Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

I accept the terms, but the conclusion makes me uneasy.

It’s not just that many readers evidently don’t know whether a story they just read is factual, invented, or a mixture, and don’t care. They do care, in the sense that I discussed above: American readers tend to value factuality over invention, reality over imagination. They’re uncomfortable with the fictivity of fiction.

Perhaps this is why they beg novelists to tell them, “Where do you get your ideas from?” The only honest answer is of course “I make them up,” but that’s not the answer they want. They want specific sources. In my experience, most readers vastly exaggerate the dependence of fiction on research and immediate experience. They assume that characters in a story are “taken” from somebody the author knows, “based on” a specific person used as “copy,” and believe that a story or novel is necessarily preceded by “research.”

(This latter illusion may rise from the necessity most writers are under of writing applications for grants. You can’t tell the guys with the money that you don’t actually need to spend six months in the Library of Congress doing research for your novel. You’ve been drawing maps of Glonggo ever since you were ten, you worked out the curious mores and social structure of the Glonggovians when you were twenty, the plot and characters of Thunder-Lords of Glonggo are ready and waiting in your mind, and all you need is the six months to write the story and some peanut butter to live on. But peanut butter and made-up stories aren’t what grants are given for. Grants are for serious things, like research.)

The notion that fictional characters are all portraits of actual people probably arises from natural vanity and paranoia, and is encouraged by the power fantasies of some fiction writers (you’re nothing to me but copy). Tracing back elements of great novel characters—Jane Eyre, Natasha, Mrs. Dalloway—to this or that element of real people the writer knew is an entertaining and sometimes revealing criticobiographical game. But involved in all such searches for the nonfiction in the fiction is, I suspect, a distrust of the fictive, a resistance to admitting that novelists make it up —that fiction is not reproduction, but invention.

If invention is so much distrusted, why is it admitted where it doesn’t belong?

Maybe this insistence that fiction is “really” not made up but derived immediately from fact is what has established the confusion of modes that, as if reciprocally, permits the entry of fictional data into purported nonfiction.

Nothing comes from nothing. The novelist’s “ideas” do come from somewhere. The poet Gary Snyder’s finely unpoetic image of composting is useful here. Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day every day, a lot of garbage, leftovers, dead leaves, eyes of potatoes, artichoke stems, forests, streets, rooms in slums, mountain ranges, voices, screams, dreams, whispers, smells, blows, eyes, gaits, gestures, the touch of a hand, a whistle in the night, the slant of light on the wall of a child’s room, a fin in a waste of waters. All this stuff goes down into the novelist’s personal compost bin, where it combines, recombines, changes; gets dark, mulchy, fertile, turns into ground. A seed falls into it, the ground nourishes the seed with the richness that went into it, and something grows. But what grows isn’t an artichoke stem and a potato eye and a gesture. It’s a new thing, a new whole. It’s made up .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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