"Truthness"

The “Truth”, as a term, is quite complicated. We’ve all been brought to believe that truth is an absolute fact and thus it is the same in every situation or condition. I remember high school logic class:
T and T = T
F and F = F
T and F = F
…
It drove me crazy! (Does that mean I’m an illogical person? I think not.)A true statement and another true statement, when put together, always generate a true conclusion. Fine, that makes sense. But on the other hand, who decided whether those statements were true? By this virtue, we can ascertain that truth is rather a subjective rather than an objective matter (and thus its definition is also). What could be true to me is not always true to you, and what is true for her is not always true for him. So when asked about what the “truth” is in O’brien’s “How to tell a True War Story” it is rather difficult to provide a concise answer. In any case, my attempt to answer such question is as follows: The “truth” about telling a true war story is that it is most likely untrue. What I just said contradicted itself right? Well I think that was part of the point O’Brien was trying to make. War is full of contradictions, the biggest of which O’Brien explained quite brilliantly:

At its core, perhaps, war is just another word for death, and yet any
soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings
with it a corresponding proximity to life…you’re never more alive than when
you’re almost dead

Because of the contradictions of war and the confusion it brings us as third party viewers, we tend to analyze it to make sense of it. And because we analyze it, it’s no longer a true war story. Why? Because it’s not what the story did to you but what you got from the story. We always come to the conclusion that war was horrible and to justify its horridness, we insert a certain sense of morality to war. But as O’Brien puts it, war isn’t just hell,

...it’s just the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure
and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and
love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery”. War makes
you a man; war makes you dead.

Readings in Relation to Me and future Writings

I thought hard and long about skipping this particular entry. I thought, “I can’t rank these readings. I can’t even rank my favorite artists, food, or movies, much less these readings.” But I realized that I was spending way too much time thinking about not writing this entry, so I might as well write the entry since I’m doing the thinking anyway. Therefore, the list I’ve got on my head looks a little bit like this:

Bret Lott’s “Toward a Definition of Creative Nonfiction”

Why? Well it’s simple. Lott’s piece made it conceivably possible for me to figure out (or at least give myself an idea of) what creative nonfiction is. Yes, I had my initial ideas of it before I even signed up for the class and some of those are ideas that I still hold to be true about creative nonfiction, but Lott helped me shape what I think of it now. And, as I am inclined to believe, the “here and now” is important to highlight since I do have to write an essay (or three) that could be conceivably be called creative nonfiction in this day and age. I loved his piece because he describes CNF as a moral cause by saying that it is our responsibility to answer to and for our lives. I’d like to that before I am no longer capable of doing so.

Montaigne’s “That Men Should Not Judge”

I will most probably receive a lot of flak from my peers for admitting such a thing but what can I say? I liked Montaigne’s piece because of exactly what it was. It’s an essay. Yes, it may not exactly be called creative nonfiction but you’ve got to love the “try.” Relying on Lott’s word, Montaigne was the first to call his writings “essais.” They were tries, endeavors, attempts to make sense of things, or, in other cases, to prove a point. This whole thing about trying is what I must do to be able to write something of value.

Danticat, Drummond, Schwartz (and maybe Kinkaid)

I’ve grouped these three together because of a particular theme they have in common (at least I think so) in their writings featured in class. The pieces I have read from these authors have a certain element of “revelation” in them as I have blogged about earlier. This same kind of element is something I’d like to incorporate in my writing. There are a few things that I can think about in my life that was something like a revelation. It’s definitely something I would like to explore.

Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”

The reason Orwell is ranked fourth as of the moment is because I really couldn’t decide if it had any real impact on me and what I might write about for my essay. But I liked it enough to rank it by itself, separated from the rank below. In any case, what rather liked from Orwell’s piece is the fact that he was straight forward. He had everything lined up to make a point. It was a deliberate criticism of imperialism. This particular one has a lot more gravity since it is something he directly experienced.

Alexie, Oliver, Thiel, Didion

Not that I didn’t like their respective pieces, its just that it really didn’t affect me as much as the others did as far its relation to what I might write about (But what do I know?)

Jo Ann Beard’s “Out There”

I absolutely enjoyed this piece. But I can’t bring myself to emulate it. I need some sense of order and flow in my writing. Yes, Beard may have some kind of order, but it was incredibly incomplete. And I can’t write in “staccato,” its just not my style.

On Revelations: Looking at Drummond and Danticat

A revelation is a powerful thing. In Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, a revelation often always came from God and, as such, held great power over the person to which it was revealed and the people he or she chose to share it to. During the Enlightenment, when reason was championed as the supreme truth, revelations also held great power since it came into fruition under one’s own capability and intellect. Hundreds of years later, personal revelations such as these hold the same power over us than that with religious themes. It is such not specifically because we as a society have forgotten our religions and replaced them with secular reason but because it holds much more gravity on us as a whole since it can apply to everyone, not just a believer. Laurie Lynn Drummond’s revelation is one such example.

In Drummond’s narrative piece “Alive,” from the get go, we are submerged into her world of thoughts with an opening paragraph that sets the tone. Her writing reads like a Jo Ann Beard piece with its short bursts of sentences, using simple but evocative language to attract and maintain a reader’s attention. Drummond’s piece narrates her experience in Baton Rouge where she was stalked by someone that we can only assume to be the serial killer she mentions in the first paragraph. Her narrative is incredibly fluid even with the short sentences and gives the reader a sense of continuity with the seemingly chronological depiction of events (I don’t think she could have told the story any other way). In the piece, Drummond was quite successful in translating her fear and paranoia into words in a way that would make it easy for the reader to grasp. However, as one reads through the piece, it is a little difficult to ascertain what Drummond’s motives were for writing down her experience. There was no specific declaration of purpose in any of her paragraphs until the last one. In this paragraph, Drummond connects all the pieces of her narrative and completes the thought in her essay when she finally realized her personal revelation:

“And that’s when I finally get, really get, what I have always known.
Alertness, tolerance, compassion, suspicion: none of it matters.
I am vulnerable simply because I am alive.”

By this virtue, Drummond’s “Alive” is also reminiscent of Mimi Schwartz’s “My Father Always Said” since the structure (though Drummond told the story in a more chronological manner) is quite similar. Both Drummond and Schwartz narrated a story by bits and pieces, pieces that, by themselves, could not stand alone. They both wait until the last paragraph (in Schwartz’s case, last segment) to unfurl the purpose of the essay.

In Edwige Danticat’s “Westbury Court,” the same sense of personal revelation is also present, but perhaps in a less explicit way. Danticat’s piece on growing up in 1980’s Brooklyn takes us through a “traumatic” event in her life in which a fire in her apartment building ravaged her neighbor’s apartment across the hall. The fire was a traumatic event Danticat even though she (and her little brother) was not affected directly by the flames. It was traumatic to her even though those who lived in the apartment that caught on fire were not people she knew (she didn’t even know their names) but she had seen the damage that was done. It was traumatic to her even though she didn’t even know the apartment was on fire until firemen smashed through her door because she was too preoccupied (General Hospital). It was a traumatic event for Danticat because she, in her mind, thought that she could have helped those who perished (two you boys) had she not been entranced by the convoluted plot lines of a popular soap opera. Not only was the fire a traumatic experience for Danticat, but it is also marked the beginning of a cycle of tragic (mildly to severe) events in her neighborhood. In a somewhat chronological way, Danticat lists the tragic events that followed the fire (intertwined with somewhat happy memories of the Parent Brothers). During the same year of the fire, she lost two more neighbors, both to disease and violence. They were also burglarized (her father’s camera was stolen; he never took a photo ever again after the event). A man was also shot and killed right across the street from their apartment. Like Schwartz and Drummond, Danticat writes us a loosely connected set of paragraphs that, on its own, would not stand. And like Schwartz and Drummond, Danticat also waits till the end to unfurl to us her purpose. The last few lines of Danticat’s piece reveals to us, though not quite as explicit as Schwartz’s “My Father Always Said” and Drummond’s “Alive”, her purpose for writing the essay. In my somewhat imaginative mind, (maybe less imaginative, more hallucinatory) perhaps Danticat’s purpose was to reveal to us her revelation: Life is a fragile gift that could, in a moments notice, be taken away by fire, gunshot or disease and because it is so, “sometimes, it is too late to say ‘I shouldn’t have.’”

Mimi Schwartz and What her Father Always Said...

