Mapping Our Narratives onto the World
IN 1984 MY stepmother, Janey, died in the cottage hospital of a small Scottish town. I was teaching summer school at a university near Boston, and her death was, from my perspective, sudden. One morning on my way to class, I found a letter in the mailbox from an aunt. On the bus I read that Janey had had a fall and was in the hospital but not to worry, my aunt wrote; she was on the mend. I don’t remember what I taught that day, but I do recall my anger. Her accident, I thought, would mean new problems, new difficulties, for me. I was still angry when the chairman came into my office with a message that Janey was very ill. I hurried home immediately and made arrangements to fly to Glasgow. Then I phoned the hospital only to discover she had died a few hours earlier. A week later a birthday card arrived. A nurse had written my address and a joke about my stepmother’s many gentlemen visitors. Janey herself had signed the card, shakily, “love M.”
I did not go to her funeral. I knew I would have to return later to deal with her possessions and I was too poor to make two transatlantic trips and too young to understand the complex reasons for which one might attend a funeral where no other mourner would be offended by one’s absence. Instead I decided to write a story about her. The question was how?
Janey was almost sixty when she married my father and I knew only snatches about the large part of her life that had already occurred. I wanted to be faithful to her memory, faithful to the facts as I understood them, including our deep estrangement. And yet merely to transcribe the facts would have resulted in a skinny, parsimonious, undignified story. I needed imagination as well as memory.
Over the course of a difficult autumn I wrote “Learning by Heart.” It was a long story, a hundred pages, with two braided narratives. One strand was based on what I remembered of my childhood and adolescence with my stepmother; I wrote that material as if I were writing an essay. Although I was presenting it as a story, I wanted readers to have that feeling: oh, yes, this really did happen. The other strand was my imagining of Janey’s life, beginning in a croft in the northeast of Scotland and ending with those hours lying on the floor of her flat, waiting to be found. The life I did not know and had no means to discover, I dreamed up on the page. And in a number of ways I signaled to the reader that this part of the narrative had a different ontological status, was true in a different way. I wrote it as fiction.
I am not sure how well “Learning by Heart” succeeds, but since then, in and out of the classroom, I have pondered how the intuitive choices I made in writing the story might be refined. I began to notice that I often gave my students conflicting advice. A student would bring me a story about a family with three children. Sometimes I would say, “Why do you need Edwina, Margaret, and Theo? It just confuses your reader. Why not combine Edwina and Margaret into a single character and just have two children?” Sometimes, however, I found myself saying the opposite. “Why only have three children?” I would ask. “Why not have five? Or go for broke—have seven.”
In the first case I was advising the student along the traditional lines of story writing: be expedient. Every sentence should, ideally, do three things: reveal the characters, advance the plot, and deepen the theme. The pleasure of this kind of narrative is not that we think we are reading about the real world (although the story usually does map onto our world fairly closely), but rather that the wings of symmetry are unfolding around us; briefly we are on a planet where, as E. M. Forster says, there are no secrets and human behavior makes sense. I call this “fiction.”
In the second case, where I was urging five children, or seven, I was suggesting an alternative strategy. The authority of the story was going to come, in part, from the degree to which it made the reader feel that the events described really had occurred. And the way to strengthen the story was to increase this effect. Rather than expediency, I urged the student to make the story messier, more confusing: in other words more lifelike. I call this, for want of a better term, “antifiction.”
Throughout this century and the last, it seems to me, an increasing number of authors have been choosing to have five children rather than two. We can find story after story, novel after novel, in which the boundaries between author and character, real and imagined, are blurred. Our experience is closer to reading autobiography, or memoir, or history. I do not mean to suggest that there are simply two diametrically opposed choices. Rather I see a continuum, stretching from tales beginning “Once upon a time . . .” where we are blithely expected to believe that a wolf can pass for a grandmother, to the most explicit antifiction, works whose authors blatantly encourage what Sartre might have termed a hemorrhaging between fiction and reality. In Joan Didion’s novel Democracy and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, characters share the names and occupations of their creators.
