Yet More on the Dotted Line

I've written earlier posts on the idea that there is a dotted line between fact and fiction, not because I want to suggest that non-fiction is fundamentally flawed. Like almost everything else in life, it has its shortcomings from time to time, but as a former journalist I'm inclined to believe what I read in credible publications unless I have strong reasons to suspect it isn't correct.

As someone who now dabbles in fiction, it is the other side of the line that is more interesting to me: how should fact be used in fiction?  I will have more to say about that in another positing, but for the moment, I want to call readers' attention to a quote in a recent "Bookends" feature in the Sunday "New York Times" Book Review section.


The topic was "Is it true that genre labels don't really matter any more?"

One of the two commentators, Dana Stevens, used the question as way to horse over the au-courant topic of gender (as an excuse, she argued that the two words share the same root.) Delighted that gender appears to now be breaking down as a "fixed system," Stevens somewhat bizarrely said: "Honestly, I wish that the breakdown in barriers between genres was happening as fast."

"I await the day when the compulsion to sort every cultural artifact that comes along into the proper genre category -- dismissing a movie because it's 'just a horror film' or a book because 'It's just a Y.A. novel' -- becomes as déclassé as it's rapidly becoming to categorize and dismiss people on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation," she said.

The other commentator. Leslie Jamison, made more sense, arguing that genre labels do matter even if boundaries aren't absolute. They help us find that for which we are hungering, she said.

But it was another quote of hers that mainly interested me.

After noting that there are important differences between fiction and non-fiction -- and that fact-checking is important, Jamison said: "But our uninterrogated absolute distinctions (between non-fiction and fiction)  leave much middle ground unspoken for."

That's a curiously oblique way of mentioning the notion of a dotted line it, isn't it?

Much middle ground.  Perhaps a future Bookends feature will help us identify just where it is and who, knows, even come up with a label for it -- much to Ms. Steven's disgust, I suspect.