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Title: The Author as a Protagonist and Artist: Applying the Auteur Theory to Creative
Nonfiction
Author: Jaren Kerr
Date: 2015
Institution name/journal where submitted: Toronto University
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Summary
Creative nonfiction is an increasingly popular form of writing that demands a lot from the author
and can be very rewarding to its readers. But, as a hybrid form, how does one determine what
belongs in the genre?
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To read a creative nonfiction work, the reader must trust the author. Positioned between
the fiction/nonfiction binary, the reader may be uncertain of what to expect from a piece of
creative nonfiction. The nonfiction part is obvious; what is being written about is rooted in fact,
though to what degree is less obvious. The most important factor to understand is the “creative”.
The creative part of creative nonfiction is personal and idiosyncratic: The author’s identity adds a
dimension to the nonfiction account, compounding factual truth with emotional insight. Eula
Biss’ On Immunity: An Inoculation and David Foster Wallace’s “Ticket to The Fair”, which will
be discussed in this essay, are strong examples of works that adhere to this model. Both pieces
are works not “based on a true story”, but stories with two truths. Choices to tell a true story
within a narrative arc or the addition rhetorical flourishes are not the main factors in making a
nonfiction work “creative”. These choices change the way a story is told, but the author of a
creative nonfiction work changes the story itself by adding a personal aspect. For creative
nonfiction to truly earn its place in the genre, it must take advantage of its unique position: the
presence of the author in the diegetic world. In a fictional work, the author is a deity who knows
all their characters, their motives, and controls what happens to them. The author is absent from
a fictional piece; no matter how autobiographical the story or a character is, fiction is imagined.
In nonfiction, the author is outside of the story, observing occurrences objectively and
documenting them. Of course, it is impossible to completely avoid bias – any omission of fact is
prioritizing one detail over another, and writing demands omission to be consumable – but the
author aims to withhold personal opinion and leave themselves out of the story. In creative
nonfiction, the author is neither a pure observer nor are they creators of the events they document
– the author is split into two entities: the protagonist and the artist. This concept is similar to the
auteur theory that is popular in film scholarship: the director as a person is the living being,
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separate from the director as an artist, who exists as his or her oeuvre. The “author-protagonist”
experiences the event that is written about while the “author-artist” shapes this personal
experience and creates universal meaning. Notably, the author-protagonist is not called the
author-character; the author must be central to the story for their personal experience to translate
into universal meaning. Also guided by the auteur theory, the creative nonfiction author’s
idiosyncratic style and vision must be apparent in their work. The uniqueness of the author
comes from the author-protagonist’s personal perspective and the author-artist’s distinctive
writing style that permeates the author’s body of work, which includes frequent use of certain
rhetorical devices, structures and tone. Creative nonfiction demands that the author assumes two
roles – writer and character – to tell a story that is both factually accurate and emotionally
dynamic.
To understand the concept of the author-protagonist, it is helpful to understand the auteur
theory. Formed in 1954 by the editors of French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema (Staples 1),
the auteur theory does not view the writer of the screenplay as the author of the film; that honour
goes to the director. Even if the screenwriter and director are one and the same, the visual
choices like cutting style, camera techniques and recurring shot angles are most important to
making the film unique (Bordwell & Thompson 33) . The director is separated into two entities:
the director as a person, and the director as their body of work; the auteur theory defines the
auteur as the latter, unrelated to the former (Staples 3) (the protagonist-artist connection values
each author as equally important and related). An auteur’s style is supposed to make any film by
the director instantly recognizable as a piece of his or her oeuvre. For example, George Cukor
had a signature abstractness to his work (Sarris 2) that set his films apart from the often
formulaic films of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The same concept can be applied to creative
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nonfiction. Although both elements are a factor, the author’s form matters more than the content
he or she may usually write about. A work that is called “Didion-esque”, for example, has less to
do with the common topics of Joan Didion’s works but more about her style, which in her case
was the tendency to write about the world with a looming sense of dread, anxiety and
neuroticism.
