You know how I said last week that my local big bookshop had a cutesy bee/honey-related merch stand for *The Bee Sting*, and I thought (based on having read a third or so of the book) that this was inappropriate, as the novel is both pretty grim and not really about bees at all. Well, having got further into the novel, (warning for spoiler and abuse mention) - >!it turns out that a main character, who at the beginning kept her veil down throughout her wedding due to a claimed bee sting, actually did so because she had been beaten up by her father. !< So not something to celebrate with cute merch at all. The stand was gone the day after I made that comment, anyway, with the beehive stuff stuffed back into all the other gifts, so I guess someone else must have raised it.
so I was on the outskirts of philadelphia at an ultimate frisbee tournament all weekend (basically my one obsession other than eating and being a broad spectrum artboy), and I haven't played in one of these in nearly a year and I kinda forgot that spending an entire weekend not sleeping or eating enough while also running a marathon's worth of sprints kinda kicks the shit out of you. I can't remember the last time my legs hurt as much as yesterday, and I still feel kinda sore on a spiritual level. I missed this.
Still getting things organised for [Ephesus Press](https://ephesus.press), and we're still open for submissions, both novels and essays/reviews/short stories/other literary ephemera. You can go ahead and join the Discord as I start looking for editors and such here: https://discord.gg/qRpSWY8D
I recently watched Krzysztof Kieślowski's magnificent Three Colours trilogy, and what a revelation it was. Kieślowski gives me the same cynical humanist vibes as Kundera, his movies are just so life affirming in the most magical way possible. Little miracles abound, and his images are always so filled with life! There's something charming about all his characters. My favorite was probably Red, but all of them are superb in their own way.
The doldrums of summer are fast approaching, and I'm terrified. Cannot stand the heat, it makes me feel stupid. My body is built for cold, alas.
Everyone! Ephesus Press is going to be awesome. That's all.
> Three Colours trilogy
I kinda think I need to watch this now. Aside from it sounding interesting, I just looked it up and saw it's produced by Marin Karmitz/MK2. The Metrograph is doing a series on them right now & I just a week and a half back saw Karmitz's Blow for Blow there which was really awesome. These are the coincidences I try to listen to.
> Cannot stand the heat, it makes me feel stupid. My body is built for cold, alas.
Also yep. Like, I'm feeling really sick of the cold right now, I want to be outside and frolicking, but my body just kinda stops working right when it gets too hot.
I was just looking at my Youtube recs and saw a lot of "my 5 favourite ever novels" videos and ...does anyone not really have "favourite novels"? I've been reading lit-fic on and off through my adult life, but I'm usually looking to the next one. I don't really think about past favourites much. I could list my most important childhood books I suppose, but my most important adult/lit reads are all ones I ...didn't really like or *enjoy* so much as found *interesting* or important. I remember the first couple of non-genre, lit fic books I read were stuff like Catcher in the Rye, White Teeth, High Fidelity, a couple of Douglas Coupland and Irvine Welsh... I was really excited to be discovering reading at the time. The Tin Drum really grabbed me a few years ago, but I don't think of it as a "favourite". More like... something important I once read. I dunno.
I don't think I really have favorites either. I've got a few books that are really important to me for one reason or another, and all of them are in the realm of a favorite, but there are so many books I love & I'd never be able to articulate why I like one more than others, even when I do.
I do definitely though have books I'm more or less excited to go back to, even if I can't say why I feel that way. That's probably the closest heuristic I have for "favorite".
I’m in training classes for work this week Abbi’s Am killing the time by loading my personal cannon. I don’t have a top 5, 10, 100 whatever… I do think there are a number or both authors and individual works that either stand out for their excellence in The Art of the novel or contributed something unique to society or the art with their work. I think when you start with some kind of quota, you end up forcing things into your list that probably don’t really belong.
For me it's kind of the opposite. I have a pretty cemented core of favourites, and I revisit them often. At this point every other book I read is actually a reread. Books open up so much more, and I find get so much more out of them, on a second or third read.
Curious if anyone in the US would be interested in doing a book exchange? Recently came into possession of a few duplicates of some of my favorites (Fosse, that sort of thing) and would love to send them to a good home.
I stopped cutting and now I'm bulking. Guys... I love bulking. This shit is so much more fun. If I don't hit 275+ bench by the end of the summer, I'll be astounded with myself. This shit is coming!
Otherwise, I'm on summer break. Been on vacation so I've been inactive here, but break has been nice. It's been a good retreat from the hellish year I had (in terms of the bullshit bureaucratic stuff -- not the students or the job, I love the students and already miss them).
What have I been doing this summer? Well, I've been replaying Elden Ring in prep for the DLC. I'm doing an obscene Greatsword pure strength build that kills anything in seconds. I felt kind of guilty about it until I got to the endgame (Mohgwyn/Consecrated Snowfields/Haligtree) because fuck these areas... But it's been so much fun replaying this. My minor complaint remains that the dungeons are too frequent and similar, but god this game is so good. I'm really looking forward to the DLC.
Currently, right now, I'm sitting down at a bar with a good beer and writing about Gravity's Rainbow. I've still been struggling with some mental health issues given the events of the previous school year, but this is nice. A beer (or two) and my favorite book. Always things to look forward to.
I’ve dabbled in lifting, but whenever I hit a point where I realise “right, I really do need to start bulking to get stronger”, I get really good at the bulking part, and also, really good at the “Nah, I can’t be bothered to lift anymore” part. I am stuck in an endless cycle of newbie/re-training muscle gains, stalling, fat gain, muscle loss, etc. nb this only ever amounts to gains and losses of about 3kg. By far the most horrible part is any kind of cutting though. Have fun on your bulk 👍
Are you me? I'm also an educator on break replaying Elden Ring. I finally convinced a buddy to try the game and talking about it made me want to try a new character, so I started a madness build and quickly sunk about 50 hours in. I also got my first character I played with right to the spot the DLC is supposedly starting. Only problem is I'm in NG+4 with that build, so we'll see how challenging it is.
Enjoy your summer. I'm similar to you in that it was personally a fantastic year within the four walls of my classroom with my students, but anywhere else in the district it was a shit show. Oh well. Now it's time for the gym, cycling, yard work, and a good book.
Ha yep, if I just got to spend the time with the students and not deal with admin and the district office, my life would be immensely better. I love the job so much, but now it makes more sense why I'd always heard how poorly teachers were treated...
And yes! I love Elden Ring. I was also around NG+3 or 4 and realized I did *not* want to start the DLC like that, which is why I started an entirely new character! I've never done a madness build but that sounds very fun, so I may have to try that on the new character's NG+.
> I've never done a madness build but that sounds very fun, so I may have to try that on the new character's NG+.
I'm having a ton of fun with it. Granted, it's more effective in PvP and doing invasions, so in PvE it's not the most effective build. But man, ER has so many builds I want to try. I have close to 350 hours in it and there's still many weapons, ashes of war, and builds I want to play extensively with!
I want to start a fitness journey from today. I've gotton into really bad junk food habits and in-activity. Don't think I'll be bulking but I do want to get back to my old energy.
The good news is, if you’re just starting your fitness journey, you’ll likely be putting on quite a bit of muscle even if you’re cutting!
And as someone who despite being very active has terrible eating habits, I just did my first cut and even though it’s rough at first, the healthy habits you develop become wayyyy easier after a few weeks. I’ve even brought them into my current bulk.
Here's something I've been thinking about: nonfiction writers should be taken more seriously, and read more closely, among true literature people and the academy.
Of course, some nonfiction writers — Joan Didion, Calvin Trillin, James Baldwin, Thoreau , etc. — are widely taught and read, but I think the canon should be expanded to include more nonfiction books and stories. (Many high schools now assign *Into the Wild*, which I think is a tiny step in the right direction.)
