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I'm sick and busy, so I haven't been able to give the blog much attention. Thanks for stopping by despite my absence. Until I'm over the sick and busy (hopefully by late Tuesday evening), I'm posting some writing on writers and writing. The first is an article on Franz Wright's poetry, specifically his Pulitzer Prize winning collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard. The second is a long paper (written for a form/theory class) on Walter Wangerin, specifically his gorgeous book Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, which will probably interest you only if you either like Wangerin or are interested in the craft of non-fiction, especially memoir.

I'll be back soon. . . .

Wangerin, Miz Lil and The Chronicles? of Grace

Sit in a non-fiction class long enough and the discussion will (de)generate into “truth talk”: What is the difference between truth and fact? Are we required to qualify what’s ultimately subjective? When we tell stories do we fail the genre if we conflate events or characters?

Should you find yourself in this situation, here’s some advice: Sit back, enjoy the show (pay close attention to the teacher’s facial expressions), and refuse to get sucked in, because the thing that sucks is a debate whose point, to a large extent, is moot. Usually, when we argue these ideas, we argue about narrative, and literary non-fiction is a genre that relies little, ideally, on narrative; certainly it relies less on narrative than the other genres. One from an other genre, the poet Robert Haas, says, “It’s not the story though, not the friend / leaning toward you, saying ‘And then I realized--,’ / which is the part of stories one never quite believes” (from “Faint Song”).

When I first encountered that line, I thought, “Wait a second. But the ‘then I realized’ is the important part. ‘Then I realized’ is what legitimizes the story.” Only later (not “then”) did I realize that he’s making a subtle, and important, distinction. Haas is talking here about realization as part of the story rather than realization outside of the story. What he is criticizing is narrative that presents itself as the locus of meaning, rather than present-tense reflection on the narrative, which is the burden of an essay (and most literary non-fiction). Most poor non-fiction is poor because it relies too heavily on narrative to be the vehicle for meaning. The danger, thus, is that the reader will begin to look to the narrative as the tenor itself, and when that happens, we lose one of the very things (extra-narrative reflection) that distinguish, formally, non-fiction from fiction and some poetry. This is true.

I teach non-fiction to college freshmen. And though I wouldn’t call most of what they write literary, they attempt to harness the craft and employ the techniques of literary non-fiction. So I meet with them to talk them through the process of this kind of writing, and for the most part, all they want to talk about are their stories: “You wouldn’t believe this story,” he says, or “The reader would love this story,” she says. “That’s great,” I respond, “but remember what I said before and will keep saying: ‘No one cares about your stories.’” Then I qualify before they start crying.

“Story” is important. We live in story, we learn through story, and we communicate by story; history, present, and future are narrative. But as far as literary non-fiction is concerned, story is important only when it serves reflection. In other words, story is important only as it points and leads into exposition and justification. “Tell your story,” I say to them, “but only if you’re going to spend more time telling me why you’ve chosen to tell this story.” I believe this.

Which is why it’s strange that Walter Wangerin should have such a strong impact on my (literary non-fiction) writing. I first read Wangerin during my time at seminary. For some reason that I can’t remember, I was on a “marriage book” kick. I was 24 years old then, one year away from being the oldest person in my family’s American history to be single, which might explain things. Whatever the reason, I decided to ask one of my professors if he had any recommendations, since I had read the standards. I was sent to find Wangerin’s As For Me and My House. I almost put it back on the shelf when I found it, not only for the awful needlepointish title, but also because the cover had actual needlepoint graphics on it. I expected to find inside the book trite, simplistic formulas: Pray together, do devotions once a day, tithe, don’t think about bad things, smile at church, and your marriage will be blessed. What I got, instead, was heavy on story—factual, sobering narrative. Where the didacticism of every other marriage book left me indifferent, untrusting, and detached, Wangerin’s narrative-based book left me engaged, frightened, encouraged—in short, narrative reached the whole of me, accessed emotion along with intellect, reached me wholly.

