This is Reality Testing, a new column where two of the smartest people we could find (on Twitter) Khalid Warsame and Joshua Barnes fight over an idea.

It’s a little like a podcast – but for your eyes! Or like a DC Comics movie adaptation where two invulnerable juggernauts battle for our delectation, only with better character development. 

Discussed: Twitter—hunches—speech acts—truth, non-truth—non-fiction as wedding

KW:

Hello Josh.

JB:

Hey Khalid. So, we find ourselves steering this column on Writers Bloc, continuing an argument we started on twitter: what, if any, is the difference between fiction and non-fiction?

KW:

Yeah, there’s a lot of ways this argument can go, and I think we’re going to need to avoid being mystical about art to properly get to the core of things. Basically: let’s talk about function, purpose, and the role of fiction, non-fiction, and everything in between.

JB:

Now, as a way of framing things up, lets keep in mind something I’m pretty sure I once heard David Sedaris say – how the only thing worse than being misquoted is being quoted accurately.

I want to start with a question for you, Khalid. You wrote on Twitter: ‘My hunch is that non-fiction is to fiction what a speech act is to general speech. Very roughly though. I’m not 100% sure on this.’ I’m not 100% sure either. Can you break this down for me?

KW:

I think David Sedaris has a point—especially when it comes to Twitter. I don’t think anybody has ever really finished a thought on Twitter—

JB:

Unless you’re Patrick Lenton, or that dude from the New Republic.

KW:

Of course. But very few of us are as good at it as Patrick Lenton.

JB:

You were saying?

KW:

Well, my gut feeling has always been that categories are natural and useful ways to make sense of the world, and that the attempt to delineate differences between things is how we make meaning. The trouble, of course, is reconciling this into a critical view—namely the argument that there is, in fact, a workable distinction between fiction and non-fiction. I'm comfortable saying that, while there is a distinction between the two, this distinction is a somewhat unstable one that breaks down when interrogated at the fuzzy edges.

JB:

I’m guessing that this is where your comparison to a speech act comes in.

KW:

Yeah, in my tweet I meant to draw a distinction between a performative speech act and a constative utterance. A performative speech act has a purpose: it changes the world in some way. A nation declares war, your boss tells you to shut the door behind you, a couple at the altar say 'I do'. These are all performative actions: they incite action and change reality.

Now, compare that to a constative utterance which, very broadly, describe something without inciting action. Say your neighbour Jeff, whom you despise, walks up to you and says 'Wow, hot one today isn't it?' Here, Jeff is making a constative utterance. Now, since you despise Jeff and all he stands for, your reaction to his attempts at small talk might be to tell him to shut his fat mouth. Here, you've just made a performative speech act.

J.L. Austin, who developed the theory of speech acts, in fact argues that there is no clear-cut distinction between performative and constative utterances and one can think of dozens of examples of utterances that don't fit cleanly into one or the other category. For example, suppose your response to your neighbour isn't to tell him to shut up, but to instead say, 'This conversation bores me, Jeff,' it looks like you're making a constative utterance, but at the same time, there's an implication there. If Jeff is perceptive enough (which he probably isn't, to be honest, since he doesn't seem to have noticed that you loathe him), he can read between the lines. You're telling him to sod off. But you're not at the same time. Here's where the instability lies.

JB:

So here we have two kinds of speech act—or in this case, two kinds of writing: one, constative, which describes, and another, performative, which enacts. Fair to say? And yet the problem with this distinction is that it doesn’t help us to do much distinguishing, but what it does do is point to the supreme importance of context: if we’re using the (admittedly complicated) analogy of a performative speech act, then the concept of non-fiction itself is a little like a wedding. It establishes circumstances in which a speech act may perform rather than merely describe. That is to say, we readers anticipate that a work of nonfiction bears a closer relationship to reality than a work of fiction, and so allow it to make different kinds of claims about the world as a result.