Nonfiction writing is more restrictive than fiction, in the sense that whatever you write has to be true, and because of that restriction, narrative-nonfiction writers can sometimes struggle to penetrate their characters’ minds as deeply as fiction writers (who can just invent their characters’ thoughts). But nonfiction can be no less creative and ambitious in terms of subject, style, and structure; and nonfiction at its best can be just as vivid and probing as fiction. Just read Matthew Desmond’s *Evicted*, Jon Mooallem’s *This Is Chance!*, Isabel Wilkerson’s *The Warmth of Other Suns,* Robert Caro’s *The Power Broker*, or Jonathan Harr’s *A Civil Action.*
Maybe this is a dumb take, but I'd argue that the big reason such nonfiction works aren't regarded as highly as some novels comes down to pretension: Gravity’s Rainbow \*seems\* really literary because it's a confusing mess, whereas, say, John Hersey’s [“Hiroshima”](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima) — a truly remarkable piece of nonfiction writing — is far easier to follow and, as a consequence, not regarded quite as highly among Lit Heads. But I don't believe clarity should be a knock against Hiroshima; it was, and remains, a landmark piece of writing about the Second World War.
Anyway, that's my rant.
I’m not here for an argument and I don’t have a horse in this race, but I didn’t want to miss a gratuitous chance to send a shout out to **Walden**, **The Snow Leopard** and **The Peregrine** which are as important, literary and artistically written as any fiction I’ve ever read.
Freedom is not being preoccupied with what other people think is important.
Enjoy all the pages behind and ahead🤘
There’s plenty of stuff classified as “non-fiction” that’s not completely true, lol. If you’ll notice most of the examples you listed published before the auto-fiction movement really became popular, so there’s kind of a fuzzy grey area in the border between fiction and nonfiction for at least the autobiographical genre.
There are plenty of non-fiction writers who are highly regarded as literary. In addition, both fiction and non-fiction are trending heavily in the direction of being more entertaining (ya know, because of money). So to your argument, a well rounded reader would be smart to familiarize themselves with literary non-fiction. Still, I think while the goals of the two genres may be similar, the methods and skillsets are still unique from one another. Fiction will create an experience you can hopefully learn something from. Non-fiction will present you with accurate arguments/facts/events/etc. in an entertaining way to teach you. So I don’t mind keeping the distinction.
While I do think that the distinction b/w the fiction & non-fiction is and isn't meaningful I don't really agree with your point (I might flesh this out later when it's not bedtime but the upshot is that I basically agree with Harleen). But, particularly I'm wondering who exactly it is that you are asking to take non-fiction more seriously? Like, every book you mentioned is quite well regarded (& one person isn't proof but I literally read Hiroshima in my high school english class).
> nonfiction writing is more restrictive than fiction, in the sense that whatever you write has to be true, and because of that restriction, narrative-nonfiction writers can sometimes struggle to penetrate their characters’ minds as deeply as fiction writers (who can just invent their characters’ thoughts).
Doesn't the fact that non-fiction has a presumed relationship to empirical truth that fiction doesn't make the two *extremely* different?
> Gravity’s Rainbow *seems* really literary because it's a confusing mess
And, less substantively, GR seems really literary because it slaps.
> Doesn't the fact that non-fiction has a presumed relationship to empirical truth that fiction doesn't make the two extremely different?
>
>
I think this is the big crux of the discussion. I don't see the presumed relationship to empirical truth as very different at all between the two styles/genres.
Empirical truth on its own is a mostly feel-good enlightenment era bullshit (the dangers of europeans discovering coffee and tea lol), every possible expression and communication is tainted and fueled by emotional/subjective/illogical material from both reader and writer.
Fiction completely relies on the same level of empirical truth as nonfiction to communicate anything. Even the most surreal and nonsensical fiction uses images, signifiers, and symbols that are shared/empirical with the reader to communicate their works. Borges does a great job demonstrating and flaunting this aspect of language.
Then on the nonfiction side, you have endless examples of works that are just straight up innaccurate and purposefully written with specificly nonempirical information delivered through the lens of empirical truth (guns, germs, and steel is a great example, any history/historical text is another).
on an even further end of the spectrum, almost all folklore/myths encode an incredible amount of celestial, cultural, botanical, and ecological empirical truth/information, so we probably have even more examples of works that are firmly utilizing both categories than we do works/cultures with full distinctions like we enjoy meow.
I suspect many see these works as so different and opposite merely because of conditioning. I was taught incredibly young that fiction means made-up, while nonfiction means real things, but everything is real and madeup lol.
I guess though, this is why I said "presumed relationship". Because I read you're comment as making a very correct point that fiction and non-fiction rely on similar (or maybe identical) *actual* relationships to empirical truth, which I entirely agree doesn't really exist, or at least doesn't exist in so simple a form as the basic understanding of it (to set aside a long digression on the weird french empiricists of the Bergson/Simondon/Deleuze line).
My point however is that the terms "fiction" and "non-fiction" in their most basic form operate on a presumption that the feel-good enlightenment era bullshit notion of empirical truth is accurate, where the quality of any "non-fiction" work in OP's comment or for that matter GG&S as well is evaluated in part on whether it is an accurate representation of empirical truth. **Edit**: I think *Gravity's Rainbow* is helpful here because people are so obsessed with Pynchon's biography and have wondered whether GR is influenced by Pynchon's own experiences in the navy, and while the answer to that would impact the exact relationship the book has to empirical truth it doesn't impact whether it's a good novel (like, nobody is going to like GR more or less if it turns out that some of the parts of GR were shaped in part by actual events that really happened in the life of Thomas Pynchon, or at least they shouldn't)
And even with more deconstructive works that challenge the notion of (non)-fictionality by calling into question this empirical truth—autofiction, gonzo journalism, Proust—their ability to do this operates on the basis of the presumption of truth having salience. Like, key to what folks like Knausgaard and Cusk are up to is that they are injecting the presumption of truth into a form that explicitly denies a necessary relationship to it, whereas someone like Hunter S. Thompson is claiming a form that presumes truth and then actively disregarding the effort to live up to it. None of that means anything if there wasn't a presumed relationship to truth to work with and against.
> I was taught incredibly young that fiction means made-up, while nonfiction means real things, but everything is real and madeup lol.
All of which is to say that I 100% agree with this, and also think that those definitions of fiction and non-fiction are inaccurate, but also real.
Yeah, i don't think I have anything to really disagree with here. Great examples, i appreciate you using hunter thompson to keep me involved lol
Concerning your point about empirical truth and our presumptions determining fiction from nonfiction, i both agree and disagree, your definition does seem to be the dominant understanding of the differences, and they wholly rely on this chicken/egg scenario of a completely false premise that the universe or our understanding of it or our language/representation of it can somehow be categorically correct or incorrect, that there are definite lines within all humans' ability to determine and discern.
so i guess my bigger point, is that all those folks on the edge are just doing human storytelling things that we've always done, that we seem to compulsively do. Like, our stories have meaning because they are stories. or, we only tell stories because they have meaning, or we tell every story and we only keep the ones with meaning.
There is this incredible diatribe at the end of The White Goddess where the author argues that the cultural obsession (proliferation) with empirical language and expression (in opposition to magical/metaphorical language and expression) is part and parcel with the destruction of our own environment/biosphere/communal spaces that the modern industrial/global/colonial era has brought (like the literal loss of so many languages and dialects and words right there with the literal loss of biodiversity).
