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Fiction that isn't.

T

Tobytook

New Member
This just hit me, leaning back as I was, having a look around the shelves and counting up the non-fiction books.

What about books like On The Road - well, pretty much all of Kerouac's oeuvre - and others in that vein. Autobiographies and biographies that are (in some part) fictionalised, or made to seem fictional. They read like novels; are often presented as novels. They present problems for booksellers all over the world. "What section does this go in, boss?"

I don't want to bring in a dopey modern term like "faction", partly because that describes a very specific sub-genre (... but mostly because it's just dopey.)

What are the defining criteria here? I want to count my books up and - [stamps foot!] - I don't know how!

Court is in session...

Tobytook
 
Well... check to see how the book has labelled it.. and shelve it accordingly. If the author themself has called it fiction... then I'd say it's too embellished to call it non.

Hard to believe people have agony over these types of things lolllll;)
 
Er, yeah. Nice one.

I don't suppose the book's author is usually the one to print up the jacket. It's the publisher who generally decides under what category to put it out. My copy of On The Road is published by Penguin, and it states quite clearly on the back that it's Fiction. But the book is no more fictional than any reasonably embellished or dramatic auto/biography.

Conversely, my copy of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas is categorised as Biography. Amazon's listing for it is appropriately contradictory: Fiction, Biography. It's not even accurate. Tom Holt's chronicle of Alexander the Great is Fictional Biography; Thompson's drug-addled (though riveting) memoir is, like William Burroughs' best work, looked at from a place where fact and fiction are on one side of the coin and the author is on the other.

Anyway, if the official definition or precis is always held as fact, it would still be possible to find a book jacket stating with absolute authority that the story of the Holocaust within is simply that: a "story". As far as I know, such books might still be out there - but would you take accept their labels? Of course not.

The same is true even if authors had exclusive rights to decide the category. An author might have a very good reason for dressing up fiction as fact (usually money - hello, The Hitler Diaries). Or vice versa, as in the case of Shohei Ooka. His "novel" about a lone Japanese soldier in the Philippines in WW2, Nobi (translated as Fires On The Plain), is drawn directly from his own horrendous - and shameful - memories. The book is, in part, his way of accepting responsibility for certain actions, and coming to terms with his role and the role of his country in the whole Pacific conflict. The only way he could do this was to filter his experiences through narrative, using a fictional alter-ego.

And that's just one example.

It is a difficult question, I know: what is the criteria for separating fiction from non-fiction in books? Obviously, simplistic answers like "Look on the back" are far less than a catch-all.

Anyone else want to have a bash at philosophising this one out?

Tobytook
 
Yes, but just shelve it according to how the book does. Then you not only won't have to agonize over it, you'll know where to look for it when you want to find it.:cool:

My point was just use the label that's on it.
 
Originally posted by Tobytook
What are the defining criteria here?
Click to expand...
= the point of the discussion.
I want to count my books up and - [stamps foot!] - I don't know how!
Click to expand...
= a light-hearted throwaway line.

Sorry if I don't express myself clearly enough. I'll start using more similies. Except I won't.

Tobytook
 
Many works of fiction draw on factual events for their plots. I haven't read the book about the Japanese soldier, but I think I'd class it as fiction - I know that similar events will have happened but the story itself is fiction. I suppose this could apply to any work of fiction where the plot is set around an actual event. The surrounding events happened but the actual plot itself is fiction. If someone wrote a book of the film "Titanic", it would be fiction, even though the events around the plot did happen.

I would class (auto)biographies in an area of their own. Most will be factual, but I would imagine that there's a bit of "embellishment" there too.
 
I may be out of my league here, but I'll give it a shot anyway. I am a glutton for punishment. (If you don't know that, just visit the thread on my recent virus sitch.)

Why not create a system of categories based on your own criteria? There may be an official way of doing it, but if it's for your own use . . .

I may be missing the point. If you are trying to find the "official" method then I AM out of my league and therefore should be ignored. I'll be quiet now and sit in my little corner. :rolleyes:
 
well, i'd have to say, darrin said exactly what i was thinking

only i can never say what i'm thinking as well as he does:D

but, i think toby wants a good hot debate and i'm just not of the mental capacity for it lol
 
I've gotta admit I couldn't quite get my mind around On the Road being classified as fiction and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas classified a biography. I was skeptical (sorry Tobytook ;) ) so I looked them up in my library online catalogue, and sure enough, that's how they're classified. Did someone talk to Kerouac and Thompson and ask them how much was truth and how much embellishment? It's hard to believe Thompson's so-called biography is any less embellished than Kerouac's road odyssey.

To make matters worse, libraries and publishers can't even agree. I looked up The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe - a book about the first astronauts of the US space program. The library classifies it as non-fiction under astronauts and space, yet Amazon clearly advertises it as a novel. When I started reading it, I thought of it as non-fiction, but the more I read, the more it sounded fictionalized to quite a large extent. (I mean, the author is really taking liberties with fact when he describes domestic conversations between spouses.) Granted, Wolfe is part of the "New Journalism" where fiction and fact become almost interchangeable. The Hot Zone is a book that I regard clearly as being non-fiction, yet even it has parts that must obviously be fictionalised.- eg. where the last days of the victims of ebola are described in detail.

