Narrative Expectations in the Personal Essay

Ballenger

AWP:

April 2015

Narrative Expectations in the Personal Essay

Do we read nonfiction narratives differently than we read invented stories? Do we expect different things to happen—do fiction and nonfiction have a different narrative logic--what might this mean for those of us who write essays? These are the questions I hope to explore here, beginning with a true story that was, for a short time, an internet sensation. In 2011, Dr. Michael Shannon, a California pediatrician, was driving his SUV on the Pacific Coast highway when he was “t-boned” by a semi. The SUV, pinned under the truck, burst into flames with Shannon trapped inside. Fortunately, firefighters from Paramedic Engine 29 we at the scene in minutes, quickly extinguished the flames, and using the jaws of life the firefighters dramatically rescued the doctor as the flames were licking around his feet and legs. Among Shannon’s rescuers was a paramedic, Chris Trokey, who, it turns out, was Dr. Shannon’s patient thirty years earlier. Trokey was born premature, weighing a mere 3 pounds, and the prognosis was grim— a fifty percent chance of survival. Dr. Shannon spent days caring for the infant “round the clock,” the very same child who of course later grew up to return the favor years later on a California highway, part of a team that saved the physician’s life. “It’s amazing to watch them all grow up,” said Shannon, “but to have one come back in your life, on a day you really need it, that’s incredible.”

If this was fiction would it be a good story? That was the question that my colleague, novelist Brady Udall, asked his graduate workshop recently, and everyone agreed that this story would be terrible fiction. Why? Because coincidence rarely works as plot points in fiction since narrative logic depends on causality, and coincidence doesn’t provide it. Consider another scenario, this one an invention that I presented to my own students to test a theory I had about narrative expectations in nonfiction: Imagine a moment in a larger story in which a famous actress, in the midst of filming a scene in a New York apartment, trips and accidently falls out of an open window and falls eight stories. I was clear that this actress was not a point-of-view character or narrator—just an unfortunate victim of circumstance. I told them to offer their predictions about what happened to the actress, first if they were reading the scene in nonfiction and then if it was a scene in a short story or novel. I had my own hunch about how this would play out. In either case, I thought my students would probably predict the actress dies from the fall, but in fiction I thought they might at least entertain the miraculous possibility that she survived. Couldn’t this highly unlikely plot development be at least plausible in a work of fiction? If this was nonfiction—in other word a “true” story—I thought my students would be unlikely to believe in miracles, and resign themselves to the inevitable outcome: an eight story fall will kill you.

There are also sorts of problems with this hypothetical scenario. Stripped from the larger context of the story, it’s enormously difficult to evaluate. Why is the falling actress part of the story in the first place? What purpose is it meant to serve? Who is the narrator, and what is the narrator’s interest in this moment? Still, I had a hunch it might be instructive as a way to begin exploring narrative expectations. Not surprisingly, most everyone I asked at first predicted the clumsy actress fell to her death, no matter whether it was part of a fiction or nonfiction narrative. But when pressed, a number of my students thought the woman’s survival was plausible but only in fiction where, as Christopher put it, “anything can happen.”

But can “anything happen” in fiction? Most of us would say no, of course not. Stories work—or don’t—depending on the presence of a number of factors that are frequently discussed, including a plausible plot that involves conflict and characters who have a stake in the outcome. At the heart of narrative logic is causality—the working out of reasons or consequences of something significant that happened. That was the problem with an invented story based on the EMT and his pediatrician on the Pacific Coast Highway—coincidence and not causality.

But might the rescue story work in creative nonfiction? The answer to that question brings us back to narrative expectations, I think, and whether a plot based on coincidence would be as fatal in nonfiction as it is in fiction. Most of my students thought the doctor’s story would work in nonfiction, depending on its execution. Why? Erin said that in fiction the meanings of the story are usually shared between characters, and in the essay, they are shared directly between the narrator and readers. In other words, coincidence alone—and especially in the absence of causality-- leaves too little for characters to work with. But a narrator in an essay—in this case perhaps the doctor or the firefighter—might have a lot to say about the experience because the coincidence itself, seen from outside the story, might provoke causal reflection.

What I understand Erin to be suggesting is this: When meanings must be worked out within the imaginative world of the story, then characters are bound to work with the plot the writer has provided, and only certain kinds of plots yield enough meaning. Coincidence seems a meager meal. On the other hand, the nonfiction narrator lives both inside and outside the story. As a matter of fact, it’s routine in essay writing to see the story itself the main subject for meditation. For example, the doctor who narrates an essay about the miraculous coincidence might find in the coincidence itself a chance to reflect on the meaning of coincidence. Fictional characters caught in the same story are less likely to see that. At least that’s the theory.

What I’m starting to explore here is how narrative expectations in true stories—particularly personal essays-- differ from those in invented ones, and what this might mean for writers of nonfiction.

First consider the element we expect of all stories, fiction or nonfiction: The presence of a narrator. But here, too, I think we can draw some distinctions from “real” stories and imagined ones. The concept of “following,” an idea I borrow from Rick Altman, a narrative theorist, might be a good place to begin thinking about this. How do we know we’re reading a story, any story, fiction or nonfiction? Well, we look for narrative activity, which means, first and foremost, that we sense the presence of a “narrator.” How do we do that? Altman uses the following example:

Imagine a long shot of the Grand Central Station waiting room. The camera doesn’t move as it captures hundreds of hurried commuters scurrying about. Suddenly the camera tracks in to focus on a single, nervous individual looking at the clock. As she moves across the floor, the camera pans to follow her. At first the space is neutral, unvectored, narratively flat. When the camera focuses on a single individual and follows her, however, we recognize that we are being cued to read this scene as narrative…As she becomes a character, thanks to the process of following, so her activities—previously indistinguishable from all the other activates visible in the image—turn into narrative-defining actions…The process of following thus simultaneously activates both character and narrator. (16)

It is the sense that someone has made a decision about who should be followed, Altman argues, that signals a presence of a narrator to readers, and in turn tells us that this is a story.

