“Dandelion”
by Lore Segal
from the March 25, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
I need to read more of Lore Segal’s work. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer when she turned 80. Here she is, in her 90s, still going. Yet I think I’ve read only a couple of her short stories from Shakespeare’s Kitchen, the collection that was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and know her primarily for her translation of a volume of Grimm fairy tales she did with Maurice Sendak (and even that I primarily know because of Sendak and not Segal).
I love how Segal starts out “Dandelion”:
That Henry James, when he got old, rewrote his early work was my excuse for revisiting, at ninety, a story I had written in my twenties.
And then she just jumps right in to that story, completing the first paragraph with this: “I was ten years old when I had to leave Austria, so the day with my father in the Alps must have taken place on our last family holiday, the previous August.”
This is a lovely revision of an old story, based on Segal’s own experience walking along the Alps with her father. To tell the story, a lifetime later, Segal both goes through the memories but also through the original version, critiquing her younger self:
“Light tinkled among the trees,” and the “grasses gleamed sword-like,” says my story. Curious how our language asks for similes. What is something “like”? The sky was “like liquid light,” I wrote. “Liquid” is close, but it’s not quite the right word.
So here we have a narrator looking back on two memories: one of her ten-year-old self having this strangely painful experience with her father and one of her twenty-something self writing of that experience. We have an exploration of writing and how that affects memory. She also ties in a beautiful moment of this childhood day with the birth of her first child. This all happens in a very brief space, the story only taking a few pages. In the end, though, the story focuses sharply on that oldest memory with her father. That is the one that stands out sharpest. That is the one that is unresolved.
Importantly, what is to happen to father and daughter are not disclosed explicitly. We don’t know, unless we read between the lines as well as some lines elsewhere, that this is one of her last experiences with her father. At first, then, we may simply wonder why this writer is going back so far, simply to tell us about what sounds like a beautiful day in the Alps that ends with a bit of childhood guilt. She is looking at a moment when she feels sorry for her father, sees him a bit vulnerable, and how uncomfortable that made her feel.
It really is a lovely story, but I think it is made more powerful if we incorporate some knowledge the story does not provide. Namely, this experience with her father happened not long before he sent her away on the first Kindertransport to England. The first paragraph suggests this — “I was ten years old when I had to leave Austria, so the day with my father in the Alps must have taken place on our last family holiday, the previous August.” That’s about it: this happened shortly before she had to leave Austria, and it was on their “last” family holiday.
I’m not sure the story would be better if that were brought in explicitly. I think perhaps not. It might get in the way, muddy up the childhood feelings. Then again, I do think it is vital to the story to come to know this about its author. So perhaps the story is perfect as is: we sense there is more to it, so we, the readers, are able to seek it out, allowing Segal to explore the memory on its own.
Trevor,
It warms my heart that The New Yorker would publish a looking back short story from a 90-year old excellent writer. Any father-daughter relationship is considered so old school, so yesterday, so irrelevant these days that to have anything about that is a treat. A famous well known Bollywood actress who married an American in Los Angeles, remembers early morning walks with her father in Simla in India as a key element in her attaining creative success. This story may be along different lines. Plus the added being able to analyze one’s younger writing from the vantage point of an older perspective is two treats in one. Even if she feels it could have been better, it must have already been pretty good for her to have it published in her early 20’s. Am very much looking forward to reading this story.
Larry B.
As usual, I’ve read the story but don’t feel I have anything insightful to add to the discussion. Re reading more of Lore Segal, I think she won a Best American award for The Reverse Bug. This was also originally published in the New Yorker so it’s easily findable by any subscriber. If I remember rightly, she amazed me by criticizing her own story in the Authors’ Notes section — saying that one of her scenes didn’t fit in with her story, and should have been omitted.
If I must give my take on the work in question, it seemed like a piece of memoir. It was interesting, I’m glad I read it etc. but I’m not nearly as impressed as Trevor was. The Reverse Bug is a much better story.