An Attempt at a Continuum
Once I got a glimpse of the continuum, I wondered what lay behind these choices and how the signals are given to the reader. The first question invites a comet’s tail of speculation. My suspicion is that most writers make these choices unconsciously, as I did, because of their prior relationship with the material. But at a deeper level, farther into the astral debris, lurks the question that we always need to ask: How can we give our work authority? By the end of her life my stepmother had very few visitors. What right had I to ask my readers to be among them? To endure the wallpaper and the antimacassars and, worst of all, her tyrannical conversation.
In a recent fit of homesickness I reread Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic novel of the double life: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson claimed that he wrote a first draft in three feverish days, following a dream, and then burned it because of his wife’s criticisms. Whatever the truth, the novel was written and published in less than three months, and I read it in a single sitting. Although it is set in London, the darkness and fog struck me once again as irredeemably Scottish. This time I was also struck by Stevenson’s use of documents: Dr. Jekyll’s correspondence and his “full statement of the case.” Looking at other nineteenth-century novels—Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Dracula, The Woman in White—I discovered a startling number of interlocking narrators, diaries found in locked boxes, deathbed confessions, and, of course, letters. These authors knew that their incredible tales needed authenticating and they approach their readers like a prosecutor addressing a jury, bombarding us with testimonials from expert witnesses.
In the twentieth century such devices fell somewhat out of fashion, but not, I think, because readers became more credulous (if anything our credulity has declined and we are liable to read a letter in fiction as yet more fiction). There are gorgeous counterexamples. Part of the brilliance of Nathanael West’s short novel Miss Lonelyhearts, in which an advice columnist for a New York newspaper gradually succumbs to despair, is the inclusion of letters from Miss Lonelyhearts’s constituents that are absolutely integral to the plot and to the anguished voice of the novel. More recently A. S. Byatt paid homage to the nineteenth century in her novel Possession by including fabricated poems. The novel captivated many readers but most, I suspect, soon realized they could follow the plot without reading the poems and turned those pages with increasing speed. Nowadays we find authors using e-mail, texts, memos, and blogs to shore up their work. We take pleasure in these devices but only in certain contexts. Broadly speaking we have decided to privilege memory over imagination. In the current climate a novel set in Afghanistan or Iraq written by someone who had never been to these war zones would be unlikely to meet with the rapturous reception of The Red Badge of Courage, which Stephen Crane wrote nearly thirty years after the Civil War entirely from research. Certain experiences—war, other races, some illnesses, perhaps other sexual orientations—are often deemed no longer appropriate territory for the imagination. We want the author to write out of memory. Even a kind of impersonal memory—the American-born Jewish author writing about the Holocaust—is preferable to none. Authors, along with other people, are now expected to have credentials.
Our confusion about the relationship between fiction and the real world is further revealed by our response to first-person narrators. Unless forcefully instructed otherwise we tend to assume that first-person narrators share the gender, and to some degree the history, of their authors. I still remember the shock of hearing that James Baldwin’s mother had followed his coffin into St. John the Divine. But hadn’t she died, I protested, conflating Baldwin’s life with that of his narrator in “Sonny’s Blues.” In “Learning by Heart” I did not bother for many pages to identify the first-person narrator as a young woman, a version of myself; I knew the reader would think that anyway.
These assumptions, which can do so much for our work when we follow them, become more problematic if we want to contradict them, especially, I would suggest, for women writing about men. Ever since Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders—“My True Name is so well known in the Records, or Registers at Newgate, and in the Old-Baily”—men have been writing confidently, in the first and close-third person, about women. A dozen great fictional heroines—Pamela, Moll, Molly Bloom, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer—sidle out of my bookcase, swishing their skirts courtesy of their male authors. Relatively few men suited by a woman’s pen follow. George Eliot writes with wonderful empathy about her male characters. And there is the male narrator of Willa Cather’s My Antonia but he is largely overshadowed by his heroine’s complicated life. Marguerite Yourcenar’s magnificent The Memoirs of Hadrian was for many years almost as solitary as the great emperor. Only fairly recently have women felt able to inhabit their male characters, in both the third person and the first, as freely as Hanya Yanagihara does in her novel A Little Life.