So, despite my insistence that literary non-fiction should concern itself only subsidiarily with story, my own writing is heavily influenced by one who concerns himself largely with story. Specifically, Wangerin’s book Miz Lil & The Chronicles of Grace has influenced me. Until recently, I had been calling this book a memoir; the first two lines of the Preface to the book say that “[t]he stories told in this book are true. They happened.” The book is composed of two main narratives: Wangerin as a child falling from innocence to corruption and into himself, and Wangerin the young pastor rising out of self-absorption and into community.

The writing itself is tight, image-rich, literary, somewhat liturgical. The childhood narratives are gripping and somber; the adult narratives are sobering and encouraging. In my past readings, by the end of the book, I had experienced the universals of another man’s life, I had witnessed convincing change, and I had myself experienced a measure of grace. Then, a few weeks ago, I read these lines from an afterword to the book (recently published in a collection of his works):

Miz Lil is not a collection of short stories merely. It must be seen as an artistic unit, every story affecting every other story . . . ; and all the stories are arranged here to honor change and growth and maturation. They are photographs, complex and sharply focused, of crucial junctures in a life that moves from innocence to culpability, and from culpability to a knowledge of God’s grace . . . and the times between each juncture in this writer’s “life” need no telling; and the narrative demand for thousands of details conjoining the times and the chapters is simply skipped. Theme, therefore, and image, character and the present moment intensely told bulk larger in the reader’s imagination, allowing his and her mind to reach—personally—for the deeper joins between the chapters which are stories. (Pilgrimage 622-3)

“Short stories”? And this, in the author’s note to Miz Lil:

The stories told in this book are true. They happened. And most of the characters you will encounter here are also accurate portrayals. But I’ve made an aesthetic and ethical decision sometimes to conflate events, sometimes to create a single fictional character from a composite of many people, and sometimes to invent the detail and the character which the deeper spirit of the story required. In this manner I’ve tightened the pace of a human life considerably, and I have absolutely rejected using details or identities which would disclose another human life besides my own. (442)

I don’t understand.

What I don’t understand is this: Why would a skilled writer, someone who has written many successful collections of essays, make this decision? In this, a memoir, such a potentially powerful work, why would he, who has the ability to deal profoundly with reality, make the decision to “invent”?

Part of my confusion stems from the fact that he is so forthright in other works about dealing with events “as-is.” In his essay “The Time in the City,” he says, “Somehow I received that facial heat as a sign from God that he would send his Spirit upon my ministry. This is the truth” (77). The “somehow” here convinces me that the present-tense narrator is reliable, that he is harnessing the vague spots around detail and using those to construct meaning, which he does later in the essay. Similarly, in an essay entitled “Edification/Demolition,” a short essay on two brief experiences at the same gas station, he says, after an account of the first encounter, “I admit it: this is a minor and nearly forgettable incident. And it should be unworthy of book print. Except that when . . .” (179). Again, this kind of honest admission helps to convince the reader that he can be trusted as a narrator dealing with reality. The rest of his non-fiction canon is smattered with qualifications, wherein he confesses fuzziness regarding specific dates, childhood motivations, and specific details, for instance.

One of the other techniques he employs to bolster his reliability is to state theme up front, or to reveal “plot twists” on the first page. He begins his non-fiction book Mourning into Dancing by naming, in the first paragraph, what the rest of the book will lead up to: fear of death (Portfleet 162). The first sentence of his short, memoiristic essay “Lookin’ for Jesus in all the Wrong Places” is simply this: “Early in my childhood I suffered a spiritual crisis” (Pilgrimage 221). This technique is important for several reasons, but it’s especially relevant to my confusion regarding Miz Lil because he uses the same technique. He begins the Preface with this:

A wandering cleric was my father.

Wherever he went I went there too, as rootless as he was in this world. But there came a time when I turned and traveled in ways he never chose, and then we were divided for a while . . . . (443)

At other points in the Preface, he writes the following:

I too, it seemed, would prove a wandering Aramean like my father . . . . (446)

And a frozen river must break before it flows again. But a summer of constant hearts can accomplish this terrible wreckage . . . . (447)

And the last paragraph of the Preface:

It will help the reader, perhaps, to know that these two series of stories are presented alternatively, first the adult, then the child, the adult again, the child again, and back and forth as once my mother went back and forth to level the tangled weed until her hill was beautiful. (447)

So, then, he at once gives me reason to trust him and prepares me, using a typically non-fictive signal, for several fictions. So I return to the question “why?”

