Participatory Journalism and Creative Nonfiction
FOR MOST OF OUR nonfiction reading, we make one basic assumption: the author remains detached from the material she presents. I don’t mean that she doesn’t have an opinion or strong feelings about her subject matter. Everyone has those, writers included, and sometimes those opinions are strong. Nevertheless, we expect a certain amount of objectivity in our nonfiction. The genre demands a degree of evenhandedness. How do I know this? Because of the number of reviews I have read over the years that use the term “evenhanded” approvingly. We don’t really want a biographer to have a thumb on the scale. And that goes for the preponderance of nonfiction works.
Except when it doesn’t.
There is a class of nonfiction writing in which the subjectivity of the writer is part of the story. We might call this class “Heisenbergian” nonfiction, but I doubt it would catch on. Werner Heisenberg, you may recall, gave us the Uncertainty Principle, which states, among other things, that the results of an experiment (we’re talking the atomic level here) are colored by the position of the observer. The writers of this sort of prose begin by admitting that the observer in this particular field of endeavor is never neutral—not really—and from there move to a position that acknowledges and even celebrates the subjectivity of the author. There are two sorts of writing that fall under this heading of subjective nonfiction: participatory journalism (which breaks down into what was dubbed “New Journalism” and more broadly immersive journalism) and creative nonfiction.
“New Journalism”
THERE WAS A TIME when a reporter inserting himself into a story was anathema. Or a news anchor. When Walter Cronkite said at the end of every broadcast, “And that’s the way it is,” you could be bloody well sure that it was just that way. News articles were written as if from on high, an Olympian view with as little personality as possible. That was not, however, exactly the ethos for the rock-n-roll era. The birth of the New Journalism came roughly a year after the Beatles’ first appearance in America, its heyday running more or less from “yeah, yeah, yeah” to the snarls and screams of the Sex Pistols. There’s nothing causal going on here, it being hard to imagine Truman Capote or Tom Wolfe rocking out to Led Zeppelin and The Clash. Rather, both are symptoms of a historical moment of resistance to accepted norms and constraints. Why should musicians want to break barriers and writers be satisfied with the status quo? In any case, a group of writers with an abundance of personality began inserting themselves into the stories they wrote. The effect was stunning. Readers felt they had never seen anything quite like this.
The actual approach was, if fairly new, not entirely novel. James Agee, for example, had moved along this road toward more personal reporting in writing about Southern sharecroppers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). As a system, no matter how ragged, though, this movement was revolutionary. Truman Capote, in what may well be the first instance of the New Journalism, inserted himself into the action in In Cold Blood (1965) as “Capote.” He went on to decree that, in what he called the “Nonfiction Novel,” use of the first person should be avoided. Well, ain’t that just the way? You get a brand-new, shiny literary form, all full of possibilities and freedom, and the first thing somebody wants to do is start imposing rules and limitations. Norman Mailer both followed and subverted that edict in The Armies of the Night (1968), his account of the 1967 anti–Vietnam War protests at the Pentagon, calling himself “Mailer” while also taking a star turn upon the stage. Capote, by the way, knew he was being mocked, and the event produced an enmity between the two that lasted until Capote’s death. Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels had appeared in 1967 and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test would appear a mere three months after Mailer’s book. Taken together, they form the four holy books of the New Journalism.
Woodward and Bernstein, by contrast, are not writing New Journalism; they are pursuing journalism in its traditional sense. The difference? In some ways, it involves the impulse toward art; of these other four writers, only Thompson has shaky bona fides as a fiction writer (the line between autobiography and fiction being very unstable), although Wolfe came to novels later than either Capote or Mailer. All four are concerned in their work with artistic impulse of their narratives. Reading All the President’s Men cover to cover, however, one will not identify any concern with the artistic possibilities of the book. These are reporters going about their work, even when their work has become part of the story. The other difference between the two types of writing: the New Journalists all work their way inside the subject of their reportage while reveling in their subjectivity. Wolfe, for instance, all but vanishes into the story he is telling, so that some people, such as Jay Cantor in his review in The Harvard Crimson, see him as essentially a cheerleader for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ drug-fueled mayhem. Woodward and Bernstein, by contrast, remain stubbornly outside and objective; they have no interest in becoming part of the sleaze-pool that was the Nixon political apparatus. Still, like New Journalists, they exploit the devices of fiction—point of view, use of scenes, reliance on dialogue, use of telling details—to make their point. What they achieve is not art so much as a very high level of craft, which is to say that their work is a triumph not of vision but of technique, by which they can manage two tracks of information: the story and its revelation.
