The Tyranny of Narrative in Nonfiction

Surveying the nonfiction bestseller lists for as long as I can remember I have oft (and increasingly) been struck by the narrowness and the vapidity of what sort of nonfiction finds a general audience. In the main it is self-help crapola making false promises about enabling you to improve your life if you do exactly what they say (promises that, along with their falsity, are increasingly vulgar in nature, such that even the titles use language I try to avoid on this blog--how right Admiral Kirk was about the state of our culture now). All the things that don't fit that description are crammed into a very little space, with much of that having little to commend it. Our books on public affairs, for example, are often just so much more gossip, simply involving people in the Showbusiness for Ugly People rather than the regular kind that is also hugely evident on the lists, and much of the rest offers not so much insight as ranting from, for example, the dreckmeisters of talk radio.

However, apart from the narrowness and the trashiness of the material there is a tendency that seems to me to merit remark, namely the extreme propensity of its authors toward narrative. Thus do we see often see in those books about public affairs that are not just Beltway gossip and talk radio rants the authors spin for us some big tale in which the personages involved read like characters in a drama, as the works of journalistic investigation turn out to be as much about the journalist investigating as what it is that they have investigated and found--they the protagonists of the drama. Granted, narrative forms of nonfiction--memoir, biography and so on--have always been part of the scene and probably always had more attraction for readers than, for example, expository kinds of nonfiction, where someone explains some phenomenon or makes an argument without presuming to "tell a story." But today it seems as if narrative forms of nonfiction have really crowded out the other kinds, that if you are hoping to reach a wide audience with a work of nonfiction you have no choice but to present that work in this manner.

A certain sort of idiot will shrug at this. "So what?" they ask. "What's wrong with that?" What's wrong with that is that if such work does not necessarily mean sacrificing relevance and substance (for an example of this kind of thing done right I would direct the reader to, for example, Greg Palast's Vulture's Picnic), in turning what was an option into a requirement places an additional burden on the writer, one that may not sit easily with other, more important, priorities. Those narrative tales of the Beltway and of journalistic investigations--the authors spend so much time luxuriating in characters and "color" and minutiae of their affairs that what it was all really about falls by the wayside. (The writer gives us interesting character sketches of the principals--almost certainly highly flattering to the principals involved--and follows every twist and turn of the battle to get that piece of legislation passed. But what did that legislation contain? What did it mean for the country? This they do not attend to nearly so well.) Indeed, besides just cluttering up what written on other terms may have been a better book from the standpoint of saying something the obligation to "tell a story" may rule out many a subject, many a way of treating a subject--those bestsellers by social scientists like C. Wright Mills and John K. Galbraith that did something to enrich the intellectual life of the country in the mid-century period pretty much unimaginable in today's "writer's market," not simply because of their politics (the narrowing of what is acceptable to the mainstream that way a whole other problem) but because they took up a subject seriously and explained it lucidly in a way impossible were they to waste their time, and the reader's, on such fripperies.

In my view we are all the worse off for it, all as this bespeaks something that should worry everyone at all serious about our collective intellectual life, namely the demand people make even when picking up what is supposed to be a serious book about a serious subject that the writer go to considerable lengths to entertain them--for their curiosity about the world and the things and people in it is so weak, their patience for explanation so slight, that one cannot hold their attention in any other way. Perhaps, too, their inability to process those things that that non-narrative nonfiction had to offer, all too much in line with the evidences we see of a plunging level of literacy from what passes in this country for a cultural elite down. And this, like so much else testimony to the country's long slide toward Idiocracy nearing its horrifying terminus.