Compounding my confusion, and helpful knowledge for the reader unfamiliar with Wangerin’s work, is that he has an extensive bibliography, one including almost every genre and sub-genre at his disposal. The Book of the Dun Cow, the first of a science fiction couplet, won an American Book Award in 1980. He has received a long list of awards spanning the last three decades, awards recognizing children’s books, essays, and practical theology works. He has been a reviewer for the Washington Post Book World and The New York Times. He has published books of poetry and short story collections. His The Book of God, a fictionalized re-telling of the biblical narrative, and Paul, a fictionalized account of the early church, have been translated worldwide. And he has published several collections of essays. And yet Miz Lil, of all books the one with the most potential, in my opinion, to be a stunning memoir, is, by virtue of “aesthetic and ethical decision[s],” fiction. Fictionalized memoir, maybe, but fiction still. And why should this be so disconcerting to me?

It’s possible that my difficulty is merely one of personal preference—since I prefer and write non-fiction, maybe I want my favorite of his works to be non-fiction. Or maybe, because I consider him a master of craft, I know that he must have a good reason for his decision, and I don’t know what it is, so I feel left out of the loop, or even condescended to (as if I didn’t know the difference between fiction and straight memoir). Because he is so forthright in his works, even going to lengths in several pieces (and in slightly differing language) to make a covenant with his reader to speak truthfully, with full knowledge of the power of words to both bless and curse, that he would use the format of memoir to write fictions is the more surprising.

I don’t have any answers for this, and I don’t imagine I will hold any answer confidently apart from a personal interview, but, based on several other works, as well as a few interviews, I can at least approach an (not the) answer.

I take my first cue from Walter Brueggeman, who says in “Finally Comes the Poet”:

The gospel is too readily heard and taken for granted, as though it contained no unsettling news . . . . The gospel of Christ is thus a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is truth that has been flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane. Our technical way of thinking reduces mystery to problem, transforms assurance into certitude . . . and so takes the categories of Biblical faith and represents them into manageable shapes. We need an alternative mode of speech to preach the good news: speech that is dramatic, artistic, capable of inviting people in . . . unembarrassed by concreteness. Such speech would assault our imagination and push out the presumed world in which most of us are trapped. (Portfleet 12-3)

Wangerin was a pastor for around two decades, and he’s a highly intelligent man. He’s widely read and has a discerning cultural eye. He has exegeted, particularly, Christian culture, and he sees in it an urgent deficiency, one that calls, in Brueggeman’s words, for an “alternative mode of speech.” Wangerin himself said during a lecture at Calvin College in April 1995,

A community of people may exist without art and literature—not well, and they may be crippled, but they can exist . . . . But a culture that explodes its myths and no longer tells stories becomes chaotic—the cosmos no longer makes sense. Community is broken, covenant is broken, and cosmos is lost. (3-4)

And, more pointedly, in an essay entitled “Telling Tales”:

My stories do not instruct in definitional, doctrinal meanings . . . . My stories by their very ambiguity do better than that: My stories make a cosmos out of chaos, and therefore, they comfort. Whereas doctrines define, find balances, classify, and report, stories cause wholeness. Doctrines may engage the understanding mind, but story engages the human whole—so the human who was fragmented is put together again through the hearing of his/her story. . . .

In all of my reading, both of primary sources and secondary, the word “story” shows up often. Wangerin is a master storyteller, which is significant for someone raised in a strict, Midwestern Lutheran household. Conservative Lutherans, by type, aren’t known for sitting around the campfire sharing a real ripper of a story. Yet Wangerin is one of if not the most popular Lutheran speakers, writers, teachers. Because he is such a master storyteller. This response to Wangerin is telling.

I think he’s right in his contemporary Christian-culture exegesis. The church in America, at least, suffers for want of artful story. Our literature (written and preached) tends to either watered-down, superfluous story-telling or overly abstract theologizing. For the Christian church, whose redemptive history is narrative, whose primary source-text is 75 percent narrative, nothing is more valuable than story. Wangerin knows this, and he knows that what the church needs now is master storytellers. In his essay “On Preaching,” he says, “God is not a God of the pulpit, though the pulpit proclaim him. He is a God in and of the histories of humankind” (91). And he says as much in the Introduction to This Earthly Pilgrimage, a volume that includes as much non-fiction as fiction:

The pieces are as various as all our countless experiences. But there will be found, finally, a unified pattern here, and a wholeness that weaves everything together.