KW:

Here's my take: sure, the exact formal boundaries are murky, and experimental writing muddies this distinction, but at one end there’s still land and at the other end there is still water. The existence of a muddy riverbank doesn’t disprove the existence of the river or the land.

I guess at this point, we have to go into the actual argument as it stands: Why are we debating that there is or isn't a difference between fiction and non-fiction? And, what, exactly, is the underpinning impulse behind this whole question? I'll leave that to you, Josh, since this whole discussion was kicked off when you recommended Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage to me some time ago. I'm interested to hear what you think before I continue to implicate myself by qualifying my argument any further.

JB:

I wanna refer here to an interview Dyer did with The Paris Review—a genre unto itself—a few years back, which neatly sets the stage for this debate. He begins in typically contrarian style:

I have to object to the parameters of this interview… It’s titled ‘The Art of Non-fiction.’ Now I could whine, ‘What about the fiction?’ but that would be to accept a distinction that’s not sustainable. Fiction, non-fiction—the two are bleeding into each other all the time.

When the ever-patient interviewer asks him whether he distinguishes between the two forms at all, Dyer says that he doesn’t, and that, far from any distinction between fiction and non-fiction, he’s interested only in ‘great books’. I suppose that’s the most difficult problem of all: how do we talk about ‘great books’? How could we even describe the greatness of a book without trying to work out what kind of book it is?

Fact is, when it comes to the bleedings-together of fiction and non-fiction, the ideological stakes are high. As Emma Marie Jones wrote recently in The Lifted Brow, apropos, once again, of Geoff bloody Dyer:

Prioritising a blending, a blurring of these intersections—shit, acknowledging a need to blend at all—presupposes a binary model of opposition between literary truth and non-truth that to me feels purist, restrictive and old-fashioned.

KW:

Emma Marie Jones makes a brilliant point, but I still feel that there is enough value in this distinction—as a statement of function if anything else—for it to justify itself. This grand synthesis of form, function, and meaning that Dyer advocates for isn’t workable under as broad a range of conditions as the old 'binary model' because it doesn't at all reflect the way we actually construct meaning and identity. Derrida hits this on the head when he says that it is by the differences that we construct identities and fashion meanings. It is, in fact, in this emergence of contrast and difference (différance, as he calls it) that our perception of a stable reality asserts itself.

The question you and I are interested in is: do need this distinction between fiction and non-fiction, as arbitrary as it can be at times? What, exactly, are the fuzzy edges? Do we even disagree?

JB:

Maybe that’s what we’re trying to figure out?

KW:

I hope so. But ultimately it all boils down to the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who, when tasked with delineating his threshold test for obscenity, exclaimed: “Perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”

JB:

In any case, for this column we’ll be looking at lots of books and films and other stuff (read: whatever seems interesting) to assess these models of ‘literary truth and non-truth’ and figure out how different kinds of reality work in different kinds of texts. We’re asking what motivates us, as common readers or as critics, when we attempt to uphold—or dissolve—a distinction between fiction and non-fiction.

We’ll be properly finding our way into this next time with Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH—talking about Highbrow Literary Stuff like narrative, reality, history, authorship, Nazis—and basically seeing where the ideas raised here run out of gas.

KW:

So: to be continued.

JB:

Yup. Bring your highest brow.

KW:

See you then.

Khalid Warsame is a writer and editor who lives in Brisbane. He is the fiction editor for The Lifted Brow and Festival Coordinator for the National Young Writers Festival. He tweets at @kldwarsame.

Joshua Barnes is a writer and editor from Melbourne. His work has appeared in Kill Your Darlings, The Suburban Review, Junkee, The Point, Voiceworks and on All the Best Radio. He is also a fiction editor at Voiceworks and a creative producer for the 2016 Emerging Writers’ Festival. He tweets from @j___barnes.

Reality Testing will return in a forthnight (or so), discussing one of the world's most interesting works of kind-of-history and maybe-kind-of-fiction. Avoid missing out by subscribing to our weekly newsletter.