Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists

Michael Lackey, Michael Lackey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623566159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this new collection of interviews, some of America's most prominent novelists identify the key intellectual developments that led to the rise of the contemporary biographical novel, discuss the kind of historical 'truth' this novel communicates, indicate why this narrative form is superior to the traditional historical novel, and reflect on the ideas and characters central to their individual works. These interviews do more than just define an innovative genre of contemporary fiction. They provide a precise way of understanding the complicated relationship and pregnant tensions between contextualized thinking and historical representation, interdisciplinary studies and 'truth' production, and fictional reality and factual constructions. By focusing on classical and contemporary debates regarding the nature of the historical novel, this volume charts the forces that gave birth to a new incarnation of this genre.

1

Fixed Facts and Creative Freedom in the Biographical Novel

Julia Alvarez

Lackey: Let me start by telling you about this project. I want to find out why the biographical novel came into being. Before the 1980s, there were only a handful of really good biographical novels by writers such as Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, William Styron, and Gore Vidal. But starting in the 1980s this genre of fiction became very popular. Why did this start happening in the 1980s? And can we define the nature of this genre?

Alvarez: I wasn’t aware of a trend developing. After all, we’ve always been writing about each other. Recently, I’ve been reading Horace’s Odes, and he gives generic names to many of the people he addresses or writes about. But even though he’s not using specific names, it is very obvious—as the footnotes often note—that the ode is about a particular, real-life figure. When Horace does use an actual name, it’s in a complimentary ode. Perhaps in antiquity there were higher stakes: the temptation to disguise was due to the danger of banishment or death. Now we settle for litigation instead! But we human beings are curious critters, and writers are no exception: we are always trying to understand each other, and especially we want to understand figures who have had some renown, whether it’s because they were so heroic or horrid. Perhaps this complicates your question, but I’m not sure that this is some new trend.

Lackey: But why not change the names? Why are we naming a character Virginia Woolf or Ludwig Wittgenstein in recent years? Why are contemporary writers more comfortable doing this? And why do authors feel like they can take this liberty more today than they could in the past?

Alvarez: In the Time of the Butterflies began with a blurb on the back of a postcard. A women’s press was doing a series of postcards on women heroines around the world, and they asked me if I’d contribute a Dominican heroine. I chose three, the Mirabal sisters, who started the underground that toppled the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. I realized I had more than a blurb to say about them! This led me to ask more questions and to collect information. At that time, not much had been written about them—a mention here and there in a history book. So, it was a process of discovery: finding and interviewing the people who had known them and who had survived the dictatorship, visiting the places that had been important in their lives. My initial objective was to write a biography about them. But as I went along, I realized that I had become interested in their characters—what made them become the figures they became, what made them stand up to the dictator at a time when so few men or—heavens!—women, dared to do so. Character, then, became my focus, and for me, that is the province of fiction: recreating what evolves in that character, the truth according to that character. At first, I kept all the names. But when the manuscript was finished, I got cold feet and I decided to make it a story about fictional characters in a fictional country. The person who actually talked me out of it was Minou, the daughter of Minerva, one of the murdered sisters. Minou said, “Julia, we’ve been behind you this whole time.” She and Dedé, the surviving sister, had given me access to everything; Minou even sent me the original letters her parents had written to each other during their time in prison. “We want people to know their story,” Minou insisted. “We want them to know about the Mirabal sisters; we want their story to get out.” And I said, “Bueno, Minou, I’m a little nervous because I’m not holding anything back, and some of these people are still alive.” Also, the last thing I wanted to do was upset Dedé, who had already been through so much. On the other hand, I wasn’t writing to order, the airbrushed story. So the deal was that Minou would read the manuscript since she knows English, and anything problematical she would discuss with Dedé. If Dedé or the family were upset with my novel, I’d go back to the idea of a totally fictional world. Believe me, I sweated those couple of weeks not knowing what was going to be the verdict. Finally, Minou called me: “You have our blessing.” Now that the novel has been translated into Spanish, Dedé has been able to read it for herself. When people ask her about the novel, she says: “Some things aren’t exactly the way I remember, but Julia caught their spirit. She captured those times.”