How can a story that is this short be this much of a mess? It’s a remarkable achievement in its own right! We get two paragraphs of this being a story about an author who is rewriting a story, and then that just all suddenly ends and it turns into just a brief story about a walk in the Alps. It’s only in reading the interview that the first two paragraphs make any sense at all, but the explanation is still very weak. That Segal wanted to rewrite an old story is fine and that she wanted us to know that she was doing that is fine, but putting that information into the story itself (1) does not actually tell us that this is what she is doing as it appears to just be part of the story and (2) has nothing at all to do with the story she seems to actually want to tell so is a bizarrely distracting waste of space. Even if you just ignore the first two paragraphs, there isn’t much to this story. It only took me five minutes to read it, but it still felt like a waste of time.
Segal is reflecting on her embarrassment about her father and his interaction with the young man. It is the unfortunate ending to what began as a beautiful day.
For some reason I didn’t see these comments until today. I knew you’d come at the piece, David, and I almost posted a comment anticipating your distaste! I reconsidered, though, because I wanted to get the full reaction — ha!
I don’t find any of it distracting. Indeed, I find her style urgent, a late-in-life attempt to dig at something that, though nearly 70 years has passed, has not resolved and is still affecting her. Too much explanation would soften that tremendously, and I prefer it hard. I also think those first two paragraphs are absolutely essential to the story. You’re right that without them there isn’t much to the piece. With them, the piece is jagged, and I think powerful.
I do agree that background information is necessary for this, but I’m learning more and more that I’m okay with that. I am not sure I was a few years ago, but with these personal pieces coming from Segal and, a few weeks ago, Li, I’m okay seeing this piece as part of a larger whole and not as a conventional story with a beginning and end. That doesn’t mean I want excerpts. That’s not the “whole” I’m talking about.
Trevor, did you say “whole” or “hole”?
:-)
Ok, ok …. But seriously, I’m going to give this story another try. This time, though, I will try approaching it from the perspective of assuming that it’s good and I’m just missing something I need to look harder to find. The part-of-something-bigger-but-not-an-excerpt idea is something I can work with, especially since I have been spending this month closely reading Fen by Daisy Johnson.
I’m not sure you’ll like it on second read, David. From our conversation on Li, we come at these from different angles, and that is okay!
Trevor, too late! I already read it again. Here are some thoughts about that second reading (and ones, for the record, I developed before reading your most recent comments in the Li discussion).
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If I am to take the story seriously as a unified whole, then it means seeing this story as really being one about an elderly writer who is moved to revisit a story written many years ago. When we get to that story, it does seem very slight and mainly to focus on the fact that as a young girl she had this experience of being embarrassed by her father (or, perhaps more precisely, being embarrassed for her father). This brings me back to the first paragraph and the presented justification for rewriting an old story – she’s doing it because James did it. Well, as any parent can tell you (“Lore, would you jump off a bridge, too, if James did it?”) that’s not much of an explanation. One reason to revisit an old story for an old writer might be just that she has run out of ideas and so needs to recycle to have anything to write about at all. That can happen to younger writers, too, but a loss of creativity with age is pretty common. But the content of the story she revisits suggests something else. The idea that she wants to revisit this particular old story again suggests some real unresolved feelings she (the character) has about that event decades ago.
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One way of looking at it is that it was a transformational experience about how she viewed her father and so it has stuck with her for all these many years, but that does not really explain the need to rewrite it. A better explanation is that she is actually now embarrassed and even ashamed of herself as a girl and how she reacted to her father then. It sounds like he was having a good time in the Alps and didn’t care that the boy had no interest in his stories, so her reaction as a girl says something more about her than it does about her learning something about her father. But this really is just a tiny event that does not seem striking for its significance, so the story ultimately becomes one about a writer who, even all these decades later, is stunted in her ability to be at peace with even the smallest of failings the longest time ago. If ever there was a case for wanting to say to a character, “Oh, please! Get over it!” this might be it.
