Fiction vs Non-fiction

This article first appeared in The Age on 13th September 2003

The novel has, in recent times, been called to account for many crimes, most particularly, a failure of the imagination. Non-Fiction, people are arguing, is where the imaginative action is at. Certainly sales figures give weight to such an argument. Booksellers and Publishers (including myself) alike have been quoted in recent articles such as 'Is the Novel Dead' by Mark Mordue, saying that sales of non-fiction are booming compared to fiction.

Is the increasing popularity of non-fiction a reflection of bad writing and poor publishing as many argue? I'm sure it is at times. But I also think it is a failure of the wider cultural imagination. Richard Ford spoke along these lines when speaking at Adelaide Writer's Week in the year 2000: the realm of the imagination eludes readers more and more. In fact it irritates them. They want facts, and when they do read fiction they try and pin down the 'real' facts that underlie the novel. Ford, amusingly, went onto to recount the number of people who have threatened to punch him for his infidelity, after he wrote a novel in which the main character was unfaithful to his wife.

Topping the bestseller lists at the moment is The Bride Stripped Bare by Anonymous (more pertinently titled The Author Stripped Bare) and it is a book that reflects this intense interest in 'who really did what' than fiction as any deeper experience (no pun intended). Of course the publishers have encouraged this prurient reading of the novel by publishing it as Anonymous while including a note to the reader by Nikki Gemmell between its pages and sending her out on an author tour to cry a lot and talk about issues of privacy. So now we can all wonder whether Gemmell really does sex like her heroine. Her assurances that it is also about what her girlfriend's like in bed only fuel this kind of reading.

We laugh at films like the strange Nurse Betty, in which Renee Zellweger plays a woman who falls in love with a character from a Soap Opera and persists in treating the actor as if he is the character he plays - yet this is what we do to fiction. Refuse to recognise that even if it takes 'real' facts, it weaves them into something else. Whether or not a novel is autobiographical is often not the point. The issue is whether it expands our understanding and view of the world by enticing us away from our own universe into somebody else's. And what is autobiography anyway? Empirical facts? Emotional truths?

Recently I read Alice Sebold's wonderful novel, The Lovely Bones. It is about a girl who is violently raped and murdered, who goes onto watch, and narrate, her family's life - now in trauma as a result of her death - from her version of heaven. I found it a novel that was as powerful as it was whimsical. It's funny, sad and beautifully written. It's a novel that made me think about what is means to be 'strong' as the mother in this novel claims she is, in comparison to her 'weak' husband. The point being made, of course, is that the father's vulnerability in the face of horror gives him a strength his wife never has. How do siblings go on to have a life not defined by loss? How do they compete with the dead, retrospectively perfect, sibling? What is heaven, and what is death? All these ideas are played with, embroidered on.

After I read the novel I was told that Alice Sebold had been violently raped as a young woman, and had written a memoir, Lucky, about that experience. So I read that too. It was a painful, and compelling book, but narrower and more self-obsessed in its scope. It was, in some ways, a legal drama, as Sebold was the first person to successfully get a guilty verdict against a rapist in her the part of the USA in which she lived. I think the novel was better, but that aside, it was different. It had the advantage of years of distance, and more writing experience.

At this year's Sydney Writer's Festival Brian Castro was on a panel in which he said, 'Personal experience is not a story unless a writer makes it so.' Castro has recently published a fictional autobiography called Shanghai Dancing and believes definitions like Fiction and Non-Fiction ignore why writers write. The imagination is seditious, he argues. Any story is overhearing, mishearing, and pushing facts into and out of shape. It inevitably transcends limits of realism. 'I've always found life limiting', Castro said. Like Castro, I think it is the blurring of genres in a lot of recent non-fiction works, which makes them exciting. It is the borderline between the two that can produce so much good writing.

