Narration in fiction and memoir

I just finished a book that reads like a memoir although it is labeled fiction. This got me thinking about the difference between the two.

I think of Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham's classic coming-of-age story. Although Maugham admitted that this was basically his own story, through which he exorcised his demons from childhood, it comes across as fiction. Why?

When we write a story, all of the characters are invented by the author. Even when authors use people from their own lives as characters, they choose the characteristics of those people needed to make the story work. If a writer is competent, no real person makes it into a story unchanged because fiction writing involves selection -- selection of details that fit with what the author wants to say. And by selecting some characteristics and ignoring others, we implicitly alter a personality.

If a story is narrated in the first person, the same principle applies in terms of creating character. The only thing that differs is that, since the point of view is the narrator's, only what the narrator sees and knows and believes gets recorded.  The only way -- and the prime way -- that the reader gets to know how others see the narrator, or that the narrator has a false view of himself, is to create situations in which other people in the story reveal -- usually through dialogue --how they see the character.

In a memoir, though, the writer is completely fused with the narrator. The writer is trying to tell the truth of his or her experience. But this is going to look different from the way it looks when, in fact, the narrator and writer are two different people.  For one thing, none of us knows ourselves very well, and none of us knows ourselves the way others see us -- and everyone we know sees us differently!  But there is a more important difference:  although the fiction writer creates a fictional interior world for the first-person narrator, this is not the same kind of interior world a real person experiences.  A real person has an implicit understanding of the world that is never voiced in words, even to himself.  Why not?  Because he has never known anything else!  Language is about contrasts, and the fictional narrator can be created and defined by his characteristics because the writer knows what the myriad other possibilities are.  But the real person has been "me" as long as he/she can remember and the world has looked as it looks through those same pair of eyes for a long as can be remembered.  The only time, then, that we, in real life, give voice to our interior sense of the world is when something dramatic happens in our lives which causes us to question our implicit assumptions.

So, this is what makes memoir so tricky.  There is an assumption that the world looks to others the way it looks to us -- and, more importantly, the unconscious assumption that our way of viewing the world is shared with our readers.  When this assumption is never overcome, we end up with a piece of writing in which the writer thinks he/she has revealed something deep or true but the reader comes away thinking, "What was that all about?"  And a memoir billed as a novel will have this same characteristic, because it really doesn't matter if the characters' names are changed or if some events didn't happen as portrayed:  if the writer is not able to create a persona separate from the way she knows herself on the inside, the work will not succeed.

Toward an Enlightened Aesthetic 4: Fictional Characters

Today I read an article about writing by novelist Dan Barden.  He says we novelists need to create characters in conflict because it is only through struggle that characters grow.  And I'm wondering, from the standpoint of Eastern spirituality, what is growth?

One approach is to show a character's growth as linear: a character responds to an unpleasant situation, and as a result of having to learn how to deal with this type of situation, the character learns something important -- about himself or maybe about other people -- that makes him a better person.

And I think most readers would say that a character "grows" when he or she becomes a better person.  That's not too bad a definition.  But what if the ultimate goal is not just becoming a better person in relative terms but realizing one's true nature as consciousness, as that which doesn't move but within which all movement happens?  Maybe a character who realizes this is not even the same "character" as before she realized it. A character, after all, is by definition limited by certain qualities he does or doesn't possess.  And so, if the character's consciousness is completely transformed, is it still the same character?

I would classify a novel that demonstrates what I am trying to describe here as "Enlightenment Fiction":  A character is in a difficult situation and can't find an exit, and perhaps after many efforts, is finally graced with the ability to see everything from the standpoint of the whole, from the standpoint that is in fact no standpoint.  Compassion would arise, then, not simply because the character has learned to emphasize but because she no longer sees her own story as the central one.  And if she no longer sees herself in those terms, isn't it also necessary that the reader's view shift as well? 

Toward an Enlighted Aesthetic

Enlightenment means realizing our nature as vastness, limitlessness, and, yes, emptiness.  Emptiness, I realize, has a bad name, but it is the source of all creativity.  When we move into the space where we are empty of our own egoistic concerns, our own ideas of right and wrong, our own cultural prejudices, we can find empathy with others who do not share our perspective.  Good fiction and poetry can do this for us, but first, the creators of such work have to come from that place themselves. This is why truly great literature is, by definition, spiritual. 

Fiction and Unconditional Love

"The nonfiction writer has to express the spiritual message in a structure and style that satisfies the demands of artistic integrity while the fiction writer struggles to enfold a nonintrusive  message within a believable narrative." 1

Really?  Is this what a fiction writer does?  Not the best ones, anyway.  And maybe that is why, even though I help edit the Buddhist Fiction Blog, I wonder about whether a work of fiction can or should teach Buddhism, Christianity, or any other "ism," however "nonintrusive" the message aims to be.   

When I think about really good literature, it taps that in me which understands what it is to be human.  It taps the universal love we all share by making us feel that the characters are like us -- even though, if we met them on the street, we might want to walk the other way.  But with a good book in hand, we can suspend our needs for safety and status and allow ourselves to empathize:  even if we are in a loving relationship, we can know how it is to love in a hopeless way; even if we have never been to war, we can know how a soldier might feel; even if we have never been hungry, we can know how that man who hasn't had a decent meal in a month might be suffering.  And we can also know joys we have never experienced.

But the total is more than the sum of its parts.  We can know all of this because we tap into the unconditional love we all, at bottom, are.  A novelist helps us to understand the message of Christ or the message of Buddha by giving us the experience they point to -- an experience for which religious "messages" are a poor substitute.

1 Philip Yancey, in Introduction to The Best Spiritual Writing 2012, ed. by Philip Zaleski.

In this blog, I will discuss two types of literature I find particularly interesting:  books about Americans in foreign places, and books about spiritual awakening or self-realization or, at least, deepening into oneself.  Sometimes these themes overlap in a given book, and then we have a real home run!  Some of the books I review will be fiction, some memoirs, occasionally they will be another type of non-fiction,such as interviews.

I am also a co-editor of a blog on Buddhist fiction, and to some extent the books discussed here may overlap with those on that blog.  But there are many books in which the authors write of their spiritual development which are not explicitly, or even implicitly, Buddhist, and there are many which are not fiction.  Thus, this blog is both more comprehensive and more idiosyncratic than that one.

In the coming days, I will be posting reviews of books that fit into the categories described above that I have reviewed over the past year.  I am also hoping that if anyone knows of any such books, or is interested in learning about them, he or she will join the conversation!