Lackey: So you started by writing a biography, but it eventually morphed into a novel?

Alvarez: You know, I didn’t even know what it was going to be. I just knew I wanted to understand those sisters, to tell their story. But I didn’t know how. Initially, I had this collage planned where I was going to use clippings from newspapers, telegrams, things that were happening around the world to create this kind of kaleidoscope around their story. I even wrote a number of poems in the voices of each sister to go between the chapters of this projected mongrel novel! It was going to be genre-bending. But as I got further and further inside the characters, the artistry started to fall away—the idea of using news clippings, the idea of using poems. I was captivated by their characters.

Lackey: This is the same strategy that Jay Parini uses in The Last Station with multiple narrators. He refers to it as a kaleidoscopic perspective.

Alvarez: Yes! The truth is complex, multi-faceted, and one person’s truth might actually negate another’s truth. I realized this as I interviewed more and more people: Dedé knew the three women as a sister, their revolutionary friends knew them as fellow revolutionaries, guards who remembered them knew them as prisoners. And so we have what I think of as a Native American moment where the truth sits in the center, but depending on where you sit around the circle, you see this or that aspect of the truth. As a novelist you can find ways to put all or many of those aspects into the narrative. But that’s what makes literature trustworthy, rich, opposed to propaganda or what you have in a dictatorship, whether political or canonical, in which there’s “one official story,” the hegemony of one approved point of view and required allegiance to it. Once you’re creating “real” characters you can complicate and present many aspects of the life and experience, because you don’t have the point of view of just that one character. You can include other characters who bring out other aspects of your protagonist. And you also don’t have just that single layer of character. You can also use setting, imagery, plot, the rhythms of your sentences, any number of elements to present other aspects of your character and his or her reality. By doing so, you are actually respecting the complexity of being a human being, including darker and hidden aspects of your character. I love what Terrence, the Roman playwright, once said, “I am a human being, nothing human is alien to me.” That could be the motto of a novelist.

Lackey: And so it is through the creation of multiple characters that you can get to this more complicated perspective, whereas in traditional biographies and histories, a singular perspective dominates.

Alvarez: Not just multiple characters that complicate and enrich the perspective, but other elements of narrative, as I just mentioned. Of course, a good biographer would continue to complicate the material; however, there is the danger of a certain take on the character. You have to present the facts and perhaps draw a conclusion. Whereas, in fiction—and this is what I love about it—you can actually create competing truths. You can show multi-faceted dimensions—no truth trumps the other. Joseph Conrad makes this point in the preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” when he says: “Art itself may be defined as the single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.” That’s what fiction does. He doesn’t say one truth. He says the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every surface. It’s that rich complexity we experience reading a novel, the feel of the texture of reality, a world as fully dimensioned and mysterious as our own. This is something that the facts can’t get at by themselves. This representation of the truth, manifold and one, was for Conrad, and is so for me, the “highest kind of justice” we can render this universe. But it might not always be factual justice.

Lackey: Is it psychological justice? Is it political justice?

Alvarez: That’s why I think it’s a wonderful phrase: “The truth manifold and one.” It’s not just the psychological or the factual, it’s “manifold and one.” All those layers of truths are woven into the narrative, which is why Conrad says that it is the way to render the highest kind of justice to our experience of being alive. Another quote I love is from Novalis, the German poet and novelist: “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.” History can’t explain the mystery of being a human being. It’s not equipped to do that. But novels—that’s what they do best. So when I want to understand the past, I go to them, I read them, I write them. Specifically, I write historical novels because I want to understand the past, or perhaps that is not totally accurate. I want to understand the experience of being alive in the past, which means being a human being alive in the past. With In the Time of the Butterflies I wanted to understand the dictatorship we had fled when I was a child, a dictatorship that had formed my parents, and thus the dictatorship which had indirectly formed me. I wanted to know why and how a whole generation and nation had tolerated this atrocious regime for thirty-plus years. Then, along come the Mirabal sisters. How and why did three women decide they could not bear it anymore? Where did they find this courage? How did they come to do this, given who they were, what no one around them had been able to accomplish? Many questions drove me to this material. People think that writers write because they know things. We write because we want to find things out.