Optimistically I like to think that this narrowing of the authorial authority has as one of its origins the widening of the canon, and the general recognition that minorities of all kinds are more than willing and able to speak for themselves. But I also wonder if it might not be linked to the surge of antifiction. Authors have been encouraging readers to map fiction onto the real world, and even when we want to, we may have trouble now in reversing that trend. Lewis Carroll’s description in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded of the search for an accurate map serves as a cautionary tale. When a mile to a mile map is proposed, the farmers protest that it will block out the sun and ruin their crops.
Putting aside these vexed matters of authority and autobiography, I want to explore in a little more detail what makes readers think, just from reading, that some stories really happened and that in others the question is irrelevant. As with the job interview, first impressions are vital, so let us look at the openings of a few familiar works.
Here is James Joyce embarking on the long voyage of Ulysses:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:
Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful Jesuit!
There is nothing in these events that renders them immediately fictional. In fact the quotidian subject matter could easily find a place in a contemporary essay, but Joyce gives us unmistakable signals that we are on the planet of fiction. Among these signals I would list the following:
1. There is no visible narrator.
2. The act of writing is concealed. We are made to believe that the words sprang up on the page without effort.
3. Characters are shown to us through action and dialogue.
4. There is no initial attempt at explanation.
5. There is considerable specificity of detail and a kind of heightened density to the style.
6. Both narrator and characters are unnaturally eloquent.
From our earliest listening and reading we have learned to understand these as the hallmarks of fiction. We are not allowed for one moment to take this as biography or history.
Here, on the other hand, is Proust at the beginning of Swann’s Way:
For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I am going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V.
The paragraph continues to explore this confusion between waking and sleeping, book and self. In his dreamlike state the narrator ponders the act of writing: “the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no.” There is an absence of dialogue and a lack of immediacy; right away we are being told that events are remembered. Most noteworthy of all, we are in the presence of a narrator who is not immediately distinguished from the author. Crucial to Remembrance of Things Past is the narrator’s situation as an only child, and such is the autobiographical force of the writing that I think almost all readers are amazed to discover that Proust had a brother. Surely we can be forgiven our confusion when he not merely tolerates but encourages it. The narrator of this novel is not named for many hundreds of pages, but when at last he is, his name is Marcel.
Over and above these signals, a crucial and obvious difference between these two great openings is the difference between the third-person voice and the first. The third person is the “once upon a time” voice that signals we are being told a story. The narrator is not telling us about her own difficulties with a wolf but about those of Little Red Riding Hood. In “Learning by Heart” I was being absolutely conventional when I used the third person for the parts about Janey’s life that I was largely inventing and the first person for the parts that I had experienced, or wanted the reader to believe that I had. But the way in which I used the first person would not have been possible without the example of Proust, and his many heirs. There were plenty of first-person novels prior to Remembrance, but reading, for example, Tristram Shandy, The Red and the Black, or even Jane Eyre, we have, I think, no impulse to confuse author and narrator.
Apart from anything else these authors carefully separate themselves from their narrators. Look at the opening paragraph of Great Expectations:
My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Phillip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
Could Dickens have mentioned Pip’s name a little more often? Reading on, we find in Pip’s fanciful description of the tombstones of his relatives the density and unnatural specificity of fiction and, although events are clearly in the past, neither the act of remembering nor the act of writing is invoked. My first thought was that even a reader who knew nothing of Dickens’s early life would suspect that more than the name of the narrator was being fictionalized. But that is the wrong way round. We are being so clearly signaled that this is fiction that the question “Did these things really happen?” does not occur to us any more than we ask if a prince could really climb up the rope of Rapunzel’s hair. This kind of opening was later passionately subverted by Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, who announces that he is not going to tell us “where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and . . . all that David Copperfield kind of crap.”
