Literary conventions

Yesterday, I read Unclassified: a Walker Evans anthology, which I picked up in an excellent second-hand bookshop in Ludlow last autumn. This surprisingly entertaining book presents selections of documents from the acclaimed photographer’s personal archive, including scrapbook entries, postcards, letters to friends, and articles for publication. Evans was an accomplished writer. Unexpectedly, I found myself making a number of notes from this book on topics that also interest me. In particular (p.80) Evans writes:

The latter half of the nineteenth century offers a fantastic figure, the art photographer, really an unsuccessful painter with a bag of mysterious tricks.

This brought to mind my pet gripe with so-called ‘literary non-fiction’ (or ‘creative non-fiction’, or ‘narrative non-fiction’, take your pick): that factual writing needs to borrow—and, by implication, be judged by—the conventions of fiction if it is to be seen as any good. Photographers are not unsuccessful painters, and factual writers are not wannabe novelists. (Well, not this one at least.)

I’m not saying that factual writers shouldn’t sometimes employ the same techniques as fiction (or photographers the same techniques as painters) but, when we do, they should be seen as useful factual-writing techniques, not factual writing somehow masquerading as fiction. Importantly, the factual writer shouldn’t feel compelled to use such techniques: there are plenty of other mysterious tricks available to us!

Literary conventions are all well and good, but we shouldn’t feel constrained by them. If enough of us feel sufficiently unconstrained, conventions will change. That said, in the introduction to his seventeenth-century masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton feels the need to apologise for a recent, regrettable literary development:

it was not mine intent to prostitute my muse in English […], but to have exposed this more contract in Latin, if I could have got it printed. Any scurrilous pamphlet is welcome to our mercenary Stationers in English, they print all, […]

and they print books
On whose pages a mere ape would scarcely shit

Compelled to write in English! The unreasonable, trendy demands of publishers, eh?