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Now having written all of that, I can now take a step back and acknowledge that Segal identifies this as a a story of a real event of her life and the opening paragraphs are hard, in that context, to read as fiction at all (although The New Yorker does claim this really is fiction). So how much of the story she presents is real from her life and how much is stuff she made up (you know, the fiction part)? I don’t know and don’t think it’s a concern for me to try to figure out. When given a work of fiction I take all of it as made up as it all is made up in the sense that the author was free to adhere to the facts of the events that inspired the story as much or as little as she liked. The claim “yeah, but that really did happen” is not a justification for anything being in the story, not if it is presented as fiction. So as far as I am concerned, my comments on the story are entirely about the fictional 90 year old writer who is the central character of a story Segal wrote and not about her at all.
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Do I still think the story is a “mess”, as I said before? No. Do I like it more than I did the first time? Yes. Do I think the story is good? No. If there were a final section added where we come back to the older writer reflecting on the revised story she has just presented and how she feels about the events of that time and even the original writing of the story, then maybe. But as it stands there is not much there.
The “what is and is not fiction” debate is, I think, one we don’t agree on, David. I see your interest in a clean dichotomy, but more and more, particularly in places like The New Yorker, black and white has turned gray. I agree I’m not always sure what that means — Knausgaard’s work is often up for fiction awards, but it is clearly a memoir — but in a case like this I’m all for it. Let Lore Segal be quasi-fictional!
Trevor, I have yet to hear any explanation of what could possibly be the gray area or how “quasi-fictional” is no more a contradiction than “quasi-pregnant”. I would very much like to hear what that definition could be. But here are a couple of thoughts on what it can’t be:
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“Quasi-fictional” means something that is partly true and partly not true. – That can’t be the definition because that describes almost every work of fiction ever written. Works of fiction very often take place in real places, in worlds where real people are named and exist along side fictional characters (eg; world leaders, actors, artists, authors, and other famous people all exist), against the backdrop of real events (eg; a WWII story). It also has been true through the history of fiction that real people appear as characters (eg; in Look Who’s Back the fictional resurrected Hitler shares the entire actual personal history with the real Hitler up to 1945), and characters and events “based on” but not identical with real ones exist (eg; Dean and Sal in On The Road).
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Quasi-fictional” means something that is mostly non-fiction, but where some bits of fiction are added to the story. – Well, in some cases that just sounds like lying about non-fiction, like when someone tells a story about something that happened to them but embellishes the story to make it more interesting. A good example of this is the film Argo, which took great pains to make sure that even the actors playing the hostages looked exactly like the real hostages did (a fact they proudly show off by showing pictures of the real people side-by-side with the actors in the closing credits) even though these are people probably no one in the audience has ever seen before, yet all the most dramatic scenes (the nearly missed phone call, the near riot in the market on an excursion, the servant who rats them out, the truck with gun mount chasing them down the runway) were all made up for the film and never happened. If that’s what quasi-fictional is then it is nothing to admire as it serves just to distort reality by lying about it.
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Any other definition of quasi-fictional would seem to me to need to be one that also says “some of this is true and some is not” like the above failed definitions, but unless there is a way the reader can know as they read which bits are real and which are made up then it would seem that the text has to fall into one of the above two categories – either it’s really just fiction and we should take the real bits as just being story (since we don’t know what or how much is real anyway) or we should dismiss it all as pernicious deception. Knausgaard’s books seem like they might be the latter. The only other possibility is that people who talk about “quasi-fiction” are just themselves confused (as your admission that you’re not sure what it means suggests) and want to be able to react to writing as fiction and non-fiction without facing the contradiction of doing that about the same work.
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In the end, an inability for anyone to be able to even offer a definition of what the “gray area” could possibly be makes me think that there isn’t any such area. But I would love to hear someone explain to me what they think that gray area is.
Have you ever read anything by W.G. Sebald? Those are not classifiable for many reasons, but also because they are not entirely fiction, not entirely non-fiction, by which I mean they don’t sit on either extreme end of a spectrum.
I think there’s a gray area when an author is exploring something personal and is using fiction as part of the process.
