Contract with the World: A Novel
Contents:
Everything must be rigorously fact-checked. The appeal of a book such as Touching the Void is dependent absolutely on Joe Simpson being roped to the rock face of what happened. In military history, as Beevor commands, no liberties may be taken. As the author of many nonfiction books which are full of invention, I second this wholeheartedly.
In my defence I would argue that the contrivances in my nonfiction are so factually trivial that their inclusion takes no skin off even the most inquisitorial nose. The Missing of the Somme begins with mention of a visit to the Natural History Museum with my grandfather — who never set foot in a museum in his life. Most of the story — which had originally appeared in an anthology of fiction — is a faithful transcript of stuff that really happened, but that incident was pinched from an anecdote someone told me about a portable toilet at Glastonbury.
In other words, the issue is one not of accuracy but aesthetics. Exporting this across to literature, style itself can become a form of invention. Travel within the subsection of the Balkans or Yugoslavia? Having won a Pulitzer prize for nonfiction in , it went on to become the source of some controversy when it was revealed that the famous opening paragraph — in which the author awakens in bed to find herself covered in paw prints of blood, after her cat, a fighting tom, has returned from his nocturnal adventures — was a fiction. This was a shower in a teacup compared with the various storms that have swirled around Ryszard Kapuscinski.
Gradually it emerged that this was part of the rhetoric of fiction, that he could not possibly have seen first-hand some of the things he claimed to have witnessed. For some readers this was a thoroughly disillusioning experience; for others it seemed that his exuberance and imaginative abundance were not always compatible with the obligations and diligence of the reporter. He remains a great writer — just not the kind of great writer he was supposed to be. The essential thing — and this was something I discovered when writing But Beautiful as a series of improvisations — is to arrive at a form singularly appropriate to a particular subject, and to that subject alone.
That book was dedicated to John Berger. The documentary studies — of a country doctor in A Fortunate Man , of migrant labour in A Seventh Man — he made with photographer Jean Mohr are unsurpassed in their marriage of image and text. The shift from the overt modernist complexities of the Booker prize-winning G to the stories of French peasant life was perceived, in some quarters, as a retreat to more traditional forms. Nothing — to use a phrase that may not be appropriate in this context — could be further from the truth. Berger was 89 on 5 November, bonfire night. He has been setting borders ablaze for almost 60 years, urging us towards the frontier of the possible.
Geoff Dyer received the Windham-Campbell prize for nonfiction. His new book, White Sands , will be published by Canongate in June. Each time a writer begins a book they make a contract with the reader. If the book is a work of fiction the contract is pretty vague, essentially saying: In the contract for my novels I promise to try to show my readers a way of seeing the world in a way I hope they have not seen before.
A contract for a work of nonfiction is a more precise affair. The writer says, I am telling you, and to the best of my ability, what I believe to be true. This is a contract that should not be broken lightly and why I have disagreed with writers of memoir in particular who happily alter facts to suit their narrative purposes.
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Break the contract and readers no longer know who to trust. I write both fiction and nonfiction — to me they serve different purposes. On my noticeboard I have pinned the lines: In the 12 years since its publication I have continued to explore the themes of civil war, though almost exclusively in fiction.
Fiction allows me to reach for a deeper, less literal kind of truth. However, when a writer comes to a story, whether fiction or nonfiction, they employ many of the same techniques, of narrative, plot, pace, mood and dialogue. This is one reason I think the distinction between fiction and nonfiction prizes is, well, a fiction.
These writers have broken the boundaries of nonfiction to reach for the kind of truth that fiction writers covet. It made no sense. We are entering a post-literate world, where the moving image is king. And more novels than ever before are set in the past. This is largely because the essence of human drama is moral dilemma, an element that our nonjudgmental society today rather lacks.
A blend of historical fact and fiction has been used in various forms since narrative began with sagas and epic poems. There is a more market-driven attempt to satisfy the modern desire in a fast-moving world to learn and be entertained at the same time. In any case, we seem to be experiencing a need for authenticity, even in works of fiction. I have always loved novels set in the past. But however impressive her research and writing, I am left feeling deeply uneasy. Which parts were pure invention, which speculation and which were based on reliable sources? She lives inside the consciousness of her characters for whom the future is blank.