A comprehension of what creative nonfiction is not can assist one in understanding what
it is. One example of a work that does not fit all the creative nonfiction criteria but is sometimes
categorized in the genre is Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”. In his review of the
book, Jeff Sharlet points out that: “Behind the Beautiful Forevers is written in a voice that might
be called “strictly third person.” Besides that [author’s] note, there’s no hint of Boo’s presence in
the lives of the slum dwellers” (51). Boo’s complete absence from the text means that her work
is not creative nonfiction because the author-protagonist is not present. It could, though, be
classified as narrative journalism. It is also notable that Sharlet calls Boo’s work literary
nonfiction (51); “literary” means that something has characteristics akin to literature (in this case,
style of prose), whereas the word “creative” is explicitly about using one’s imagination to
construct something. A literary style is not enough to make a nonfiction work a piece of creative
nonfiction; it can surely contribute to bringing a work closer to that status, but alone, it is
insufficient. Although Boo combines the observatory nature of nonfiction reportage with the
narrative frame and employment of a protagonist commonly found in fiction, she fails to fulfil
the role of author-protagonist. One may be able to infer that Boo’s status as a middle-class white
woman from the West would shape the way she writes about the impoverished in the Global
South, and her presence in Indian slums could create an interesting dialogue, but she does not
situate herself in the story, eliminating these opportunities to understand her story further. Boo
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tells her readers what happened, and she makes her work read like a novel (Sharlet 51), but
passing on the chance to make herself a protagonist disqualifies the work from being creative
nonfiction. Without the particular, we cannot derive the universal and understand what the story
means in totality.
The work of Eula Biss exemplifies the concept of the author-artist because of her
idiosyncratic style. In her book On Immunity, Biss employs an associational style. She often
juxtaposes ideas and perspectives from paragraph to paragraph, and sometimes, her topic at the
end of a paragraph is radically divergent from the subject at the beginning. For example, Biss
begins one paragraph stating the dangers of bicycles and ends it with a quote about pregnancy.
As Biss proves, there are many connections to be made between seemingly unrelated topics.
Bicycles are risky, but so is pregnancy. In both cases, valuable things – lives – are being carried,
and there is a lack of complete control and a level of uncertainty associated with both. Cycling
requires control of the body, but also a trust that the vehicle will not malfunction. Although a
mother carries a baby, she cannot stop her child from kicking, or prevent the symptoms of the
child rearing process. Biss also compares vaccination to slavery, which at first seems jarring and
questionable, but as she explains, vaccination and slavery both relate to the agency one has over
his or her body (60). Biss’ juxtapositions fulfil the creative nonfiction author’s duty to speak to
the universal implications of her topic. Biss draws on myth, science, statistics and history to
build her argument about vaccination. Her personal experiences are also included, and she
consistently weaves the personal with the universal. For example, the popularity of vampirethemed books and television shows during her pregnancy reflected her personal experience,
being sapped of energy from her child, and taking in blood that was not hers due to pregnancy
complications (Biss 71). Later on, she returns to the vampire theme, saying: “Our vampires,
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whatever else they are, remain a reminder that our bodies are penetrable. A reminder that we
feed off of each other, that we need each other to live… they give us a way of thinking about
what we ask of each other in order to live” (Biss 73). Biss connects Susan Sontag’s theory that
the idea of a “risk group” is archaic by referencing her personal life, where she made the sudden
transition from being “safe” to a member of the risk group after pregnancy complications (59).
Not only does Biss intersect various topics, disciplines and perspectives to build her
argument, she also lingers before exploring her main topic. At the beginning of the chapter on
page 17 of the book, she does not mention vaccination until her eighth paragraph. She takes the
first seven paragraphs to recap a book she read in college, recall memories of her father, discuss
blood types and explain her reason for donating her son’s umbilical cord to a public bank. This is
another example of Biss combining the personal and universal, and her delay to discuss
vaccination is strategic and true to her style. Instead of delving right into vaccination, a vast and
controversial topic, Biss makes a big topic smaller by providing her reader with several reference
points and creating a logical progression. The book that Biss read in college included the biblical
commandment “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”; then, she recalls her father’s interest
in blood types; next, she discusses the concept of the universal donor from a religious and
medical perspective, and finally, comments on her donation of her son’s umbilical cord (56).
Before exploring vaccination, the reader is immersed in concepts and ideas about selflessness,
charity and blood, which all relate to vaccination. Biss then imagines each vaccination as an
addition to an “immunity bank” (56), and suddenly, all her previous musings fuse into a concept
that is cohesive and clear because of all her initial insights.
