Non/Fiction. Stress testing the genres 9th International Non-Fiction Conference 1-2 May 2015 Friday, May 1, morning Narrating non-fiction: fascinating but tricky Introduction Maarten Valken – Finally I can welcome you to the ninth non- fiction conference. The idea came up a few years ago. When I hosted the first conference in 1997, we only had three months to prepare. The subject of the first conference was the border between literary non-fiction and fiction, so in a way we’ve come full circle, having in between treated themes like taboos in non-fiction, popular versus academic non-fiction, globalization, digital developments etc., and now we’re back to the borderline and the genre with many names: fictional or creative non-fiction, the historical or non-fictional novel, literary reportage, non-fictional memoir, faction, friction, unconventional non-fiction and so on. Almost everybody I presented this subject to over the past years reacted enthusiastically. Some of them will be speaking here. But not in every country. For instance in the US quite a lot of publishers are very careful to stay away from the borderline. Lieve Joris can tell us more about that. In other countries, like France, different categories are used, classifications like document, essai, récit, the last one possibly the nearest to the type of books that we are discussing on these two days. The same book can be called fiction in France and non-fiction in Germany. National differences in how the crossing of the line between fiction and non-fiction is looked at is an interesting point to discuss. As are many others, like the responsibilities of the non-fiction author, publisher or agent, the influence of images from the internet, games, film and television, and the recent stress on emotions, subjectivity, intimacy, authenticity, identification etc., and perhaps also the question of 1 what future generations will expect in the time of information overload and fictionalized reality. My own fascination with the theme comes from the time when I was in publishing, a long time ago, when we published narrative non-fiction from authors like Simon Schama, Jonathan Spence and Georges Duby. Later, during my time at the foundation, I talked about authors whose books you can see over here: Henk van Woerden, Frank Westerman, Jan Brokken – Dutch authors who move freely in the area between fiction and non-fiction, some of whose publishers are here too. So how does the mixing of fiction and non-fiction work, or not work? As this subject seems endless, we’ll try to focus on the leap over the border from the side of non-fiction. But of course we will also talk about in-between forms like the personal essay, and other forms which accept the imagination and the manipulation of facts. Those forms come back in the titles of the three sessions. I had a lot of discussions with my co-organizer John Müller, who cannot be here unfortunately, about the various definitions of truth: historical truth, objective truth, subjective truth, literary truth, emotional truth, truer than truth... I want to thank John for all his contributions to the programme and to finding a good title. The speakers have seen a few passing by: The end of non-fiction, The new clothes of non-fiction, Fooling ourselves with stories, which finally became ‘Non-slash-fiction: Stress testing the genres’. And the discussion is often about classification. Who decides on that? The author, the publisher, the agent, the reviewer or the bookseller? How elastic are they and do we really believe in divisions? We kept some teasing subtitles in the programme, like ‘Fascinating but tricky’ or ‘Compelling stories and confidence tricks’, or ‘The space between where strange things happen’. And the titles of the speeches of our eight speakers show how each will deal with the subject in their own unique way. It’s very special that they’re here, as I have pursued them over the last year with questions and propositions with the aim of making their points as provocative as possible. I want to thank them for their continuing commitment to this conference. Among the participants are authors, publishers, agents, translators, book 2 reviewers and literary journalists, and colleagues from the Foundation, all of whom we have asked beforehand to answer a few questions, which you can find in the programme, together with the list of participants. It also has some practical information: the twitter account is there, the password for Wifi. Important information for smokers is that a tent has been built outside especially for you. We also hope to be outside when the weather gets better. The conference staff, for those who were not here yesterday when I presented them, consists of Tijmen, Lisa and Suzanne, and my colleagues at the Foundation are Barbara, Jaja, Tiziano and Victor, who will take photos and is responsible for the twitter account. As you can see we will also film the speeches, that’s Daan, and that will all come on our website afterwards. Today we have lunch here, at the Foundation, all made by Amstelkeuken, who, by the way, will try to bring some fiction into the food that they are preparing. This is for you to find out. The combination of our different backgrounds and spending one and a half days together in discussion has proved to work well in the past. I am again very curious as to how the discussions will unfold. Therefore I gladly introduce our moderator Maarten Asscher to you, who not only combines all the backgrounds I’ve just mentioned – author, translator, publisher, literary critic – but is also the director of Athenaeum, the best bookshop in Amsterdam, so in more ways than one he might have the final word on the stress testing of genres. Maarten Asscher – Thank you very much Maarten Valken. The confusion of Maartens should not be exploited too much. A warm welcome from my side as well to all of you, especially to the three speakers of this morning’s session seated behind the table. I’m very happy that we are assembled here in this imitation bookshop, which feels very much like being at home, not only for booksellers but also for writers and translators and publishers and anyone professionally engaged in dealing with books. I myself returned last night from a stay of a week in New York. I slept very well I must say, but it could be that in the course of the day I start keeling over to the left or the right and I trust the people behind this table will then put me in an upright position again. 3 I would like to begin by saying that we have for our morning session until twelve thirty, which is a generous amount of time for three presentations and a discussion. And the title of this morning’s session is ‘Narrating non-fiction: fascinating but tricky’. I would like first to introduce to you as our opening speaker of the day, Neil Belton. Perhaps you have already met last night. I wasn’t able to be here for drinks and the opening dinner, so perhaps all kinds of interesting discussions have already taken place which I missed. But in any case I’m very happy that to my right is Neil Belton, who has worked for distinguished publishing houses like Jonathan Cape, Granta and Faber and Faber and is now heading a newly established imprint called Head of Zeus, and if I look at the list of writers and books he has been engaged with over the past years – Steven J. Gould, Orlando Figes, Neil Ascherson, Mischa Glenny, John Gray, Rachel Polonsky, Enzensberger – I think we could have no better speaker for this morning session. I should also mention two Dutch writers he has been involved with, Henk van Woerden and Willem Elsschot, a Flemish Dutch-language author. So Neil, tell us about your views on the dangers in between fiction and non- fiction. Is it a demilitarized zone or are there battles going on there? Neil Belton: Danger on the border Neil Belton – When Maarten first mentioned the possibility of this conference and of the subject, the phrase that instinctively came to my mind was that of ‘debatable land’. Now the debatable lands were a strip of territory on the border of the old Scottish and English kingdoms that didn’t clearly belong to either. This was a dangerous and rather lawless zone, and I think the border between fiction and non-fiction can be equally porous and tricky territory. Today it’s full of traps, temptations, and also of watchtowers and vigilant police. As publishers I think we have a duty to our readers to make sure that our writers are describing the world accurately, that their work has an integrity the reader can trust, but the borderline cuts across important issues of historical truth, the legitimacy of different perspectives and the instability of genres. There are I think gradations of intermingling or outright invention in what we might like to think of as securely truthful forms of writing. None of us would connive with forgery, but we may still be lured into strange places where all is not quite what it seems. Historians, for example, 4 are expected by editors and the public to tell us what their sources and documents tell them, which can usually be narrated in the simple past tense, but they’re also expected to write vivid narrative prose in order to bring their subjects alive in the setting in which they lived.