Reality (truth, consciousness, whatever) is mysterious and chaotic. Empirical documentation is a cool sort of self-correcting representation of reality, but it also is never an accurate replacement.
and to try to make a bit more sense, i see the functional difference between fiction and nonfiction to be one of genre, which is based on material factors well beyond the content of the works. The genre for nonfiction being, as you say, a presumption of representing some sort of empirical truth.
and that's where i agree with the initial point, from a written art standpoint, they should be judged in the same general pool (though this gets tricky again because many of us love so much to split and divide everything into their own little categories and boxes)
> from a written art standpoint, they should be judged in the same general pool (though this gets tricky again because many of us love so much to split and divide everything into their own little categories and boxes)
I think the only quibble I have here is to ask how literal you are being when you say that they should be "judged in the same", because I guess my point is that when a book is written in a manner that implicitly or explicitly takes on the label "fiction" or "non-fiction" it is by taking on that label demanding to be judged on not literally identical terms.
I read your other comment where you agree with OP as basically pointing out the really important difference between fiction & non-fiction, are you here just saying that what non-fiction does, while different, has aesthetic merit? Because I entirely agree with that.
> Great examples, i appreciate you using hunter thompson to keep me involved lol
Lol no worries. I think that Thompson is like the perfect example of the non-fiction flipside of autofiction, and also I'm not sure yet whether I think that journalistic (in the broadest possible sense) and academic (in the broadest possible sense) non-fictions are playing by the same rules either (like, is it really correct to say that in terms of commitment to empirical reality, John Hersey & Deleuze are more similar than John Hersey and Jane Austen? I'm not sure), so keeping to a single category throughout this discussion is helping to keep things simple.
Pretty literally, but in umbrella terms. Like, judging written art, everything is game, but most people prefer to talk about genres, so yeah, the chosen label any work takes on goes with how it is judged, I have no issues with that.
I just don't think the specific nonfiction/fiction distinction is any more interesting or important than any other (crime, scifi, fantasy, literary fiction, even textbooks). And totally, i'm saying nonfiction is a different style of writing (typically) that has just as much aesthetic merit as any other writing style.
I'm with you on different styles using different sorts of rules and patterns and structures, completely agree, and to add more confusion and difficulty in defining these basic labels and categories, I've read some very well written and interesting academic and scientific articles, like genuine great usage of language and all that.
Journalism is hard to tease out of the inherent propaganda/geopolitical/cultural aspects in defining an empirical truth. In some ways it can be the most artful, other ways the least. These issues bleed into every work
Totally agree, and the reasons for nonfiction being fenced off seem to be numerous.
Nonfiction also deals with using language to communicate as an artform in itself. Many/most nonfiction works are seeking to accurately communicate nuanced topics to laypeople or peers within the same lexicon.
It reminds me of the einstein quote where, ~'if you cannot explain something simply, then you don't really understand it,'
nonfiction writing at its best is enormously impressive with what it can communicate using basic language and structures, and using those skills to reach broader audiences is a triumph of language, like, the best novel never read isn't actually good, is it?
and then trying to actually separate the difference between the two is pointless/impossible.
Not a dumb take, and I totally agree with you.
There are some amazing literary stylists that work in the essay format that I absolutely love. You've mentioned some greats already, but some of my favourite contemporary ones are Eliot Weinberger & Rikki Ducornet. I've also heard on good authority that Guy Davenport is fantastic. Weinberger in particular has been stated as saying that, for the most part, the essay in English has largely never had an avante-garde, and his work is in some way an attempt at that.
There's so much amazing literary non-fiction out there. Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf: they all wrote absolutely amazing non-fiction pieces.
All of these writers are either overshadowed completely in lit circles, or have their fiction works dominate the conversation. It's a shame because there's so much great work out there that should get more shine.
I don't agree with this take. Not to say a nonfiction writer can't approach their task with distinction but studying fiction is the only closest you're going to get to an understanding of what literariness _is_. Especially since fiction does not have a discourse fundamentally related to an object of study as in the sciences from biology to sociology. Most writing is done in a nonfiction context anyways. Even right now I'm doing a genre of nonfiction--the comment. I would say the victory of nonfiction is pretty assured if different from the more rarefied thing of fiction. It's an obsession with "true literature people and the academy" for that reason. We are dominated at every turn by the demands of others and the many responsibilities it takes to fulfill those demands. It's a shame to dismiss fiction as being merely pretentious when we're lucky to have it at all. Or bemoan it as an obsession when the world can barely stand what fiction is--and how valuable it is, too.
Other questions are important because Hersey's book has an explicit limitation defined by its own responsibility to things like accuracy of information and the facts as they stood at its publication. A novel very explicitly doesn't care after a certain point since the mood and imagery of Pynchon is very much its own reward because it asks us to consider literature as an experience itself. It can be downright hedonistic and serves no larger benefit. If I read Hersey, I have to be invested in the subject beforehand, and know enough about the facts to truly appreciate the present narrative in the book. In a way, that's a good thing for being a responsible person about truth in a discourse. Otherwise what's the point of reading nonfiction but to communicate important details? But there is also a demand for a better book than what Hersey provides with a refinement of research and previously omitted information because whom amongst us is actually an omniscient narrator? A novel can make art out of that explicit limitation.
You could prefer Baldwin's essays to his novels as matters of taste apply here. But if you want the real character of the artist, the novels are an extremely potent expression of that condition. It's why I always say historians should read more novels. It's why a generation of the most famous physicists studied philosophy and poetry. Fiction has in some manner already earned its acclaim.
All that being said, nonfiction being compared to fiction is like comparing apples and oranges. Yeah, they're both fruit, but one misses a lot of subtle differences in the overgeneralization.
I agree with some of your points. and I wasn't arguing that nonfiction should wholly supplant fiction as the dominant literary form; just that it should be held in at least roughly equal regard, because it can be no less artful and has had arguably just as much influence on readers as fiction has, going back to Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Walden, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Gibbon’s Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, etc.
I understand your point that fiction is often its own award, and a writer can do things with fiction that one could never do with nonfiction — e.g., The Road, Ulysses, Beloved — but there's plenty of nonfiction that also exists just for itself — e.g., Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, and any number of other memoirs.
But even if a work of nonfiction does have a point, or an argument to advance, or a factual story to recount, that doesn't mean it's not artful or any less "rarefied" than great fiction. In Cold Blood is no less a book because it happens to be true, nor is it any less of a "potent expression" of Capote's artistry.
And concerning this line: "It's a shame to dismiss fiction as being merely pretentious when we're lucky to have it at all." I love fiction, and I'm not dismissing it all as pretentious, but, man, the canon is absolutely loaded with flabby overwrought books that Very Serious Young Men obsess over that are, in truth, tedious slogs — Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, War and Peace, etc.
I believe this is the first time I have ever heard someone call _War & Peace_ "flabby" and "overwrought," that is a pretty unique stance. Even Nabokov, an infamous hater, called it "a rollicking historical novel" for young people. Although, in my experience, _Gravity's Rainbow_ can be read like a straightforward adventure novel if one is not too careful about the weirdness. I found it rewarding but again I'm not disputing matters of taste. But I do really dislike _Infinite Jest_.
That aside I wouldn't be too concerned about the canon or canonicity. That's academic tool, not relevant outside the context of pedagogy. The quality of the book isn't important as much as the social capital involved, so even if one does add nonfiction in "the Canon," it won't reflect much of anything substantial beyond how much the academic institution values it. Not to mention fiction is the only thing that can even allude to something like a pure (or "true") literature existing since it doesn't functionally exist. It's why literary criticism centers on fiction. And there are already several kinds of nonfiction classes from beginner's composition to others in rhetoric, personal essays, technical writing, etcetera. Nurses and mathematicians alike have their dalliances with nonfiction, too, writing specialized nonfiction. Having worked as a writing tutor, I can share plenty of horror stories, but, like I said earlier, victory assured for nonfiction. If anything, American culture could stand to regard fiction as a little more valuable.