Not that these participatory journalists are doing the same thing, any more than The Sun Also Rises and Ulysses, both ostensibly modernist novels, can be said to have the same ends or methods. The one constant is that the reporter—and here we must include Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Terry Southern, and numerous others—records his or her presence as an observer/participant in the events of the story.
We might as well start with the one who is least like, well, anybody. Hunter S. Thompson crashed the party with Hell’s Angels (1967), but his most famous paragraph is the opening of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971):
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . .” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.
It takes precisely one sentence to realize that this experience, this writing, is not going to be normal. The book is a drug-fueled romp through the scene in Vegas: loud, profane, crude, hilarious. That part is certain, but not everything is. For instance, what is it? It started out as a magazine assignment (Sports Illustrated initially hired him to provide a two-hundred-fifty-word caption and photo for the Mint 400 motorcycle race), but that largely melted away in the, er, research process. The main character is called “Raoul Duke,” but when that person is shown a photo of himself, he identifies it as Hunter Thompson. There is much that is true in the book but much that is fictionalized. For a while, it was seen as an extreme example of gonzo journalism, a term a colleague provided to Thompson that he quickly embraced. More recently, a mild consensus has formed that it is a novel, a roman à clef or novel in which a thin veneer of fiction has been cast over real-life personages.
And there lies the problem, or perhaps problems, with Hunter Thompson. His “journalism” is so gonzo that it veers away from reality with considerable regularity, yet other elements are grounded in truth of one sort or another. That’s item A. Item B is that his brand of New Journalism centers on his own consciousness and experience. External events fade into the background, giving way to his madcap adventures. Whether or not his book is nonfiction or novel, we should probably place Thompson at one pole of the immersive journalism continuum. No one could get further out than he did.
Toward the opposite pole, if not all the way there, is Tom Wolfe. He may not exactly be Emerson’s transparent eyeball—he wears suits, after all, and seems physically present in the action—but he does his best to merge with the scenes he describes. What Wolfe does with prose in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is remarkable. No journalist before him had tried quite so assiduously to capture the inner lives of his subjects. Indeed, a first principle of journalism is that we can only know surfaces, what people do and how they behave. From that, we may infer interior lives, but no writer can burrow into the mind of another except in fiction. Wolfe’s response? Maybe, but we can figure out a lot from how they sound. And he does, indeed, figure out a great deal.
The book begins with Wolfe’s introductory, jouncy ride into the San Francisco world of the Merry Pranksters in a Day-Glo painted pickup truck with shot suspension. His fellow travelers are a kid called Cool Breeze, who has some legal troubles (a recurring theme) and a black peaked hat best suited to the well-dressed gnome; a Mexican-American young woman, Black Maria; and Lois Jennings, the girlfriend and later wife of Stewart Brand, who is driving and who will become known for the counterculture magazine Whole Earth Catalog (1968–72) and then for various visionary activities in the realm of electronics. The passengers are all riding in the pickup’s bed. Lois is firing a cap pistol that looks exactly like a Colt .45, picking off “marshmallows,” their term for ordinary people. Black Maria has just told Wolfe that he seems too “solid” to be a Pisces. This kicks off a set piece of Wolfean free association:
But I know she means stolid. I am beginning to feel stolid. Back in New York City, Black Maria, I tell you, I am even known as something of a dude. But somehow a blue silk blazer with a big tie with clowns on it and . . . a . . . pair of shiny lowcut black shoes don’t set them all to doing the Varsity Rag in the head world of San Francisco. Lois picks off the marshmallows one by one; Cool Breeze ascends into the innards of his gnome’s hat; Black Maria, a Scorpio herself, rummages through the Zodiac; Stewart Brand winds it through the streets, paillettes explode—and this is nothing special, just the usual, the usual in the head world of San Francisco, just a little routine messing up the mind of the citizenry en route, nothing more than psyche food for beautiful people, while giving some guy from New York a lift to the Warehouse to wait for the Chief, Ken Kesey, who is getting out of jail.