But back then, there was hardly anything written about the Mirabal sisters. The fear and silence of those oppressive years were still with us. To find these things out I had to travel back to the Dominican Republic. I felt an urgency to contact the people who had known the girls, who could tell me the facts of what had happened to them. Originally, I intended to write a biography about the famous sisters, a factual document. But as I went along in my interviews, two things happened which moved me in the direction of a novel. First, I became more and more interested in character—the truth according to character, the province of novels, and second, the facts kept shifting depending who I talked to. I’ll tell you about one instance: the legendary slap Minerva was supposed to have given the dictator at a dance when he got fresh with her. This story is told everywhere. There is even a popular merengue about the slap. I interviewed a handful of people who had been at the party. Some recalled the slap. Some remembered the pink imprint left on the dictator’s right cheek. But Dedé, the surviving sister, told me there had been no slap. There had been words, an insulting remark on the dictator’s part, a rebuff on Minerva’s part that was “como si le hubiera dado una galleta,” as if she had slapped him on the face. The same happened time after time with one or another fact: someone’s fact became another’s fiction. I began to realize that “these facts” lay at the center, and the truth consisted of all these points around that circle. Everyone agreed there had been an insulting moment at the dance and a rebuff on Minerva’s part. I chose to put in the slap because of the kind of truth that detail told. Facts are only a part of what really happened.

It’s that kind of truth which is more than fact, but includes the facts, that I want to get to in a novel, the emotional, the lived reality of that moment and the drama, and the feeling of the character living it. And the fact is: the minute you start trying to capture an experience in writing, you begin making selections, leaving certain things out, highlighting others, even if you are writing biography. You want to create the feeling of that moment. But the feeling of that moment is not just the facts. If that were the case, just give people the transcript and have the deadpan camera record the information.

Even in our own experience of history, or what will be history to the future, and now it’s just “our own times,” we experience it as a story we tell ourselves of what is happening to us: we are a certain character, with our unique point of view, a certain background, living in a certain context, a particular setting, with a certain set of friends: all these elements are also the elements of storytelling, and they complicate and enrich the “facts” that are happening all around us. So when you are creating a character, and recreating moments in history through that character, you’ve got to create all that context on paper. For me, a novel is the best vehicle for conveying the feel of that moment, the drama of the moment, the emotion of the moment, the fact of the moment, the setting of the moment, the smells of the moment—for that particular character you are trying to make real. And sometimes, that reality can begin to seem more real than our own reality!

I’ve noticed that with the Mirabal family itself. I am now a part of the family; they have all read the novel. Sometimes, they start talking, and I think they’re remembering the novel. There are things I recall in doing the research that Dedé said, “Oh, I don’t know about that,” or “I wasn’t there,” or, “I never knew that,” but now she remembers the full-blown scene, which I made up from the details I got elsewhere. Or which I made up out of whole cloth because no one alive could tell me what exactly happened that resulted in said fact. So even our own memories are storytellers. We remember things that never really happened or that never really happened to us.

Lackey: Let me shift to another question. I’ve heard many professors criticize contemporary biographical novels. They say that creative writers are merely summarizing and paraphrasing histories and biographies and then calling their works novels. How would you respond to this critique?

Alvarez: It’s not easier to write biographical novels; it’s not a slacking off of the imagination, second-rate creativity, just a different set of difficulties and challenges. When you’re writing within a certain set form you have to make it breathe. You have to make the sonnet sound like a real human voice speaking within that form. You’ve got to make it fluid, and you’ve got to move within its restraints. The same principle applies to biographical fiction. You have these set points that you can’t change. There are certain things that are givens, and certain information which you intuit. You want to present your character accurately, authentically; you want to honor the truths, manifold and one. But you also have to create them on paper, render them real. I could have just reported on Dedé’s Mirabal sisters, and that would have been just one perspective. But I found my challenge was to go around that circle and take in as many points of view as I could. I certainly had fixed facts: this happened and then this happened. But how did the character evolve from here to there? How did she who was here and reacted in this way become capable of doing this contradictory thing later? So that’s where the truth according to character comes in. Maybe in a totally invented fiction, and I doubt there is such a thing, you yourself are fixing those points. But once those fixed points are there, you, too, have to work within the constraints you’ve set up. I suppose you can always go back and move this point over here, and then you’ll have to recreate the whole web, because you tweak one thread and the whole weave changes. So you’re just working with different kinds of difficulties and challenges. You still have to create that world and that life and that interior character on paper—that’s still the same: bringing to life your characters (historical or not). And that’s never easy. No shortcuts. Good writing is hard work.

