Yesterday, I tried to suggest we could think about narrative non-fiction not as divided up into genres but as dictated by the writer’s proximity to their subject.
There’s a confusion here between closeness and scale, that I am still trying to work through — and here’s where I’ve got.
I remember from university John Carey’s lectures on the poet and divine John Donne. Carey always wore a tight black leather jacket and liked to satirize his subjects, but fondly. For example, he noted that Donne, when speaking of the creation, had a tendency to expand himself to a size just slightly bigger than it, and when speaking to God, an inclination to speak down to Him.
Donne mansplained Jehovah.
That, I hope, relates to this —
At the biggest scale (top left), we are looking at something very large from unbelievably far away; at the smallest (bottom right), something tiny from an infinitesimal distance.
Unlike Donne, we don’t need to change our dimensions, or even the size of our eyes, in order to do the necessary gazing at galaxies (a cat may look at a king).
Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space. Still our humanly embodied selves, but just having a cosmic shufti.
In order to write about events that take place on that scale, however, we need to imaginatively extend our lifespan by aeons. If not, there won’t be any change we’re able to see. Objects six light years across only swirl and shimmy and flop and burp when sped up millions of times.
To examine the subatomic realms we are forced, imaginatively, to shrink ourselves. (And physicists will tell us that things smaller than atoms can’t really be seen and aren’t really things.) There is still a lot of empty space between stuff, but we need to fit inside of this. We also need to slow down time almost to a stop in order to be able to see anything like an event, or the as-yet-indeterminate possibility of an event.
These are the big outside and the tiny inside views of matter.
Yet, in terms of non-fiction, there is a different kind of inside, and it has a transformative effect on genre.
For the moment, we’ll forget spatial distance. And we’ll not that all of these forms of non-fiction — even the most immediate — are likely to be written retrospectively, over a period of time.
If something or someone we are writing about is in the past, and outside us, we’d end up calling that genre History or Historical Biography.
If it we are writing about what took place in the past and inside us, we’d call that Memoir or Autobiography.
If our subject is what’s taking place now, inside us, we’d call that a Live Blog or a Journal.
If our subject is with us in the present moment, outside us, we’d call that Travel Writing or Reportage, or an Interview or a Profile.
I should make a grid or table up, to put these all in their places. There may be gaps.
Where it gets really interesting is that — in contemporary non-fiction — there are no longer firm divisions between, say, History and Memoir. The ‘I’ of the narrator will be prominent. It’s even likely, in straight narrative history, that presumptions will be made about what a historical figure thought or said to themselves.
Television history is now mediated through personable presenters going on personal journeys of discovery, rather than dispassionate experts walking over battlefields and quoting mortality rates. This is an attempt to bring the past to visual and emotional life in the same way that David Attenborough walks with dated digital dinosaurs.
In books, the effect is different and more subtle. The ‘I’ narrator’s appearance in both past and present means that there’s a greater entanglement of values. The entrenchment of attitudes from the past — imperial, colonial, theological — are confessed more openly in the present, and the back projection of who we individually and collectively are is made an issue.
I’m mentioning this all because thinking in terms of variable proximity, rather than pre-existing genre, might mean you see a less limited, more lively, more original way of approaching a subject.
Critical/theory essays are almost all I ingest these days. I do love a bit of bio in there too though. Katie Goh's book The End was a great example. Obviously Mark Fisher was the God Emperor of the genre.