The Marriage of Fiction and Nonfiction

In the beginning

And the Lord said to the man, “from all the trees in the garden you are allowed to eat. But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not allowed to eat. For as soon as you eat from it, you will die.”

Stories from the beginning of time feature some of the best lies.

After I’d read Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines for a travel writing class, our instructor revealed that most of it had been made up. This revelation irked me at first, like my mother telling me late in her life she’d always thought the man I knew all along as my father was not my biological father. Chatwin’s narrator speaks in the first person, goes by the name Bruce, and there’s nothing in the text to suggest any of it had been concocted by the author’s prodigious imagination.

I’d been pranked.

The Songlines is a collection of philosophical and anthropological meanderings quilted together into a story by encounters with Aboriginals in Central Australia. Bruce explores human migration in parallel with his search for the etiology of his own restlessness. Early on, researching animal migration in the British Museum library in London, he comes upon “the most spectacular of bird migrations: the flight of the Arctic tern, a bird which nests in the tundra; winters in Antarctic waters, and then flies back to the north.” Later, as he steps out into the street he’s miffed to see a tramp begging for money being rebuffed by a well-heeled gentleman. He buys the tramp lunch. Over two generous helpings of steak, the tramp tells Bruce his life story, and then as they part, the tramp says: “It’s like the tides was pulling you along the highway. I’m like the Arctic tern, guv’nor. That’s a bird. A beautiful white bird what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again.”

Chatwin’s magical nomadic metaphor, accentuated as it is by synchronicity, had sparked a visceral connection for me with Bruce and I’d felt comforted by the feeling there were many other nomads, migrants, and restless souls.

According to Keith Oatley, a Canadian scholar of the psychology of fiction, fiction means “something made, even some­thing made up.” Compared to nonfiction, what he calls “things found,” Oatley notes people tend to be skeptical about fiction, a suspicion that “leaks into common usage: Fiction has come to mean falsehood.”

In the middle

And the serpent said, “You will not die. God knows that as soon as you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” And when the woman saw that the tree was good to eat from and beautiful to look at, she took one of its fruits and ate, and gave it to her husband, and he ate too. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.

The first frame of the three-part made-for-television movie “The Widower” displays these words on the screen:

This is a true story. Some scenes and characters have been created for dramatic purposes.

In Tell It Slant, Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola suggest the essayist makes a “pact with the reader” to tell a “true story, one rooted in the world as we know it,” as if the writer had taken a solemn oath to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, and the whole truth. This unmentioned pact means the writer won’t deceive the reader into believing something that turns out to be false.

Miller and Paola concede there is no easy answer to the question of how much a writer can invent or embellish. Writers differ in worldviews and attitudes about questions of ethics and truth, and about the extent to which they acknowledge a truth pact with the reader. Some creative nonfiction writers believe nothing should ever be knowingly made up; others aspire to create an engaging written work, fabricating details and composite characters, and reconstructing events, all with an eye to telling a more engaging story.

I’ve narrowed my philosophy of life to one three-word rule: “Do no harm.” This comes to me from the Hindu/Buddhist notion of ahimsa, not from the physician’s Hippocratic Oath. So I’d say Miller and Paola’s stance seems an appropriately ethical approach.

While I admire Keith Oatley’s definition – that fiction is made up – I’d say that nonfiction is mostly reality, actual, and accurate, while fiction is mostly made up or imagined. But Oatley makes the provocative proposition that fiction may be twice as true as fact. Fiction, he says, dives into deeper truths – matters that nonfiction often doesn’t bother with. And if what Oatley says is true, then why should we abide any notion of a truth-pact?

The way I read it, the truth is that fiction is almost always made up but set in a context of real life. It’s almost always partly true and factual. Likewise, most creative nonfiction is almost always set in a context of real life, but is also almost always partly invented, imagined. Every story, whether labeled as fiction or nonfiction suggests some kind of truth, because every story is constructed in the mind of a fallible human being possessed of an imagination.