Trevor, first, I notice that you have not tried to offer any sort of definition of what the gray area is. That makes me continue to be suspicious that maybe no one really knows what that might mean. But you do say “not entirely fiction, not entirely non-fiction”, which describes almost all fiction ever written (as previously discussed). So I don’t know that you have not just described something that is fiction. Virtually no fiction is at the “extreme end” of being true or being made up. But if there is anything else to the idea of what this gray area might be, it seems that it might be given by the idea of “an author is exploring something personal and is using fiction as part of the process.” Is that a necessary condition for something being in this supposed gray area? Because so far as I can tell every example people have tried to give of the supposed gray area involves something like this. Your examples of Bergman and Sebald, this story by Segal, the Annie Ernaux book Paul reviewed here recently, and Knausgaard all fit that description. So I wonder if it is not possible to be in the supposed gray area if the subject is not personal or if the author is not working out their own personal issues. The fact that examples seem to only come from such narrow a possibility again makes me suspicious that such a space really exists.
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To answer your question, I have not read Sebald, but I did read (almost) the first hundred pages of Knausgaard’s first volume of My Struggle. At the time I read it, I thought it was non-fiction and quit because, frankly, I found his life unremarkable. But now, being told it is “not entirely fiction, not entirely non-fiction” I have to wonder what the point of it all from a reader’s perspective is? If that description is true, then by the end of reading all six volumes of his work no reader could possibly know anything about him. Let me repeat that: No reader could know anything about him. Why? Simple. If he writes about going to the circus as a child and seeing a clown fall off a unicycle, did that really happen? No reader can possibly know if it’s one of the real bits or one of the made up ones. Maybe the clown didn’t fall. Or maybe there was no clown on a unicycle. Or maybe he never actually went to a circus. From the reader’s perspective, none of it can be taken as reliable so the only way to engage with it is as fiction.
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If there were a circus scene in the book and you happened to meet Knausgaard and asked him why he included the circus scene in the book, he might answer “because that’s what really happened”. But for a book that is “not entirely non-fiction” that’s the wrong kind of answer. “Why” questions like this can have two types of answers: An answer that tells you the cause of something and an answer that gives you a justification for something. That the circus incident happened might be the cause of its inclusion, but given that the author has decided to feel free to make stuff up as he chooses it is not a justification for including it. Now most readers are never going to meet the author and never get to ask questions like this, but it does mean that a reader has no bearings at all to know whether a scene can be examined by wondering about the cause or the justification of its inclusion. The idea that you can’t treat the book as fiction and you can’t treat it as non-fiction means you can’t really say (or think) anything at all about it.
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Getting back to the idea that purported examples of the “gray area” are cases where authors are trying to work out something personal seems to say that this space is one that only exists for authors who are using writing as therapy. Now that’s fine for them if it works (and I have no idea if it is good therapy or not, although a lot of writers of fiction and writers of non-fiction see their writing as therapeutic without being confused about which they are writing). But that does not mean that it makes the writing make any sense to any other reader.
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I would still like to hear a suggestion (still having seen none) of what defines the supposed gray area. But any successful answer would explain why it is ok for Knausgaard to write books that a re mostly non-fiction but where he just makes up bits in places he feels like because that helps him work through something and that also explains how a reader, who has no way to tell the true bits from the fabrications should care at all that any of it is not fiction. That it seems impossible to define something that meets these criteria is, to me, telling. If a text were clear about what is fiction and what is non-fiction in it (say, by perhaps alternating chapters where the even numbered ones are fiction and the odd numbered ones non-fiction) then I think I could accept that as something that can reasonably be called not entirely fiction, not entirely non-fiction and could be treated as a hybrid work. But none of the purported examples of “quasi-fiction” are like that at all.
What I think is gray you think is fiction. I believe you have the perspective that a bit of fiction affects the whole (like a drop of food coloring in water), and you never again end up with something you consider non-fiction.
You’re statements — like “From the reader’s perspective, none of it can be taken as reliable so the only way to engage with it is as fiction” — suggest an adherence to absolutism I don’t possess. I think I see where you’re coming from up to a point. But you yourself seem to talk about a spectrum when you say virtually nothing is at the extreme end (I disagree 100% there; quite a lot is).