This is not Wolfe’s native style. Rather, he is attempting to render the emotional and psychic realities of his subjects. I described this earlier as a version of Flaubert’s “free indirect speech,” a mediated (by a narrator) version of the character’s thoughts; we can think of that as the way a character would speak about herself if she had the ability to step outside herself and bring her inner consciousness along. In this case, that freely indirect rendering is a group effort—a little bit Cool Breeze, a little bit Black Maria, a little bit Lois Jennings, but probably not Brand since he is alone in the cab and has not yet conversed with Wolfe.
We don’t have to wonder if this is Wolfe’s intention: he tells us it is in an author’s note at the end of the book. “I have tried,” he says, “not only to tell what the Pranksters did but to re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it. I don’t think their adventure can be understood without that.” Indeed, in 1968, when the first edition appeared, the reality of the “head world,” as he calls it, of the Pranksters was as remote as the moon, on which humans had not yet set foot. To merely record their actions in standard journalistic prose would have been to present them as space aliens, although it could be argued that presenting them in their own private language merely situates them in a different version of space. This examination of closed social groups—the Hell’s Angels, the Pranksters, the Apollo astronauts, presidential campaigns, groups of Wise Guys—turns out to be something at which the New Journalists prove to be quite adept. Their methods seem well suited to ferreting out what is scary or amusing or strange or shocking—in short, what is fascinating—about their subjects.
Problem Child
A LITTLE WHILE AGO, I mentioned that a number of writers get lumped together under the rubric “New Journalism.” One of that number is Joan Didion, whose relationship to that movement seems especially tenuous. In fact, her relationship to any label seems problematic. Like the New Journalists, she places herself and her reporting inside the stories she tells. And much of her work has indeed appeared in “journals”: Life, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Review of Books, Holiday, Vogue. What she was doing in those early years, moreover, was distinctly new, so both parts of the name are covered, yet her work seems to fit uncomfortably, if at all, beside that of Capote and Wolfe and Thompson. While she employs certain techniques of fiction in her work, they seem to add up to something less than the sustained narratives of those other writers. Much of her work, in fact, gets classified as essay, although that moniker also seems to fall short. And critical responses sometimes attack her for not pushing any of the genre buttons cleanly. In her 1980 review, “Joan Didion: Only Disconnect,” Barbara Grizzuti Harrison called her a “neurasthenic Cher,” reliant on “a bag of tricks” for her effects and writing only, whatever the ostensible subject, about herself. This review itself became a source of controversy and a point of annoyance for Didion for decades after its appearance.
That review appeared in the wake of Didion’s 1979 The White Album, a collection of journalistic essays from and about the late 1960s. The title work, which kicks off the book, was named by Publishers Weekly in 2013 as one of the ten most important essays since 1950. But here’s the thing about that designation: if it is an essay, it isn’t one that Ralph Waldo Emerson or Joseph Addison and Richard Steele would recognize. Handled in a disjointed, pointillist style, the piece moves dizzyingly from figure to figure and moment to moment to capture the gestalt of California circa 1968–69, from The Doors’ third album to the Tate-LaBianca murders with side trips to Black Panther Huey Newton in jail awaiting trial and San Francisco State University, site of demonstrations in support of Newton, and to fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s apartment and to Charles Manson “family” member Linda Kasabian at a women’s correctional facility where she was held in protective custody ahead of her testimony against other members involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders to a party at Didion’s where Janis Joplin showed up, brought by unknown persons to, well, a lot of places, sometimes for only moments. All of this is related in Didion’s peculiar, Hemingway-esque flat-affect prose, as if she has been leveled out by Valium or whatever her preferred antianxiety drug may have been at the moment. This is the quality that Grizzuti Harrison calls “neurasthenic” and that English novelist Martin Amis more charitably describes as “listless.” How much of this is Didion and how much a part of her strategy to depict the anxiety, paranoia, and sense of impending doom in the California she knew then is hard to pin down. Here is her conclusion to the highly inconclusive recording session of The Doors, who had waited a long while for singer Jim Morrison to make an appearance, although that would prove anticlimactic:
Morrison sat down again on the leather couch and leaned back. He lit a match. He studied the flame awhile and then very slowly, very deliberately lowered it to the fly of his black vinyl pants. [Keyboardist Ray] Manzarek watched him. The girl who was rubbing Manzarek’s shoulders did not look at anyone. There was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever. It would be some weeks before The Doors finished recording this album. I did not see it through.
