Issue 19, 2013 - Balliol College - University of Oxford

features
The ethics of
narrative non-fiction
By Jonny Steinberg (1995)
Central to any book is a contract, by its nature unwritten, between the reader and the
writer. It consists of a set of rules the writer must obey if anybody is going to bother
to read his book. What they are depends on the genre of the book. I want to talk here
about the sort I write, narrative non-fiction, where the subject of the book is a real,
living person. When the reader opens such a book, she will expect to see a particular
sort of construction. If she does not see it, she will close the book and do something
else with her time. She may even be offended and accuse the author of an ethical
breach. What is it that readers expect to see when they start reading
In a recent essay, David Grossman,
the Israeli novelist, writes about the
difference between writing about a
person and making love to him:
We tend to think that when we
merge completely with another
person, in moments of love and
sexual contact, we know that
person in an incomparable way. In
biblical Hebrew the sex act is even
connoted with the verb ‘to know’.
‘And the man knew Eve, his wife,’
says Genesis. But at the highest
moments of love, if we are not
completely focused on ourselves
or on a pointed projection of our
heart’s desires onto our partner,
we are usually directed towards
what is good, beautiful, attractive
and sweet in him. Not to all his
complexities, all his different
tones and shades – in short, not
to everything that makes him ‘an
Other’ in the deepest and fullest
I was looking
for the places
where his soul
shatters and his
consciousness
crumbles – these
things are not
hard to find in
a man who has
just lost his son –
in order to tell
a story . . .
sense of the word. But when we
write about the Other, we aspire
to reach the knowledge that
encompasses the unloved parts
in him as well, the parts that
deter and threaten. The places
where his soul is shattered and his
consciousness crumbles. 1
Whether she knows it consciously
or not, the reader of a work of
narrative non-fiction is acutely aware
of the difference between making
love to someone and writing about
him. When she senses that an author
has crossed the line and has begun
to make love to, rather than write
about, his subject, she puts the book
aside. Part of a reviewer’s job is to give
advance warning, and let prospective
readers know whether the author is
on the right side of the line.
I am thinking here of my own
experience. Reading a couple of the
reviews of my book Little Liberia, 2 I
saw that I had almost crossed the line
between writing about, and making
love to, a subject. In the epilogue, I
describe giving a draft copy of the
manuscript to a man named Jacob,
one of the book’s two protagonists.
Jacob sits up through the night reading
every word very closely. When he
summonses me to his apartment the
next day, I see the loose pages of the
manuscript strewn all over the floor,
each covered in coloured highlighting
and ballpoint marginalia. Jacob sits me
down and goes through his objections
one by one, a process that takes seven
hours. I accede to some of his demands
and not to others.
Several reviews of the book paid
special attention to the epilogue.
Some said that what I did was
controversial, or edgy. They were
suggesting that I had come close
to admitting that I had colluded
with Jacob, that together we had
found all the places where his soul
had shattered and his consciousness
crumbled and that we had patched
him up, and thus presented him to the
reader as a lover, not a writer, might
see him. The suggestion was that I had
almost played a trick on the reader but
that I had just managed to stay on the
right side of the breach.
And so you can see a potential
problem that emerges from the
triangular relationship between reader,
writer and subject. It is not difficult
to imagine moments when a writer
of narrative non-fiction must choose
between betraying either the reader or
the subject.
To put it dramatically, one might
say that the writer is a spy working
in the employ of the reader. You
are invited into the subject’s home,
where you memorise the furniture,
the photographs on the mantelpiece.
You take notes the moment you leave,
while the visit remains fresh in your
memory. You are gathering goodies to
take back to the reader.
But it is of course not quite right to
call the non-fiction writer a spy, for he
does not employ a private eye and he
seldom snoops around himself. After
all, the subject invited him in. Why
does she do so Why does she consent
to allow thousands of strangers, many
of them voracious, hungry people
with little sympathy for her, to see the
places where her soul shatters and her
consciousness crumbles Each has her
own reasons, often very private, often
quite opaque, even to herself. I want to
take as an example a man about whom
I wrote.
The book is called Midlands. 3 I
began writing it in 1999. Much in the
news at that time was a syndrome that
South Africans were beginning to call
‘farm murders’, a horribly loaded term
that signified far too much. Narrowly
speaking, it referred to what appeared
to be an escalation of murders of white
farmers by black predators. But it was
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