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