In an interview with Harper’s Magazine, Biss acknowledged that she had to change her
style of writing for On Immunity because the content would not allow for as much “loose
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association”, which she considers a habit of hers (“Science Writing”). However, it is clear that
while she may have toned down this technique in On Immunity, she did not dismiss it
completely. Biss’ signature style is found in her other works like “Time and Distance
Overcome”. In this essay, Biss is again patient in introducing her main topic. After reading the
first few pages, the reader may think that they are reading an essay about the history of
telephones. Eventually, the historical summary stops at the early days of telephone poles, which
were first seen as a nuisance until they became useful for lynching black men. Biss explores the
history of lynching and recounts several episodes of lynching on telephone poles, but, true to her
style, she deviates from her subject to form associational relationships. After discussing the
history of lynching, she writes: “The children’s game of telephone depends on the fact that a
message passed quietly from one ear to another to another will get distorted at some point along
the line” (243). This lone paragraph about a children’s game does not obviously relate to
lynching, but one can understand that the game and motivations for lynching share a common
characteristic: alteration of truth. Biss explains earlier that many black people were lynched
because of a rumour, or sometimes an outright lie (243). In this work, Biss waits until the end of
her piece to situate herself in the essay, but does so, confessing that her childhood admiration for
telephone poles faded once she had discovered a disturbing part of their history. Again, she
combines her personal experience with historical fact to create universal meaning. Her methods
in the two works are not identical, but similar enough to identify that they were written by the
same author. Artists can grow, experiment and change, but their key techniques tend to mutate
instead of dissolve.
While Biss tends to situate herself within broader issues, David Foster Wallace inverts
this approach in “Ticket to the Fair”, finding universal truth in a subjective experience. Wallace’s
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coverage of Illinois state fair, makes him an outsider in the state he grew up in. Having adopted
the East Coast lifestyle, Wallace writes for an East Coast magazine (Harper’s), about the fair,
which he finds bizarre, amusing and unusual. One way that Wallace makes his text universal is
by referring to Harper’s as an East Coast magazine in the piece, allowing the reader to
understand how his views are an extension of how the East Coast generally views the Midwest.
Wallace’s article is like an ethnographic study infused with philosophy. He observes
major events and minutiae with extreme detail, immersing the reader in – for most of the target
audience – an alternate reality, world building while simultaneously experiencing the fair
himself. He uses a long paragraph to describe the variety of unhealthy foods available at the fair
(143), and dedicates over a page to chronicling an intimidating ride, The Zipper, and his friend
Native Companion’s experience on it (141). Wallace again makes the specific generic, calling
his friend Native Companion instead of her real name; disposing of her individuality makes it
easier to make her a Midwestern “everywoman”, adding to the anthropological style of his
analysis. Wallace imitates words spoken in a Midwestern accent, sometimes refusing to wrap
the geographically specific pronunciations like “git” (get) and “joo” (you) (141) in quotations,
making them a fluid part of the text; the language of the locals is the language of the article. His
frequent use of filtered description reminds the reader that they are reading an account of
Wallace’s experience. One example of this technique is found in his visit to the Sheep Barn:
“Sheep Barn. I am looking at legions of sleeping sheep. I am the only waking human in here. It is
cool and quiet” (145). Wallace could have simply said that there were many sheep sleeping in a
cool, quiet and empty barn, but he includes himself in the exposition, reminding the reader that
he exists in the story. Wallace occasionally exits his mode of detailed observation and opts to
philosophize about what the fair, and his attendance there, means on a universal level. This is a
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transition from author-protagonist to author-artist. He discusses the relationship between typical
Midwestern behaviour and the vast amounts of open space that Midwesterners often work and
live in, making the land a commodity that alienates them, and making a busy, highly populated
fair a truly exciting experience (138). He returns to this line of thinking at the end of the article,
comparing East Coasters in urban settings who vacation to escape daily overstimulation, whereas
Midwesterners actively seek stimulation and interaction in their time off. Wallace concludes by
saying “The real spectacle that brings us here is us” (154). Wallace’s personal experience has
allowed him to transcend his East Coast outlook and realize that in 90% of America (135),
people often feel isolated by open spaces and crave the chance to form, literally and figuratively,
a close community.