So I’m imagining you sitting in an arbiter’s chair, holding up a book and determining it’s either fiction or non-fiction. For many this will surely be an easy choice. But for others, you have to acknowledge, the choice isn’t always readily apparent unless you simply hold a hard and fast rule that a drop of food coloring transforms the entire thing into fiction. I wouldn’t do that nearly so quickly, and I’d seek a third category for books that play with that line between fiction and non.
I know you want a definition, another hard and fast rule that allows for easy categorization. But that’s what’s so great about Sebald and Ernaux — they defy easy categorization. Both absolutely fit into that gray area.
Still, if I’m trying to define the indefinable gray area, I’d bring up another example: memory. Memory — individual and collective — is not always factual, but, regardless of that, it can become the truth. When the author of a book is aware of this and plays with this, it’s hard for me to call their work nonfiction autobiography, because that is not even what they are going for. But because they are writing about their life or about history it is just as hard for me to call it fiction, and that’s also not really what they are going for.
By the way, I feel there is a lot of conflation going on in your comment. I never put Bergman in this quasi-fiction gray area. His films are fiction, even though his biography is interesting to consider when looking at his output and knowledge of that biography may enrich that output. So let’s not bring him into this particular discussion about the gray area. I don’t think it’s applicable, if slightly tangentially related.
Knausgaard, I think, is going for something different from Sebald and Ernaux, and I might even think it’s more along the lines of clear non-fiction. Then again, I’m not particularly concerned, and I think it is possible to engage with a work as fiction on the one hand and non-fiction on the other.
[WARNING: This is far far too long. Seriously. It’s literally only 100 words shorter than Segal’s story. Read at your own risk.]
Trevor, this response helps a lot and there are many things to reply to. Let me start with the simplest one. You say, “what I think is gray you think is fiction.” I agree with that, although I might be willing to count some examples as perhaps “problematic non-fiction”, as in a book that is being passed off as being readable (at least for the most part) as non-fiction while failing to have the necessary quality of non-fiction. But I’ll get to that.
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“But you yourself seem to talk about a spectrum when you say virtually nothing is at the extreme end (I disagree 100% there; quite a lot is).”
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Really? Give me examples of fiction that are at that extreme end. I just finished re-reading Wuthering Heights. All the characters are fictional and the supernatural element is also something that is not part of the real world, but all the natural geography of the place, the social reality of England at that time, the nature of particular types of characters and how they speak — all of that is real. One might read that book and say that they learned something about English geography or accents or social positions of the 18th century. Even a book like that is not at this 100% fiction extreme. So what is? Some fantasy (only some) is, but most general fiction is not.
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“I know you want a definition, another hard and fast rule that allows for easy categorization. But that’s what’s so great about Sebald and Ernaux — they defy easy categorization. Both absolutely fit into that gray area.”
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How can you say they “absolutely” fit unless you have some criteria for this gray area and can say they definitely fit that criteria? It is bizarre to say that you can’t really explain what a category is but you are absolutely sure of some things in it.
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“You’re statements — like “From the reader’s perspective, none of it can be taken as reliable so the only way to engage with it is as fiction” — suggest an adherence to absolutism I don’t possess.”
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I disagree. The difference we have here is not that I am an absolutist and you are not (see the last two comments). It is that I say there are two categories to put things in and you say there are three. You have made it clear that you think Knausgaard, Sebald, and Ernaux are in that third category and Bergman is not, so you must have some idea of what that category is and who does and does not belong in it even if you cannot define it. But the inability to define it does create a problem for you. Suppose you and someone else who agrees with you that there is a third category are talking about a new book. One of you thinks this new book should be categorized as fiction and the other thinks it belongs to the gray area. How can you decide which categorization is correct? Imagine it is someone arguing that Bergman is in that category. You seem to have some basis for saying that he isn’t, so there must be some clear criteria for the category. But yet it is not possible to say what that is? That seems odd.