We can notice a couple of things here. Besides, that is, these being some strange cats. One is the reliance on short, declarative sentences with few modifiers. Very Hemingway. The second is that there is almost no rise in emotional temperature. While in this instance we may conclude that drugs are involved, that flatness is evident in nearly every vignette in the essay. Even when the characters are animated, the narration levels them out, as with that “ever” in “no one was going to leave the room, ever.” It carries a kind of deadening finality, adding to the affectless quality of the experience. And third, her closing sentence, “I did not see it through,” brings things back to her. We never know what her purpose had been in being present, who had sent her or who had admitted her or what the endgame might have been, had she seen it through. The only thing that matters, finally, is less the image of this band than her perception of that image.
This passage is less about its ostensible subject than it is about the experience of the witness-scribe, Joan Didion. In that regard, if not necessarily others, “The White Album” resembles other New Journalistic efforts. Is she one of them? Maybe, but . . . But maybe it doesn’t matter. She is what she is. Her method is her own, although it may overlap with others. Her concern with perfect sentences (something she has spoken of repeatedly), for the clean line, is a signature element. Don’t look for that in Hunter Thompson.
Come to think of it, maybe Didion is emblematic of the New Journalism precisely because she does not fit comfortably into the category (I’m not sure it coheres sufficiently to qualify as a “genre”): it may well be that there is no such beast as New Journalism, only a collection of individuals who arrived on the scene at more or less the same time and threw various wrenches—each after his or her own fashion—into the works of conventional journalism. The ironized attitude toward all subjects of Tom Wolfe, the madcap adventurism of Thompson, the cool distance of Didion—what have they to do with one another, really? And why should they? These writers are not club-joiners, much less law-givers. Nothing about them suggests a “movement,” let alone a coherent one. The one thing that connects them is that each was looking for new ways to tell true stories. It turned out to be plenty new.
Immersive Journalism
THERE IS A PEACOCK quality to much of the New Journalism. “Hey, look at me,” the text fairly screams, “I can be really clever.” Quite often, the claim is true, but one wonders how many imitations, pale or overwrought as the case may be, died on editorial slush piles. These are writers who want to be noticed, who want to be seen as part of the story, in the case of Thompson, to be the story. Peacocks are showy, striking, but maybe not for everyone. Besides, do we want every piece of nonfiction we read to make a spectacle of itself? Sometimes, we just want the writer to burrow into the story. At the same time, we may not want the writing to be devoid of personality or to read like a generic New York Times story from 1957. Turns out, there’s a solution for that, a method whereby the journalist can immerse herself in the story without distracting our attention. And a handful of journalists have gotten very good at it.
In the early 1980s, I started hearing an odd buzz among my literary friends. Literary buzz is hardly odd in itself; it is the stuff of life in English and related departments, “Have you read,” “Did you see,” “Have you talked to anyone about . . . ?” Conversations about new books are the background hum, something to take the mind off the latest batch of mildly competent student essays or hottest campus gossip. But these opening salvos to a discussion weren’t about the usual stuff—the latest novel, a volume of poetry by an old friend, the current French critical atrocity—but about something folks in English departments almost never talk about. Rocks. Landscape. Plate tectonics. In short, geology.
Having spent my sophomore year of college rooming with a rocks jock, I had a bit of experience with how wrapped up some people can become with matters geological. Just not, you know, my people. So, I thought, what gives? Why are otherwise sober and serious scholars of literature suddenly giddy over a book about what lies between us and the molten center of the earth? The answer, it turns out, was not “geology” but “literature.” I should have known. My colleagues, you see, didn’t care merely about a category but about any writing that rises above the ordinary, and this book was as far from ordinary as you can get. Basin and Range (1981), as matters turned out, was the first of four standalone volumes that would come out over the next decade or so and, together with a previously unpublished essay, constitute Annals of the Former World (1998), the magnum opus that would win a Pulitzer Prize for John McPhee.