Wallace is often self-referential in his writing (“Culture Writing I”) and the tendency is
apparent in “Ticket to the Fair”. “Wallace-protagonist”, the journalist for Harper’s, is a parody of
“Wallace-artist”. The level of artifice in creative nonfiction, specifically what Sharlet considers
the illusion of immediacy (51), creates narrative distance between the author-protagonist and the
author-artist. Wallace-protagonist is under the illusion of immediacy. Although he is writing
about a past event, Wallace-protagonist’s observations are instant, and in this case, often rash
and condescending. He consistently mocks his duties as a journalist and the people at the fair.
One excerpt of the text shows his immediate discontent with the fair:
“The corn dog tastes strongly of soybean oil, which itself tastes like corn oil that’s been
strained through an old gym towel. Tickets for the race are an obscene $13.50. Baton
twirling is still underway… A band called Captain Rat & the Blind Rivets is playing at
Lincoln Stage, and as I pass I can see dancers there. They look jagged and arrhythmic and
blank, bored… The whole thing looks unspeakably numb and lonely” (150).
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Here, Wallace-protagonist is dreading the fair, criticizing everything in sight. There is a
sense that he is dealing with unbearable overstimulation. Grotesque similes, boredom and shock
permeate the writing of Wallace-protagonist. On page 148, he is again reactive and resistant,
fact-checking a Christian woman who runs a booth, and referring to his upbringing as a “child of
humanist academics” who was taught early to ignore “rural Christians” who he depicts as lowly
and strange. In contrast, Wallace-artist is observing the observer; unlike the reactive journalist,
he sees, contemplates, and then evaluates. Wallace-artist is not necessarily more partial to the
fair, but more considerate of what his surroundings mean. On page 152, he says: “There’s
something intensely public about young Midwestern couples. The girls have tall hair and beestung lips, and their eye makeup runs in the heat and gives them a vampirish aspect. The overt
sexuality of high school girls is not just a coastal thing”. Here, Wallace-artist is making
connections between what Wallace-protagonist makes out to be a world completely different
from his. Outside of the immediate surroundings, Wallace-artist has absorbed the experience at
the fair and produced cohesive thoughts about the bigger picture. Wallace-protagonist is often
crude, mocking and unforgiving. Wallace-artist is critical of Wallace-protagonist for his style of
exposition, and also critical of the East Coasters (including himself) who may indulge in this sort
of ridicule and elitism. Wallace-protagonist and Wallace-artist work in tandem to build their
story like a house; the protagonist lays the foundation, sometimes uneven and rough around the
edges, and the artist cleans things up, makes edges sharper and gives the house windows: a view
of something universal that connects to the self-contained content the protagonist provides.
The narrative distance in Wallace’s text is naturally present in all creative nonfiction to
some extent, and it is based on temporality. The author-protagonist writes about how he or she
felt when the story was happening, while the author-artist writes on he or she feels – or views
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something – in retrospect. For example, in Joan Didion’s “The White Album”, Didion makes a
long list of the items she would pack for trips, then, looking back, she thinks:
“Everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was
never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was
supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew
was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond
their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience… to know that
one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as
rather more electrical than ethical” (156).
Didion builds on her extremely precise, personal list of traveling items, expanding on the
idea that sometimes we live life going through the motions, on auto-pilot, never really
experiencing anything but instead having things happen to and around us and not bothering to
truly absorb these occurrences. Cheryl Strayed often uses narrative distance to comment on her
past situations in “The Love of My Life”. Contemplating a period of lonely mourning for her late
mother, with a strained marriage and a negligent stepfather, Strayed-artist thinks: “We are not
allowed this. We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek or jazz, but
we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to “let go of,” to
“move on from”” (266). This distance allows the author-artist to make sense of what happens to
the author-protagonist.
True creative nonfiction demands that the author’s world building is idiosyncratic and
that this idiosyncrasy is dependent on the author-protagonist’s existence in the text. For example,
in Jamaica Kincaid’s lyric essay “Girl”, the text is dominated by a girl’s mother who builds a
world of womanhood based on her lessons and warnings to her child, forming a picture of what
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everyday life is like for a woman in Antigua. The daughter completes this world by giving it a
person to interact with it; her interjections add the personal element that challenges the universal
role of the woman that the mother presents. In “Ticket to the Fair”, Wallace builds a physical and
tangible world, but sometimes the author builds an emotional or ideological landscape instead. In
“Bluets” by Maggie Nelson, Nelson talks about something cliché – heartbreak – in a unique
fashion, by making the colour blue a character and referencing ideas and history to strengthen
her message. Her perspective on heartbreak is based on her personal experiences, but the use of
blue as a symbol and the addition of theoretical, historical and cultural information adds
universality to her text. In David Shields’ Reality Hunger, he is both writer and curator, and his
unique curatorial choices build the ideological world of thought that challenges the
fiction/nonfiction binary. His words are the personal element, but the thoughts and ideas he
borrows from other thinkers make his message universal.