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But there is another problem with your comment on my sentence you quoted there. Surely what I said is true, even if I were to agree that there is this gray area category. Books in that category cannot be viewed as a reliable source of information because you know going in that some of it is made up and you don’t know which parts are those. Take my example of Argo. Most of the film reports what really happened. But if someone seeing the film says “I learned that the plane was chased down the runway by a truck with a mounted gun” you would have to let that person know that no, he didn’t learn that from the film because it was something just made up for the film. But someone else who says “I learned that a CIA agent concocted a cover story about a science fiction film, created a fake Irish identity, and a cover story that the Americans he was helping escape were Canadians working on that film” you would, again, have to say no, you didn’t learn that from the film because while those things actually all are true, you had no way of knowing from seeing the film if those were among the true bits they put in it or among the made up bits. (This is similar to anyone who cites an unreliable source for information, even if that source happens to be correct on this occasion.) If Knausgaard says that some of the things in his books are made up, then you don’t know from reading his book anything about whether or not he went to the circus (to again use my earlier example). If you think you do know things about him from reading the books, then you are deluding yourself by willfully forgetting that some of it really is made up and he doesn’t say which bits those are.
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It does seem that you think that if a sufficiently high portion of a book is true and only a very small bit is made up that it fits in the gray area, even if you can’t or just don’t want to try to quantify that further. Which I suppose might mean there is more than one gray areas, another one being between the first gray area and fiction when you’re not sure which of those two categories it fits into. It all seems such a mess. But let me offer this strange attempt to be precise about the gray area. Surely you would think that a book that is 95% true and only 5% made up belongs in the gray area and not in the fiction category, right? (And if you don’t like those numbers I am willing to go with 99% vs 1% even. And if you want to resist even that pair of numbers, it really does become a complete mystery what the gray area is for you.) Great. So with any book you think belongs in the gray area how do you know (how can you possibly know) that it’s non-fiction enough to be counted as such? It seems strange to say you think you know that a book that you are told is at least partly fictional is non-fictional enough to fit this gray area you have created when you are not told how much is made up.
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The ultimate question for you or anyone who thinks there is a gray area is this: How sure are you that writers like Knausgaard, Sebald, and Ernaux have at least a similar enough conception of what this gray area is to your conception of what the gray are is (especially when none of you can actually give a definition of it) to be confident that any of their books should be counted as being in the gray area? What if they fictionalize a lot more than you are comfortable with calling the gray area because they just have a bigger gray area than you do? What if everyone who thinks there is a gray area conceives of it differently? This gray area seems not only a zone of self-deception about what is true and what is not, but opens the door to mass confusion.
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But my final question about the gray area might be this: Why do you think we need the gray area? when I read a fully fictional biography (Margaret Laurence’s great novel The Stone Angel comes immediately to mind), Part of what makes it a great book is the biography being believable as a real life, even though it is not. It does not matter in the end if the author made it all up, based it partly on the lives of herself or people she knew, or based it very closely on her own life. The question of how true it is doesn’t really matter. So with Knausgaard, given that I (and most people) literally know absolutely nothing about him other than what I (or others) think we learn from reading his My Struggle series, how does it affect my reading to think of it as true? My only answers to this are all negative: An author of a gray area book gets to use the “but that really happened” as a defense against any criticism of the plot or characters, yet also feels free to fool the reader about his what his life is like without fear of being accused of deception because “but some of it is made up”.
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In the end, an author who tells you that some of the book is made up, even if they assure you it is a very small part, is warning you not to take the book as fact. That is all I need to know to take the book as fiction.
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[PS – I decided not delete the section where I comment on your sentence: Memory — individual and collective — is not always factual, but, regardless of that, it can become the truth. I know my writing reads as terse enough at the best of times that I was pretty sure I could not reply to that without sounding downright rude. But the gist of it was that, no, something that is not factual cannot become true, not ever, and a claim like this sounds like giving up on the idea of there ever being any truth and instead there just is a variety of … ahem … “alternative facts”. Ok I better stop there.]
