On 'Creative Nonfiction'
Nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction, Noncreative Nonfiction, etc.
1969: I had better tell you where I am, and why. There are a great many things to tell of what was happening then and what had happened before, which led up to then, but now I must describe what I saw when I came. A spectre is haunting Europe. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The city, in brief, where all become drunken on the fine old air of freedom. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place. This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. Human architects create structures that are bigger than any tree and sometimes, like the great cathedrals and mosques, are of great beauty. But a cathedral or a mosque is built: it does not grow. The beautiful October day was fading and the leaves were falling from the trees in the avenue as I walked through it. The old man didn’t have much to say about Henry David Thoreau but a man talking to his son has to have something to say, so he told the boy stories. The grey fox climbs like a cat. He goes up leaning cedars. He hides in the forks of oaks. These are tentative theories, Father, not downright assertions. Slogans, graffiti in public toilets, on walls in the street, poems, and dirty jokes, headlines. I will imagine that the sky, air, earth, colours, shapes, sounds and everything external to me are nothing more than the creatures of dreams. I don’t know if I’m after truth or hanging on to its dwindling half-life, or if it matters. We know we are deluded, but the strange thing is that this delusion is necessary, if only temporarily. It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. And the world whistled in his ears.
Ever since I first read the phrase – I don’t remember exactly where or when, but definitely online – I’ve been unsure what Creative Nonfiction means; how it differs, both in the abstract and in text, from standard nonfiction. As a term, it’s a tautology. Its use conjures the idea of a noncreative nonfiction (which then also suggests a whole host of categories; creative poetry, noncreative novellas; the Cambridge Dictionary Online offers “creative music” as an example of a tautological phrase, because what would noncreative music be?) The coupling also draws suspicion, as though somewhere, there is a lie. Because what exactly is ‘creative’ qualifying?
There are not many set definitions, but Wikipedia offers a summary: “Creative nonfiction (also known as literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction or literary journalism or verfabula) is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which is also rooted in accurate fact but is not written to entertain based on prose style.” Of course, an instruction manual, or a list of ingredients on a meal are not ‘written to entertain’, but what corner of modern nonfiction writing is free from use of ‘literary styles’?
In the introduction to The New Journalism anthology, Tom Wolfe tracks the historical and intellectual progress of the period, one that establishes itself as the superficial predecessor to creative nonfiction:
‘in the early 1960s a curious new notion, just hot enough to inflame the ego had begun to intrude into the tiny confines of the feature […] It was in the nature of a discovery. This discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would…read like a novel. Like a novel, if you get the picture.’
Though initially met with disdain from critics, New Journalism managed to slip the novel into reportage, allowing writers to ‘excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally.’ Wolfe goes on to call his first attempt at this new style, ‘a garage sale, that piece…vignettes, odds and ends of scholarship, bits of memoir, short bursts of sociology, apostrophes, epithets, moans, cackles, anything that came into my head.’ This, it seems to me, is the premise that creative nonfiction has picked up, like a baton (Lee Gutkind, editor of the Creative Nonfiction Magazine: ‘the primary goal of the creative nonfiction writer is to communicate information, just like a reporter, but to shape it in a way that reads like fiction.’) The trouble here, though, is that New Journalism’s techniques, its relaxing of form strictures and of literary hierarchy, have since been adopted into nonfiction writing and become the norm. The baton was not passed, at least not textually; it was absorbed. To tell a story within nonfiction, to describe character like a novelist, to explore a scene as if in a short story; metaphor, simile, natural dialogue, first person narrative - these are now, more than ever, the common tools readily available to any writer.