We read this cue the same way in both fiction and nonfiction. But does it matter whether the character being followed is imagined, or as in the personal essay, is a “flesh-and-blood narrator,” one we know to be “real?” Consider the following opening from “Breaking Clean,” an essay I’ve long admired from the western writer Judy Blunt.

I rarely go back to the ranch where I was born or to the neighboring land where I bore the fourth generation of a cattle dynasty. My people live where the hardpan and sagebrush flats give way to the Missouri River Breaks, a country so harsh and wild and distant that it must grow its own replacements, as it grows its own food, or it will die. Hereford cattle grow slick and mean foraging along the cutbanks for greasewood shots and buffalo grass. A two-hour trip over gumbo roads will take you to the lone main street of the nearest small town.

From the start, we know we’re reading a story because we’re “following” a narrator remembering a particular time and place, beginning with the phrase “I rarely go back…” Knowing this is nonfiction, readers won’t have much confusion about who is speaking: Judy Blunt. Yet imagine for a moment how the “I” changes if we were told that this was a short story. The first question a reader will have in fiction—one that largely avoided in a nonfiction reading—is who is this “I”? A fictional narrator like this doesn’t begin with a name, a reputation, and a historical record. You can’t google her. The fictional I-character is a resident of an imagined world, not a real one, and while this character can be made somewhat real if the writer makes that imagined world a convincing one, she is not of this world. She will never live both inside and outside of the story, as nonfiction characters must (Lehmann). What difference does this make in our narrative expectations?

When we quickly dispense with the problem of mimesis—that is, of seeing characters as real people—and if this character is the narrator of a personal essay, then readers will work from the following set of assumptions:

1. The narrator must always play by the rules of real life—an eight story fall will kill you.
2. The narrator must also play by the narrative rules of nonfiction: you don’t make things up that aren’t true.
3. The narrator is the mouthpiece for the author. The story’s meanings aren’t ambiguously shared between author and characters. In nonfiction, the author’s purposes and the narrator’s purposes are the same.

It is this last assumption that most influences how we read—and how we write—personal essays. Since there is no question of who’s in charge of meanings, then from the start readers of the essay expect the narrator to have something to say. Now we might expect this as well of certain narrators in fiction, particularly if they signal an awareness that they are part of a story that they promise will yield meaning. These are narrators who often tell a tale retrospectively (Ishmael). . But the contrast with nonfiction is that these fictional narrators’ have a murky relationship to the author. I think this makes a difference in how we “follow” them. Knowing that the “I” in the story is Judy Blunt—not some imagined narrator—places her in our world, not an invented one. This is a world with certain, some would say severe, limitations. In “our world,” the narrator’s highest obligation is first to what actually happened—to reality—and second to telling a good story about what happened. In fiction, it’s the other way around. Readers of nonfiction, therefore, look above all for evidence of the narrator’s reliability, something that is always at risk when anyone can google the life histories of famous actresses or the medical implications of eight story falls. There is also the readers’ expectation that when nonfiction narrators write retrospectively about their lives; they are not naïve. It is risky business in nonfiction to pretend you know less than you do. In contrast, this is the bread and butter of much narration in fiction.

So when Judy Blunt begins telling us about the Missouri Breaks country in Montana, we recognize this a particular kind of narrative situation: an author brings up her childhood because she has come to understand something about it, and the reason we follow her as a narrator is to find out what that might be. I think that means we read Blunt’s story differently than we might if it was fiction. First, we read her account of ranch life in Montana , as Daniel Lehmann put it, from the outside in and the inside out. We always see a nonfiction narrator as figure who lives in our world and the world of the story. Of course, this has serious implications for those of us who write nonfiction because we have to get the facts about both worlds right. But it also means that in reading nonfiction narrators we are also reading ourselves. Arguably we do this in fiction, too, but I don’t think we ever shed the sense that imagined characters aren’t quite “real.” Films that are “based on a true story” address these doubts, which may be why people often say that they find those kind of movies especially compelling. I think this might also explain why the baby and the doctor story will work better in nonfiction. We want to believe that unbelievable things happen in real life, and we will, if we trust the narrator and the story plays by the rules of what is possible.

But more than anything, we follow the essay’s “I”-character to discover what they will do with the stories they choose to tell. I wonder if we therefore don’t apply a completely different narrative logic when reading a true story. The scenes, details, and action must always serve the insights. We read them as part of another narrative altogether, a narrative of thought that both feeds off story—generating what Eileen Pollack calls “meditative sparks”-- and feeds the story, directing its movement.

What does this mean for us as writers of the essay? I don’t have this fully worked out yet, but most of all it means that we run into trouble when we let our “I-characters” behave like fictional narrators. For instance, Judy Blunt in that same essay I mentioned earlier, promised to remove a scene when she admitted, after her family protested, that it never happened. The lyric essay, which may have narrators who don’t explicitly say what they mean, is vulnerable to the kind of criticism that Phillip Lopate once offered: he called it a genre with a “license for vagueness.” We should also be wary as essayists pretending to know less than we know. But perhaps there’s freedom as well for essayists in understanding readers’ narrative expectations. We have more material to work with, including reflecting on strange coincidences. As essayists we could probably take a baby, a firefighter, and a doctor and make it work.