Creative nonfiction leads with the adjective “creative” because creative nonfiction aspires to be Art – in other words – literature. In that striving to achieve artistic worth, creative nonfiction writers evoke and provoke emotional responses and meaningful insights in readers. Good writers aim for the lofty heights of art, but also to engage readers using the hypnotic power of narrative. And as the creative nonfiction writer aspires to create art by writing literature and story rather than reportage, it’s tempting to prefer dramatic effect and affect over factual accuracy. (What Farley Mowat advised: “Don’t let the facts stand in the way of a good story.”)

Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines is a literary work of art. I know several people who place it high on their list of favourite books. But not one has griped after I’ve mentioned casually that most of it was made up. Chatwin understood, I think, long before psychologists began to study reader response in fiction and nonfiction, long before Keith Oatley proposed that fiction may be twice as true as fact, that readers want – no, that readers are owed – a good story told well more than they desire facts.

David Gessner, in his “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Truth in Nonfiction But Were Afraid to Ask: A Bad Advice Cartoon Essay,” proposes creative nonfiction is writing that shares many techniques used by writers of fiction such as scene, dialogue, and setting. He reminds us that De Montaigne flatly admitted his essays were a product of a feeble memory; Thoreau squeezed two years into one in Walden Pond; Orwell created whole scenes. And in much of creative nonfiction today, several characters are often conflated into one, and rare is the writer who does not “re-create” remembered dialogue.

What is the real harm here? Since we live in what Gessner calls “a culture that values money and fame and emotional meaning in published writing,” should we be surprised that writers “stretch the truth?” Haven’t humans since the beginning of time been telling tall tales to impress the tribe? Or maybe it all started when men first came back from hunting and fishing with their stories of great feats of survival and subsistence. (Or maybe it’s a masculine flaw?) The bear was seven feet tall and had paws the size of a tennis racket; that trout weighed twenty pounds and fought me off for an hour, and so on. Aren’t humans the storytelling animal?

Gessner suggests pre-empting reader expectations and potential harm by cueing the reader with a cautionary note in appropriate places (like the note that opens the film “The Widower”). Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his five years in Paris in the 1920s opens with a preface that offers: “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” And Ruth Reichl, one of a rapidly growing cadre of flexible creative nonfiction writers, proclaims everything in her book Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table “is true but may not be entirely factual,” having learned early on the most important thing in life is a good story.

Certainly life is a story. But Gessner warns “a misplaced fact here and there can be forgiven, but an overall lack of honesty will not.” He calls on creative nonfiction writers to dig for the truth, “examine it, play with it, rest on it. It’s the best thing about writing. (And that’s a fact.)”

I’m not obsessed with truth. Not factual truth. Meaning is so much more stimulating. Or maybe I’m just not comfortable with the truth. On those rare occasions when the four Flexer siblings get together (I’m the oldest), we often slide casually into recounting stories from our common past, stories that inevitably have one of our deceased parents as protagonist. For instance, a few years ago we’re all in Toronto at my brother’s house for a couple of days. After the dishes are put away, I casually ask my brother why, at the age of fourteen, he’d been sent off to England for a year.

My brother pauses to think. “She couldn’t feed all of us. And you were going off to the army. It was a good deal for her because Yona and Peter offered to look after me like their own.”

“NO,” my sister – the memory-keeper – smiles knowingly and turns to my brother: “She wanted you to learn English and get a first-class education. We all knew you were bored with school and she wanted to let you live in a different world.”

I want to say I’d always thought my mother had grown tired of her four unruly and ungrateful teenagers that she’d worked so hard to bring up; maybe she’d finally had enough. I’m not so sure anymore. And it’s too late to ask.

Apparently, from the time we can speak, grown-ups inculcate us into the cult of “Truth.” But according to Dr. Frances Stott, child development scholar, learning to fib is an important step in every child’s development. And grown-ups tell lies of convenience frequently, while children watch and learn.

What’s more, psychologist Dr. Bella DePaulo finds lying is a condition of life. In a 1996 study, DePaulo and her colleagues asked 147 people between the ages of 18 and 71 to record all the lies they told in one week. Most of them admitted to lying once or twice a day, and in a week, on average, they lied to 30 percent of people they’d interacted with. Worse yet, Dr. DePaulo concludes, some types of relationships, such as between parents and teens, are often built on foundations of deception.