My stories, perhaps. But stories, you know, make cousins of us all. And more than laws or cities or governments, it is the story that creates and preserves deepest community. My stories, then, I hope to make your stories before we are done and come to the ends of the journey. (13)

So here is one of my initial conclusive guesses: Wangerin sees “story” as some sort of meta-truth, a meta-genre that encompasses fiction, essay, memoir. When he speaks of story, he speaks not of fiction or structure, but of rubric. He seems to equate story with truth so seamlessly and out-of-necessity that, for him, non-fiction as a genre isn’t entirely distinguishable from fiction. In other words, in some senses, to write fiction well is at the same time to write non-fiction. I’m not suggesting that he doesn’t understand the structural and technical differences between the two—he does. What I’m suggesting is that the boundaries between the two are much thinner in his mind than they are in mine, maybe in most everyone else’s. I recognize that I’m trying to take a bath in the ocean here, that I can’t begin to adequately discuss the issues this raises in this paper, but this is to say that Wangerin may not have issue with fiction in memoir to the degree that I do.

Whether my assumptions hold any weight, what does seem reasonable to conclude is that because he recognizes the Christian community’s particular need for story, he might, for this reason, have sacrificed a purely non-fictional memoir for a fictionalized one.

In most of his writing, Wangerin labors over detail, especially character detail. What I recall as well as anything else from both his essays and his fictive works (Miz Lil included) are character descriptions:

Well, Grandpa chewed tobacco. Was there some custom of which I was ignorant that grandsons must take the places of their grandfathers, to chew tobacco on behalf of the whole family—and to spit? Grandpa spat. Would his spitting image have to spit?

The prospect dried my mouth out. I didn’t fancy chewing on the old man’s quid.
Besides, I could never match my grandpa for spitting. I didn’t think anyone could. Grandpa Storck was an athlete at spitting. ‘Twas an admirable, breathtaking thing that he could do.

Moreover, he loved me, did my Grandpa Storck, the solemn Lord of the green lawns and the gravestones. He loved me. And this was his particular way of showing love for me, by spitting. No, I simply could not imagine duplicating the meaning of the marvelous act . . . .

. . . Grandpa seldom smiled. He had an eruption of moustache beneath his nose, like white smoke from the chimney pots of his nostrils. His face was mostly expressive of one mood only: solemnity, rectitude, Lutheran doom. His arms were long and strong, his hands huge, his stride unhalting, his whole body an uncompromising dogma. Moses! Grandpa Storck, his hair like cloud at the top of his head, was an immediate Sinai, grim and untender—but I was not intimidated.

For this Mount Sinai could spit. This old man, he loved me in the spitting. (from Miz Lil) (458-9)

And from his essay “The Making of a Minister”:

After several months of chair-sitting, both Arthur and his room were filthy. I do not exaggerate: roaches flowed from my step like puddles stomped in; they dropped casually from the walls. I stood very still. The TV flickered constantly. There were newspapers strewn all over the floor. There lay a damp film on every solid object in the room, from which arose a close, moldy odor, as though it were alive and sweating. But the dampness was a blessing, because Arthur smoked.

He had a bottom lip like a shelf. Upon that shelf he placed lit cigarettes, and then he did not remove them again until they had burned quite down, at which moment he blew them toward the television set. Burning, they hit the newspapers on the floor. But it is impossible to ignite a fine, moist mildew. Blessedly, they went out.

