On authority in storytelling

How identity, authenticity and craft now battle for supremacy in the literary hierarchy

Alice Walker a long time ago

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I like to start creative writing lesson sequences with some meta discussion about why people write, who writes and why. One of the big questions I like to ask is about who has the right to compose and publish diverse stories. Does one need lived experience of a certain culture, sexuality or gender to authentically write about it? And if a writer is just, you know, a writer, are they overstepping when they inhabit a diverse persona for the purpose of self expression, or even worse, to make a living?

Even though I have stated a dislike for tokenism in literature curricula, I don’t bring my personal politics into classroom discussions and I do love the way that students welcome these kinds of messy questions, especially if there is a bit of diversity in the room. Sometimes the strategy backfires with all of the non-Caucasian or queer students silent, possibly waiting for their white CIS peers to dip a toe in before participating. Occasionally I get emails after class from students who report a kind of catharsis from being invited to share their non-mainstream perspective. It’s both worrying and satisfying at the same time, to know that they finally feel heard.

Students invariable come up with a certain hierarchy that seems to evolve in a predictable pattern as they think more deeply about their initial responses. The conversation usually goes a bit like this:

1. We start out pretty firm on the idea that lived experience of a standpoint is what gives a perspective authenticity.

2. We then move to the question of whether this is the overarching feature of good novels and more often than not decide that it isn’t.

3. We try to think of examples where the author is diverse and the work is mind-blowing.

4. We come up with examples of diverse stories where the non-diverse author created a character that had a profound effect on us.

5. We decide that lived experience is ‘nice to have’ but not the main ingredient of a truly powerful story.

6. We suggest that ideal might be something like an Alice Walker - Pulitzer Prize winning, female, bisexual, African American and disabled. The example is mine.

It might sound like my questions are leading, but the conversation lands where it lands. I add information to consider and coach it along so that we don’t just end up with simplistic conclusions. To be truthful, I think students all walk away with different conclusions to each other, that possibly just reflect their home or personal politics. But they’ve been prompted to circle around the question and inspect it from all angles. That’s my role.

On what I really think

My audience here is educated grown ups who can take or leave what I have to say. In a way, I agree with students, that the ideal is an authentic perspective, so well crafted as to bring a reader to tears. You know, those secret book-nerd tears that we all cry? Along with novelists like Walker, we have examples like the devastating memoir of Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant; the canonical The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall; and the universal vulnerability of outcasts like Blanche DuBois, a proxy for Tennessee Williams in Streetcar. So I don’t buy the idea that diverse manuscripts are rejected because of the diversity of their authors. If you want to be published, write something really, really good.

I don’t think that lived experience carries nearly as much weight as some would like us to think. This requirement seems to have arisen at the same time as critical theory and identity politics. John Steinbeck was able to capture the desperation and ignorance of a poor, white, ‘pregnant person,’ Dewey Dell in As I Lay Dying. Jeffrey Eugenides wrote the ultimate gender-epic with Middlesex. And Craig Silvey capably captured immigrant and Indigenous experiences in Jasper Jones along with writing the trans experience sensitively in Honeybee¹. Writers have been pretending to be other people for millennia, with the aim of illustrating a common humanity. It’s only now that this practice is being questioned.

I’m reminded of this Nobel lecture by Olga Tokarczuk. She elaborates my perspective so much more perfectly than I ever could.

We live in a reality of polyphonic first-person narratives, and we are met from all sides with polyphonic noise. What I mean by first-person is the kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself. We have determined that this type of individualised point of view, this voice from the self, is the most natural, human and honest, even if it does abstain from a broader perspective. Narrating in the first person, so conceived, is weaving an absolutely unique pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times.

…

And yet, remarkably often, the readerly experience is incomplete and disappointing, as it turns out that expressing an authorial “self” hardly guarantees universality. What we are missing—it would seem—is the dimension of the story that is the parable. For the hero of the parable is at once himself, a person living under specific historical and geographical conditions, yet at the same time he also goes well beyond those concrete particulars, becoming a kind of Everywhere Everyman. When a reader follows along with someone’s story written in a novel, he can identify with the fate of the character described and consider their situation as if it were his own, while in a parable, he must surrender completely his distinctness and become the Everyman. In this demanding psychological operation, the parable universalizes our experience, finding for very different fates a common denominator. That we have largely lost the parable from view is a testament to our current helplessness.

Perhaps I’m a literary purist. The craft comes first for me, and I’m fairly unremitting on that. As Tokarczuk says, in the cacophony of ‘unique’ voices, we lose some of the universality of great literature. The goal of literature is empathy and if an author can engage me in the humanism of another - real, imagined or unreal - they’ve done their job.

1. I’m not a huge Silvey fan but he is a good example. Comment if you can think of others.