Everyone lies; some people more than others.

Jonathan Gottschall, author of the book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human, wasn’t surprised that John D’Agata, who teaches creative writing, defends rampant inaccuracies in his magazine articles by glibly asserting he’s an artist, not a reporter. Sometimes artists have to lie to get to the truth. For Gottschall, D’Agata’s response is wholly consistent with how we tell our own stories. “We all spend our lives crafting a story that makes us the noble-if flawed-protagonist of a first-person drama.” Seems our life stories, like D’Agata’s essays, are only based on true stories.

Reading The Songlines I found myself transported into the story of Bruce’s journey through scenes and dialogue and action, punctuated by Bruce’s reflections and anecdotes. Chatwin had written a literary novel. Had I known at the time most of it was fiction, I don’t think I would have been transported any the less. Chatwin could have used Hemingway’s opening, “this book may be regarded as fiction, but there is always a chance it may throw some light on what has been regarded as fact.” But it would have been superfluous.

In the end

And Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go for a walk.” And when they were alone, Cain turned on his brother Abel and killed him.

And the Lord said to Cain, “where is your brother Abel?”

And he said, “I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”

When it comes to creating engaging and meaningful stories, scenes and conversations are better reconstructed rather than described in factual language (although at times this may be what the story calls for). Getting at the deeper truth, making art and literature, telling dramatic stories, all these invite techniques of fiction.

Creative nonfiction is nonfiction fictionalized. Facts are malleable. Truth is in the eye of the beholder. Engaging narrative weaves together reality with imagination to ignite a spark of human community; to invoke and incite meaning; to invigorate emotion. So what do we mean by “creative”? Creativity is the application of imagination. And what is imagination? Imagination comes from what is not real. Creativity flows from imagination and is imbued with the unreal. And that’s one of the elements of The Songlines I’d appreciated most – Chatwin’s imagination articulated on the page.

I’d say much of the best nonfiction is at least partly fiction. Just as the best fiction is at least partly fact. It’s an interesting paradox, a paradox that holds true for metaphor as well. As Canadian poet and essayist Don McKay once said: “Paradox is central to metaphor; a metaphor must be false to be true.” A meaningful metaphor transports the reader to something different from the subject of comparison. The aim is to illuminate meaning by shifting mental context. The same might be said of creative nonfiction; creative nonfiction is fact (and truth, and reality) illuminated by fiction. Just like fiction is a dream clothed in reality.

In November, 2007 the Associated Press reported on a legal settlement for readers who asked to be reimbursed after buying James Frey’s best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Frey had earlier acknowledged that he’d made up significant parts of the book. The settlement offered a refund for anyone who’d bought the book before Frey confessed. But strangely enough, even though sales exploded after Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club, only 1,700 readers wanted their money back.

As part of the settlement, Random House agreed to put a warning in future editions that some parts of the book were not quite accurate. Still, over 90,000 copies of the book were sold in just seven months after the controversy erupted. A Million Little Pieces stayed on the best-seller list for another six months. Frey earned over four million dollars in royalties before the court settlement in 2007.

New York Times columnist Andrew Harvey, in his 1987 review of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, called it a book that combines fiction and non-fiction, a blend of “Chatwin’s reflections with a made-up story taken from two trips he’d made to Australia.” In an interview, Chatwin admitted his Australian tales were based on ”incoherent scribblings” about real events, later reshaped by his writer’s mind. ”To call it fiction isn’t strictly true, but to call it nonfiction is an absolute lie,” he said.

Chatwin was surely on to something. D’Agata and Reichl, and hundreds like them, will, I imagine, continue to play with factual truths while digging for deeper truths. They’ll give us better stories. They’ll create literature and art. The marriage of fiction and nonfiction gave us creative nonfiction, a kind of Cain blended with Abel. The first strives for stability and tradition and is content in one “ethical” place, while the second tends to roam and seek out new territory. Will one try to destroy the other, or will both learn to appreciate the nature of their origin and paradoxical relationship?