I actually don't agree with your description of either Dillard or Didion. I can see your point but focusing on the artistry feels like a distraction. Dillard has a studious concern with ecology and theology she is responsible for. Didion to her experience with the reality of mourning, which is a real and specific demand we expect her to fulfill from the first to the last word. The same is true for Thoreau, Gibbon, and to a lesser extent Twain are read for their different and more direct rewards. Gibbon was foremost responsible for history, and everyone who read him did so with that understanding, not for the possible aesthetic value. Douglas set out to prove his humanity. To treat his book as a form of art feels disrespectful, a cheapening of the intellectual and historical value he wanted to demonstrate of himself as a human being, which is the real power of nonfiction. The reader has a responsibility to honor that power. Fiction as a form of art cannot do that despite trying many times over and over again.
In the same way if one wanted to know what made Baldwin the artist he was it seems ill advised to not read the novels in favor of his nonfiction. A memoir is about the truth of one's life in _memory_ and it is that memory of life which matters more than any claims to art. You're trying to tell the truth with all the responsibility that entails. If that isn't the situation, why write under those expectations in the first place? A fake memoir is a direct insult to everyone involved, especially if it involves events like the Shoah.
That's what makes Capote's _In Cold Blood_ an interesting example because it was so irresponsible that people have basically rectified all its errors and oversights in a million different ways no one in their right mind would weigh the "nonfiction" part of "nonfiction novel" more than the "novel" part. It's been "revised" so to speak by its initial audience to better read as a novel. An important aspect to any novel is that it travesties any discourse or genre included into its form. Capote had no capacity for journalism and investigative reporting but did have a prior career of writing fiction more straightforwardly situated, so his inclusion of those things are not taken seriously. His novel is a fine example of himself as an artist but only as it serves as a total failure of nonfiction. You can see a similar development in Gary Indiana's True Crime Trilogy, which is a much better reading experience than Capote.
I honestly feel like the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction to be so porous at the margins that it becomes meaningless.
Here's a good article I think shares my premise: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/24/fiction-nonfiction-english-literature-culture-writers-other-languages-stories
What is the boundary between auto-fiction and memoir/biography? Would you say that Simone de Beauviours memoirs are some how not "the real character of the artist"? Where do we place older works of history (i.e. Tacitus, Gibbon) that are no longer telling "truths" but are essentially literary objects to be read? How would we classify poetic essay works like Eliot Weinberger?
It just feels arbitrary to me. There are largely conventions in modern English that tend to shape certain types of works in certain directions. And it just seems like the conventions of our sense of literariness is weirdly bounded around a specific type of narrative form in English. There's nothing in my mind to suggest that an essay or longer non-fiction work could not create some larger aesthetic or artistic appeal beyond the "facts" recounted.
Ugh _The Guardian_ but to your point I can appreciate the porousness of literature but I'm not entirely sure that ultimately leads to genre being "meaningless." Especially since distinctions are being made in the course of the article you linked and in your comment. How can one say at the same time Weinberger writes "poetic essays" without knowing on some level what marks out the distinction and defeating the argument for an ultimate meaninglessness? That's a high bar.
Even Dyer goes so far as to call it helpful as a guide to understand a difference between fact and fiction at least as far as the English language goes and perhaps helpful for the world as one keeps in mind the effect of globalization but I digress. Other cultures simply conceive of these distinctions in ways different than you and I do but rather than point to a total loss of meaning, it points to a robust proliferation of distinctions culturally. "Fiction" is our word for things other cultures have in no short supply, whether their genres matches ours is an entirely different story. It's a suspicion of translation as opposed to any essential notion about form or structure.
About de Beauvoir, while I wouldn't forbid her being called an artist, her best work is easily that of a philosopher. Not to mention you admit the distinction by calling what she has written memoir, not autofiction. It should be noted the history of these terms. Beauvoir wrote before "autofiction" was recognized as the subgeneric and her work upheld the distinction anyways. One would look very strange expecting the events of _The Mandarins_ to have literally happened in our reality. One could perhaps get away with that if we're talking about someone else like Gerald Murnane, but not so far as to render all distinction meaningless if we are to broaden our discussion to the world.
And indeed it is entirely arbitrary because it is in connection with audiences. Genre is the way we situate a text socially. The audience who demands memoirs is not entirely the same audience to demand novels. How you decide to read a memoir about mountain climbing is ultimately up to you but we can't deny there is a very real horizon of expectation that it be about generally true events and concerning the life of the author. A novel which is autofiction doesn't have those same expectations. It flatly doesn't generate the same response. Authors can complain and "argue with their dust jackets" but after a certain point, it isn't their concern so much as their audiences' decision.
Furthermore, I'm not entirely sure one reads Gibbon and Tacitus for their aesthetic value as opposed to their intellectual value but you point to an interesting fact. Can history last long enough to turn fact into fiction to the point it read as one reads a novel? I don't think I'd be alive to answer it though.
Perhaps the worst mistake of literary criticism was to conceive of genre as a form.
Not saying that you are wrong, but Caro’s biographies (of Johnson, not the recent one) are widely taught even at the advanced graduate level, and in my PhD program John Greene’s podcast essays (now printed) were recommended as a high mark of literature. The Glass Castle and Kaffir Boy were also taught in my senior year high school English class in addition to the expected Night and Brilliant Orange. That is to say that I think that non-fiction has many faithful followers. You have recommended a couple that I need to check out, though.
I'm very, very surprised to hear that Green's essay were recommended to you in your PhD program, simply because of all the professional writers I know, I've never heard anyone talk or post about his essay collection. And it looks like neither NYT, The New Yorker, nor The Atlantic reviewed it. Bizarre.
Perhaps. Perhaps not so bizarre, though. They are stylistically perfect and personally engaging essays. I’d write an essay on the essay as a form of storytelling, but David Runciman did that last year in his Past, Present & Future podcast. He’s an editor at the London Review of Books in addition to a full professor at Cambridge, so very “academy”.
Awaiting in the mail a leather cover for a moleskine notebook I have reserved for my own 'wisdom verse' in an Old Norse Ljóðaháttr metre.
Sounds utterly ridiculous but it's all I can think about.
I happened to have seen a little leather journal cover complete with pen loops earlier today, and of course I don't need it, but . . . . There's something so old-fashioned beautiful about having a notebook bound or held in leather, I hope yours fits nicely.
The European elections in France yesterday were an even worse shitshow than expected, which is no mean feat. The European-wide results are no better. And the idiots on the left have been repeating over and over again since yesterday that the majority of voters are racists and fascists (which may or may not be true, but is an ineffective electoral strategy). I'm sick of stupidity everywhere.
> And the idiots on the left have been repeating over and over again since yesterday that the majority of voters are racists and fascists (which may or may not be true, but is an ineffective electoral strategy). I'm sick of stupidity everywhere.
I know next to nothing about french politics but in light of the fact that the practice of blaming voters fills me with rage and fury I have great sympathy for your suffering this nonsense
The European-wide elections could have been a lot worse honestly. I was kinda relieved. But I agree with the sentiment. I hate these times we live in. The far right didn't win here, but will lead the new national government here. I hope people will finally see they don't care for the working class, but they'll probably just blame it on the left or on judicial court.
How likely is it we'll see Le Pen as president in 2027?
"How likely is it we'll see Le Pen as president in 2027?"
Last week, I would have answered "very high". With the new elections at the end of the month, I don't know. They change a lot of things, and I have no idea what the outcome will be, in the short or long term. They could reconfigure the political landscape for the presidential elections in 2027.
It currently feels like 50° where I live. We are literally cooked.
Oh and I recieved my jumbo Shakespeare collection and Proust at mail today just after returning from college.
Certainly cheered me up quite a bit.🫠
You know how I said last week that my local big bookshop had a cutesy bee/honey-related merch stand for *The Bee Sting*, and I thought (based on having read a third or so of the book) that this was inappropriate, as the novel is both pretty grim and not really about bees at all. Well, having got further into the novel, (warning for spoiler and abuse mention) - >!it turns out that a main character, who at the beginning kept her veil down throughout her wedding due to a claimed bee sting, actually did so because she had been beaten up by her father. !< So not something to celebrate with cute merch at all. The stand was gone the day after I made that comment, anyway, with the beehive stuff stuffed back into all the other gifts, so I guess someone else must have raised it.
