A Moveable Genre?

Tip-toeing the line between novel and memoir,  A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway, recounts Papa’s time in 1920’s Paris.  The book weaves episodic tales about the author’s Lost Generation peers, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Gertrude Stein to John Dos Passos, into a compelling narrative commentary on the now-romanticized epoch most associated with Hemingway.  But how does A Moveable Feast differ from, say, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, or even For Whom the Bell Tolls, which draw heavily from the author’s personal experiences?

Listed under “Biography/Memoir” on Amazon.com, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition makes this unusual negotiation easy for the average reader: it seems to promise that, though Hemingway’s other books may are interpretations of personal experience, this is what actually happened.  But The Restored Edition promises commentary and reorganization from Papa’s heirs, Sean and Patrick Hemingway; not to mention the fact that Hemingway wrote AMF far removed from the 1920’s, and had quite a memory-clouding thirst for vino tinto at the time.  So is Hemingway’s memoir what actually happened, what the author thinks actually happened, or what his estate wishes had happened?

Though we’ll never know for sure, the answer falls somewhere in the middle.  As readers, we are concerned with Hemingway’s life experiences, and if AMF is what the author thought and remembered about the 1920’s, then the question of difference between the memoir and what actually happened seems marginal.  All history gets communicated through perspective, and Hemingway’s word is as good as anyone else’s,  however, Papa’s stature and unique, reporter-esque style casts a strange light upon A Moveable Feast nonetheless.


Creative Non-Fiction: A Literary Burrito

 

Like everyone’s favorite Tex-Mex dish, creative nonfiction combines the best of two worlds to create a fresh literary flavor.  Rather than Mexican spices and Texan tortillas, the genre entitled ‘creative nonfiction’ synthesizes journalistic topics and tactics, with the writing and narrative structure of the novel.  But what exactly is creative nonfiction?

With Mailer’s Armies of the Night, Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, the glory days of the so-called nonfiction novel would seem to have come and gone, but in actuality, the ascendancy of creative nonfiction is in full swing. As the academy says, fifty years after a literary movement enters the scene, a countermovement emerges and memoirs in the style of Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, lead the charge past postmodernism. Wrought in conversational tones, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius tells the story of a young Eggers and his child brother bobbing in the wake of their parent’s death.  Reading like the Internet generation’s manifesto, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ‘s personalized detail, pop-cultural commentary, and use of modern vocabulary raises a tragic, though everyday, story to epic proportions.  Similarly, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior drapes ghosts and dragons over the harsh realities of childhood as a first-generation immigrant. Juggling a difficult relationship with her mother and intense cultural conflicts, Kingston navigates her California world with a sublime eye and lyrical observations. The title ‘creative nonfiction’ implies that the genre’s defining trait is an interpretive approach to the world, and like their literary predecessors, both Eggers and Kingston’s chief trope is the subjective experience of ordinary reality.  Achieved through nigh-surreal descriptions extracted from a twelve-year old mind, episodes of manic stress and self-reflection, and frighteningly relatable  articulations of our worries and prejudices, the pair of authors tell personal stories in a way the twenty-first reader can understand and empathize with.

Though it runs in the contemporary forefront, creative nonfiction is not without a track record.   Mark Twain’s stories from riverboat life, Hemingway’s Lost Generation tales, and even Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson’s travel-worn accounts of trotting the globe are all interpretive approaches to the normal, though incredibly diverse experiences of this world.  Is this self-indulgent, or life affirming?  In theory, much of what the genre concerns itself with appears narcissistic, however, consider the context: in a de-spiritualized world, where nearly all knowledge is available at the click of a button and science has an answer for almost everything, consciousness itself and our emotional responses to the world seem to be one of the final mysteries.  So, like a philosophical burrito, creative nonfiction blends the empirical reality we know and love, and then coopts the artist’s techniques to morph it into the supernormal.  Affirming the carpe diem attitude espoused by thinkers from Nietzsche to Plato*, creative nonfiction ultimately asks us to go out and ride the roller coaster of life with imagination, through all of its peaks and valleys.

 

*Gathered from carpediem.im and monomorphic.org

Much of the above information was gathered from an excellent class taught by Dr. Michael Crowley, who is an expert on the subject


W&L’s Tie-Died Toms

The cast of Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

For a campus of white columns and blue blazers, Washington & Lee’s literary C.V. reads like a countercultural manifesto. Our own walking paradox, Tom Wolfe, made a name for himself writing about LSD then sunk his profits into a wardrobe full of genteel, cream-colored suits.  But in the shadow of Wolfe’s New Journalism, another hippie-driven author passed through W&L: Tom Robbins.  Known for his works Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Robbins pushes Wolfe’s summer-of-love subject matter through a narrative kaleidoscope until manic novels emerge on the other end.  But wait, one asks, why haven’t I heard about this member of the W&L community before? Are Robbins’ books in the alumni publications section in the Bookstore? In the library?

Unlike Tom Wolfe, a star athlete and 1951 graduate, Robbins attended Washington & Lee from 1951-1952 before leaving at the end of his sophomore year. Robbins’ early departure from Washington & Lee, then a distinctly Southern college, would seem to mark a personal break from convention, a rejection of the traditions in which he was raised.  The son of a second-generation Baptist minister from North Carolina, Robbins weaves the tobacco-plains of his native state throughout his work, particularly his debut novel, Another Roadside Attraction.

Literature’s favorite (only?) hippie hotdog vendors
    Plucky Purcell, a member of the tie-died ARSA cast, embodies the Washington & Lee literary paradox to such an extent one can’t help but wonder if this character reflects Robbins’ own experiences. A mischievous gentleman who graduated from Duke, Purcell infiltrates the Vatican and accidentally discovers the corpse of Christ, shedding light on a centuries-old conspiracy;  of course, Plucky plans on exposing the Catholic hoax with said remains in favor of a 1969 society based around free-love and psychedelics.

Thus, Robbins injects some of the South’s primary literary concerns into his anti-establishment, anti-religious work.  Echoing Faulkner and O’Connor’s struggles with the darker side of Western Christianity, Robbins praises Jesus of Nazareth’s fundamental message, while blasting the righteous oppression of the High Church.

So, as one of the South’s postmodern literary figures, why is our campus almost empty of references to the (halfway) alumnus? Robbins’ books are, in fact, available in the “Alumni Publication” section of our library, but, unlike our other literary Tom, there is no Robbins Lecture Series, nor any inspiring Tom Robbins posters strewn about campus. Is this a Vatican-esque conspiracy by the W&L administration to keep a drop-out off the radar? Doubtful, but who would really believe such a place produced two of the psychedelic era’s loudest voices?

*Biographical information gathered from famousauthors.org

*Copy of Another Roadside Attraction provided courtesy of Leyburn Library, and was the Ballantine Books (New York) edition, published in 1971.