People who lived through (and associate themselves with) a particular past generation carry a sense of how it was in the “good old days.” More often than not, these people are our parents, grandparents, older relatives or even older siblings (my older brother is 18 years older than I). You’ll always catch people like these saying things that put their generation (or decade, in the case of my brother and sisters) in a higher platform than your own. Lines like “it was better then” or “back in the day, it wasn’t as bad” are always thrown around when these particular people talk about the things that are going on in today’s world. To Mimi Schwartz, her father was one of these who came from a past generation. And in the tradition of those from past generations, Schwartz’s father had a favorite saying, “In Rindheim, you didn’t do such things!” The line is clearly a reflection of how things change through time and Mimi Schwartz, at first, did not understand why this was such a big deal for her father. In her essay “My Father Always Said,” Schwartz explains to us how she had come to terms with her father’s constant comments about how different it was in Rindheim, and in the process, she came to understand her family and even herself.

Schwartz’s essay is subtly separated into six sections. The first section serves as an introduction for the piece. It introduced who she was when she was a teenager and who her dad was then (albeit it was just the tip of the iceberg). She also touched on how things were where she grew up (Forest Hills, Queens). She finishes the introduction by explaining to us that the rest of the piece was to be about her first trip to Rindheim with her father and mother.

The second section deals with her initial impressions of Rindheim. She expressively remembers how different the town was to cities like Stuttgart where her mother was from. The section also tells us a little bit of what Schwartz’ father did as a young man in his old town. The rest of the section deals with how different Rindheim has become in 1993 than the Rindheim she remembers in 1953. However, I believe that the point of the section is the comparison that we get between the life of Schwartz’s father as young man and her young life in America.

The third section goes more into the old synagogue that her father had brought Schwartz and her mother to. Schwartz, being a young and curious girl, asked her father if they were going to go inside the temple. Her father explains that the synagogue was merely a shell of its former self as it was “gutted by fire during kristallnacht.” Not knowing what it was, she asked her father and received an answer that she really wasn’t expecting. The section shows us that the teenage version of Schwartz was beginning to understand a little but more of her history and heritage. It also explained the anxiety her father had about visiting certain places in Rindheim (his old house and the synagogue). Despite the fact that her father’s catch phrase was “In Rindheim, you didn’t do such things,” Schwartz’s father had many stories about Rindheim better left untouched. Schwartz’s father left in 1933, before things became really bad in Rindheim. But a lot of Rindheim Jews did not leave until kristallnacht. The idyllic town was certainly not isolated from the evils brought upon by Nazi Germany.

The fourth section was a little less somber than the previous one. The relatively short section deals with Schwartz’s parents as they told her a few stories from their youth. Schwartz reiterates the fact that life in Rindheim was very different for her father than her life in Queens. She marvels at the fact that her father’s school was not separated by age but rather by religion. But she does feel some comfort in knowing that they all got along. She also receives some comfort from the fact that her mother and father did have some fun when they young.

The fifth section sees a return to somberness. The section is about her visit to the Jewish cemetery in which a lot of her relatives were buried. In actuality, the initial purpose of this trip was to visit their relatives rather than visiting Schwartz’s father’s hometown. Schwartz explains that as much as she tried, she couldn’t put faces to the relatives (especially grandparents) she had never met but essentially she also lost. All she could think of were the grandparents she did know, her maternal grandparents (I assume) who lived three blocks away from their house in Queens. Even when the real tragedy and sadness of the cemetery is explained by her father by describing what happened to tante Rosa, teenaged Schwartz thought it to be not so bad since they were people that she did not know (the existence of tante Rosa was only made known to her when they visited the cemetery).

The sixth section ties all the other sections together. In this section, Schwartz explains how she’s finally accepted her father’s signature line, how it gave her a sense of her own history and sense of legitimacy. However, after the trip, she realized that her father had changed. He no longer said his often repeated line; in its place was a happier one that goes “Smile, Smile! You are a lucky girl to be here!” Although she doesn’t say it quite explicitly, the last paragraph of the section explains to us that her father, during their trip, was able to find some sort of closure that let him let go of Rindheim.