Creative nonfiction is a flexible genre that can exist in many written forms, but it is also
highly demanding. A creative nonfiction work has unique qualities and privileges, but unlike
fiction or nonfiction, creative nonfiction requires two truths and more responsibility. The fiction
author’s only responsibility is to create a world that is somewhat imaginable to the reader
(“Reportage”), who can then interpret a message from the story, while the nonfiction author is
only responsible for reporting what actually happened; there should be very little to interpret as
the facts are laid out. It is important to note that this is not a question of subjectivity versus
objectivity; as Shields said, “the act of writing itself is inherently falsifying” (“Collage/Major
Questions in Creative Nonfiction”). In creative nonfiction, the work must tell us what actually
happened and offer insights on what it means. This double duty means that the authorprotagonist and the author-artist must work together to answer these questions. The particular is
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made into the universal, but universal does not mean generic. The universal message is not mass
produced, nor is it an absolute; it will be interpreted differently by each reader. The factual truth
and emotional truth do not negate each other, they fortify each other. The demands are many, but
creative nonfiction has the power to teach a reader a lot about themselves and the world they live
in.
Works Cited
Biss, Eula. Excerpts from On Immunity: An Inoculation. Graywolf Press. 2014. 17-28, 33-39, 51-54,
67-71, 77-89. Rpt. in INI410: Analyzing Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Lim, Thea. 2014. 55-76. Print.
Biss, Eula. "Time and Distance Overcome". Graywolf Press. 2009. 3-11. Rpt. in INI410: Analyzing
Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Lim, Thea. 2014. 55-76. Print.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill
Companies, 2010. Print.
Didion, Joan. "The White Album" in The White Album. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1979. 11-48. Rpt.
in INI410: Analyzing Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Lim, Thea. 2014. 155-174. Print.
Kincaid, Jamaica. "Girl" in At the Bottom of the River. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2000. 3-5. Rpt.
in INI410: Analyzing Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Lim, Thea. 2014. 89-90. Print.
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Lim, Thea. "Collage/Major Questions in Creative Nonfiction." INI410. University of Toronto, Toronto.
25 Feb. 2015. Lecture.
Lim, Thea. "Culture Writing I." INI410. University of Toronto, Toronto. 4 Mar. 2015. Lecture.
Lim, Thea. "Reportage." INI410. University of Toronto, Toronto. 21 Jan. 2015. Lecture.
Lim, Thea. "Science Writing." INI410. University of Toronto, Toronto. 28 Jan. 2015. Lecture.
Nelson, Maggie. Excerpts from Bluets. Wave Books. 2009. 1-21. Rpt. in INI410: Analyzing Creative
Nonfiction. Ed. Lim, Thea. 2014. 77-88. Print.
Sarris, Andrew. "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962." Film Culture 27 (1962): 1-8. Alexwinter.com.
Web.
Sharlet, Jeff. "Like a Novel: The Marketing of Literary Nonfiction" in The Virginia Quarterly
Review. University of Virginia. 2013. 196-198. Rpt. in INI410: Analyzing Creative Nonfiction.
Ed. Lim, Thea. 2014. 51-53. Print.
Shields, David. Excerpts from Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Vintage. 2011. 3-19, 32-44, 63-75, 209214. Rpt. in INI410: Analyzing Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Lim, Thea. 2014. 91-117. Print.
Staples, Donald E. "The Auteur Theory Reexamined." Cinema Journal 6 (1966): 1-7. JSTOR. Web.
Strayed, Cheryl. "The Love of My Life" in The Sun. The Sun Magazine. 2002. 1-8. Rpt. in INI410:
Analyzing Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Lim, Thea. 2014. 265-272. Print.
Wallace, David Foster. "Ticket to the Fair" in Harper's Magazine. The Harper's Magazine Foundation.
1994. 35-54. Rpt. in INI410: Analyzing Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Lim, Thea. 2014. 135-154.
Print.
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