Then the old man would sharpen the sacrifice of my visit. Motioning toward a foul and oily sofa, winking as though he knew what mortal damage such a compost could do to my linens and my dignity, he said in hostly tones: “Have a seat, why don’t you, Reverend?” (85)

This labor over character detail is partly a product of his story-telling ability, but his attention to character seems, as well, to be part of his theoretical aim. He speaks often of the need for, and his use of, objective correlative and controlling metaphor. “Young people and old people, as Walter Wangerin describes, aren’t all that much different from each other. We all battle sin and lethargy and selfishness and lack of love . . .” (Portfleet 166). The exact detail, rather than distancing the reader from the particular experience, decreases the distance between narrator and reader. What Wangerin’s characters produce is deep feeling, and feeling, as Charles Williams’ says, is the “real source of image . . . the image is but a symbol of feeling” (59). His characters are more than mere setting; they are symbols, vehicles that enable the reader to recognize himself, or at least his self’s patterns.

Here’s the difference, I think, between Wangerin and many other master storytellers. Wangerin is not interested in a relativist reading of his works. Whereas many writers are content to leave their writing open to an individual interpretation, Wangerin always has in mind specific appropriate responses to his work. Because of the precise Christian worldview that structures all of his writing (whether children’s book or memoir), he is after specific responses at specific points: recognition of sin, repentance, understanding of forgiveness. And he crafts his characters with these responses in mind, making them objective correlatives for our own experiences. This is where, again, Wangerin’s covenant with the reader is clear. His characters are present in his work to image what he believes is the truth about the world we live in, to be an accurate mirror for his readers.

In many of his works, Miz Lil included, his characters progress through a series of epiphanies, from small deaths to resurrection, tracing the progress of God’s working in the present tense. His characters are always moving toward an ideal, though they never reach it fully in the individual works. In his essay “Preaching,” he says, “Then why haven’t we been astounded by such holiness? Well, I think we are by nature blind to sacrifice . . . . Perhaps we have to suffer sacrifice in order to understand it” (41). So, rather than didacticize on the idea of sacrifice, he gives us characters who suffer, who are forced to sacrifice, and by his telling, the reader, by his imagination, experiences sacrifice in a way that neither didacticism nor present-tense reflection could provoke. For my part, I don’t have command enough over story-telling and characterization to do the same, so I would choose essay to present sacrifice, but Wangerin is a master story-teller, and if story (and character) are the most effective way for imparting such important truth, then he will, understandably, choose story.
Back to the Preface to Miz Lil, even here, he sets up a controlling metaphor to oversee the entire book: “ . . . and back and forth as once my mother went back and forth to level the tangled weed until her hill was beautiful” (447). Could he have effectively imparted an understanding of the processes of grace through entirely non-fictive means in Miz Lil? Yes. But more powerful his use of story, so let him mix the two if he will. Some things are more important than my desire to see genre lines unblurred.

I am a bit hesitant to read Miz Lil again. This is true. I haven’t read the book since I began considering non-fiction theory. Will my understanding of this memoir as fictional change the way I read, understand, experience? Will I find the book less successful? Despite the Author’s Note and the Preface, which I read each time I read the book in the past, I always entered and exited the book telling myself that everything in the book actually happened, and implicit in my assessment was the idea that truly-happened is more powerful, more meaningful, more important than true-but-didn’t-truly happen.

Some of this is semantics, I’m sure. How can I argue the nature of truth here? Let the reader know that I share Wangerin’s understanding of the nature of reality, of the nature of objective Truth. And yet I remain disappointed that he didn’t stick with truly-happened over true-but-didn’t-happen in Miz Lil. I can see the effects, and maybe even understand, some aspects of his decision. Yet I don’t know if I can read without wondering whether the power of his writing would be significantly diminished had he stuck to straight non-fiction. I’ll never know. What I do know, however, is that even though I will continue to fight for the distinction between non-fiction and fiction, I will be more willing to give those who blur boundaries the benefit of the doubt. That in my own writing, there may be times when audience demands a change in form, depending on my purposes and abilities. When these arguments rear their heads in class, I’ll be quicker to remain silent, as there’s more to be said than I have words for, more to consider than I have understanding of. That’s what the teacher is for.

Works Cited

Portfleet, Dianne R. Walter Wangerin, Jr., Shaping Our Lives With Words of Power: A Study of the Major Works of Walt Wangerin, Jr. Grand Rapids, MI: Greenleaf-Witcop Press, 1996.

Wangerin, Walter. This Earthly Pilgrimage: Tales and Observations On the Way.
Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003.

Posted by ghetto monk at November 21, 2004 09:18 PM | TrackBack