Citation: Mays, Chris. “‘You Can’t Make This Stuff Up’: Complexity, Facts, and Creative Nonfiction.” College English, vol. 80, no. 4, March 2018, pp. 319-340, Web.

Summary:

Through the lens of genre theory, Chris Mays posits that creative nonfiction is a complex genre that can only be properly understood and contextualized by acknowledging the inherent selection bias of any piece of writing.

Mays surveys seminal creative nonfiction studies by Lee Gutkind to provide context for his reappraisal of the genre. Gutkind, in Mays’s reading, acknowledges the subjectivity of facts but fails to fully accept that writers of creative nonfiction are shaping those facts as they see fit. For Mays, this shaping of facts is not simply a byproduct of a conflicted genre, but a means of understanding the complexity inherent in writing itself (321).

Mays asserts that genre theory provides tools necessary to understand the ways in which context and form can shape an audience’s view of creative nonfiction works. Utilizing these tools, Mays delves into the controversy over David Sedaris as an apparent violator of creative nonfiction standards. Mays argues that whether or not Sedaris crossed boundaries by exaggerating or outright fabricating convenient story elements depends on who is framing the boundary.  One person might say that Sedaris invents to make his stories more humorous – so it’s harmless. Others frame the genre in a way that forbids any non-factual elements from a work of nonfiction – so he’s cheating. To Mays, the understanding of how the writer perceives their role in the creation of work within the genre is endlessly complex and must be considered before worrying about the degree to which facts are exaggerated.

Mays goes on to assert that perfect, 100% factual writing is actually impossible.  Writing is created by authors, and authors write within a context. The form of creative nonfiction can allow readers to indulge in the fiction that what they are reading is all fact, but the reality is that they are only reading the facts as the author sees them and not the facts maintained by an objective reality.

Quote Bank:

• “We all selectively invent, and we all have our own boundaries around what we choose to include in that narrative” (319).
• “The controversy also reveals that the seemingly straightforward genre categories we use to classify writing are, in fact, tools we use to pretend this complex manufacturing does not exist” (322).
• “Facts emerge from writing, but they can emerge quite divergently, and the process that creates this divergence is often impossible to see. In this sense, fact and fabrication, highly complex concepts, are always on the move. Moreover, we can say that the very act of writing creates a contingent and unstable context, carved out of a reality that is always exceeding our capacity to fully know it or even to pin it down for too long” (329).
• “There isn’t anything close to absolute consistency in the assessment of whether a work is fact or fiction” (329).
• “As genre theory shows, genres organize our interpretations of writing in ways that shut out alternative organizing schemes, and so the production of facts in a genre will preclude the legitimacy of other ways of constituting the facts. In short, it is very difficult for a person to draw or demarcate facts in multiple ways, since the very acceptance of one set of facts reifies boundaries that are a product of one version of a genre instead of another” (333).
• “That is, writers will never be able to fully control or stabilize what is truth, fact, or fabrication in their writing, and the boundaries that separate them will never be universally stable” (336).
• “Sedaris famously argues that his work is ’97 percent true,’ and for him ‘that’s true enough’ (Cruz). His point may have been tongue in cheek, but it nevertheless illustrates the persistence of the ideal quantification of facticity—100 percent accuracy—that is a product of our faith in the possibility of perfect writing and that continues to plague popular and academic discourse on creative nonfiction” (337).
• “Just as both rhetoric theory and genre theory explain, there is no way to present the entirety of a situation, nor to present a situation in a way that is understood identically by every reader. Authorial choices, and the genre rules used, entail a specific view of reality that is always and unavoidably partial” (338).

Analytical Reflection:

The malleability of truth in alleged nonfiction, the suspension of disbelief in reading specific genres, constructing our own false narratives and then living them – there were so many parts of this article that made me curious to continue studying this topic. Mays hit many sweet spots that overlap my own perceptions of how we are conditioned by genre to take as fact so many things that we should read with a more skeptical eye.

There is room to expand Mays’s arguments beyond creative nonfiction and into authoritative history and investigative journalism. Those subjects contain assumed truths far more damaging than the output of creative nonfiction writers. One only need look at the circular reappraisal of notorious/renowned Civil War historian Shelby Foote, who has traveled the route from authority to charlatan and back again depending on who needs a Confederate sympathizer in their corner. 

As far as classroom applications, teaching students to recognize genre and how genre can manipulate readers, is already happening to a degree in our classes. Perhaps showing them more examples of false narratives and asking them to consider the complexity inherent in trying to write the truth would allow them to see nonfiction writing in a new, more skeptical light.

The only trouble I had with Mays as a writer is his tendency to rely on the crutch of using internet comments to glean valuable quotes that fit perfectly into his argument. Given that one could find a quote that says practically anything if the dig into the comment section is deep enough, the comments in general lack the stature to speak for a large group of people or a particular authority like an editorial board. On the hierarchy of opinion writing, the stature and authority of the average internet comment fits somewhere between the bark of a dog and a Tweet from a Russian bot. To use these comments to prop up an argument in a scholarly article, an argument I believe Mays comes very close to definitively proving, takes the whole project one step closer to hack journalism and away from serious scholarly discussion.

I’d also have liked Mays to find a more difficult target for manufacturing facts than David Sedaris [or the comedy showman Mike Daisey, who Mays also analyzes]. That Sedaris would exaggerate and manipulate facts for the sake of humor and story is unsurprising. I would argue that Sedaris, although ostensibly writing creative nonfiction, actually writes in another genre altogether, one with its own set of norms that would not look askew at exaggeration: the humor memoir. What I would have liked to see is Mays applying his theory to more rigorously reported creative nonfiction – perhaps something from that genre’s ostensible canon by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, or Joan Didion. If you’re going the iconoclast route, you’d better take on the largest icons.

At the end of her seminal essay “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” Joan Didion offers readers the perfect encapsulation of everything the essay is really about in the image of Susan, a five-year-old girl lying on the floor stoned on acid and peyote. That may be one of the single greatest moments in any work of creative nonfiction. After reading Mays, I wonder whether it’s true, or an act of creative license. And beyond whether it’s factual, does it matter that it’s factual when I’m reading work created to exist in a genre that is factual only in form and can never be entirely factual in substance? I buy into most of what Mays claims about the complexity of writing and how genres are inherently manipulative, but that child better have been stoned or Joan Didion owes little Susan, the Haight-Ashbury, and the entire 1960s counterculture an apology.