The problem arises precisely when the novelist imposes their consciousness on a real historical figure. Restorers of paintings and pottery follow a code of conduct in their work to distinguish the genuine and original material from what they are adding later.
Should writers do the same? Should not the reader be told what is fact and what is invented? The novelist Linda Grant argued that this also gives the writer much greater freedom of invention. Keeping real names shackles the imaginative writer perhaps more than they realise.
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For a time I even stuck to a pedantic sequence of fiction followed by fact as if it were an unwritten commandment passed down to autodidacts like me. There was also a certain amount of piety involved. Reading should be about learning. Pleasure should be a secondary consideration. I still recall the very first nonfiction book I ever read: The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead. Even the most devoted film fan must appreciate the occasional documentary. As for my own favourite nonfiction book, it would have to be An Immaculate Mistake , an exquisite memoir of childhood by Paul Bailey.
I often tell book festival audiences that I want to write fiction myself, to which the cynics in the audience suggest I write the next manifesto. I like to think myself as anti-genre-labelling. There is nothing more likely to stunt your creativity than to think of walls between genres. I understand that booksellers, and even readers, need to know if a book is a crime novel or literary or commercial or romantic but for a writer, thinking in those terms is limiting.
Also, at the risk of sounding like a pretentious sixth-former, the divide between fiction and nonfiction is inherently false according to the multiverse theory, in that all fiction is true in one universe or other, so when you write a novel you are writing reality that belongs to somewhere else. But there is another reason the divide is false, or at least why it creates false ideas. And that is because things categorised as nonfiction can be inauthentic while fiction can contain more truth.
The aim of any writer, even a fantasy writer, is the pursuit of truth. I have written nonfiction and fiction. I wrote a science fiction novel that was very autobiographical about my experience of depression, and then I wrote a nonfiction book about depression. We need both genres, sometimes at the same time, because the moment we trust too much in one fixed idea of reality is the moment we lose it.
But as a reader, I must admit I read more nonfiction than fiction at the moment, because there is so much good stuff around and because I am writing fiction and my mind likes the counterbalance. It might seem logical that nonfiction, with its rigorous foundation in fact, would be a more persuasive instrument of social change than fiction; but I believe this is not the case. We are feeling creatures, and often it is only our refusal or inability to empathise that allows us to pursue our cruelties.
Fiction gets under the guard. It creates empathy, changes fixed opinions and morality, and contributes to reform of law and social practice. The sweatshop is still with us and so are slavery, the denial of rights to women and the sufferings of those swept aside. You will not emerge from these books unchanged. It is, I think, generally true that most writers write either fiction or nonfiction, to the exclusion of the other, most of the time; though it is easy to think of exceptions to this rule.
Nicholas Shakespeare, for example, is a much-admired novelist, but he has also written an excellent biography of Bruce Chatwin. As a writer, I specialise in biography, which seems to suit my interests and aptitudes. Being nosy, I enjoy investigating the lives of others, like a detective, or perhaps a spy. He found no support for his ideas, and left the world of commercial comics after ending his signature work The Spirit in The growth of comics fandom convinced him to return in the s, and he worked to realize his aspirations of creating comics with literary content.
He wanted a mainstream publisher for the book and to have it sold in traditional bookstores, rather than in comic book shops ; the small press Baronet Books released A Contract with God in and marketed it as a "graphic novel", which thereafter became the common term for book-length comics. It sold slowly at first, but gained respect from Eisner's peers, and since has been reprinted by larger publishers. A Contract with God cemented Eisner's reputation as an elder statesman of comics, and he continued to produce graphic novels and theoretical works on comics until his death in A Contract with God mixes melodrama with social realism.
In the preface he stated his aim to keep the exaggeration in his cartooning within realistic limits.
The story "A Contract with God" drew from Eisner's feelings over the death at sixteen of his daughter Alice. The stories' sexual content is prominent, though not in the gratuitous manner of underground comix ' celebration of hedonism, [11] which contrasted with the conservative lifestyle of Eisner the middle-aged businessman. Eisner used no profanity in the book, [10] and according to critic Josh Lambert the sex in Contract is not so much erotic as disturbing, the characters frustrated or filled with guilt. In Russia, the young, deeply religious Hasidic Jew Frimme Hersh [a] carves a contract with God on a stone tablet to live a life of good deeds; he attributes to it his later success in life.