I wouldn’t have taken it personally, David. And I’m far from the first to venture that direction. Let’s throw César Aira into the mix of writers who play with the line between fiction and nonfiction, who play with it enough to create a gray area.
Here is what I said when I reviewed The Linden Tree:
I think we are talking past each other, so I’m really not sure there’s much utility to continuing on. I feel you know where I’m coming from for the most part, and I think I see where you are coming from. You probably disagree!
Trevor, I thought I knew what you were saying … until this last comment of yours. Previously I agreed with you that what you call the gray area I count as fiction, but this last comment makes me think that that is entirely wrong and what you count as the gray area I count as non-fiction. So I am now more confused than ever. Let me try to explain (and I will try to be brief).
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Suppose you read a non-fiction book that is a biography of a historical figure. The author does a faithful job of thoroughly researching the subject and presents her best attempt to accurately depict the story of that person’s life. But then, in the years after the book is published, more information comes to light to show that there are a number of significant things this author got wrong. In light of that, the book is still non-fiction. It does not get transformed into fiction. Yes, it might no longer be a reliable source of information on the historical figure it is about, but it’s still a non-fiction book. To read it as fiction is to make a basic category mistake.
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Now suppose instead of the book being a biography of a historical figure, it is an autobiography. The author has faithfully attempted to present the events of her life as accurately as possible, as well as her recollection allows. But then suppose subsequently people who are discussed in the book come forward and say they disagree with the characterization of events in the book. Suppose further that this leads to documents or some other concrete evidence that the author did get some events wrong. Again, that does not make the book transform into fiction. It’s just non-fiction with some errors.
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Now suppose we have a case just like the last one, but going into writing the book the author is aware that others might remember events differently and aware that memory can be a fragile thing so knows that it is possible, even likely, that she misremembers some events. The resulting book is still 100% non-fiction. It still is a fully faithful accounting of how she now remembers the events of her life, even if some of those memories are inaccurate.
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Now take a case like Aira’s. Suppose the writer tells us both what how he remembers things and then tells us about the evidence that these memories might be wrong. That is still 100% non-fiction. It faithfully presents all the evidence to the reader. Even if it is clear that the memories are inaccurate, the author telling us those memories is still telling us something true about himself now: “This is how I do, in fact, remember it”.
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There is no fiction in any of these examples. To think that there is fiction in any of these examples sets an impossible and absurd standard for what counts as non-fiction, a standard that probably nothing ever written meets.
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So let’s go back to Knausgaard for a moment. My question about his My Struggle books is this: Does he write anything in those books that he presents as fact, as events that actually happened, that he knows as certainly as anyone can that they did not happen? Is there anything like the circus story of a clown falling off the unicycle where he would say, “Yeah, that never happened. I just made that whole story up for the book.” If yes, then the book is fiction. If no, then it is non-fiction. The precarious nature of memory is irrelevant to the determination of category. If it were, then the category “non-fiction” would not exist.
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So there you have it. I now know less about what you think the gray area is than I ever did and no longer know whether or not Knausgaard’s books contain any fictional element at all.
David, I agree. Each of those is nonfiction. The books I’m talking about are not your typical non-fiction biographies and autobiographies, which are always going to have errors and areas where reasonable minds can disagree on events. The books I’m talking about deliberately play with fiction. They are inventing, on purpose, to make a point, sometimes a point about memory, sometimes a point about the larger issues underlying the simple event and its effects. They put in fictional aspects, deliberately, into what otherwise appears to be non-fiction. I don’t know about Knausgaard. To me it does appear he’s doing a convention, albeit long-form, autobiography. And yet he’s been up for fiction awards, so others who know more may thinks he’s playing. But I don’t hold him up as an example of what I’m talking about.
More of a sketch than a story and not a particularly layered or intriguing sketch at that. The meta level that opens the piece doesn’t really bear much fruit. I liked Segal’s previous story in The New Yorker, “Ladies’ Lunch,” as that one had a lot of wit and flair and really captured a reality. There was subtlety and nuance and the characters felt well-realized. This is more like a journal entry and the take-home isn’t a particularly profound one. It avoids cheap nostalgia but the reminiscence has little real weight.
