Staring into the Mirror, Part I

One topic that keeps coming up in our class is the need for reflection in personal narrative and memoir. These genres don’t simply tell us a story. Rather, they tell us a story and use it as the vehicle for introspection and thoughtfulness. In many ways, this differs from what we expect to see in fiction (where the mantra “show, don’t tell” warns against editorializing, sermon, polemic, and anything else that might break the fictional dream). In most fiction, it’s considered bad craft if the author steps in and explains the underpinnings of the scene. But nonfiction is not fiction, and though it may borrow some of fiction’s approaches, it doesn't move in the same direction or with the same trajectory, as Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola make clear in their book Tell It Slant: “In contrast [to the short story’s narrative trajectory], a more essaylike narrative might have a stronger vertical line to it, the reflective voice that comments upon the scenes it re-creates . . . . This reflective voice runs underneath the horizontal line, creating a sense of movement that delves below the surface of narrative.”

I’ll be honest, I hate the word “reflection”; it sounds like something I’d teach to my composition students after asking them to write about the moments that have allegedly changed their lives and broadened their horizons. It feels artificial, clumsy, inorganic. I prefer the word “interrogation” (despite the images it calls up of secret police and blindfolded suspects) because I think, more often than not, in good nonfiction we are simply asking questions of our past and about what it means to be human (usually questions that are, and should remain, unanswerable), as opposed to cogitating on what we've supposedly learned.

Either way—reflection or interrogation—this unique opportunity for “open thought” stems from the demands of the form itself.

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In the book, Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life, Philip Gerard lists the five hallmarks of the genre (the qualities or conventions that make creative nonfiction different from every other type of writing), as follows:

1. It has an apparent subject and a deeper subject. Those of you who took my fiction workshop last spring (or those who have read the book Ron Carlson Writes a Story) will immediately think of what Carlson calls the outer story and the inner story. Not so different here, I think. We have the inventory of scenes, action, objects, characters, sensory images, etc., as they are depicted in the writing. This is the active force behind the piece, the "motor." It grabs a reader’s attention and transports him/her from beginning through middle to end. And then we have the “freight” of the piece—to steal from Carlson: “the complicated interplay of the facets of the human heart, irreducible to a phrase.” This is the emotional and intellectual cornerstone of the piece—the bigger picture that emerges as you revisit past events.
2. It is released from the usual journalistic requirements of timeliness. This isn't a breaking news story, and so while we may feel tempted to address impactful moments in our lives while they are still fresh, it is often better to let things percolate a little. If nothing else, we gain perspective on our motives.
3. It’s narrative. Two words: fictive devices.
4. It contains a sense of reflection on the part of the author. Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner. There it is again, that word: “reflection.” A reader needs to know that the writer has asked the tough questions about the events he or she is relating if that reader is going to trust the piece’s retelling.
5. It shows serious attention to the craft of writing. This is where creative nonfiction writers share a common goal with poets and fiction writers. In each case, the written word matters. We are, after all, creating art here, and so it is our obligation to be artful in how we employ language.

Some of these demands (particularly #4) are still reflected in the very names we've chosen for our creative nonfiction genres: essay and memoir. If you look up Essay in the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll find that it predates the existence of Creative Nonfiction as a recognized genre by at least 450 years. We can trace its origins back through the French verb essayer and the French noun essai (which mean respectively “to test or try” and “a trial”). The French words are based on the late Latin exagium (“weighing”) and its base exigere (“ascertain, weigh”). Memoir, of course, traces its roots back to the French words for “memory” and “memorandum” (or record). In each case, the demand for what Miller and Paola call the “vertical line” is evident. Essays and memoirs don’t simply tell us stories, they have an obligation to “weigh” or “try” their subject matter, to establish the “record,” or more simply put: to bear witness. They do this through reflection.

(Please note: Lyric essays are a little different. When I say “essay” from here on out in this post, I am referring to personal narrative or meditative pieces, not lyric essay.)

Now, it may seem like the almost-legal connotations to the words listed above suggest “judgment” or the onus on the writer to come up with “the answer or truth,” but as I've previously hinted at I think that’s a little misguiding. To describe exactly what creative nonfiction does with its subject matter, I am going to go back to fiction for a moment, and, in particular Anton Chekhov. Those of you who know me know that I don’t believe a short story exists to impart wisdom, reveal truth, or teach us any lessons (despite what others might have us believe). My personal thoughts about story are fodder for a blog entry down the road somewhere, but where they become relevant to our discussion of creative nonfiction is in this idea that the journey/struggle/weighing/wrestling with difficult questions (those questions of who am I? for example) are more important than any simple answers or “morals” we might impart at the end of our essay or memoir. No one finishes an essay and says, “Wow, I’m glad I read that. Now I know that you shouldn't steal from your boss/cheat on your wife/gamble away the nest egg.” No one puts down the book and says, “Now I know how bad it is to grow up with an abusive stepfather/find out you have AIDS/learn that the woman you thought was your sister is actually your mother. How win-less and mean the world can be.” We all know all these things already (and if you don’t, well, I don’t know what to say about that).

If an essay only manages to pass along these simple lessons or messages, it fails. There’s no reason for it to exist. And, as we've said before, everything we write, especially anything intended for an audience, needs to legitimize its own existence in one way or another. (After all, no one has to read your work. They choose to do so because you've managed to convince them it’s a better use of their time than playing Angry Birds or watching Cake Boss.) It’s my belief that an essay must take an “intelligent attitude” toward its subject matter. (And that’s where I am stealing from Chekhov.) You don’t need to have answers, lessons, morals, themes—you just need to be able to muse intelligently about the story you're telling. In other words, reflect on it.

Another way of thinking about this is to say that every essay is made up of two parts: the temporal and the intellectual. The first, temporal, is the telling of a story through the manipulation of time. (Every time we write, we manipulate time. For more information on how to do this, please do check out the previous blog entry about Fictive Devices.) The second part, the intellectual, is the lens through which we can see the author’s thoughts, opinions, ruminations, musings, meditations, about the events or subject he or she has written about and its possible meanings and implications. This takes place more or less through exposition (rather than dramatized scene and description), and it’s made possible by perspective (the fact that we are writing about events that have happened in the past, events that we are capable of interrogating now thanks to the passage of time, even if we still don’t fully understand them).

In other words, essays tell us a story, and then they tell us the story of the author telling the story.

How do they do this? Stay tuned for next week's blog entry (Part II of "Staring Into the Mirror") and find out . . . .