But here’s the thing: it’s not a book about geology. Or perhaps it’s only partly about geology. It’s really about two other, not-unrelated, things: understanding the world the author inhabits, and the people who make that understanding possible. There is almost nothing in John McPhee’s world that is beneath his notice or that he can’t work his magic on. He has, after all, written a book entirely about oranges and another on the historical and cultural importance of shad, a fish that almost no one living more than two hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean knows or cares about. Robert Frost objected to being called a “nature poet,” since he claimed that fewer than a half dozen of his poems had no human presence. So it is with McPhee. Like oranges, like shad, the story of geology—which after all is the story not of rocks but of the study thereof—is the story of humans interacting with their world. In this case, it is the story of humans decoding the puzzle of earth’s formation.
How does one write about something entirely beyond our capacity for comprehension, about what the earth looked like a long time ago? No, not last year or the sixties or the time of Jesus. Way back. Two hundred million years ago, add or subtract a few, when the space that would become the Atlantic Ocean was occupied instead by land masses that would move off to the far sides of the globe, to become India, Africa, Australia, Antarctica. There is no chance we mere mortals, with our threescore and ten allotted years, can grasp such numbers. In terms of geologic time, we’re like the tribe whose concept of numbers only goes to two: one, two, many. Is there any way to help us to see that far back? McPhee strikes upon the expedient of an imaginary road trip across the country on Interstate 80. By using this device, he can let us relate this bizarre world to the one we actually know, and he can place us at points along the way by name-dropping familiar places: New York, Ohio, Council Bluffs, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Sacramento, San Francisco.
“If you were to make that trip in the Triassic—New York to San Francisco, Interstate 80, say roughly at the end of Triassic time—you would move west from the nonexistent Hudson River with the Palisades Sill ten thousand feet down.” Wait! No Hudson? No cliffs rising dramatically above its west bank? And so it goes as we cross the space that will become our country, all the way to the West Coast, which is also not where, to our minds, it belongs: “Then, at roughly the point where the Sierran foothills will end and the Central Valley will begin—at Auburn, California—you move beyond the shelf and over deep ocean. There are probably some islands out there somewhere, but fundamentally you are crossing above ocean crustal floor that reaches to the China Sea. Below you there is no hint of North America, no hint of the valley or the hills where Sacramento and San Francisco will be.” Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. But that’s I-70, so never mind.
We’re still lost, but now we’re lost in ways we can pin on a map of the familiar world. I can’t imagine a world in which Sacramento is at the bottom of the ocean, but at least I know where that will be in a hundred million years or so when it rises from the brine. McPhee has shown his plan for his tetralogy in this early passage from book one: connect the unfamiliar, the bizarre, the incomprehensible to something accessible, whether it is a map or the person studying whatever phenomenon is at hand. He knows better than to batter us about the head and shoulders with hard data, and he wants us to know that he will ease us through the hard bits, which will be everything except for the articles and conjunctions. The concepts and the facts of the earth sciences are just plain difficult, and so is talking about them. One of the notions McPhee mastered early on in his career is that the harder the subject matter, the more gentle and supportive the discussion must be in order to lead bewildered readers to safer shores.
And then there’s the terminology: Triassic, Pennsylvanian, Devonian, craton, sedimentary, igneous, orogeny. What a mess of labels! There may be no field of human endeavor more bedeviled by nomenclature than geology, and that includes the military. In fact, McPhee does a riff far better than I could manage in the section, early in Basin and Range, on the maddening—and proliferating—array of terms employed by geologists. After saying that the nomenclature would have attracted the attention of Gilbert and Sullivan, he provides a sort of patter song jammed with terms reminiscent of their operettas, or perhaps of Tom Lehrer’s song “The Elements,” which consists of the entire periodic table at the time of its composition. These terms range from the comparatively simple (pigeonite, samsonite) to the insanely convoluted (Metakirchheimerite, Clinoptilolite). Indeed, there seem to have been some sort of unholy linguistic liaisons between ancient Greek, German, and various other languages, not inevitably excluding Klingon. Readers may find their eyes swimming even as they realize that the passage is intensely funny. Opposing the traditional “granite” with the newer “granodiorite” for a rock that is a variety of the former, he opines that “the enthusiasm geologists show for adding new words to their conversation is, if anything, exceeded by their affection for the old. They are not about to drop granite. They say granodiorite when they are in church and granite the rest of the week.”
