When teaching my creative writing classes in Paris, I typically begin my memoir-themed craft lecture by writing these words on the whiteboard:
Author | Character / Narrator
The vertical line between “Author” and “Character/Narrator” is in part meant to underscore the fact that – in analyzing a person’s writing – we’re not talking about the individual who wrote it (the “author”); we’re discussing how that individual evoked his or her own narrative persona through the writing itself.
Indeed, on the page, the person telling a nonfiction story appears both as a “character,” who participates in the story’s action as it happens (without knowing how things will turn out); as well as the “narrator,” who analyzes and makes sense of things as the story plays out. At the risk of oversimplifying how all this works, one could say that the “character” persona is used to make real-time discoveries in the story, and the “narrator” persona makes retrospective sense of that character’s discoveries.
Writing nonfiction from this “double perspective” is a task that has been masterfully explained by the essayist Phillip Lopate, but I stumbled into my own understanding of creating the “I character” by attempting to write Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-completed first travel book).
23-year-old Rolf as the narrative “I character”
Part of the challenge of reducing yourself to the size of a “character” on the page is deciding which parts of your persona you will explain (or dramatize) for the reader. In Pilgrims in a Sliding World I never quite settled on a consistent mode of describing myself. Often, I wound up “performing” a version of myself that belonged more to other books than to my own life.
One evocation of the “I character” that stands out in retrospect is this faintly charming attempt to describe what I looked like back then, which appeared in the book’s opening chapter, “Face the Muzak”:
Someone once told me that I was not handsome enough to pass for Jesus. I think he was trying to say that if a children’s book of Bible stories were illustrated with a Jesus who looked like me, devout people would consider it somewhat blasphemous. My body cannot compensate for my haircut, either: somehow, I am simultaneously tall, big-boned, and skinny. With my shirt off, I look like someone who was meant to be muscular, but acquired a heroin habit instead of lifting weights.
This description appeared in a section describing how I’d cut my grunge-chic long hair short to avoid drawing unwanted attention to myself while living out of a van. Yet, clever as the Jesus analogy was, my physical appearance had less narrative relevance than clearly stating my goals and motivations for taking an eight-month van trip across America.
Unfortunately, I mostly evoked my young persona through vague angst at the prospect of adulthood, and never set up coherent personal stakes for the journey itself.
When The Catcher in the Rye goes On the Road (with no clear reason)
Critic Harold Bloom has written about the “anxiety of influence” some writers have in the face of the books that inspired them, and I appear to have written Pilgrims in a Sliding World under the anxious influence of a previous generation’s iconic road-trip and coming-of-age novels.
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was a book I no doubt hoped to model in some sense, but my own travels were far more deliberate — and far less manic and ecstatic — than Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise characters. This meant that my narrative conflict was more pegged to a J.D. Salinger / Catcher in the Rye sense of lost idealism in the face of the adult world.
In Chapter Three of the book, for example (which I entitled “Burrowing Through the Topsoil” — a metaphor for my limited understanding of everything I’d encountered in California), I described a group of kids at a Monterey playground with a tone that evoked Salinger’s Holden Caulfield reflecting on his own childhood:
Sentimentality, it seems, is nothing more than a litmus test that tells us what we can no longer be. For eight-year-olds, life is predicated on motion, not analysis. Still, I hope that somewhere in me, a few molecules or neurons or fugitive sand-grains remain of my third-grade starter culture: free of pubescent testosterone and post-adolescent cynicism—capable of simple belief, and content with the idea of the future as a distant and safe cartoon reality where everyone works in a nonspecific office, and life is funny and makes sense.
Beyond reflecting on the recent memory of childhood, however, I used a kind of Cather in the Rye energy to channel my exasperation at the adult world I encountered as I traveled through California. In Berkeley, for example, I declared my narrative irritation at the arrogant and standoffish “counterculture” types I’d encountered there:
Three days ago, I was under the naive impression that hippies were gentle idealists living transcendental transient lifestyles. In the past two days, however, I’ve seen mostly cannabis-choked paranoiacs, humorless black-market capitalists, and self-righteous demagogues who seem to be rebelling against a society that ceased to exist twenty years ago. It is possible that I haven’t met a representative sampling, but the hippiedom I have seen so far strikes me as silly and ineffectual—a sentimentalized shadow of a past age, like the Daughters of the American Revolution, or the Benevolent Order of Elks.
Thirty years after having written this, it now feels peculiar that I sought out the countercultural corners of Berkeley (places like the ’60s-hippie relic People’s Park, or the all-ages punk club 924 Gilman), when — apart from my flirtation with Seattle’s grunge scene one year prior — I didn’t consider myself a denizen of counterculture scenes.
In retrospect, it’s clear that I sought out countercultures in California for the simple reason that I assumed they were the purest manifestation of America’s youth-zeitgeist. This probably had more to do with the self-celebratory Baby Boomer youth narratives I read growing up than with my own interests (which included, but were not limited to, professional sports, DIY journalism, theological philosophy, indie filmmaking, and the natural history of the Great Plains).
In reflexively seeking out out California’s countercultures, I was — for no good reason — creating a fictionalized sense for what the “I character” version of Rolf really wanted to seek as he drove across North America.
Lesson #2: “Show, don’t tell” is still good narrative advice
The over-analytic (and overly self-conscious) Catcher in the Rye version of the Rolf character reappears again and again in later chapters of Pilgrims in a Sliding World. At one point, in a chapter that takes place in the Virginia wilderness, he admits to something of a moral breakdown: “I feel like I don’t believe in hope as much as I refuse to believe in despair, ” he declares. “At some point, I chose to avoid hypocrisy by believing in nothing. But. Perhaps I am realizing that believing in nothing is hypocrisy itself.”
This sentiment utilizes a rather clever turn of phrase — but it feels like the person who wrote it knew that the turn of phrase (rather than the sentiment itself) was why he’d chosen to declare it. As a young writer, he was besotted with phrases that “sounded like writing,” and this tended to make his narrative voice less convincing.
Ultimately, my favorite depictions of myself in Pilgrims in a Sliding World occurred when — instead of analyzing everything I’d experienced — I simply depicted myself having an experience. In creative writing workshops this is known as “show, don’t tell,” and its good narrative advice.
Take for instance this section from Chapter Seventeen (entitled “Alienation By the Numbers”), which took place in a dive-bar in the Alphabet City neighborhood of New York’s East Village:
Sophie’s proved to be a warm, claustrophobic respite from the cold night. I bought a beer, then stood at the back wall as a group of guys and girls my age puffed on cigarettes, chatted, and waited their turn at the pool table. I was so taken by the desire to talk to someone that I became shy and skittish. Twice I bummed cigarettes with the intention of striking up a conversation, but I could never think of anything to say. My solitude was like a manifesto instead of an invitation. I smoked the cigarettes, but only because it gave me something to do. After four dollars’ worth of Sophie’s bargain beer, I left to find a phone booth and make a long-distance call to Skye. I hung up after two rings.
This narrative sequence, which evokes loneliness without ever saying I was lonely, feels truer than the pages and pages of self-declaration that appear elsewhere in the manuscript.
It also hints at another character — “Skye,” a young woman I’d met weeks earlier, in Florida (and with whom I was still somewhat fixated, even as I was writing about her a full year later).
My next entry will explore my attempts at depicting other people in Pilgrims in a Sliding World.
Share This
