By Edward Nawotka
By now, it’s well known that memory — in particular as exercised by lying memoirists and some easily misled nonfiction writers — is fallible.
What’s more, in today’s lead editorial by Shira Nayman, the novelist and psychologist notes that “remembering always involves dark patches of obscuring; it is, in its essence, a kind of personal chiaroscuro — the illuminated spots of recalled happenings, feelings, events, combining with the shadowy bits of the forgotten into a distinctive pattern that is uniquely our own. For all of us, a healthy orientation towards the past involves a delicate balance between remembering and forgetting, with subtle and ongoing adjustments.”
This ultimately suggests, at least to me, that a work of fiction can be “more true” than a work of nonfiction. Do you agree?
Read Nayman’s editorial and let us know what you think in the comments. And, if it comes to mind, please offer some examples from your own reading life where you feel fiction has captured the essence of something better than a nonfiction account.
4 Comments
This is actually a topic I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. A great example of a novel being truer than what actually happened is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which is about soldiers in Vietnam. O’Brien writes himself into the story and constantly says “all of this is true, but none of it actually happened”, while at the same time creating a vivid account of what it’s like to be a solider in Vietnam for the reader.
Ursula LeGuin has also stated (in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness) that novelists lie so that they can convey the truth. I think she’s right–oftentimes it’s easier to recognize ourselves, our flaws and our triumphs through a made-up person than it is to face those things head on in the mirror or in a memoir or biography. It’s easier on our brains to deal with things subconsciously and indirectly!
It can often be said that whatever a historian says is colored by his personal approach to writing. I cam currently working on a novel of this ilk, and my historical researches have led me to conclude that the history books are not always right. Scholars will argue that the history has to jive with actual events. I couch my fictional characters in the context of real history, or as close as I can approximate it, based on my knowledge of human nature. The fact is that history is not all fancy costumes and affairs of court. The peasantry are never taken into account in history books. We read more about the royalty than we ever will about the common people. That said, I think I have managed to include them anyway.
History is written by the victors, but it’s often the accounts of the vanquished that are more interesting and enlightening. Once you’ve lost, you’ve got a lot less to lose.
A wonderful writer friend, Rochelle Gurstein, pointed out that “how we make other people’s suffering/misfortunes/nightmares come alive and stay alive” cuts to the heart of what “eighteenth-century moralists thought of as the essence of sympathy.” If truth involves understanding others, then fiction is a wonderful medium, given that very often fiction is striving most of all to delve deeply into human experience, in all its complexity and variety. It is a rare non-fiction book that allows us really to feel the textures of other people’s subjective realities the way fiction does.
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[...] DISCUSS: Can a Novel Be “More True” than a Work of Nonfiction? [...]
[...] Yesterday, for Memorial Day, Publishing Perspectives ran an article by novelist/psychologist Shira Nayman on remembering and how it differs for those who fight war and for those for whom war is fought. PP usually runs a discussion post along with features, and this one addresses whether or not a novel can be truer than a memoir because of the peculiar way in which memory works–something I’ve talking about here before, especially in my post on Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (a book that touches on some of the same themes Nayman does in her post). So, I recommend you check it out and comment, or discuss it on Twitter with hashtag #ppdiscuss! Read the article here, and view the discussion here. [...]