Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

In writing this essay I consciously include my subjective reactions and partialities as part of the process and lay no claim to either objectivity or authority. This is, to put it mildly, not how I was taught to write at Harvard in the forties. To me it seems perfectly appropriate to what I am doing, which is mostly speculation and opinion (as were most of the authoritatively phrased and apparently egoless papers produced at Harvard in the forties).

If, however, I were an eyewitness journalist charged with describing an event, if I were writing a biography, or an autobiography, could I not claim a genuine authority, based not only on knowledge (research), perceptivity, and inclusiveness but also on a strenuous attempt to be objective?

When scientists come out and state that they cannot achieve objectivity, and historians follow suit, a certain demoralisation may follow. Objectivity was an ideal to journalists, too. If the scientists abandon it, why should a poor stiff working part-time for the local foreign-corporation-owned rag even try for it?

Yet most journalists still profess the ideal of objective reporting, even when it comes to highly subjective matters. No proper journalist has ever admitted that anybody who does or suffers anything that brings them into public attention, intentionally or not, has any right to privacy. But in practice, journalists respect privacy when they describe objective actions and speech, leaving subjective motives, thoughts, and feelings to be deduced from the description; and outside the tabloids, most journalists do that. Serious journalism defines itself by the avoidance of speculation presented as fact.

Though they may have abandoned the claim to objectivity, serious history and biography define themselves in the same way. As soon as the writer tells us what Napoleon murmured to Josephine in bed and how Josephine’s heart went pitpat, we know we’re nearer Oz than Paris.

Many readers, of course, want Oz, not Paris. They’re reading for the story, and don’t care if the story is inaccurate or if the characters make a travesty of the historical figures they’re based on.

Why, then, are they reading history rather than a novel? Is it because they distrust the novel as being “made up,” while the narrative that calls itself history or biography, however dishonest, is “real”?

Such a bias, reflecting the Puritan judgmentalism so common in American minds, turns up in many and unlikely places. I hear a ring of such absolutism in both the New York Times Book Review quotations above, with their emphasis on “theatricality” and “conjuring.” You can’t tell the whole truth; nothing less will do; so you fake it.

But it’s equally possible that many or most American readers are genuinely indifferent to the distinction of fiction from nonfiction. These categories mean little or nothing in preliterate cultures, and even now, when the written word is the word that counts, ever more so as we increasingly communicate via electronic media, perhaps they are not generally seen as carrying any great intellectual or ethical significance.

This perception may be in part connected to the increasing electronicisation of writing. In so far as writing becomes electronic, surely its categories and genres will change. So far, the new technology has influenced fiction only by opening to the novelist the garden of forking paths accessible through hypertext. Genuinely interactive fiction, where the reader would control the text equally with the writer, remains hype or a promise (or, to some, a threat). As for nonfiction, it seems that scant care for accuracy and fact checking, along with wide tolerance of hearsay and opinion, characterise a lot of what passes for information on the Internet. The transitory nature of Net communication encourages a freedom like that of private conversation. Rumormongering, gossip, pontification, unverified quotation, and backchat all flow freely through cyberspace, shortcutting the skills and/or self-restraints of both fiction and factual writing. The pseudo-oral, pseudonymous, transitory character of electronic writing encourages an easy abdication of the responsibility that accrues to print. But that responsibility may be truly out of place in the Net. A new form of writing has to develop its own aesthetic and ethic. That’s to come. In this essay I’m talking about print, the essence of which is that it gives writing reproducible permanence. All permanence in human terms involves responsibility.

A group I belong to that gives annual awards to writers got a letter recently asking us to divide our nonfiction prize into two—one for historical nonfiction and one for creative nonfiction. The first term was new to me, the second was familiar.

Writing workshops and programs all over the country now offer courses in “creative nonfiction.” The arts of scientific, historical, and biographical narrative are rarely if ever taught in such programs (or anywhere else). Autobiography, however, has been increasingly popular in the writing programs. It may be taught as journal writing or as therapy through self-expression. When it has more literary goals, it is called creative nonfiction, personal essay, and memoir.

The writer of a memoir, like the responsible biographer, ethnographer, or journalist, used to describe what other people did and said, leaving what they may have felt and thought as implications to be drawn by the reader or as authorial speculation identified as such. The autobiographer limited her account to her own memory of how her uncle Fred looked as he ate the grommet, what she heard him say when he’d swallowed it, and what she thought about it. The only sensations and emotions she described were her own.

According to those who defend the use of fictional devices and elements in nonfiction, the memoirist is justified in telling us how, as he swallowed it, Fred vividly recalled the slightly oily taste of the first grommet he ever ate, fifty years ago in Indiana, and how bittersweet the memory was to him.

Many writers and readers of creative nonfiction hold that such ascription of inward thought or feeling, if it’s based on a knowledge of Fred’s character, is legitimate. It does no harm to Fred (who died in 1980 of a surfeit of grommets), and no harm to the reader, who after all will almost certainly know Fred only in and through the story, just as if he were a character in a novel.

But who is to certify the writer’s knowledge of her uncle’s character as accurate, unbiased, reliable? Possibly her aunt, but we’re not likely to have the chance to consult her aunt. The memoirist’s responsibility seems to me to be exactly that of the ethnographer: not to pretend to objectivity, but also not to pretend to be able to speak for anybody but oneself. To assign oneself the power to tell us what another person thought or felt is, to my mind, co-optation of a voice: an act of extreme disrespect. The reader who accepts the tactic colludes in the disrespect.

Characters “come alive” in a story, fictive or factual, they “seem real,” not, of course, through the mere report of their actions and words, but by selection, suppression, rearrangement, and interpretation of that material. I take it this is what Mr. Di Piero, quoted above, meant by “Remembering is an act of the imagination.” (It may be what Genly Ai, in my novel The Left Hand of Darkness , meant by saying that he was taught on his home world that “Truth is a matter of the imagination”; but Genly, of course, wasn’t real.)

The most cogent argument in support of the use of invention in nonfiction is, then: as fiction involves the arrangement, manipulation, and interpretation of inventions, so creative nonfiction involves the arrangement, manipulation, and interpretation of actual events. A short story is an invention, a memoir is a reinvention, and the difference between them is negligible.