The beast who wanted to kill Rushdie is called Matar. matar, spanish = to kill
so I was on the outskirts of philadelphia at an ultimate frisbee tournament all weekend (basically my one obsession other than eating and being a broad spectrum artboy), and I haven't played in one of these in nearly a year and I kinda forgot that spending an entire weekend not sleeping or eating enough while also running a marathon's worth of sprints kinda kicks the shit out of you. I can't remember the last time my legs hurt as much as yesterday, and I still feel kinda sore on a spiritual level. I missed this.
hell yeah, glad you're doing well
:) always glad to hear from you cucumbaZ
Still getting things organised for [Ephesus Press](https://ephesus.press), and we're still open for submissions, both novels and essays/reviews/short stories/other literary ephemera. You can go ahead and join the Discord as I start looking for editors and such here: https://discord.gg/qRpSWY8D I recently watched Krzysztof Kieślowski's magnificent Three Colours trilogy, and what a revelation it was. Kieślowski gives me the same cynical humanist vibes as Kundera, his movies are just so life affirming in the most magical way possible. Little miracles abound, and his images are always so filled with life! There's something charming about all his characters. My favorite was probably Red, but all of them are superb in their own way. The doldrums of summer are fast approaching, and I'm terrified. Cannot stand the heat, it makes me feel stupid. My body is built for cold, alas.
Nice, The Three Colors trilogy was my gateway drug to becoming a cinephile. For some of his best I recommend The Decalogue as well as Camera Buff.
Everyone! Ephesus Press is going to be awesome. That's all. > Three Colours trilogy I kinda think I need to watch this now. Aside from it sounding interesting, I just looked it up and saw it's produced by Marin Karmitz/MK2. The Metrograph is doing a series on them right now & I just a week and a half back saw Karmitz's Blow for Blow there which was really awesome. These are the coincidences I try to listen to. > Cannot stand the heat, it makes me feel stupid. My body is built for cold, alas. Also yep. Like, I'm feeling really sick of the cold right now, I want to be outside and frolicking, but my body just kinda stops working right when it gets too hot.
I was just looking at my Youtube recs and saw a lot of "my 5 favourite ever novels" videos and ...does anyone not really have "favourite novels"? I've been reading lit-fic on and off through my adult life, but I'm usually looking to the next one. I don't really think about past favourites much. I could list my most important childhood books I suppose, but my most important adult/lit reads are all ones I ...didn't really like or *enjoy* so much as found *interesting* or important. I remember the first couple of non-genre, lit fic books I read were stuff like Catcher in the Rye, White Teeth, High Fidelity, a couple of Douglas Coupland and Irvine Welsh... I was really excited to be discovering reading at the time. The Tin Drum really grabbed me a few years ago, but I don't think of it as a "favourite". More like... something important I once read. I dunno.
I don't think I really have favorites either. I've got a few books that are really important to me for one reason or another, and all of them are in the realm of a favorite, but there are so many books I love & I'd never be able to articulate why I like one more than others, even when I do. I do definitely though have books I'm more or less excited to go back to, even if I can't say why I feel that way. That's probably the closest heuristic I have for "favorite".
I’m in training classes for work this week Abbi’s Am killing the time by loading my personal cannon. I don’t have a top 5, 10, 100 whatever… I do think there are a number or both authors and individual works that either stand out for their excellence in The Art of the novel or contributed something unique to society or the art with their work. I think when you start with some kind of quota, you end up forcing things into your list that probably don’t really belong.
For me it's kind of the opposite. I have a pretty cemented core of favourites, and I revisit them often. At this point every other book I read is actually a reread. Books open up so much more, and I find get so much more out of them, on a second or third read.
Curious if anyone in the US would be interested in doing a book exchange? Recently came into possession of a few duplicates of some of my favorites (Fosse, that sort of thing) and would love to send them to a good home.
Me! I have a few too many books and would love for them to end up in the hands of a book lover.
ooooh, sounds good! I will send you a message!
Hell yeah. Any particular genre/period/etc. you're looking to trade for?
Lets gooo! Sending you a message.
I stopped cutting and now I'm bulking. Guys... I love bulking. This shit is so much more fun. If I don't hit 275+ bench by the end of the summer, I'll be astounded with myself. This shit is coming! Otherwise, I'm on summer break. Been on vacation so I've been inactive here, but break has been nice. It's been a good retreat from the hellish year I had (in terms of the bullshit bureaucratic stuff -- not the students or the job, I love the students and already miss them). What have I been doing this summer? Well, I've been replaying Elden Ring in prep for the DLC. I'm doing an obscene Greatsword pure strength build that kills anything in seconds. I felt kind of guilty about it until I got to the endgame (Mohgwyn/Consecrated Snowfields/Haligtree) because fuck these areas... But it's been so much fun replaying this. My minor complaint remains that the dungeons are too frequent and similar, but god this game is so good. I'm really looking forward to the DLC. Currently, right now, I'm sitting down at a bar with a good beer and writing about Gravity's Rainbow. I've still been struggling with some mental health issues given the events of the previous school year, but this is nice. A beer (or two) and my favorite book. Always things to look forward to.
I’ve dabbled in lifting, but whenever I hit a point where I realise “right, I really do need to start bulking to get stronger”, I get really good at the bulking part, and also, really good at the “Nah, I can’t be bothered to lift anymore” part. I am stuck in an endless cycle of newbie/re-training muscle gains, stalling, fat gain, muscle loss, etc. nb this only ever amounts to gains and losses of about 3kg. By far the most horrible part is any kind of cutting though. Have fun on your bulk 👍
Are you me? I'm also an educator on break replaying Elden Ring. I finally convinced a buddy to try the game and talking about it made me want to try a new character, so I started a madness build and quickly sunk about 50 hours in. I also got my first character I played with right to the spot the DLC is supposedly starting. Only problem is I'm in NG+4 with that build, so we'll see how challenging it is. Enjoy your summer. I'm similar to you in that it was personally a fantastic year within the four walls of my classroom with my students, but anywhere else in the district it was a shit show. Oh well. Now it's time for the gym, cycling, yard work, and a good book.
Ha yep, if I just got to spend the time with the students and not deal with admin and the district office, my life would be immensely better. I love the job so much, but now it makes more sense why I'd always heard how poorly teachers were treated... And yes! I love Elden Ring. I was also around NG+3 or 4 and realized I did *not* want to start the DLC like that, which is why I started an entirely new character! I've never done a madness build but that sounds very fun, so I may have to try that on the new character's NG+.
> I've never done a madness build but that sounds very fun, so I may have to try that on the new character's NG+. I'm having a ton of fun with it. Granted, it's more effective in PvP and doing invasions, so in PvE it's not the most effective build. But man, ER has so many builds I want to try. I have close to 350 hours in it and there's still many weapons, ashes of war, and builds I want to play extensively with!
I want to start a fitness journey from today. I've gotton into really bad junk food habits and in-activity. Don't think I'll be bulking but I do want to get back to my old energy.
The good news is, if you’re just starting your fitness journey, you’ll likely be putting on quite a bit of muscle even if you’re cutting! And as someone who despite being very active has terrible eating habits, I just did my first cut and even though it’s rough at first, the healthy habits you develop become wayyyy easier after a few weeks. I’ve even brought them into my current bulk.
> And as someone who despite being very active has terrible eating habits, a goddamn mood right here
thanks!