Mark Mordue and I discussed this creative fission between fiction and non-fiction after his article came out. He pointed that he had deliberately quoted many people, such as Ivor Indyk, disagreeing with his thesis that non-fiction was more viable and interesting, to illustrate that he himself was persuaded by the strengths of some of his detractors arguments. To this end he quotes Text Publishing's Michael Heyward: "It's not a horse race."

So why is the novel is always being 'ticked off', like a naughty child by its parents, the critics? Is it this irritation with fiction that Ford alluded to? James Hall, the books editor for The Australian, has asked where our novels concerning politics, sport and business are, and a few months ago there was a critique by Malcolm Knox in the Sydney Morning Herald asking why our novelists weren't dealing with day to day reality. But when a lot of novels in the early to mid-Nineties were set in the present, they were quickly herded into the 'grunge' corral, and left in the mud. I published some of the books in question and was constantly being asked for quotes to explain the dissatisfaction that the 'grunge' novel clearly sprung from. Critics spoke as if these novels were a group of problem adolescents. Questions were asked about the authors' sense of history, there was a lot of talk about narcissism and the lack of relevance such novel's had to our (who's?) lives.

At the height of the debate I chaired a session on Grunge at the Melbourne Writer's festival. I introduced the panel by asking whether DH Lawrence was to be considered a grunge writer since he wrote about, sex, work and the angst of the human condition. That got a big laugh, but I was deadly serious. The three panellists, in an act of quiet rebellion, ignored the question. Fiona McGregor, author of Suck My Toes talked about the importance of grammar. Andrew McGahan, author of Praise, chatted about penis size, and Christos Tjolkas stood up and talked about Kennett's Victoria. Perhaps to make the point that Loaded's hero Ari's life was deeply political even if he didn't bang on about it.

Novelist and essayist Delia Falconer, also speaking at the Sydney Writer's Festival, responded to such criticisms by arguing that an emphasis on Real Politic reflects Prime Minister John Howard's rhetoric and the extremely literal culture that has grown up around all debate in this country over the last decade. An extension of this is the idea that a novel should have a 'mission statement'. It reminds me of 1930's Social Realism. The Right wants control over the messages art puts out there, and the Left wants everyone to be clear about their position. Neither side likes ambiguity, the territory the novel inhabits with such enthusiasm.

Richard Flanagan, discusses novelist's response to carping critics and living in Howard's Australia, in an unpublished essay that he sent to me. 'Colonialisation is not just a process, it is also a state of mind, that demands one willing to be colonised as much as a coloniser. As a contemporary Australian novelist you begin to feel somehow ashamed. The deployment of more playful forms, the use of fable or allegory or historical elements, is seen to be a creative failure, a retreat. The liberating possibilities, the political edges of story are denied. You sense a collective loss of nerve, a fear of using the full arsenal of fictional techniques to confront fully our experience.'

Curiosity and empathy are not values being encouraged in the present political climate and it could be that it is precisely because the novel is an intrinsically political form that readers aren't as interested in it as they once were. In many countries merely writing a novel is a political act. The Melbourne Writer's Festival this year set aside a red chair on each panel for a writer that was currently in prison as a reminder of their plight, and to allow many individual writers' stories to emerge. In the six months to June 30 this year PEN has been working on behalf of 130 cases in which they are confident that the person has been persecuted because of their writings. There have been a total of 775 cases reported in this time period. These statistics include 6 writers killed, 11 missing, 31 received death threats, 9 kidnappings, 19 deportations and 8 in hiding.

Falconer again, 'I've always been particularly persuaded by the critic Milan Kundera's argument that the novel is a form whose sheer existence carries within it its own ontology, a radical, humorous, and antiauthoritarian way of seeing the world, that is fundamentally at odds with authority, precisely because it creates a parallel universe in which characters are fully rounded and where authorial judgment is suspended, where things slip beyond the author's grasp. It is anti-reductionist that is not reducible to a single issue. If the novel teaches the reader anything it is to be curious about others and to try to comprehend truths that differ from his own.'