He moves to New York, into a tenement building at 55 Dropsie Avenue, and lives a simple life devoted to God. He adopts an infant girl, Rachele, who is abandoned on his doorstep. When she dies of a sudden illness, Hersh is infuriated, and accuses God of violating their contract. He abandons his faith, shaves his beard , and lives a life as a miserly businessman in a penthouse with a gentile mistress. He illicitly uses a synagogue's bonds that were entrusted to him to buy the tenement building in which he had lived when poor.
He becomes dissatisfied with his new way of life, and decides that he needs a new contract with God to fill the emptiness he feels. He has a group of rabbis draw up a new contract, but when he returns home with it, his heart fails and he dies. A boy, Shloime, finds Hersh's old contract, and signs his own name to it.
Eisner called the story's creation "an exercise in personal anguish" [16] as he was still grieved and angered over his daughter Alice's death from leukemia at He stated, "[Hersh's] argument with God was mine. I exorcised my rage at a deity that I believed violated my faith and deprived my lovely year-old child of her life at the very flowering of it. Marta Maria, an aging opera singer, tries to seduce a young man, [18] Eddie, whom she finds singing in the alleys between tenement buildings. She had given up her own singing career for an alcoholic husband; she hopes to get back into show business as mentor to Eddie, and gives him money for clothes.
He buys whiskey instead and returns to his pregnant wife, who herself had given up on show business for him and whom he abuses. He hopes to take advantage of Maria and build an actual singing career, but is unable to find the aging diva again—he does not know her address, and the tenement buildings appear all the same to him.
Eisner based the story on memories of an unemployed man who made the rounds of tenements singing "popular songs or off-key operatic operas" [20] for spare change. Eisner remembered throwing the street singer coins on occasion, and considered he "was able to immortalize his story" in "The Street Singer".
Those who live in the tenement at 55 Dropsie Avenue fear and mistrust their antisemitic superintendent, Mr. Farfell's young niece Rosie goes down to his apartment and offers him a peek at her panties for a nickel. After receiving the nickel she poisons Scuggs' dog and only companion, Hugo, and steals Scuggs's money. He corners her in an alley, where the tenants spot him and call the police, accusing him of trying to molest a minor.
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Before the police can break into his apartment to arrest him, he shoots himself, embracing Hugo's body. Eisner wrote that he based the superintendent on the "mysterious but threatening custodian" [20] of his boyhood tenement. To be alone with his mistress, a man named Sam sends his wife and children away to the Catskill Mountains , where they stay at a "cookalein" Yiddish: A clothing cutter named Benny and a secretary named Goldie are staying at an expensive hotel near the cookalein, both hoping to find someone rich to marry; they mistake each other for a wealthy target, and when they discover this, Benny rapes Goldie.
Herbie, an intern Goldie had earlier turned down, takes her into his care, and Benny goes on to court an heiress. An older woman seduces Sam's fifteen-year-old son Willie at the cookalein; they are discovered by her husband who, after beating her, makes love to her in front of the boy. At the end of the summer, the vacationers return to Dropsie Avenue. Goldie and Herbie are engaged, and Benny believes he will be marrying into the diamond business. Willie is affected by his experiences, but does not express them, [10] and his family plan to leave the tenement.
Will Eisner was born in New York in to poor Jewish immigrants. Like others of his generation, he turned to comics as an artistic outlet, [27] a career he began in In the late s he co-owned a studio which produced content for comic books; he left the studio in to produce his best-known creation, the formally inventive The Spirit , which ran as a newspaper insert from to With the rise of comics fandom in the s, Eisner found there was still interest in his decades-old Spirit comics, and that the fans wanted more work from him.
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After American Visuals went out of business in , Eisner entered a deal with underground comix publisher Denis Kitchen to reprint old Spirit stories. Eisner had had greater artistic ambitions for comics since his time doing The Spirit. Since the s, he had been developing ideas for a book, but was unable to gain support for them, as comics was seen by both the public and its practitioners as low-status entertainment; at a meeting of the National Cartoonists Society in , Rube Goldberg rebuked Eisner's ambitions, saying, "You are a vaudevillian like the rest of us With the critical acceptance of underground comix in the s, Eisner saw a potential market for his ideas.