Lackey: This reminds me of Virginia Woolf, who argues that the novelist’s primary responsibility is to character. The author must use the imagination to create a figure that is brimming with life and authenticity. It is this obligation that explains why, according to Woolf, it is impossible to mix fact and fiction, to mix biography and the novel. In an effort to create a character’s rich interior life the novelist cannot be restricted by the mundane facts of an individual’s biography, which requires a person to focus primarily on representing a historical figure accurately. How do you respond to Woolf’s critique? Can you offer some reason why she couldn’t see her way toward the biographical novel? Or conversely, can you explain what has happened that has enabled so many writers like yourself to do what Woolf thought impossible?

Alvarez: One could argue that all of Woolf’s novels are loose biographies of the world and the people who surrounded her. True, Woolf doesn’t write about a particular known historical person, but she’s writing about places and people and situations not all that different from her own. As a novelist, you write about a character because he or she intrigues you. You want to understand that character’s interior life, what forms and informs that character. What was it like to be that character? If you have a historical figure, you already know some of the circumstances that shaped that character. If you have a totally fictional character, you invent those circumstances—it’s just a different set of forces shaping your character, but character is what you are interested in. And in creating your character, real or fictional, you’re always writing out of the material of your own life, your own biography. If you’re writing about Napoleon, say, and you have him eat an orange, you never saw him do that, right? But maybe you had a father who was dictatorial and aggressive, and you remember how he used to devour oranges. So when you write about Napoleon eating that orange, you access that memory of your father to inform your description of Napoleon. The same goes for a totally fictional character, who is pushy, bossy. When you describe that character, you access what you remember from your own experience. And I also bet that your interest in Napoleon or a bossy protagonist has everything to do with your experience with that kind of character in your own life. That’s what makes a particular character, whether historical or not, entrancing to you—your own biography. So I think.

Lackey: But here’s the dilemma as Woolf represents it. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” she discusses the task of the novelist, which is to picture a Mrs. Brown. Arnold Bennett fails because he focuses on superficial externals rather than rich interiors. But for Woolf, if a novelist wants to mak...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• TOC
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Rise of the American Biographical Novel
• 1. Fixed Facts and Creative Freedom in the Biographical Novel: Julia Alvarez
• 2. The Truth Contract in the Biographical Novel: Russell Banks
• 3. Big Revolutionary Bangs in the Biographical Novel: Madison Smartt Bell
• 4. Building the Imaginative Record with the Biographical Novel: M. Allen Cunningham
• 5. The Biographical Novel and the Complexity of Postmodern Interiors: Michael Cunningham
• 6. Imagining a Matrilineal History in the Biographical Novel: Anita Diamant
• 7. In the Fog of the Biographical Novel’s History: Bruce Duffy
• 8. Sensualizing and Contextualizing Historical “Truth” in the Biographical Novel: Ron Hansen
• 9. The Art of Claiming Power in the Biographical Novel: Sherry Jones
• 10. Feminist Naming in the Biographical Novel: Rebecca Kanner
• 11. Re-Composing a Life in the Biographical Novel: Kate Moses
• 12. Enhanced Symbolic Interiors in the Biographical Novel: Joyce Carol Oates
• 13. The Biographical Novel’s Practice of Not-Knowing: Lance Olsen
• 14. Reflections on Biographical Fiction: Jay Parini
• 15. The Masking Art of the Biographical Novel: Joanna Scott
• 16. Gay Interiors and the Biographical Novel: Edmund White
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page