Craft Essay, Alexandra Rae
Come with me, here into the canon. It is this literary space that, according to the men who deemed it so, contains the exemplary works of our time (and by our time I mean the time in which we are living and the pasts that converge with it which we study and discuss through the art of storytelling, ultimately making these threads from a different time inseparable from our own). Male writers have dominated, and therefore controlled, the literary canon since its inception (for American scholars) in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, with works like The Odyssey (750 BC), Macbeth (1606), Ulysses (1920), and The Great Gatsby (1925) setting the terms for their inheritors. What makes these books representative of the hallmarks of great literature are their memorable characters embodying dichotomous archetypes (such as the hero and the villain), recognizable moral dilemmas, and conventional narrative structures – all criticized and praised by men, further evoking their control over the literary canon with whiteness, maleness, ableism, and disregard for women-centered narratives. To question the stature of these texts would be to question these men and the canon they created in its entirety.
For feminist writers, this is what we seek to accomplish through establishing our own set of rules to follow – or break – about what makes a written work essential. The work of American psychotherapist and writer Lauren Slater challenges the conventions of storytelling through her nonfiction texts that are as full of her academic scholarship as they are of her ability to take risks with words. She is the author of nine books detailing her work in the field of psychology, role as a mother, and person who relied on medical intervention to restore her mental health after struggling with depression and suicidal ideation in Prozac Diary; Welcome to My Country; Playing House; Opening Skinner’s Box; and Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. The latter is her most controversial and, to me, most interesting published piece to date. Within this book, she defies genre boundaries and gender expectations alike by uprooting the very definition of nonfiction: writing that is “based on facts, real events, and real people, such as biography or history” (Oxford Languages). What is real and what is not is never clarified by Slater’s narrator in the 2000 memoir, making it a highly unnatural story to “shelve” in the nonfiction genre. Using the art of speculation within these 217 pages, she engages in unnatural feminist narratology – or the deconstruction of how a traditional nonfiction tale is structured through a woman writer telling a woman’s story; a successful and risky revision of literature outside the realm of the canon.
As defined by Jan Alber and Stefan Iversen et al. in “What is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology? A Response to Monika Fludernik,” unnatural narratives “highly implausible, impossible, unreal, otherworldly, outrageous, extreme, outlandish, and insistently fictional narratives” (380). In the context of feminist literature, this kind of implausibility coincides with the very plausible destruction of male-created narrative structures (narratologies) by feminist writers. But what happens when an unnatural narrative isn’t fictional at all, but, rather, its unnaturalness is rooted in the fact that the narrative structure in a text is upheld by its own impossibility? Lauren Slater happens. The narratology within Lying is highly unnatural and, therefore, a successful feminist project that sets out on a literary endeavor few are willing to undertake. Ellen Peel exemplifies the connection between feminist and unnatural narratology in her article “Unnatural Feminist Narratology” from Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 2016. Here, Peel argues that “feminist narratology explains the stakes of unnatural narratives, investigating how they can indeed have meaning and significance, exerting power in the world, creating the potential for action” (Storyworlds, 82). The power to create literary change by opposing what is natural, traditional, and comfortable is not understood by many, and is utilized by even less. In the case of Lauren Slater, creative nonfiction and the possibilities within it would be forever changed by the way she wielded this power as a feminist writer.
The cover of Lying has a black background with a woman standing in a pink nightgown, unbuttoning the top to reveal a night sky darkness underneath – a clue of the deception and magic that is to come within this narrative. Below the title lies this quote from Slater herself: “There is only one kind of memoir I can see to write and that’s a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark.” Even before readers can flip to the first page, unnatural feminist narratology is represented by Slater’s work through hints of the “slippery” and “impish” text to come. A question mark this memoir is indeed; the first chapter is two simple words that offer the audience a guide of how to read the narrative that is to follow: “I exaggerate” (3). If this were written in a fictional story, then perhaps this would be interpreted as a bold opening from the first-person narrator. As this is a (metaphorical) memoir, Slater’s words carry more weight in the nonfiction genre. Personal essays, academic papers, memoirs: they are all founded on the truth, whether that be objective truth found through research or an individual truth about a specific event or series of events in the writer’s life. To exaggerate in nonfiction is to push the boundaries of the genre itself that readers and literary critics are not always receptive to. Luckily for those of us invested in risk-taking and unconventional storytelling, Slater does not seek to conform for the sake of tradition. As Ellen Peel demonstrates in “Unnatural Feminist Narratology,” relating the feminist unnatural to the narratological unnatural makes sense “since both question what is comfortable, conventional, or taken for granted. Both often point out the constructedness of what is perceived as natural” (Storyworlds, 83). For nonfiction writers, it is natural for the events in the piece to be limited to what actually took place in their perceived reality; it is even more natural for writers to state their oath to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, to the reader. Slater’s use of unnatural feminist narratology disrupts both of these “natural” expectations. By admitting to compulsive exaggerating, she tells the truth about her unnatural approach to the genre and how she conflates the objective truth with her stories of childhood, sexual awakenings, and seizures.
