Literary Blog Hop: Literary Nonfiction

The Literary Blog Hop, hosted by The Blue Bookcase, poses another fascinating question this week: Is there such a thing as literary non-fiction? If so, how do you define it? Examples?

Defining "literature" is hard enough, and now we are throwing "nonfiction" into it. And yet, my answer is a most definite yes. For me, what is literary has very little to do with the veracity of the story.

Narrative nonfiction is the easiest to classify as literary because much of it subscribes to the same aesthetic and stylistic conventions as fiction, the more common owner of the term literary. For me, the only real distinction between narrative nonfiction and narrative fiction is the veracity of the story: one story really happened and one did not. In both, there are protagonists, antagonists, central conflicts, inciting incidents, resolutions, themes, etc. Writers of both are concerned with drawing readers into the story, developing complex and interesting characters, and revealing a truth to the reader. For example, Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife tells the story of a Warsaw zookeeper and his wife who saved around 300 people during World War II by hiding them in the bomb-ravaged zoo, both in the house and in the animal cages. The story has a specific plot line, interesting characters, and a complex message, much as a work of fiction would.

The problem with narrative nonfiction is not, in my mind, whether or not it is literary. The problem is whether or not it is nonfiction. If nonfiction is narrowly defined as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, then most narrative nonfiction doesn't fit. Authors take a wee bit (or a gigantic chunk) of artistic license when writing narrative nonfiction. We can read historical figures' diaries, research the setting they lived in, read other accounts of their lives, we can do everything to learn about past figures. But once we start writing about who they were and what they did - or worse how they felt and what they thought - we are straying into the realm of fiction. Now personally, I have absolutely no problem with this. I actually love books which combine real life events/people with fictional elements. Literary nonfiction.

Other types of nonfiction can feel quite literary without crossing the line into fiction. Personal or creative essays can be very literary. Charles Bowden's The Bone Garden of Desire (Read it online here) is the essay that got me interested in this style of writing. Bowden weaves food, flowers, lust, and death in this poetic personal essay. The essay is fragmentary, moving horizontally forward and backward through time even as it moves vertically through the topics. I'm not sure why I assign those particular directions, but I do. Something in the tone, the interrelation of these primal topics, and the melancholy seduces me. Any piece of writing that can be described in such a way is literary in my opinion.  Essays like Bowden's focus on form - the style of writing - as a way to deliver content. Authors manipulate the form to mirror or contradict the content in an effort to challenge readers, and this relationship between form and content is how I define literary.

Non-literary non-fiction elevates content over form, concerning itself with delivering specific information in a relatively straightforward manner. Angela Provitera's Teaching Today's College Student is not concerned with drawing you into a story or with artful sentence construction; she is merely, and appropriately, trying to analyze the current mentality of college students so that professors can modify teaching habits to suit the new model of student. Neil Postman's amazing analysis of the effect media is having on the populace, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a wonderfully complex and important work; but again, the book's primary concern is analysis, and of course, persuasion. And finally, Ben Thompson's Badass, one of my favorite reads of the year, contains multiple short essays, quickly and hilariously summarizing the life of a historical badass. Clever? Absolutely. A good read? Definitely. Literary? No.

Hopefully some of what I've said in here has made sense. I'm writing this rather early in the morning, not my best time, and I didn't even get coffee this morning as we are out of creamer. Grocery shopping must occur today. Yuck.