When it comes to these kinds of books, I don't know that there can be criteria that everyone would agree on. So, no help here, Tobytook :(

When it comes to my own bookshelves, I've given up sorting them other than the dictionary, thesaurus, and medical texts are on one shelf, everything else overflows, in sort-of alphabetical order?

Ell
 
well, with regard to organizing them for your bookshelf... just do what I do

this'll really throw ya!

organize them by size:eek:

it's also quite purdy when you have a row standing up, but at the end of the shelf there are a few laying down appearing to be bookends

lollllll

sorry, i have spring fever this time of year and cannot possibly be polite until it passes!!! lol
 
wait! i had another thought!:)

since people memory's vary greatly, and perception is everything, and no 2 people can tell a real life situation the same way, nor give a word for word recap of a situation or a conversation that really took place.... even non-fiction is fiction:D
 
Originally posted by Ell
When it comes to these kinds of books, I don't know that there can be criteria that everyone would agree on
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Probably true, Ell, but we're giving it a go, which can only be a good thing.

Liked the Wolfe anecdote, by the way.
Originally posted by Darren
Many works of fiction draw on factual events for their plots... The surrounding events happened but the actual plot itself is fiction. If someone wrote a book of the film "Titanic", it would be fiction, even though the events around the plot did happen.
Click to expand...
So you seem to be saying that fiction inevitably comes into play when people are introduced. Or, more specifically, when their mental and emotional landscapes are introduced - be they imaginary characters or historical figures. It's one thing to write about what someone actually did or said as a matter of record; maybe speculating on what they thought or felt constitutes crossing the line into what we could tentatively call "fiction"?

One more thing. (Getting a bit Twilight Zone here, but why not?) Most authors of fiction tend to support the maxim "Write about what you know". That's a philosophically capacious statement, as we know, but we could interpret from it that, on some level, there is no such thing as true "fiction".

Tobytook
 
Originally posted by TownBear
organize them by size:eek:
Click to expand...

Yessssss! I was just waiting for someone to say this! Did not dare to post it! It is the way my shelf looks like too!

Looks nice :D
 
Re: Re: Fiction that isn't.

Originally posted by Tobytook

Sorry if I don't express myself clearly enough. I'll start using more similies. Except I won't.
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Did you know?

Sometimes when we type things on a forum, things don't quite sound exactly as we meant them.

We can't all be author's;) .

Thus the point of using a :D when you sound a bit harsher than you really are feeling.

I didn't reailze you don't like the smiley's.

UH OH.... off topic.

oh well:p ]:D
lol
 
Well, somebody's yet to put forward an actual criteria, although Darren & Ell have made some very interesting points.

It's entirely possible that - as someone pointed out - defining what is (and is not) fiction can't be done to universal satisfaction.

It seems overly strict to characterise non-fiction as the documenting of pure verifiable fact. That would would render the genre of "non-fiction" very dry: limited to the minutes of meetings, or prose as exciting as "Then the ship went forward, then it hit the iceberg, then it sank."

On the other hand, calling books like The Right Stuff and On The Road non-fiction seems to be stretching any reasonable definition to breaking point.

It's a bit of a cop-out to say that books of this sort should be addressed case by case - rather like admitting intellectual defeat; in the words of Randy & Andy Pig, "This job is too hard!". But perhaps the question is really just too big, after all.

Rats and double rats.

Tobytook
 
The professionals come unstuck, too!

(Source: The Guardian Review 01/05/02)

Interestingly, when a panel of literary celebs were asked to choose their fave books, problems of a similar nature occurred.

Michael Holroyd selected Virginia Woolf's Orlando as a biography.

Simon Schama chose two novels as historical works: If Not Now, When by Primo Levi, and The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa.
Originally posted by Darren
I would class (auto)biographies in an area of their own. Most will be factual, but I would imagine that there's a bit of "embellishment" there too.
Click to expand...
Serendipity strikes - here's a link to the above mentioned Michael Holroyd's article, Our Friends The Dead, on how biog and autobiog have changed over the years - and their closer ties with fiction.

Tobytook
 
Memory is a device for forgetting as well as for remembering. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction, and every work of fiction is an autobiography.:D

how's dat:confused:

:D

lol

(credits: P.D. James, Time To Be In Earnest (knopf) )
 
Interesting. Good opening line ("Memory is a device...").

Anyway, I think the second part sort of scuppers the good opening line. Some things can be remembered despite not ever having happened. (Weird but true - think how many vivid images are locked in your memory that never really occurred outside your head.) But even if something is forgotten, it did actually happen.

I do think that a lot of autobiography (and biography, and journalism, and other kinds of "non-fiction") has fictional aspects - and posters to this thread have already discussed how that works. But I don't think that those aspects slip in conveniently when memory blanks out, and vice versa, as the (paraphrased?) quote suggests. It's not that simple. Perhaps it is more to do with memory also being a device for selective and - one step further - creative remembering. In that sense, the quote's central premise has more strength.

Tobytook
 
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