In , he produced his first book-length, adult-oriented work, A Contract with God. He marketed it as a " graphic novel "—a term which had been in use since the s, but was little known until Eisner popularized it with Contract. The Dreamer and To the Heart of the Storm Eisner was brought up in a religious household, but himself was a reluctant disbeliever. The narration is lettered as part of the artwork, rather than being set apart in caption boxes, and Eisner makes little use of conventional box-style panels, often avoiding panel borders entirely, [39] delimiting spaces with buildings or window frames instead.
The dark, vertical rain surrounding Hersh when he buries his daughter in the first story is echoed by the revised final image of the last story, in which Willie stares out into a city sky in a similar hatched rainy "Eisenshpritz" [b] style. In contrast to comics in the superhero genre, in which Eisner did prominent work early in his career, the characters in A Contract with God are not heroic; they often feel frustrated and powerless, even when performing seemingly heroic deeds to help their neighbors.
The stories share themes of disillusionment and frustration over thwarted desires. Frimme Hersh grieves over the death of his daughter, which he perceives as a breach of his contract with God; [47] street singer Eddie returns to insignificance when he finds himself unable to find his would-be benefactor; [2] Goldie's and Willie's romantic ideals are disillusioned after her near-rape and his seduction.
The characters are depicted neither as purely good or evil: According to academic Derek Royal, Jewish ethnicity is prominent throughout the stories; in "A Contract with God" and "Cookalein", religious and cultural Jewish symbolry are prominent, though in the middle two stories, there is little outward evidence of the characters' Jewishness. The two outer stories further emphasize Jewish identity with the extra-urban portions of their settings—the rural Russian origin of the religious Hersh in "Contract", and the Catskill mountains in "Cookalein", a retreat commonly associated with Jews in the 20th century.
He juxtaposes individual stories and individual characters, who have different experiences which may be incompatible with one another; this confounds any single definition of "Jewishness", though there is a communal sense that binds these characters and their Jewishness together.
Royal argues that Eisner shows the unresolved nature of American identity, in which ethnicities are conflicted between cultural assimilation and their ethnic associations. Royal argued that the book was not only important to comics studies , but also to the study of Jewish and ethnic American literature. Much like short story cycles common to contemporary Jewish prose, in which stories can stand alone, but complement each other when read as a loosely integrated package, Royal wrote that Contract could be better described as a "graphic cycle" rather than a "graphic novel".
Art critic Peter Schjeldahl saw the "over-the-topness" endemic to American comics, and Eisner's work, as "ill suited to serious subjects, especially those that incorporate authentic social history". The concept of a contract or covenant with God is fundamental to the Jewish religion. The idea that God must uphold his end of the first commandment has been a subject of works such as Elie Wiesel 's play The Trial of God , made in response to the atrocities Wiesel witnessed at Auschwitz.
But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? She wrote that "the suffering of the righteous" is "one of the greatest problems in Jewish thought", [56] and that a character as devoutly religious as Hersh would not have struggled with what she saw as elementary Jewish teaching.
The book took two years to finish. As he had no deadline, he reworked and resequenced the stories until he was satisfied. Eisner intended A Contract with God to have an adult audience, and wanted it to be sold in bookstores rather than comic shops; [59] as such, he turned down an offer from Denis Kitchen to publish it.
Eisner had originally intended to call the book Tenement Stories , Tales from the Bronx , [60] or A Tenement in the Bronx [30] but Baronet titled it A Contract with God , after the lead story, [60] as the term "tenement" was not widely known outside the eastern US. Sales were poor, but demand increased over the years. A Contract with God has frequently, though erroneously, been cited as the first graphic novel; [70] comic book reviewer Richard Kyle had used the term in in a fan newsletter, [71] and it had appeared on the cover of The First Kingdom by Jack Katz , with whom Eisner had corresponded.
It is considered a milestone in American comics history not only for its format, but also for its literary aspirations and for having dispensed with typical comic-book genre tropes. Eisner continued to produce graphic novels in a third phase to his cartooning career that ultimately lasted longer than either his periods in comic books or in educational comics.