Schwartz writes the piece in a rather exquisite manner. It is quite reflective, like most of the creative nonfiction works I have read thus far. But, perhaps, the main difference lies in Schwartz’s ability to write seemingly disconnected (they were in a way disconnected despite it being about the same trip) sections and brining it all together in the end. It’s as if each sections were like separate pieces of colorful beads. By itself, they are pleasant to read but they lack a beginning and an ending and thus it seems like they are floating (perhaps the first section doesn’t suffer so much from this since it was essentially a “beginning”). However, the last section is like the string that goes through the beads and makes the entire ensemble into a necklace (or bracelet). The gaps in between the sections serve like bookends for the several snippets of Schwartz’s memories of her first trip to Rindheim. The gaps are like smaller, plain beads that emphasize the difference between other beads, making them standout.

On Montaigne and Orwell

Heraclitus, an incredibly smart (and obviously very observant) scholar who lived in the 5^th century BC, once said that “there is nothing permanent except change.” A millennium and half after his death, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist, geophysicist, or Mensa member to realize that Heraclitus’ observation is still true. Everything and everyone, at some point or another, no matter what one does, is subject to change. Creative Nonfiction, like everything else in this world, is also subject to change. In a previous reading, the essayist Bret Lott mentioned that Michel de Montaigne, the 16^th century French statesman and writer, was the forerunner, if not the inventor, of Creative Nonfiction. But after reading Montaigne’s “That Men Should Not Judge of our Happiness till after our Death,” the casual observer might have trouble believing in what Lott said about the Frenchman. If one is only used to contemporary works of creative nonfiction, Montaigne’s piece would seem almost completely alien especially if it was read aloud. However, this disconnect between the works of the “inventor” of creative nonfiction and the works of contemporary CNF authors like Joan Didion and Jamaica Kinkaid, is merely the product of several hundred years of change. Writing styles change, meaning of words also change, even the most rigid conventions of writing eventually change over several hundreds of years. Nonetheless, upon closer inspection, there are several elements of this particular Montaigne piece that has filtered through time. Take for example Montaigne’s rumination halfway through “That Men Should Not Judge.” It is somewhat similar to the kinds of reflection contemporary CNF authors use in their works. Even Bret Lott’s “Toward a Definition of Creative Nonfiction” has some ties to Montaigne’s work. Lott’s use of ancient and not so ancient writers as examples in his work is quite reminiscent of Montaigne’s penchant for quoting and referring to classical writers like Plutarch and Lucretius.

Assuming that we all agree with Lott’s claim that Montaigne is the forerunner of creative nonfiction (I agree with Lott, but what do I know?), it doesn’t take too long for the sound and appearance of creative nonfiction to change (what’s a few hundreds in the grand scheme of things anyway?). By the time George Orwell wrote “Shooting an Elephant” in 1936, creative nonfiction (or personal essays) has changed dramatically. Writing styles changed, meanings of words have changed, and the most rigid conventions of writing have also changed, thus resulting in a very different product. Unlike in the time of Montaigne where personal reflection was thought of as detrimental to the proper style of writing, personal reflection in the 20^th and 21^st century was and is quite common and accepted (at least in essays, never in scholarly works). Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” resembles contemporary creative nonfiction in many different ways. Obviously, the element of self-reflection present in this particular work. How can one be more self-reflective than recalling and analyzing one’s past experiences? Also, the tone of the piece is simple but very descriptive, similar to more recent works like Kinkaid’s “Biography of Dress.” Anyone who has read about anti-colonialism in the former British Empire knows that Orwell was one of the staunchest proponents of the movement. In this essay, Orwell uses his personal recollection of an event in his life as a vehicle to share his revelations about evils of tyranny and colonialism much like how Kinkaid used snippets of childhood memories to share who her mother was in relation to her as a two year old.

Kinkaid and Lott: Understanding CNF just a little bit more...