The central transgression Slater engages with in Lying is her claims of having epilepsy. These claims about her medical disposition conflate with the fraught relationship she has with her mother, who was a woman of “grand gestures and high standards” who rarely “spoke the truth” (5). It was from her that Slater “learned that truth is bendable, that what you wish is every bit as real as what you are” (5). Using unnatural feminist narratology, Slater bends the shape of her life into a question mark fit for a narrative like no other. Knowing how her mother connects to her lying is essential for readers to know before Slater begins weaving her tale of seizures and daughterhood. She writes in chapter two: “I have epilepsy. Or I feel I have epilepsy. Or I wish I had epilepsy, so I could find a way of explaining the dirty, spastic glittering place I had in my mother’s heart” (5-6). The decision to not make a decision about what kind of narrative she is weaving here pushes Slater into the territory of unnatural narratology that seeks to go against traditional story structures – which includes the narrator’s omission of truth; of clarity.
Slater further strays from the conventions of the nonfiction genre with her vivid descriptions of the seizures she may or may not have had as a child: “And when I opened my mouth after that, all my words seemed colored, and I don’t know where this is my mother or where this is my illness, or whether, like her, I am just confusing fact with fiction, and there is no epilepsy, just a clenched metaphor, a way of telling you what I have to tell you: my tale” (6). Explaining her illness is the same as explaining her need for writing this memoir. The compulsion to write nonfiction utilizing unnatural feminist narratology takes hold of her the same way seizures do to a brain inflicted with epilepsy. Her tale is one where the audience never truly knows what happened in real life or what would have happened if Slater had epilepsy. Teetering between fact and fiction, the narrative blends the possibility of epilepsy (the idea of it as an illness) and a lived experience with epilepsy (an illness that Slater did live with). As a feminist writer, the “if” of her memoir acts as a conduit to her freedom from the genre parameters and metrics of canonization established by male writers and critics. The “if'” is what makes this a detrimental or liberating tale, depending on what kind of reader you are. For readers looking to avoid experimental literature, the plausibility of everything Slater writes may be detrimental. For readers with an aversion to narratives following a traditional narrative structure, this same plausibility may feel liberating, even revolutionary, upon discovering its depths throughout each chapter.
What makes this memoir not only an unnatural narrative but an unnatural feminist narrative is the narrator’s gendered experience as a woman. If this text were written by a man, it would be entirely different as every encounter the narrator has with the outside world is dictated by her gender. Marion Gymnich speaks to the importance of understanding the implications of a narrator’s gender in her article “Gender and Narratology” from Literature Compass 2013 by John Wiley & Sons. She references Susan Lancer and Robyn Warhol, who made significant contributions to researching and developing a feminist narratology project. They claimed gender “is a category that is highly relevant to the analysis of narrative structures and...needs to be integrated into the discussion of narratives from a primarily structural point of view” (706). Gymnich agrees, contending that “it is indeed important whether the narrator and the narratee of a text are constructed as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ by readers” (706). In Lying, the constructed feminine narrator is told and has things done to her that wouldn’t have taken place if she were constructed as masculine instead. When she attends a writing retreat one summer, she meets one of the mentors, Christopher, and engages in sexual acts with him in a field. There under the night sky where no one could see them, Christopher tells her, “You don’t have to do a thing…This is all for you, sweet girl” (130). After the narrator begins to tell him “No” when he touches her in a way she doesn’t want to be touched, he mocks her: “ ‘No?’ he said, smiling, ‘No? No? No?’ As he moved my thighs around. ‘Very easy now,’ he said, and he went between me…I tried to regain myself but I was gone, girl gone, for good” (130-131). These words would not have been uttered if the power dynamics were flipped, but, as the male had control over the relationship, he was able to convince the narrator to give up autonomy over her own body. Slater’s work as a writer utilizing unnatural feminist narratology, however, does not let this reign long over her narrator. The sexual acts the narrator commits with Christopher marks a turning point in the story – one where understanding her experience as a woman’s experience is crucial to understanding how the narrator gains her own autonomy back through the art of speculation.