Journalism, though, is only one stream feeding the body of creative nonfiction; Wolfe himself admits that his generation weren’t the first to merge forms. According to its Wikipedia page, creative nonfiction also encompasses ‘memoir, diary, travel writing, food writing […] chronicle, personal essays, other hybrid essays, as well as some biography and autobiography.’ Didion, Baldwin, Barthes; Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thomas De Quincey, Anne Carson; the entire writing staff of the New Yorker, Annie Ernaux, John McPhee, The Paris Review Daily – in effect, nonfiction. For example, every single line in my opening paragraph has been sampled from a text that would fall under the above parameters of creative nonfiction: Darwin’s entangled bank, Descartes’ demon, Jia Tolentino’s ecstasies, Colin Tudge’s cathedrals and trees. My collage above would both be made up of creative nonfiction work, and become it, and so what the prefix apparently serves as is a second carrier bag, just in case the first one splits. It suggests that if our reading is allowed to fall freely, we will lose track of where everything should fit – and how are we supposed to enjoy our nonfiction if we can’t remember which shelf we found it on?
At least part of the problem is that, as a term, creative nonfiction does not look nor feel natural. ‘New Journalism’ arrived, as far as Wolfe knows, from nowhere, and like so many of these titles (as with Impressionism), was often used to patronise. Apparently nobody knows who coined ‘creative nonfiction’ either, but it bears all the markings of the academy. Its applicability to the university lexicon, where the norm is the academic essay, is easy to see. In this relationship, creative nonfiction is looser, free enough to contain subjective truths, scraps, poetic language, to step outside of theory. But if so, what is ‘Creative Writing’ doing, as a field? If you can study creative nonfiction within creative writing, perhaps one of these tautologies can go, because how creative of a cul-de-sac can writers be driven into?
What I suppose I’m asking, then, is who does the term serve? Who does it help? My suspicion is that it does a disservice to both a reading audience, and to writers. In my experience of working at a bookshop, there was the truth and there was made up. People came looking for a crime novel or a true crime thriller, a memoir or a romance; WWII history, or a spy novel; a Tudor novel or a biography. If, while scanning their books at the till, I had mentioned their book was ‘creative nonfiction’, they would have assumed I meant made up. Instead of perhaps liberating a work, the category pre-empts reader response; the prefix puts a premium on ‘standard’ nonfiction, as if there is a difference in fidelity. In his essay, ‘Making Meaning’, Garth Greenwell discusses how limiting it can be to use ‘relevance’ as a literary barometer.
‘When I use relevance as a filter for determining what books to read, I’m failing to make myself available for an authentic encounter with otherness, something genuine art always offers. I’m presuming that I can guess, from the barest plot summary, whether a book will be useful in my life. But how can I know what I will find relevant about a work before I have submitted myself to the experience? I don’t think we are likely to be transformed by art if we try to determine that encounter in advance. Part of the vulnerability necessary for transformation is the recognition that I am, to a great extent, a mystery to myself. How could I know what I need?’
Perhaps, like with Greenwell’s relevance, creative nonfiction has become more popular as a term because of internet culture – especially since most new ‘CNF’ is published online; a response to constant information and news, to the art sterilising word, ‘content’, and digital data. But this comes down to the difference between facts and truth. Material that we constitute as ‘fact’ – news at its untouched base, scientific analysis, questions answered on Google – are chunks of raw material. And if that is all we ever needed, we could understand say, France, via weather report and chronology. France as fact. But I don’t believe that facts alone are what we mean by ‘nonfiction’; instead, we mean France as truth. We mean Annie Ernaux’s France, ‘[i]mages of tanks and rubble appear and blur with others of old people who have died, handmade Mother’s Day cards, the Bécassine albums, the First Communion retreat […] the time she dressed up as a music-hall dancer, the curly perm, the ankle socks.’ If all we needed were facts, Virginia Woolf could simply have asked for a room.
Nonfiction has always been history as truth, and I believe that all ‘creative’ does is hang a cynical question mark over those truths. And I should be clear, this isn’t an effort to deny that the form is moving through a change like New Journalism; in fact, I think it has to be, given the influence of social media; I think that in the face of constantly disposable information, the truths written in nonfiction are both more integral, and harder to maintain. I am simply suspicious of a term that, accidentally or otherwise, delegitimises truth as it is written; I believe that we can do better. What we need is not another genre, especially one without tangible meaning. And given modern nonfiction’s constant experimentation of style and subject, the trial and error, the dialogue between memory and text, the individual and the collective, there seems to be now, perhaps more than ever, no better definition than essay: a form of constant renewal, perfect for all of these infinite, individual truths.