To anybody else, a simple yellow dress from a person’s childhood would probably not garner more than a few sentences of pleasant but fleeting nostalgia. To Jamaica Kinkaid, her yellow dress deserved an entire essay. Kinkaid’s “Biography of a Dress” is a stirring reflection on a particular event in her childhood that revolved around a yellow, homemade, poplin dress. However, unlike what the title suggests, the essay is not about the dress her mother made for Kinkaid when she was a toddler. Yes, I must concede that there was a lot written about how the dress was made. On the other hand, upon closer inspection, all that talk about the yellow dress merely served as a vehicle for Kinkaid to show us (rather than tell us) a particular part of her childhood and how she remembers her mother. In fact, as I finished reading the essay, I got the notion that the story was more about who her mother was in relation to her rather than what the yellow dress was in relation to a two year old. Kinkaid goes on and shows us how she, as a two year old, thought of what was going on around her. By doing so, Kinkaid deliberately shows us who her mother was as well. What makes this essay different from what I have read earlier (Didion, Alexie, and Beard) is precisely that, it wasn’t about what happened in her past but rather who she was in the past. Yes, this theme is somewhat reminiscent in Jo Ann Beard’s “Out There” but Kinkaid’s explanation of who her mother was in relation to her (and in effect, who she was in relation to her mother) takes it to a whole other level.

***

More often than not, when a writer writes about the definition of a term, their intent is to carry you from Point A (the question, the term) to Point B (the answer, the definition) in a precise and concise manner. Bret Lott doesn’t do that. What he does is nudge you (push sounds a little too violent) from Point A to wherever you decide to go to between Point B and Point Z. Perhaps I tried to milk the analogy a little bit too much there but I would like to believe that I’ve made my point. Lott’s essay “Toward a Definition of Creative Nonfiction” is exactly what the title tells us it is. Lott gives us several possible definitions that he gathered by reflecting on what other writers like Philip Lopate, Derek Kidner and even Michel Montaigne have said about writing such pieces. However, the main point of the essay is Lott’s argument that, as a writer, one owes it to himself or herself to find a definition of CNF simply through experimentation. He explains that “ we can no more understand what creative nonfiction is by trying to define it than we can learn how to ride a bike by looking at a bicycle tire, a set of handle bars, the bicycle chain itself.” (p.270) In essence, we can really only come up with a definition of CNF if we try to write creative nonfiction. There’s no substitute for trying. Nevertheless, despite all of this, the one thing that left an impression in me is Lott’s “last element” in his essay. The reason we write creative nonfiction is because it is “our responsibility as human beings to answer for and to our lives.” (p. 276)

Creative Non-Fiction?

How does one define “Creative Non-Fiction?” It’s easy to define “Creative”, whether as an adjective or a noun. It is also relatively easy to define “Non-Fiction.” However, putting the two together and treating it as a single term is another story. It becomes a little unwieldy and somehow ambiguous. Unfortunately, “Creative Non-Fiction” can’t be defined as “non-fiction with a creative quality to it.” If there’s one thing I learned in my fairly extensive academic career, you can’t define a word (or a term) by simply repeating it. In situations like these, perhaps the best thing to do is trust an authority in the subject (in this case, my professor) and read works that have been labeled as “Creative Non-Fiction” so as to be able to discern a unique definition for it. After sampling Joan Didion’s inspired piece about keeping notes, Sherman Alexie’s anecdotes on his childhood and the struggles of the younger Native American generation, and Jo Ann Beard’s seemingly chaotic but purposeful narrative of being “Out There”, I was able to define “Creative Non-Fiction” as an exercise in retrospective self-contemplation.

I know what you’re thinking. If it could be summed up in one word, it would be “What?” Don’t worry, I am completely aware that I have just defined a complex term with another complex term and for this I apologize. I find that this is the easiest way to define CNF. Perhaps, if I explain my conclusion, it wouldn’t cause as much confusion as I assume it’s causing right now. The word Retrospect comes from the Latin word retrospectare (which actually comes from two Latin words, spectare and retro) which means to “look back.” The three authors definitely did not have similar styles but they did have at least one thing in common, they were “looking back.” The word Contemplate comes from the Latin contemplari which means to “gaze attentively or observe.” I wouldn’t say that Didion, Alexie and Beard gazed attentively at themselves (is that at all possible?) but all three, while “looking back”, certainly observed who they were at the time in regards to what happened to them. Maybe the way I chose to explain all of this makes the authors sound egotistic and what not, but in reality they aren’t. All their “Retrospective Self-Contemplation” actually serves a greater purpose. It helps us, the readers, critics and eventual pupils of such literary pieces to read, understand, and digest the truths that they have written about. However, this definition of CNF is only one of many correct definitions. CNF does not have to be like Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” or like Alexie’s “Superman and Me,” in fact, it doesn’t even have to be an essay at all. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple but eloquent retelling of your summer’s adventures to a friend or two.

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