Fiction offers creative freedoms that allow authors to reach truths that non-fiction writer's, constrained by facts, can't always find. As a publisher I have worked on many biographies and things often get messy when the subjects of the biography read the manuscript and dispute the approach taken by the biographer. Often support is withdrawn as the book hits the shops and the publisher and the author lose thousands of dollars in lost sales. Like Mephisto, many biographers unwittingly make a pact with the devil (which in this case is the pressure to tell one person's version of the truth) to have access to papers, families and friends. Often this pressure can feel unendurable though most good writers resist buckling under it. More simply, there is the thorny ethical issue of taking up the time of family and friends and the consequent sense that one may feel responsible to give their versions of a life.

A related hurdle for non-fiction is defamation. Like any publisher I could get bogged down in my version of 'the day I got sued' story. Suffice to say it is very distressing, stressful, and can lead to over cautious publishing and low level censorship. Malcolm Knox quoted author John Birmingham in the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this year as saying that he had been so "hollowed-out" by publishers' fear of defamation that he will no longer release non-fiction books in this country.

Mordue claims that recent local literary fiction has been of a low standard. 'For every big novel from the likes of Peter Carey, Tim Winton and Frank Moorhouse, there were a plethora of second-raters and wannabes, post-modern failures and hype riders beached in "grunge-lit", "chick-lit" and assorted niche-marketed clichés.' But Michael Heyward believes that the problem is not too many, but not enough. 'We are not going to publish lots of good novels until we publish a lot of novels, and learn to publish them well.' In the USA, he told me, there are 17,000 novels published a year. In Australia there are just a few hundred.

I think there are good novels published. It is possible, though, that there are so many novels that readers have trouble identifying which ones are for them. They are competing for space in overloaded bookshops and, unless there is some particular hook (you're a spunk, you're famous, you have a racy past, or your novel has sold well overseas) first novels aren't reviewed or only get 100 words. Things aren't much better the second time around, and even writers that have had success with the first novels aren't receiving attention. A similar syndrome is occurring in the film industry where first films are feted and by the time the second film is released the directors are old news.

In an essay in Timepieces, Drusilla Modjeska states, "I used to read every Australian novel that came out - but, one after another, they disappointed and irritated me." I think this irritation (and clearly she isn't alone) grows out of a discomfort with change. This relates, in part, to a common complaint that contemporary novels feel as if they are being written for the overseas market. Certainly the publishing industry, like most others, has become more global, and publishers are leaning towards books that float more easily between different countries and markets.

But I also believe that younger Australian's sense of Australia and what it means to be Australian has changed dramatically. The fact that, for the middle-class anyway, email and cheaper airfares, global shopping franchises, and jobs that take us travelling a lot, means our sense of place is changing dramatically. Not to mention work place restructuring which also reminds people of globalisation's heavy hand. I would argue that a person from Sydney is going to have a lot more in common with someone from Los Angles than someone in Broken Hill. It is not always National boundaries that define us. Globalisation is a process that I am critical of in many ways - but it certainly informs my identity, and many people's identity, these days.

Many critics talk about how it is hard to develop a national identity when writing from the city. That may be true. But that doesn't mean that such writers aren't writing in an authentic voice. Australian culture has always harked to the bush in its search for identity, but, to use Real Facts to bolster my argument, most Australians who have come here on boats over the last 230 years have lived in the cities. Romantics may not like the fact that you are more likely to find our national heart beat in the anonymous buildings, banks and cafes of Sydney, Melbourne and Perth than in the red desert or rainforest. We'd all prefer to have lived the lives that would allow us to write novels about our deep connection with country. But that's the thing with the novel - you can't, and you shouldn't, tell it what to do, what to write about or expect it to be predictable. What you can ask of it is that it uses language in a thoughtful way, that it allows you to empathise with people and places you have never known, and that it sets your imagination free.

Posted by Sophie at 01:40 PM

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