In shifting the boundaries between the self and the book, Proust, I would argue, has had a far greater influence than Joyce. A host of fictional memoirs (what the French call “autofiction”) have been published since Remembrance of Things Past, some of which have sought to extend the continuum of antifiction even further. How far this can be done without the reader wondering why this material is being presented as fiction is a question to ponder. In 1984 the French writer Marguerite Duras, after a long silence, published a short novel, The Lover. The novel revolves around the relationship between a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old French girl and her twenty-seven-year-old Chinese lover. The American edition had a photograph of the young Duras on the front cover, and it was widely mentioned in reviews that the novel was largely, if not entirely, autobiographical.
Putting aside these marketing techniques, one of the most striking aspects of the opening pages of The Lover is the way in which Duras’s first-person narrator, who seems to share everything with her author, shuttles back and forth between France and Indochina, between her present self and her fifteen-year-old self. This could, I suppose, give the effect of muddle or disorganization, but in fact it strengthens our sense that the events described are historical rather than imaginary. Duras is simply remembering, looking back over many years, and picking out what she wants to tell us. When I went back to “Learning by Heart” I discovered I had, unwittingly, used the same strategy. Janey’s story, the story I was imagining, moved steadily forward with the occasional memory or flashback embedded in the flow; it was hard enough to make things up without making them up out of order. But in the part where I was combining memory and imagination, trying to smuggle in as much real-world material as possible, I found it hard to progress chronologically. Describing Janey’s marriage to my father, I skipped a quarter of a century to report my reading of the letters she received at that time. As I read again and again the phrases of congratulation—Your husband is a lucky man; We wish you much happiness—I gradually understood that Janey had entirely failed to mention my existence.
In the nineteenth century Duras would probably have used letters, or a sensational secret diary, to support her story. Late in the twentieth century, however, she relied upon a heavy hemorrhaging between reality and fiction. No one could attack the plot because she was claiming that these events really happened, but if pressed too closely, she could protest that this was fiction; she had invented everything. Several times in The Lover, the narrator remarks that she has never written about this material before and, now that she is, she plans to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Even fairly soon after publication astute critics were diagnosing a hole in the heart of the novel. And subsequently Duras agreed with them. In 1991 she published The North China Lover, which revealed what had been concealed by the scandalous affair in The Lover—namely her narrator’s incestuous relationship with her younger brother.
I do not mean to sound as if I am taking Duras to task for mendacity. My concern is not whether the events described in a work of fiction occurred, but rather the techniques by which an author might make a reader believe that they can be mapped onto the real world. All authors—whether writing traditional fiction, antifiction, or nonfiction—omit and select. When I discover that Proust had a brother, it does not detract from the beauty and authenticity of his portrayal of an only child. In “Learning by Heart” I describe at length the loneliness of living with my father and stepmother. I do not mention the neighbors with whom I often took refuge and who would later become my beloved adopted family. I like to think that this omission is not merely a bid for reader sympathy but also a way to dramatize my relationship with Janey more clearly. No, my charge against Duras is not the omission, per se, but the way in which the omission sometimes flattens rather than dramatizes the novel.
Vagueness, the invocation of remembering and writing, shuttling, hemorrhaging, the absence of dialogue—all help to create the illusion of antifiction. Another strategy, one I seldom advocate to my students, is what I am rather nervously going to call “bad writing.” Fiction tends to be well written. A surprising number of characters and narrators reach what, if we stop to think (but of course we don’t), are quite unrealistic heights of eloquence. It follows then that one way for an author to make her or his work more lifelike is by the judicious use of bad writing.
I was a little hard-pressed to find an example of this outside of my own work, but you can glimpse what I’m suggesting in the opening of Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger, a novel for which I have great admiration:
Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
The old people’s home is at Marengo, about eighty kilometers from Algiers, I’ll take the two o’clock bus and get there in the afternoon. That way I can be there for the vigil and come back tomorrow night. I asked my boss for two days off and there was no way he was going to refuse me with an excuse like that.
