For the most wild, yet homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. –E.A. Poe, “The Black Cat”
Laura Runyan, an MFA Fiction graduate and occasional visitor to this little blog, has taken immense pleasure in reminding me every now and then that my attempt to neatly categorize much of literary fiction as “autobiographical” is terribly misguided.
When I first made this assertion, she reacted as if I had insulted not only herself, but all respectable Creative Writing Programs and even literary fiction itself.
Oh the idea that literary fiction—the holy craft of literary imagination—would be, or could be, or would dare to be, merely thinly disguised memoir! The sacred author reduced from architect, researcher, scientist, god of creativity to—a mere child with a diary! How dare I make such an assertion!
Let me re-assert my point. Laura’s objection rests on nothing but authorial vanity.
Let me go even further. All fiction is non-fiction.
And by non-fiction we mean just this: the simple, naked truth. And the simple, naked truth is that all discourse, whether it be labeled fiction or non-fiction, is a human talking—and this act itself is nothing if not an autobiographical act.
The truth is this: We don’t read stories. We don’t read books. We don’t read poems. We don’t read philosophy. We read a person.
The modernist/writing workshop agenda: “show, don’t tell” is a false belief that the person can hide behind things like “character development” and “research” and “invention,” in which discourse magically turns into reality, or heightened reality.
Characters (people) do not exist in fiction. There is only one ‘character’ in fiction: the person who is writing the fiction.
In addition, the whole idea of “narrative” is falsified, as well, as “let’s see what happens next” is the false magic which replaces a well reasoned discourse or well-reasoned argument.
The good argument is good, whether we know the ending, or not. In fact, the good argument finds its end in its beginning.
Narrative, however, is supposedly best when it surprises us—which is another way of saying:
A good narrative is a bad argument.
A true surprise is random, but no good argument is random; a Narrative, however, filled with true surprises, pleases as ‘exciting’ narrative, but exists thereby as a flawed and wretched Argument.
Fiction chases away Philosophy.
Plato was right: there is an ancient quarrel between the Poets and the Philosophers—and discourse of all kinds is autobiographical, and neither poetry (fiction) nor philosophy (non-fiction) can hide from the “Living Voice” by tricks of “craft,” which is just another word for the deceptions of fiction’s narrative surprises, or the tricks of “writing” which characterizes the worst modern philosophers (Derrida, etc).
Recall Derrida’s agenda: to attack Plato, while favoring Writing (Text) over (Living) Speech.
So what does it mean to say that we read, whether fiction or non-fiction, a person?
Aren’t we reading ‘craft’ that is executed well, or not? Aren’t we reading facts that are true, or not? Are we really reading a person?
Yes. We are reading a person.
This is the fact, the truth, of everything we read.
A person who is either tricking us, or not.
To read Plato is not to read a pretty good book.
To read Plato is to experience the living voice of an extraordinary human being—of which there is no substitute in any other book.
Autobiographical? Absolutely.
