NonfictioNow 2015, Flagstaff, Arizona
Theorizing Nonfiction:
Sidestepping Boundaries Between the Theoretical and the Creative
Travis Scholl
Travis Scholl is a PhD candidate in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri. His book of creative nonfiction, Walking the Labyrinth, was published in 2014 (IVP). He also edits Concordia Journal at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, and writes on religion for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
|
Beth Peterson
Joanna Eleftheriou
|
Corinna Cook
|
Travis Scholl
|
In the 1920s and early 1930s, German aesthetic theorist Walter Benjamin wrote three autobiographical narratives that reformulate the modern autobiographical act by resituating the subject’s relation to history. Gerhard Richter characterizes Benjamin’s narratives as “archaeological montage”…. (229) |
The trouble is, Smith and Watson don’t mention which three essays they’re talking about, and we could almost say any of them fit their bill. I can’t think of a better definition of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” or “Theses Toward a Philosophy of History,” or that staggering work of [creation nonfiction] genius entitled “Unpacking My Library.”[3]
And perhaps “archaeological montage” is about as good a definition of creative nonfiction as any we got. Whether we work in memoir, literary journalism, personal or lyric essay, are we not patchworking language out of our own personal or collective digs into facts, memories, ideas? I can think of worse ways to define what we do.
Be that as it may, when I read Benjamin—whether I read it as scholarly theory or as creative nonfiction—the ideas are still there. And they are fertile ground. Such is his idea of aura, how a trace of an artwork’s original haunts all its various reproductions (Benjamin Illuminations 221ff). It is a visual metaphor any writer could be drawn to, and it has animated my own creative engagement with ekphrasis, creating art that is in some way speaking to, from, and within another work of art. Anything we write has, in its own way, a kind of aura, the traces of those originals that inspired it, from whence it came, and to which it may yet return. But I would have had no idea of how these traces are at work in my own writing if I hadn’t engaged Benjamin’s writing on it. I would have no “depth grammar” to let it be at work in my own writing. If, as Philip Lopate and others have argued, part of the necessary DNA of nonfiction must include a powerful sense of “reflection,” then I don’t know how I could pretend to write the nonfiction I hope to write without it, without this thing called “theory” to guide me along the way.
And perhaps “archaeological montage” is about as good a definition of creative nonfiction as any we got. Whether we work in memoir, literary journalism, personal or lyric essay, are we not patchworking language out of our own personal or collective digs into facts, memories, ideas? I can think of worse ways to define what we do.
Be that as it may, when I read Benjamin—whether I read it as scholarly theory or as creative nonfiction—the ideas are still there. And they are fertile ground. Such is his idea of aura, how a trace of an artwork’s original haunts all its various reproductions (Benjamin Illuminations 221ff). It is a visual metaphor any writer could be drawn to, and it has animated my own creative engagement with ekphrasis, creating art that is in some way speaking to, from, and within another work of art. Anything we write has, in its own way, a kind of aura, the traces of those originals that inspired it, from whence it came, and to which it may yet return. But I would have had no idea of how these traces are at work in my own writing if I hadn’t engaged Benjamin’s writing on it. I would have no “depth grammar” to let it be at work in my own writing. If, as Philip Lopate and others have argued, part of the necessary DNA of nonfiction must include a powerful sense of “reflection,” then I don’t know how I could pretend to write the nonfiction I hope to write without it, without this thing called “theory” to guide me along the way.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1978. Print.
Lopate, Phillip. “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 7.1 (2005): 143-56. Web.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2001. Print.
[1] I am alluding here to an early scene in the movie The Matrix, in which Neo (Keanu Reeves) opens a hollow copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation to retrieve a CD of presumably illegal data or programming that he then sells on some sort of virtual black market.
[2] My own personal (non-scholarly) term of endearment.
[3] All of these essays can be found in the anthology of Benjamin’s work entitled Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1978. Print.
Lopate, Phillip. “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 7.1 (2005): 143-56. Web.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2001. Print.
[1] I am alluding here to an early scene in the movie The Matrix, in which Neo (Keanu Reeves) opens a hollow copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation to retrieve a CD of presumably illegal data or programming that he then sells on some sort of virtual black market.
[2] My own personal (non-scholarly) term of endearment.
[3] All of these essays can be found in the anthology of Benjamin’s work entitled Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt.