On the Narrator, the Writer, and the Self

Given the fact that I obviously did not draw the comic above and cannot, for the life of me, find out who did, I'm somewhat worried about copyright laws-- but this is technically an educational blog, right? Regardless, I think that it excellently introduces today's topic: the intersection of the writer and the self in fiction-- or, as I'll focus on today, in the shady, labyrinthine realm of creative non-fiction.

Generally, I'm almost physically incapable of writing myself. This blog you've been reading? That's me impersonating a digressive, book-loving high school student, right down to the parenthetical asides, the chatty tone, the sense of humor. If you were to read my fiction, you would encounter a completely different voice, one that might sound a little closer to who I am, how I think-- but, even then, it's not quite right. There is no self, no "I." Which is, if I'm not mistaken, the reason they call it fiction.   


However, I'm going to have to learn to write about myself, as myself, and quickly. The Norman Mailer High School and College Writing Awards, which previously had been open to fiction submissions, are now only allowing creative non-fiction submissions from high school students. What they mean by "creative non-fiction" is unclear, but I'm assuming it will involve a certain amount of autobiographical, first-person narration.

And that means I'm going to have to open the nasty Pandora's box of the personal*, the very subject matter that, as an aspiring fiction-writer, I am most desperate to avoid. In the face of such hardship, as per usual, I've been looking to my personal literary idols for answers.   

Which is relevant to this blog, as À la recherche du temps perdu is somewhat auto-biographical. While Proust refuses to name the narrator for the majority of the book, he does so in the fifth volume, with flourish-- and (you guessed it), like the author, the enigmatic "I" of the novel is also named Marcel. Other characters find their origins in the lives of real people, as well--the Duchesse de Guermantes is largely modeled after the Comtesse de Greffulhe, and M. de Charlus-- a sort of Anthony Blanche-esque figure-- is based off the Comte de Montesquiou, just as Blanche was based off Acton*. This is creative non-fiction at its most abstract, most obscure: life distilled, conveyed in lucid, cast-off fragments, recognizable only through the most skewed of lenses. And Proust's prose, despite the age of his narrator, remains decidedly mature, thoughtful, adult-- an adult reflecting on his childhood, tossing on the edge of sleep, mind redolent with heady, long-ago perfumes.

For some reason, I can't picture Joyce without the lovely
moustache-and-eye-patch look. This, I suppose, is simply
how his writing sounds: so smug, so self-important,
so generally piratical.

At the very opposite end of the spectrum, however, is another supposedly semi-autobiographical book I've been reading: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness masterpieces. While I generally adore modernism, I do have a slightly trickier relationship with Joyce, as-- though A Portrait and Dubliners were both fairly easy reads-- the bits of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake I've read were, to say the least, a tad incomprehensible. "But Noodynaady's actual ingrate tootle is of come into the garner mauve and thy nice are stores of morning and buy me a bunch of iodines..."-- what? I usually try to avoid reading literary criticism, as I feel it's sort of an insult to my intelligence**, but I'm not quite sure I'd be able to get through these books on my own.

But then, I'll get to a certain passage that makes me stop, breathless. Think of the end of The Dead: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Usually, I'm a coherent annotate-er, but all that I was capable of writing next to that line were a couple of emphatic exclamation marks. 

Oh, Twain. Even if he wanted to do unspeakable things to
Austen's corpse, at least he loved cats.

But, while I'm convinced during these moments that he was an absolute genius (Fitzgerald said he admired Joyce so much that he'd jump out of a window to prove it, and I understand the sentiment completely), I feel like throttling him the rest of the time, or-- as Twain said of Austen-- digging him up and beating him over the head with his own shin bone. 

Whether or not any gravedigging is going to occur, it can't be denied that certain parts of the book are reminiscent of Joyce's life. Even so, they're not entirely helpful to me at the moment, given the fact that I would be wary of submitting anything so stylistically experimental to a contest. So, in sum, I should probably start reading more creative non-fiction, for a broader idea of what the genre is/was/can be. The only strictly non-fiction pieces I've read lately are In Cold Blood and Fear and Loathing, and I'm not sure they're going to help me in regards to writing anything I'd feel comfortable showing to teachers, acquaintances and/or small children.

However, I have been reading a lot of ridiculously brilliant writing of late (see Proust, Joyce, Nabakov, et al.) and I think that, if my writerly self-esteem isn't going to plummet irreparably, I ought to read something by an author who's not a genius, or even  particularly good. Possibly Bret Easton Ellis, because -- although I'm usually not a fan****-- I'm just in that sort of mood.



As far as writerly suicides go, Chatterton's was
probably one of the most flagrantly romanticized.
Apparently, after the debut of Vigny's play on the topic,
one could hear "solitary gunshots" echoing through Paris.

* I'm not saying that, for a writer, personal subject matter is always dark and dreary, but I find it often is. I used to abhor the cliche of the depressed, pill-popping novelist, until I read about a recent Swedish study. Apparently, writers are 50% more likely to kill themselves than other people, and are vastly more likely to have bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, &c. Another study linked high levels of creativity to a lack of dopamine receptors-- yep, the same dopamine receptors that exist at lower levels in the brains of schizophrenics. Connection? I'm not sure, but I do have some concern for my future mental health.

** Apparently, that part of Brideshead Revisited in which Blanche recites The Waste Land through a megaphone actually happened. Why, why, why doesn't anyone I know do things like this?

*** I'm beginning to wonder if this will prove to be a serious problem when I go to college. Even if my autodidactic, haphazard sort of literary education has given me a fresh perspective, I'm not sure it will necessarily be a correct one.

**** Some of his comments about women make me furious. I realize that this is the same guy who wrote American Psycho, that he's trying to shock me, but he still manages to push all of my angry-feminist buttons.