So Are You Fiction or N o n - F i c t i o n ? Michael Juul Holm

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esterday I visited several publishing houses here in Amsterdam and shared lunch with yet other Dutch publishers. One specific question came up several times during the day, one that has been posed to me hundreds of times by the colleagues I c~ccasionally meet in Frankfurt and elsewhere, over the years. The question that often opened a conversation about books and publishing after the more formal "How do you do" is: "Do you do fiction or non-fiction?" In short: Are you fiction or non-fiction. In both its forms the question leaves me short of an adequate answer. Especially in Frankfurt during the Book Fair, which you can only survive by going into a special absurdist mode that, for me at least, borders on fiction. Anyway. Coming from a small publishing house in a small country with a small market even for what would be categorized a. success, there is no room for wasting any available talent or skills. If the person who happens to have an extraordinary sensitivity to modern fiction and the training to back it up, also happens to take a particular interest in, say, bio-ethics, the fate of the welfare state in the next century, the impact of the internet on civil society, or the permanent crisis in the Middle East, there is no reasonable argument for keeping that person away from books on these subjects. The examples given are random but they refer to specific books that have been published by Rosinante over the past few years. ! should add that Rosinante was founded seventeen years ago as a one-person-company by Merete Ries, who came from a position as editor in chief in the department of Literature at Gyldendal Publishers, but whose commitment and network in the Danish cultural life went way beyond the limitations of the sheer literary society. Her intention, right from the start, was to build up a list of strong literary fiction and books that would add to broadening and qualifying the overall debate on public matters; Fiction and non-fiction. Rosinante is now the daily working place for seventeen people, and with the exception of one specialized reference-book editor, every new editor that has been employed with the company over the years has, in a way, followed her example--her idea of a publisher as someone who is willing and able and even eager to do everything, as long as the quality of the books in question is indisputable.

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So I usually reply to the question with the single w o r d both, k n o w i n g that the time is neither right nor sufficient for opening a debate about the relevance of the distinction. Given the chance to think it over in this forum, I will start out by offering the thesis that the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is in the first place an intuitive, but also a finite and fixed one, which each one of us is making as we read (or watch the telly or listen to a radio show). Certainly, a very interesting discussion can take place about the means and objectives of the distinction. It is a discussion that sums up the positions of most of w h a t is k n o w n as the philosophy of language in this century and takes its departure from, for instance, epistemological, psychological and narratological theory. Professional historians have been going through a more than twenty-year-long, very productive identity crisis, ever since H a y d e n White and others pointed out h o w virtually all history-telling is based in literary modes and techniques, and that the idea of history per se is, in itself, a fictive construction. He never said, though, that the classic works of history-telling from Thucydides to J.M. Roberts, including the Michelet that m y French colleague Eric Vigne mentioned earlier today, is fiction: I w o u l d refer anyone interested in an in-depth analysis of this subject to H a y d e n White and, being here in Amsterdam, to the Dutch philosopher F.R. Ankersmit, w h o made w h a t is probably the most cogent and exhaustive expedition into this area in 1983 with the study Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian's Language, which also offers tools to clarify the interrelation between history-telling, on the non-fiction side, and the historical novel on the fiction side of the continuum running from pure fact to complete fabrication. But the decision as to whether the text before you is fiction or non-fiction is, I will argue, m a d e a priori to the journey into this vast and rich area of reasoning. In m u c h the same w a y as you intuitively distinguish between irony and statements that are meant to be taken seriously, you immediately k n o w if a book belongs to the world of imagination, or if it is to be read with the underlying premise that what it says points toward, and adds to, our understanding of the real world as we know it. If this was not the case, you w o u l d ultimately find yourself in the position of the schizophrenic, a state of m i n d that is, by the way, almost impossible to establish artistically, even with the most powerful means. I am aware, of course, that it is the blurring of the border between imagination and reality, and the undermining of the authority of the narrator, that have been target issues with (post)modernist writers. But the incidents of true textual hypnosis, which take the reader, or in broader terms "the audience," on a fake trip, displacing us for some duration of time, are few, and m a y count as exceptions to the rule of textual sanity. There may be a difference of degree here. The not-so-trained, naive reader may tend to read in m o d u s "reality" w h e n e v e r the option is open, whereas the sceptic professional reader (which you represent) w o u l d probably tend to opt the other w a y around. We do not buy the "based on a true story" creditline if the overall sensation of the w o r k is fictitious. But this difference is marginal. In reality, it takes a lot to top

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Orson Welles' radiobroadcast reading from H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. One such incident is reported in the latest work by Danish journalist, critic, essayist, novelist and presumably literary non-fiction writer Carsten Jensen. Nearing the end of a one-year-long trip around the world, he lives for several weeks with his friend, the Danish poet Thomas Boberg, in Lima, Peru. One night on television a news-story is broadcast: an American vehicle orbitting Mars has transmitted pictures to the control-center, zooming in on pyramid-like buildings and large statues on the surface of the dead planet. The story is repeated shortly afterwards on another channel and, filled with excitement, the two Danes try to grasp the possible meaning and impact of this marvellous discovery. "This could be the most important day in the history of mankind," one of them concludes. But the following day and the day after, there is nothing in either the press nor television covering the most important discovery in the history of mankind. The two friends are in a state of recharged, openminded restlessness; they keep on talking, but they cannot get the story confirmed anywhere. After a few days, the mystery is solved. A Peruvian friend knows for a fact that the story was a hoax, a joke in the tradition of Orson Welles, which was arranged in cooperation between the two television channels when they could not get any real information from NASA about the American satellite that actually was on a mission to Mars at that time. "I didn't even feel betrayed." Carsten Jensen points out. The incident had given him an experience of provisional relief and a sense of breaking down a barrier to the universe, for which he was grateful, even if he had to admit that the joke was on him. In two grand volumes of travelogue, which interweave political and social reflection with face-to-face meetings and an omnipresent reference to world literature, fiction as well as nonfiction, Carsten Jensen follows a tradition of literary non-fiction that has played an active role in forming Danish literature for more than a hundred years. Since H.C. Andersen's Journey of My Life-which was not one of his fairy tales--prominent figures in the tradition are Tom Kristensen with A Gentleman in Spain, and Thorkild Hansen, who started out writing documentary realism in the form of historical novels, such as Arabia Felix, in the early sixties, but moved from fiction to non-fiction in works about the Danish slave trade and our colonial adventures in the Virgin Islands, and in an exhaustive biography on the Norwegian genius Hamsun. Carsten Jensen examplifies the genesis of a certain type of literary non-fiction writer. His first two books were short prose, collections of singular observations reflected on in one, two or three pages. After that he wrote five books, two of them novels, three collections of essays, before entering into his literal and literary journey around the world. In these two volumes, entitled respectively, I Have Seen the World Begin and I Have Heard a Shooting Star, he employs a number of the literary techniques of the novel as well as the contemplation of the traditional essay and the meditations on singular observations so typical of his early writings, in a work that is indeed literature. Here I must disagree

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with Eva Coss6e, if I got her point right yesterday (she may correct me, as she is the next speaker here). Literature, but not fiction. You can tell from the very beginning.