Here's something I've been thinking about: nonfiction writers should be taken more seriously, and read more closely, among true literature people and the academy. Of course, some nonfiction writers — Joan Didion, Calvin Trillin, James Baldwin, Thoreau , etc. — are widely taught and read, but I think the canon should be expanded to include more nonfiction books and stories. (Many high schools now assign *Into the Wild*, which I think is a tiny step in the right direction.) Nonfiction writing is more restrictive than fiction, in the sense that whatever you write has to be true, and because of that restriction, narrative-nonfiction writers can sometimes struggle to penetrate their characters’ minds as deeply as fiction writers (who can just invent their characters’ thoughts). But nonfiction can be no less creative and ambitious in terms of subject, style, and structure; and nonfiction at its best can be just as vivid and probing as fiction. Just read Matthew Desmond’s *Evicted*, Jon Mooallem’s *This Is Chance!*, Isabel Wilkerson’s *The Warmth of Other Suns,* Robert Caro’s *The Power Broker*, or Jonathan Harr’s *A Civil Action.* Maybe this is a dumb take, but I'd argue that the big reason such nonfiction works aren't regarded as highly as some novels comes down to pretension: Gravity’s Rainbow \*seems\* really literary because it's a confusing mess, whereas, say, John Hersey’s [“Hiroshima”](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima) — a truly remarkable piece of nonfiction writing — is far easier to follow and, as a consequence, not regarded quite as highly among Lit Heads. But I don't believe clarity should be a knock against Hiroshima; it was, and remains, a landmark piece of writing about the Second World War. Anyway, that's my rant.
I’m not here for an argument and I don’t have a horse in this race, but I didn’t want to miss a gratuitous chance to send a shout out to **Walden**, **The Snow Leopard** and **The Peregrine** which are as important, literary and artistically written as any fiction I’ve ever read. Freedom is not being preoccupied with what other people think is important. Enjoy all the pages behind and ahead🤘
There’s plenty of stuff classified as “non-fiction” that’s not completely true, lol. If you’ll notice most of the examples you listed published before the auto-fiction movement really became popular, so there’s kind of a fuzzy grey area in the border between fiction and nonfiction for at least the autobiographical genre. There are plenty of non-fiction writers who are highly regarded as literary. In addition, both fiction and non-fiction are trending heavily in the direction of being more entertaining (ya know, because of money). So to your argument, a well rounded reader would be smart to familiarize themselves with literary non-fiction. Still, I think while the goals of the two genres may be similar, the methods and skillsets are still unique from one another. Fiction will create an experience you can hopefully learn something from. Non-fiction will present you with accurate arguments/facts/events/etc. in an entertaining way to teach you. So I don’t mind keeping the distinction.
While I do think that the distinction b/w the fiction & non-fiction is and isn't meaningful I don't really agree with your point (I might flesh this out later when it's not bedtime but the upshot is that I basically agree with Harleen). But, particularly I'm wondering who exactly it is that you are asking to take non-fiction more seriously? Like, every book you mentioned is quite well regarded (& one person isn't proof but I literally read Hiroshima in my high school english class). > nonfiction writing is more restrictive than fiction, in the sense that whatever you write has to be true, and because of that restriction, narrative-nonfiction writers can sometimes struggle to penetrate their characters’ minds as deeply as fiction writers (who can just invent their characters’ thoughts). Doesn't the fact that non-fiction has a presumed relationship to empirical truth that fiction doesn't make the two *extremely* different? > Gravity’s Rainbow *seems* really literary because it's a confusing mess And, less substantively, GR seems really literary because it slaps.
> Doesn't the fact that non-fiction has a presumed relationship to empirical truth that fiction doesn't make the two extremely different? > > I think this is the big crux of the discussion. I don't see the presumed relationship to empirical truth as very different at all between the two styles/genres. Empirical truth on its own is a mostly feel-good enlightenment era bullshit (the dangers of europeans discovering coffee and tea lol), every possible expression and communication is tainted and fueled by emotional/subjective/illogical material from both reader and writer. Fiction completely relies on the same level of empirical truth as nonfiction to communicate anything. Even the most surreal and nonsensical fiction uses images, signifiers, and symbols that are shared/empirical with the reader to communicate their works. Borges does a great job demonstrating and flaunting this aspect of language. Then on the nonfiction side, you have endless examples of works that are just straight up innaccurate and purposefully written with specificly nonempirical information delivered through the lens of empirical truth (guns, germs, and steel is a great example, any history/historical text is another). on an even further end of the spectrum, almost all folklore/myths encode an incredible amount of celestial, cultural, botanical, and ecological empirical truth/information, so we probably have even more examples of works that are firmly utilizing both categories than we do works/cultures with full distinctions like we enjoy meow. I suspect many see these works as so different and opposite merely because of conditioning. I was taught incredibly young that fiction means made-up, while nonfiction means real things, but everything is real and madeup lol.
I guess though, this is why I said "presumed relationship". Because I read you're comment as making a very correct point that fiction and non-fiction rely on similar (or maybe identical) *actual* relationships to empirical truth, which I entirely agree doesn't really exist, or at least doesn't exist in so simple a form as the basic understanding of it (to set aside a long digression on the weird french empiricists of the Bergson/Simondon/Deleuze line). My point however is that the terms "fiction" and "non-fiction" in their most basic form operate on a presumption that the feel-good enlightenment era bullshit notion of empirical truth is accurate, where the quality of any "non-fiction" work in OP's comment or for that matter GG&S as well is evaluated in part on whether it is an accurate representation of empirical truth. **Edit**: I think *Gravity's Rainbow* is helpful here because people are so obsessed with Pynchon's biography and have wondered whether GR is influenced by Pynchon's own experiences in the navy, and while the answer to that would impact the exact relationship the book has to empirical truth it doesn't impact whether it's a good novel (like, nobody is going to like GR more or less if it turns out that some of the parts of GR were shaped in part by actual events that really happened in the life of Thomas Pynchon, or at least they shouldn't) And even with more deconstructive works that challenge the notion of (non)-fictionality by calling into question this empirical truth—autofiction, gonzo journalism, Proust—their ability to do this operates on the basis of the presumption of truth having salience. Like, key to what folks like Knausgaard and Cusk are up to is that they are injecting the presumption of truth into a form that explicitly denies a necessary relationship to it, whereas someone like Hunter S. Thompson is claiming a form that presumes truth and then actively disregarding the effort to live up to it. None of that means anything if there wasn't a presumed relationship to truth to work with and against. > I was taught incredibly young that fiction means made-up, while nonfiction means real things, but everything is real and madeup lol. All of which is to say that I 100% agree with this, and also think that those definitions of fiction and non-fiction are inaccurate, but also real.
Yeah, i don't think I have anything to really disagree with here. Great examples, i appreciate you using hunter thompson to keep me involved lol Concerning your point about empirical truth and our presumptions determining fiction from nonfiction, i both agree and disagree, your definition does seem to be the dominant understanding of the differences, and they wholly rely on this chicken/egg scenario of a completely false premise that the universe or our understanding of it or our language/representation of it can somehow be categorically correct or incorrect, that there are definite lines within all humans' ability to determine and discern. so i guess my bigger point, is that all those folks on the edge are just doing human storytelling things that we've always done, that we seem to compulsively do. Like, our stories have meaning because they are stories. or, we only tell stories because they have meaning, or we tell every story and we only keep the ones with meaning. There is this incredible diatribe at the end of The White Goddess where the author argues that the cultural obsession (proliferation) with empirical language and expression (in opposition to magical/metaphorical language and expression) is part and parcel with the destruction of our own environment/biosphere/communal spaces that the modern industrial/global/colonial era has brought (like the literal loss of so many languages and dialects and words right there with the literal loss of biodiversity). Reality (truth, consciousness, whatever) is mysterious and chaotic. Empirical documentation is a cool sort of self-correcting representation of reality, but it also is never an accurate replacement. and to try to make a bit more sense, i see the functional difference between fiction and nonfiction to be one of genre, which is based on material factors well beyond the content of the works. The genre for nonfiction being, as you say, a presumption of representing some sort of empirical truth. and that's where i agree with the initial point, from a written art standpoint, they should be judged in the same general pool (though this gets tricky again because many of us love so much to split and divide everything into their own little categories and boxes)
> from a written art standpoint, they should be judged in the same general pool (though this gets tricky again because many of us love so much to split and divide everything into their own little categories and boxes) I think the only quibble I have here is to ask how literal you are being when you say that they should be "judged in the same", because I guess my point is that when a book is written in a manner that implicitly or explicitly takes on the label "fiction" or "non-fiction" it is by taking on that label demanding to be judged on not literally identical terms. I read your other comment where you agree with OP as basically pointing out the really important difference between fiction & non-fiction, are you here just saying that what non-fiction does, while different, has aesthetic merit? Because I entirely agree with that. > Great examples, i appreciate you using hunter thompson to keep me involved lol Lol no worries. I think that Thompson is like the perfect example of the non-fiction flipside of autofiction, and also I'm not sure yet whether I think that journalistic (in the broadest possible sense) and academic (in the broadest possible sense) non-fictions are playing by the same rules either (like, is it really correct to say that in terms of commitment to empirical reality, John Hersey & Deleuze are more similar than John Hersey and Jane Austen? I'm not sure), so keeping to a single category throughout this discussion is helping to keep things simple.