To seriously call this bad writing would be a woeful error, but the cunningly crafted sentences are flat almost to the point of being simplistic. Even though they demonstrate what Flaubert calls “fundamental accuracy of detail,” many writers would hesitate to write them. They seem too unadorned, too unliterary, to transport the reader. But in The Stranger they effectively create a narrator in whose capacity for violence and lack of self-analysis we come to vividly believe. The antifictional quality is further strengthened by the uncertainty: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe.” After all, if it’s fiction, there is no reason for any uncertainty. We are making things up, so we can make them up precisely.
From these opening sentences Camus leads us forward to the moment when Meursault, the narrator, kills a man on the beach, a crime for which he offers no explanation and shows little remorse. Which leads us to another technique of antifiction. Motivation is one of the principle ways in which fiction makes sense. Terrible things may happen, indeed they often do, but we understand why. Readers are deeply committed to this aspect of fiction, and even when a writer tries to prevent them from making certain connections, they insist on doing so.
But one of the most frightening things about the world we inhabit is that action and motivation are not so neatly connected. Putting aside the complex issues that fill the newspapers, we often struggle to understand the behavior of family and friends, and yet even they, I would suggest, are more transparent to us than we are to ourselves. How easily we complete such sentences as “He’s afraid of anger because . . .” or “She can’t finish her novel because . . .” Yet how hard it can be to finish those sentences when we ourselves are the subject. Hours of conversation, therapy, walking the Appalachian Trail, may be necessary before we find an explanation that clarifies our own inner workings, and that explanation is often provisional, a work in progress. Part of what Camus accomplishes in The Stranger is the creation of a much more complex psychological model, a model that partakes not so much of the glibness with which we too often analyze others but of the sense of mystery with which we regard ourselves. We are our own terra incognita, the country on ancient maps where dragons lurk.
In writing about Janey, I felt reluctant—to the point of paralysis—to attribute motivation to her. She was a giant of my childhood and neither time nor mortality can dwarf her. I knew I couldn’t offer my readers the pleasures of conventional fiction: explanations, those moments when cause and effect come together. So I had to give them another kind of satisfaction; I used the techniques of antifiction to suggest that the relationship between Janey and me, the fourteen years we lived together, really had occurred.
Private history plays a part in most fiction but, public history is often in short supply. While there are admirable novels that deal with war, technology, politics, fracking, immigration, the Edict of Nantes, it is surprising how many works of fiction contain almost no references to current events. Jane Austen has often been taken to task for not mentioning the Battle of Waterloo (although only Persuasion was written after the battle). Since then many other writers have followed in her footsteps, focusing almost entirely on the characters and their relationships. A Little Life takes place over several decades but Yanagihara makes almost no reference to American politics. And in many other novels we learn surprisingly little about the real world: an odd newspaper headline, or a few phrases of radio news. Perhaps this suggests a mutual longing, shared by both writers and readers, for art to transcend the everyday. Perhaps it also stems from the danger of such references seeming expository, or becoming dated.
Whatever the source of this exclusion, it also means that as soon as we start to connect the lives of our characters with the real world, we are taking a step toward making our fiction sound like antifiction. From the ages of nine to thirteen I attended a girls’ school that I prayed nightly would be destroyed: burned to the ground or flattened by a hurricane. I didn’t care which. But in “Learning by Heart,” I explained that when the school did finally close it was due neither to arson nor prayer but to the shrinking of the British colonies, which led to fewer people working abroad and sending their daughters home to be educated. (I had my revenge on the school when I renamed it, and made it several times more Dickensian, in my novel The Flight of Gemma Hardy.)
