sale of the book, that wasn’t all it was valued for. Since the takeover of most publishing houses by
their accounting departments, the financial aspect of the literary award has become more and more important.

These days, literary prizes carry a huge weight in fame, money, and shelf longevity.

But only some of them. Certain awards are newsworthy and success-assuring: most of them are not. The selection of which prize is sure to hit the headlines and which is ignored seems to be almost totally arbitrary. The media follow habit without question. Hysteria about the Booker Prize is assured; general indifference to the PEN Western States Award is certain.

Most writers who have served on award juries agree that the field of finalists is often so qualitatively even that selection of a single winner is essentially arbitrary. Many also agree that the field of finalists often contains books so various in nature and intent that the selection of a single winner is, again, essentially arbitrary. But a single winner is what is demanded of them, so they provide it. Then publishers capitalise on it, bookstores fawn on it, libraries stock their shelves with it, while the shortlist books are forgotten.

I feel that the competitive, single-winner pattern is suited to sports events but not to literature, that the increasingly exaggerated dominance of the “big” awards in the field of fiction is pernicious, and that the system inevitably perpetuates cronyism, geographical favoritism, gender favoritism, and big-name syndrome.

Of these, gender favoritism particularly irks me. It is so often and so indignantly denied that I began to wonder if I was irked over nothing. I decided to try to find if my impression that the great majority of literary awards went to men had any foundation in fact. To establish my facts, I limited my study to fiction.

If more men than women publish fiction, that would of course justify an imbalance towards male prizewinners. So to start with I did some gender sampling of authors of novels and story collections published in various periods from 1996 to 1998. My time was limited and
my method was crude. The numbers (only about a thousand writers in all) may not be large enough to be statistically significant. My author-gender count covers only four recent years, while my figures on the awards go back decades. (A study on author gender in fiction in the whole twentieth century would be a very interesting subject for a thesis.) My sources were
Publishers Weekly
for general fiction,
What Do I Read Next?
for genre fiction, and the
Hornbook
for children’s books. I counted authors by sex, omitting collaborations and any names that were not gender identifiable. (My genre sources identified aliases. Rumor has it that many romances are written by men under female pen names, but I found only one transgenderer—a woman mystery writer who used a male name.)

A
UTHOR
G
ENDER

Summations

(see Details of the Counts and Awards, below)

General fiction: 192 men, 167 women: slightly more men than women.

Genre fiction: 208 men, 250 women: more women than men

Children’s books and young adult: 83 men, 161 women: twice as many women as men

All genres: 483 men, 578 women: about 5 women to 4 men.

Eighty of the authors in my Genre category were romance writers, all women; if you consider them as probably balanced by predominantly male-written genres such as sports, war, and porn, which I did not have figures for, you might arrive at parity. It looks as if, overall, as many women as men, perhaps slightly more women than men, write and publish novels and stories.