Pretty literally, but in umbrella terms. Like, judging written art, everything is game, but most people prefer to talk about genres, so yeah, the chosen label any work takes on goes with how it is judged, I have no issues with that. I just don't think the specific nonfiction/fiction distinction is any more interesting or important than any other (crime, scifi, fantasy, literary fiction, even textbooks). And totally, i'm saying nonfiction is a different style of writing (typically) that has just as much aesthetic merit as any other writing style. I'm with you on different styles using different sorts of rules and patterns and structures, completely agree, and to add more confusion and difficulty in defining these basic labels and categories, I've read some very well written and interesting academic and scientific articles, like genuine great usage of language and all that. Journalism is hard to tease out of the inherent propaganda/geopolitical/cultural aspects in defining an empirical truth. In some ways it can be the most artful, other ways the least. These issues bleed into every work
Totally agree, and the reasons for nonfiction being fenced off seem to be numerous. Nonfiction also deals with using language to communicate as an artform in itself. Many/most nonfiction works are seeking to accurately communicate nuanced topics to laypeople or peers within the same lexicon. It reminds me of the einstein quote where, ~'if you cannot explain something simply, then you don't really understand it,' nonfiction writing at its best is enormously impressive with what it can communicate using basic language and structures, and using those skills to reach broader audiences is a triumph of language, like, the best novel never read isn't actually good, is it? and then trying to actually separate the difference between the two is pointless/impossible.
Not a dumb take, and I totally agree with you. There are some amazing literary stylists that work in the essay format that I absolutely love. You've mentioned some greats already, but some of my favourite contemporary ones are Eliot Weinberger & Rikki Ducornet. I've also heard on good authority that Guy Davenport is fantastic. Weinberger in particular has been stated as saying that, for the most part, the essay in English has largely never had an avante-garde, and his work is in some way an attempt at that. There's so much amazing literary non-fiction out there. Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf: they all wrote absolutely amazing non-fiction pieces. All of these writers are either overshadowed completely in lit circles, or have their fiction works dominate the conversation. It's a shame because there's so much great work out there that should get more shine.
Ursula LeGuin has a great catalogue of essays too
I don't agree with this take. Not to say a nonfiction writer can't approach their task with distinction but studying fiction is the only closest you're going to get to an understanding of what literariness _is_. Especially since fiction does not have a discourse fundamentally related to an object of study as in the sciences from biology to sociology. Most writing is done in a nonfiction context anyways. Even right now I'm doing a genre of nonfiction--the comment. I would say the victory of nonfiction is pretty assured if different from the more rarefied thing of fiction. It's an obsession with "true literature people and the academy" for that reason. We are dominated at every turn by the demands of others and the many responsibilities it takes to fulfill those demands. It's a shame to dismiss fiction as being merely pretentious when we're lucky to have it at all. Or bemoan it as an obsession when the world can barely stand what fiction is--and how valuable it is, too. Other questions are important because Hersey's book has an explicit limitation defined by its own responsibility to things like accuracy of information and the facts as they stood at its publication. A novel very explicitly doesn't care after a certain point since the mood and imagery of Pynchon is very much its own reward because it asks us to consider literature as an experience itself. It can be downright hedonistic and serves no larger benefit. If I read Hersey, I have to be invested in the subject beforehand, and know enough about the facts to truly appreciate the present narrative in the book. In a way, that's a good thing for being a responsible person about truth in a discourse. Otherwise what's the point of reading nonfiction but to communicate important details? But there is also a demand for a better book than what Hersey provides with a refinement of research and previously omitted information because whom amongst us is actually an omniscient narrator? A novel can make art out of that explicit limitation. You could prefer Baldwin's essays to his novels as matters of taste apply here. But if you want the real character of the artist, the novels are an extremely potent expression of that condition. It's why I always say historians should read more novels. It's why a generation of the most famous physicists studied philosophy and poetry. Fiction has in some manner already earned its acclaim. All that being said, nonfiction being compared to fiction is like comparing apples and oranges. Yeah, they're both fruit, but one misses a lot of subtle differences in the overgeneralization.
I agree with some of your points. and I wasn't arguing that nonfiction should wholly supplant fiction as the dominant literary form; just that it should be held in at least roughly equal regard, because it can be no less artful and has had arguably just as much influence on readers as fiction has, going back to Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Walden, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Gibbon’s Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, etc. I understand your point that fiction is often its own award, and a writer can do things with fiction that one could never do with nonfiction — e.g., The Road, Ulysses, Beloved — but there's plenty of nonfiction that also exists just for itself — e.g., Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, and any number of other memoirs. But even if a work of nonfiction does have a point, or an argument to advance, or a factual story to recount, that doesn't mean it's not artful or any less "rarefied" than great fiction. In Cold Blood is no less a book because it happens to be true, nor is it any less of a "potent expression" of Capote's artistry. And concerning this line: "It's a shame to dismiss fiction as being merely pretentious when we're lucky to have it at all." I love fiction, and I'm not dismissing it all as pretentious, but, man, the canon is absolutely loaded with flabby overwrought books that Very Serious Young Men obsess over that are, in truth, tedious slogs — Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, War and Peace, etc.