After the narrator decides to follow Christopher back to his faculty room a few nights later, Slater’s version of the truth is revealed: “I am genuinely sorry to report that I slept with him. Lauren Jean slept with him. Or Lauren Jean’s words slept with him. Or he slept not with Lauren Jean but with his idea of her talent, which was, I now see, an idea overwrought and ridiculous and possibly even entirely fraudulent, even though, dear reader, well, I do have some talent, wouldn’t you say?” (138-139). This confession, or perhaps antithesis to a real confession, illustrates the success of Lying as an unnatural feminist narratology in several ways. The writer’s interjection here of “dear reader” was a convention developed in 18th century prose writing to establish a sense of truthfulness to narrative, to build a bridge between the reader and writer. There is a level of performance arising at this point in the text because of the meta relationship building between the writer, her work, and the reader. Marion Gymnich references Susan Lanser in “Sexing Narratology,” where Lanser claims that “texts, like bodies, perform sex, gender, and sexuality, and it is the interplay of these categories – the ways in which they converge and diverge in normative and transgressive ways – that may yield the most interesting material for narratology” (Literature Compass 2013, 171). The memoir’s performance as a text that defies genre and narrative structure coincides with the narrator’s bodily performance as she has sex (at least on the page) with Christopher. This convergence between the work and the narrator as embodiments of unnatural feminist narratology elucidates how Slater intentionally used the idea of a confession to upset the typical responsibilities of truth-telling nonfiction writers are subjected to. There is also the power that rests in the authorial “I” which transports the text beyond a natural account of an event that happened in the past. It is the narrator, “I,” who is sorry to report something that may or may not have happened – but it is that same “I” that addresses the reader and prescribes some talent to herself, asking the audience if they agreed. Instilling this level of meta-writing in a memoir is highly unnatural, but it is also unnatural for meta-writing to perform as part of the piece. The entirety of Slater’s book is based on her ability to combine these performances – the sexual performances of the narrator, the “I” performing as Slater, and the words themselves performing as the truth – into an unnatural feminist narrative that works against the grain of narratology man created. By defying conventional narrative structures, Slater is able to amplify her own voice as a writer and communicate to her audience her version of the truth.
In the last section of this audacious memoir, Slater writes, “Here. Here is where I am. Thus, myself. My memoir, please. Nonfiction, please” (215). Slater implores us to believe what she has written, and what she has written is a memoir; an account of her life based on her own personal knowledge and experiences. Our innate curiosity as human beings makes us want to know what experiences are fact and what are fiction – but it is the work of feminist writers and unnatural narratologists that remind us that the experience we have while engaging in a text like Lying is far superior to the comfort we get in knowing what we are reading aligns with all things possible in the literary canon. Like Slater, we need to – as readers, writers, and feminists – explore the subterranean of the literary structures sustaining our current writing climate. In the age where the impossible is almost always possible, unnatural feminist narratology allows us to break beyond genre boundaries; reclaim autonomy over our bodies; and question the men who tell us what to write and how to write it. Fact: their narratives no longer dominate our narratives. Fiction: the need to control the shape of our stories for the sake of the canon. Let your words become an unnatural, playful, exasperating question mark.
Alexandra Rae is a writer & editor from Ohio. Her poetry and prose reflect her interests in intersectional feminism, queerness, etymology, sexuality, and the meaning of liberation in the 21st century. She is currently a Columnist and Media Director for Spiritus Mundi Review and a Submissions Reader for Narratively. Her work can be found on Substack @byalexandrarae and Instagram @theresonationofalexandra.