Here is a list of the techniques I’ve been suggesting.
| FICTION | ANTIFICTION |
| Tidy (2 Kids) | Messy (5 Kids) |
| No Visible Narrator | Hemorrhaging |
| Act of Writing/ Remembering Concealed |
Act of Writing/ Remembering Invoked |
| Action + Dialogue | Lack of Immediacy |
| specificity/Density | Vagueness |
| Chronology: A > B > C | Skipping/Shuttling |
| Eloquence | “Bad” Writing |
| Post-Freudian Psychology | Lack of Causation |
| No History | History |
| Clarity | Confusion/Ambiguity |
| There Are No Accidents | Perhaps there are . . . |
All these techniques (with the notable exception of bad writing) are used to gorgeous effect in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. This book, dedicated to its characters, takes as one of its main themes the connection between fact and fiction. For the sake of simplicity I have been presenting my argument as if the techniques of fiction and antifiction were in opposition—one must choose entirely from either one column or the other—but O’Brien, and many of my favorite writers, demonstrate how they can be successfully combined. The stories in The Things They Carried range along the continuum from the highly fictional “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” about a soldier smuggling his girlfriend into Vietnam, to the highly antifictional “How to Tell a True War Story.” In the antifiction stories O’Brien offers us the specificity and eloquence of fiction but uses historical details, vagueness, and shuttling to reject an easy psychology of cause and effect. He often invokes the acts of remembering and of writing: “I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive.”
In “How to Tell a True War Story” the narrator says if you ask whether the story is true and the answer matters, you’ve got your answer:
For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
Is it true?
The answer matters.
You’d feel cheated if it never happened. . . . Yet even if it did happen . . . you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
Here I think O’Brien delineates the dilemma of all serious fiction writers. However we approach our work and the world, we are trying to get at the truth that lies beyond absolute occurrence.
Most of the examples I’ve offered demonstrate the strength of antifiction—how using these techniques can enable us to tell stories that would otherwise strike the reader as too farfetched, too extreme—but one of the major hazards of the enterprise can be seen in an editor’s response to a book of personal essays about Israel written by a friend of mine. “Very nice,” she said, “but who would want to read about you?” I immediately applied this chilling question to myself. When I stop to think, it seems very odd that I would never want to write my autobiography—my life is so pedestrian—and yet I persisted in writing a story as autobiographical as “Learning by Heart.”
The answer to this apparent contradiction lies in the nature of fiction, and of art in general. Art has the power to transform, and nowhere is that power more evident than when applied to the unpromising material of the everyday. Madame Bovary, with its sensational plot, made Gustave Flaubert famous, but his artistry is perhaps even more evident in the novella he wrote twenty years later. In “A Simple Heart” he transforms the relationship between a poorly educated serving woman and her parrot into a subject of resonance, beauty, and, finally, spiritual transcendence.
In the case of Janey, however, I lacked confidence in my ability to transform; there were too many suitcases of truth, too many things that I still didn’t understand, that I wanted to smuggle into the story. I would never have gotten them all onto the planet of fiction. Instead I tried to create the illusion that Janey had lived and died in the way I described. I knew that this illusion could be immensely seductive, but that if I failed to rise above the anecdotal then the reader would balk and ask, Why should I want to read about Janey and you?
As a young writer, I made these choices intuitively, often not fully understanding what I was choosing. As an older writer, I’ve learned how useful these different techniques can be, how they can help me tell the stories I couldn’t otherwise tell. In The Prince Machiavelli, the Florentine philosopher and diplomat, urges princes to become great liars. In the service of absolute truth writers need to follow his advice. We have stories we want to tell and many, happily, belong on the planet of fiction, where readers can delight in eloquent characters, precise narrators, and the pleasing symmetry of cause and effect. But some of the stories we want to tell may be too implausible, too contradictory, too psychologically outrageous to exist on that planet. Only by suggesting a different ontology, a different relationship to the real world, can we persuade readers to suspend their disbelief. So we head to the dark star of antifiction.
Will we send our work into the world as fiction? Antifiction? Or some cunning mixture of the two? As Proust’s narrator so simply and elegantly says, “[T]he subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or not.” Whether we hide behind a third or first-person narrator very different from ourselves or, alternatively, we encourage our readers to confuse the cunningly created “I” of our stories with the I of our lives, we are always seeking authority for our work. The question is what the source will be.