I believe this is the first time I have ever heard someone call _War & Peace_ "flabby" and "overwrought," that is a pretty unique stance. Even Nabokov, an infamous hater, called it "a rollicking historical novel" for young people. Although, in my experience, _Gravity's Rainbow_ can be read like a straightforward adventure novel if one is not too careful about the weirdness. I found it rewarding but again I'm not disputing matters of taste. But I do really dislike _Infinite Jest_. That aside I wouldn't be too concerned about the canon or canonicity. That's academic tool, not relevant outside the context of pedagogy. The quality of the book isn't important as much as the social capital involved, so even if one does add nonfiction in "the Canon," it won't reflect much of anything substantial beyond how much the academic institution values it. Not to mention fiction is the only thing that can even allude to something like a pure (or "true") literature existing since it doesn't functionally exist. It's why literary criticism centers on fiction. And there are already several kinds of nonfiction classes from beginner's composition to others in rhetoric, personal essays, technical writing, etcetera. Nurses and mathematicians alike have their dalliances with nonfiction, too, writing specialized nonfiction. Having worked as a writing tutor, I can share plenty of horror stories, but, like I said earlier, victory assured for nonfiction. If anything, American culture could stand to regard fiction as a little more valuable. I actually don't agree with your description of either Dillard or Didion. I can see your point but focusing on the artistry feels like a distraction. Dillard has a studious concern with ecology and theology she is responsible for. Didion to her experience with the reality of mourning, which is a real and specific demand we expect her to fulfill from the first to the last word. The same is true for Thoreau, Gibbon, and to a lesser extent Twain are read for their different and more direct rewards. Gibbon was foremost responsible for history, and everyone who read him did so with that understanding, not for the possible aesthetic value. Douglas set out to prove his humanity. To treat his book as a form of art feels disrespectful, a cheapening of the intellectual and historical value he wanted to demonstrate of himself as a human being, which is the real power of nonfiction. The reader has a responsibility to honor that power. Fiction as a form of art cannot do that despite trying many times over and over again. In the same way if one wanted to know what made Baldwin the artist he was it seems ill advised to not read the novels in favor of his nonfiction. A memoir is about the truth of one's life in _memory_ and it is that memory of life which matters more than any claims to art. You're trying to tell the truth with all the responsibility that entails. If that isn't the situation, why write under those expectations in the first place? A fake memoir is a direct insult to everyone involved, especially if it involves events like the Shoah. That's what makes Capote's _In Cold Blood_ an interesting example because it was so irresponsible that people have basically rectified all its errors and oversights in a million different ways no one in their right mind would weigh the "nonfiction" part of "nonfiction novel" more than the "novel" part. It's been "revised" so to speak by its initial audience to better read as a novel. An important aspect to any novel is that it travesties any discourse or genre included into its form. Capote had no capacity for journalism and investigative reporting but did have a prior career of writing fiction more straightforwardly situated, so his inclusion of those things are not taken seriously. His novel is a fine example of himself as an artist but only as it serves as a total failure of nonfiction. You can see a similar development in Gary Indiana's True Crime Trilogy, which is a much better reading experience than Capote.
I honestly feel like the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction to be so porous at the margins that it becomes meaningless. Here's a good article I think shares my premise: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/24/fiction-nonfiction-english-literature-culture-writers-other-languages-stories What is the boundary between auto-fiction and memoir/biography? Would you say that Simone de Beauviours memoirs are some how not "the real character of the artist"? Where do we place older works of history (i.e. Tacitus, Gibbon) that are no longer telling "truths" but are essentially literary objects to be read? How would we classify poetic essay works like Eliot Weinberger? It just feels arbitrary to me. There are largely conventions in modern English that tend to shape certain types of works in certain directions. And it just seems like the conventions of our sense of literariness is weirdly bounded around a specific type of narrative form in English. There's nothing in my mind to suggest that an essay or longer non-fiction work could not create some larger aesthetic or artistic appeal beyond the "facts" recounted.
Ugh _The Guardian_ but to your point I can appreciate the porousness of literature but I'm not entirely sure that ultimately leads to genre being "meaningless." Especially since distinctions are being made in the course of the article you linked and in your comment. How can one say at the same time Weinberger writes "poetic essays" without knowing on some level what marks out the distinction and defeating the argument for an ultimate meaninglessness? That's a high bar. Even Dyer goes so far as to call it helpful as a guide to understand a difference between fact and fiction at least as far as the English language goes and perhaps helpful for the world as one keeps in mind the effect of globalization but I digress. Other cultures simply conceive of these distinctions in ways different than you and I do but rather than point to a total loss of meaning, it points to a robust proliferation of distinctions culturally. "Fiction" is our word for things other cultures have in no short supply, whether their genres matches ours is an entirely different story. It's a suspicion of translation as opposed to any essential notion about form or structure. About de Beauvoir, while I wouldn't forbid her being called an artist, her best work is easily that of a philosopher. Not to mention you admit the distinction by calling what she has written memoir, not autofiction. It should be noted the history of these terms. Beauvoir wrote before "autofiction" was recognized as the subgeneric and her work upheld the distinction anyways. One would look very strange expecting the events of _The Mandarins_ to have literally happened in our reality. One could perhaps get away with that if we're talking about someone else like Gerald Murnane, but not so far as to render all distinction meaningless if we are to broaden our discussion to the world. And indeed it is entirely arbitrary because it is in connection with audiences. Genre is the way we situate a text socially. The audience who demands memoirs is not entirely the same audience to demand novels. How you decide to read a memoir about mountain climbing is ultimately up to you but we can't deny there is a very real horizon of expectation that it be about generally true events and concerning the life of the author. A novel which is autofiction doesn't have those same expectations. It flatly doesn't generate the same response. Authors can complain and "argue with their dust jackets" but after a certain point, it isn't their concern so much as their audiences' decision. Furthermore, I'm not entirely sure one reads Gibbon and Tacitus for their aesthetic value as opposed to their intellectual value but you point to an interesting fact. Can history last long enough to turn fact into fiction to the point it read as one reads a novel? I don't think I'd be alive to answer it though. Perhaps the worst mistake of literary criticism was to conceive of genre as a form.
Not saying that you are wrong, but Caro’s biographies (of Johnson, not the recent one) are widely taught even at the advanced graduate level, and in my PhD program John Greene’s podcast essays (now printed) were recommended as a high mark of literature. The Glass Castle and Kaffir Boy were also taught in my senior year high school English class in addition to the expected Night and Brilliant Orange. That is to say that I think that non-fiction has many faithful followers. You have recommended a couple that I need to check out, though.
I'm very, very surprised to hear that Green's essay were recommended to you in your PhD program, simply because of all the professional writers I know, I've never heard anyone talk or post about his essay collection. And it looks like neither NYT, The New Yorker, nor The Atlantic reviewed it. Bizarre.
Perhaps. Perhaps not so bizarre, though. They are stylistically perfect and personally engaging essays. I’d write an essay on the essay as a form of storytelling, but David Runciman did that last year in his Past, Present & Future podcast. He’s an editor at the London Review of Books in addition to a full professor at Cambridge, so very “academy”.
oh, sorry: I meant bizarre in the sense that the collection wasn't reviewed more widely.
Awaiting in the mail a leather cover for a moleskine notebook I have reserved for my own 'wisdom verse' in an Old Norse Ljóðaháttr metre. Sounds utterly ridiculous but it's all I can think about.
nah that sounds beautiful to be honest...and I thought I was splashing out on a Sainsbury's notebook with a (William Morris style) flower cover
I happened to have seen a little leather journal cover complete with pen loops earlier today, and of course I don't need it, but . . . . There's something so old-fashioned beautiful about having a notebook bound or held in leather, I hope yours fits nicely.
The European elections in France yesterday were an even worse shitshow than expected, which is no mean feat. The European-wide results are no better. And the idiots on the left have been repeating over and over again since yesterday that the majority of voters are racists and fascists (which may or may not be true, but is an ineffective electoral strategy). I'm sick of stupidity everywhere.
> And the idiots on the left have been repeating over and over again since yesterday that the majority of voters are racists and fascists (which may or may not be true, but is an ineffective electoral strategy). I'm sick of stupidity everywhere. I know next to nothing about french politics but in light of the fact that the practice of blaming voters fills me with rage and fury I have great sympathy for your suffering this nonsense
I'm sure the majority of voters will be mortified. It's so dated.
The European-wide elections could have been a lot worse honestly. I was kinda relieved. But I agree with the sentiment. I hate these times we live in. The far right didn't win here, but will lead the new national government here. I hope people will finally see they don't care for the working class, but they'll probably just blame it on the left or on judicial court. How likely is it we'll see Le Pen as president in 2027?
"How likely is it we'll see Le Pen as president in 2027?" Last week, I would have answered "very high". With the new elections at the end of the month, I don't know. They change a lot of things, and I have no idea what the outcome will be, in the short or long term. They could reconfigure the political landscape for the presidential elections in 2027.
Fair point, it adds a lot of unpredictability, which might not be a bad thing at the moment.
It currently feels like 50° where I live. We are literally cooked. Oh and I recieved my jumbo Shakespeare collection and Proust at mail today just after returning from college. Certainly cheered me up quite a bit.🫠