What we learn from this passage, which is something we really need to know, is that he understands how difficult this material is and will be on our side as we struggle to keep up. The section, untitled on the page, is noted in the table of contents as “Why Would an English Major Write about Rocks?” It begins with his own mystification in his undergraduate geology course as terms “came floating down the room like paper airplanes,” which may, as intended, allay our fears a bit. It’s nice to have someone representing our own distance from the subject: if this guy can get up to speed on all the technical material, maybe there’s hope for us.
Now, his question comes with some obligations attached, not least the need to establish some authority. There is no way that an English major who took a course or so in geology can write this book, much less the whole tetralogy. Clearly, such a person must latch onto others who actually know and study the field. Which suits John McPhee right down to the ground he’s writing about. He may be the ride-along king of American journalism. In his career he has hitched lifts on tugboats, coal trains, merchant ships, long-haul tractor-trailers, pickup trucks, and canoes. Given half the chance, he might have gone on the space shuttle for a story. Each book in the group revolves around his observing and interrogating an earth scientist or two whose expertise covers a part of his journey about which he wishes to know more. In Basin and Range, he latches onto geologists Karen Kleinspehn and Kenneth Deffeyes as his guides and mentors. From there he finds others in the field who can explain the trickier aspects of a notoriously tricky area of study. This arrangement is as it must be. A working journalist is an expert in one area of human endeavor: writing about stuff. But that’s a good area, since it involves finding information the writer does not already possess, then processing, synthesizing, and disseminating it. McPhee is not different from the rest of his field, just much, much better at it. He rarely ventures an opinion on anything technical, although he passes along many opinions belonging to the researchers. Instead, he limits his own thoughts to those he has about said researchers, who amaze, delight, and not infrequently confound him.
Okay, so how is this like or unlike New Journalism? Or the traditional kind, for that matter?
Humility, chiefly. McPhee doesn’t lack for confidence or ambition. No one undertakes writing on the scale he does while doubting he has the ability to complete the work. Nor is he shy about insinuating himself into places—the cab of a train engine, the wheelhouse of a tug—that most of us would feel we have no right to step. But believing in your talents is not the same as putting yourself on display. It’s just that, when it comes to the writing, the story comes first. Try saying that of Hunter Thompson. Yet McPhee is more immersed in his subject matter than many other journalists, in part because he has so much time to pursue his research and in part because he is writing about living, breathing stories. Yes, even when the subject is rocks. It’s the people who matter. The other thing that sets him off from many other writers is his artfulness. By that, I do not mean something cutesy, like employing a lot of rhetorical flourishes. What I intend, rather, is the way that he brings the implements of fiction writing—point of view, careful use of the telling detail, chapter organization, effective presentation of dialogue, a knowledge of what to omit and why, the poetic use of language (in its best, non-flowery sense).
McPhee is sometimes lumped with the New Journalists, sometimes with Creative Nonfiction (which makes him a sort of pioneer in that field), and sometimes in a little club whose membership numbers one.
Creative Nonfiction
OF THESE THREE GENRES, creative nonfiction is the newcomer. It seems to have arrived a decade or so later than participatory journalism, so mid-to-late-1970s, although instances of it can be found much earlier. Numerous sources cite James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, detailing the lives of poor tenant farmers during the Depression, as an early instance. Of course, Agee had the advantage of wonderfully evocative photos by Walker Evans, something few such works can boast. Others would go back still further, to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), to find models. The first is well known, but the second, ostensibly an account of a float trip he took with his late brother some years earlier, morphs into an elegy for that brother, becoming a fitting archetype of the creative nonfiction enterprise.
The modernists did a lot of work that we would call “creative” or “literary” nonfiction. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own or “Modern Fiction,” or D. H. Lawrence’s “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine” or “Fantasia of the Unconscious,” or Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon or A Moveable Feast all stand as examples of nonfiction as a literary pursuit, as do efforts by many of their contemporaries.
One of the later examples, although an early one in the development of this contemporary movement, would be Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). That work, covering an entire year and divided into four sections mirroring the seasons, explores the natural world by her home near Roanoke, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the course of her examinations, although the narrator is never named, she ruminates on nature, consciousness, religion, solitude, the inevitable cruelty of nature, and the problem of evil. The narrative goes where it goes, when it decides to go there. In this regard as in so many others, the book follows the example of Thoreau’s Walden, on which she wrote her master’s thesis. The creek, for instance, functions as she claimed in that thesis that Thoreau’s pond did, as a center around which the book is organized. True, she set herself the task of observing her home water for just one year, not the two that consumed Thoreau, but the principle is much the same.