Ok Trevor, I think I’m clear on what you’re saying now. I have a few questions and one comment to add. First the questions:
1. Presumably authors and publishers don’t want to get caught up in some sort of James Frey A Million Little Pieces type controversy, so if they have a book that fits in the gray area they probably want people to know it contains at least some fictional elements. My question is how do they go about doing that? Perhaps you might be able to say how you came to know that books that you know of that for you are in the gray area are, in fact, in that area as opposed to being simply fiction or non-fiction.
2. With books in the gray area, do authors or publishers generally let readers know how much of the book is fiction?
3. Do they generally indicate which parts are the fictional ones and which are not?
4. Do they generally offer an explanation for why they included the fictional parts that they chose to include as opposed to just reporting the facts?
My comment is this: Unless the answers to the middle two questions are yes and yes, then it would be foolish for any reader to use such a book as a credible source for the truth of any of the claims in the book. Any time anyone in any context says “I’m going to tell you a bunch of things, most of which are true, but some of which I just made up – and I won’t tell you which ones and how many are made up” they are telling you not to rely on them as a reliable source. Which is not to say the book isn’t worth reading. It still might be worth reading. But only as fiction.
Just quickly, the differences between categories like creation nonfiction, biographical fiction, and memoir are slight and subtle. Short of researched non-fiction that contains an index and a bibliography of sources, I think it’s fair to assume that everything else falls more towards having at least some elements of fiction. If a work is based on an author’s memory, we should assume it’s got some degree of bias, or at least the fallibility of memory (jjust like a documnentary is non-fiction but contains those as well). Neuroscience has shown us that you don’t actually remember something, you remember your last memory of that thing. Oliver Sacks has gone so far as to say that memory IS fiction.
So any discussion of the slight differences between, say, Joan Didion’s nonfiction, and a work like Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and Thoreau’s Walden, is a pretty inside-baseball question when you start to talk about how academic departments or publishing entities categorize things. Is Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas nonfiction? Social commentary? Memoir? Semi-fictional narrative? All of the above? I think the James Frey controversy is instructive. Mainstream books with mainstream readers, like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild or Jeannette Wall’s The Last Castle, would be disappointed if some of that stuff was revealed to be straight-up concocted, but it’s almost ALL a gray area. Heck, people are still arguing over whether or not Shakespeare wrote all of “Shakespeare” or if Homer was one person or many, a man or a woman, blind or not. What is Philip Roth’s Patrimony? What is Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know For Sure? What is John Updike’s Self-Consciousness? Does it matter? See Jonathan Lethem’s wonderful essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” on just how blurry the line between fake and real can be in all things literary.
Trevor,
Lore Segal’s novel, “Her First American” is wonderful. And it’s interesting to read it alongside of Horace Cayton Jr.’s autobiography “Long Old Road”–Cayton who was with Segal for some 5 years is the model for Carter Bayoux. I also think it criminal that Segal’s books for children “Tell me a Mitzi” and “Tell me a Trudy” are out of print.
The story is brought home in the closing “if I ever ask you for anything, you don’t have to listen, because nothing is necessary except this.” The value of percievebly meaningless walks with parents become reveled, irreplaceable memories. This is the knowledge of a 90 year old looking back, whispering to a ghost what they wish they understood at the time.
Passionate feeling, love, loss, childbirth, exertion, beauty, prayer, anguish, exhaustion, memory, guilt, embarrassment, sun, shade, food, pleasure, revision, re-vision, expectation, experience, gee, is it fiction? Is it too short? Who cares?
Ps: I still have my kids’ copy of “Tell me a Mitzi.” It has the same lack of definition, and the same wealth of defined experience as this painful, lovely story.
Madwomanintheattic, I’m so glad I came across your comment at the very end. This short and (bitter)sweet breakfast read brought tears to my eyes…and I didn’t even know the author’s background. May we learn to let go of our regrets by 90.