Don’t panic: you can perfectly understand what Dillard writes even if you’ve never read Thoreau, even if you’ve never heard of him, although you may wonder why this guy gets mentioned without first or middle names twice in the first chapter. Otherwise, it’s clear sailing.
Here’s what you may notice. Dillard writes this memoir of noticing the world as if she is writing a novel. The opening, in fact, could easily be from a novel, with its memory of a tomcat who used to jump, bloody from fighting others of his kind or catching small creatures, through the open bedroom window and land on the narrator’s chest. That memory opens out into other observations and memories, of comparing herself to medieval religious hermits, of living along Tinker Creek in a valley of the Blue Ridge, of watching a green frog being consumed by a giant water bug, of the beef cattle across the creek, of the Koran and Blaise Pascal, of the arrow-making of “certain Indians,” and of her central project, which is to learn to see and know her immediate surroundings. As in a novel, her solitude is noted but not explained, as if something we will learn later, and her background before Tinker Creek is left unsaid. That she comes as an outsider is clear enough from the newness of her way of perceiving this space.
That first chapter, then, becomes a model for how the book will proceed, veering between careful noticing and sudden shifts of subject in which we move from frogs to Eskimos, from pinochle to arctic exploration. The kaleidoscopic nature of these shifts—each crystalline in itself but with only a tenuous connection to the one before or after—led Eudora Welty, in an otherwise glowing review in the New York Times, to admit that in some of Dillard’s more fanciful flights, the reviewer does not know what the author is talking about.
That becomes the main question we must ask of this book, or any work of creative nonfiction: what is the author talking about, and why does she express it as she does? Welty’s uncertainties are momentary and localized, while we want an answer on a more global level. In this case, it becomes clear very early that Dillard’s main concern is with seeing the world as it is. Her second chapter is called, in fact, “Seeing,” and concerns itself with the difference between what experts notice that ordinary folk do not, as when a herpetologist comes down off a hillside with a sack full of snakes, a hillside that a local told him had no snakes, or with the difficulty in seeing for early recipients, blind from birth with cataracts, after surgery removed the clouds from their sight. Seeing, it turns out, is a lifelong habit. Beyond mere seeing, though, Dillard is concerned with what we these days might call, with our embrace of Buddhist terminology if not practice, “mindfulness,” the habit of turning sensation into something deeper, more meaningful. For what Dillard really wants to consider is creation, and the possibility of a creator, in a manic sort of teleology: discerning the nature of the Watchmaker by intensive study of the watch.
McPhee and Dillard represent, as it were, two poles of creative nonfiction, the reportorial and the autobiographical. It is certainly possible, as McPhee demonstrates again and again, to write from the inside of something other than the self; it appears to be a matter of immersion in that object of consideration, coal trains or otherwise. Dillard, by contrast, shows that consideration of the Other can be a doorway into exploration of the self. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as set out by the first word of the title, is ultimately concerned with the growth of the writer/narrator/character. Neither of these approaches is right or wrong; they are simply approaches, merely means to different ends. While there has been an explosion of creative nonfiction over the last quarter century or so, it remains a genre in progress, something like the early novel of the eighteenth century. This condition is extremely fertile, since there is nothing ruled out or required on the basis of long-standing practice, there being no practice that has stood long. Nor is there a substantial body of criticism, much less of theorizing, about creative nonfiction, although that work is coming. Soon. We do not know, in short, what the genre can become, so instead we watch it in the act of becoming.
Writing about and from the self has always been with us, and it is always evolving. What these newer personal forms, New Journalism and creative nonfiction, have taught us is that the building blocks of narrative or discursive nonfiction are largely identical to those of traditional realistic fiction: point-of-view selection, narrative voice, tone and mood, scene construction and sequencing, dialogue, control of diction, tension, flashbacks, foreshadowing, and all the rest. As we have noted with Wolfe, they can even touch on such arcana as stream-of-consciousness or indirect free speech techniques. Not every work will employ all of these, of course, but they may and will use any number in any combination their writers desire. What this broad technical palette reminds us is that, after all, nonfiction writing is first and foremost writing, a branch on the tree of literature.