Here’s the Deal With Fitting Writing to Literary Genres
Defying Categorizations
I read a book not too long ago and I had difficulties confining it to a genre. (“In a Strange Room: Three Journeys”, by Damon Galgut). Was it a novel? Was it a memoir? Or was it a travelogue? The book defied categorization. It could be all of them at once and maybe none as well.
Was it a novel?
Well, what exactly is a novel? I googled Oxford Dictionary and didn’t like the definition as it seemed rather incomplete. Thus, I decided to go with Dictionary.com as it always enlightens me when in doubt. So, “a novel is a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes.”¹
Yeah, this book could definitely be a novel: it was complex, not very long, yet long enough to fit the genre, it portrayed more characters and it did present a sequence of both action and scenes. So, novel… check. Except… well, the fictitious prose narrative part is quite debatable, which begs the second question.
Was it a memoir?
The author talks about three strange journeys that he undertook at different moments in his life. So, he is narrating facts that took place in real life. Shouldn’t it be framed as a memoir then? “A memoir is an account written by somebody, especially somebody famous, about their life and experiences.”²
So, to go back to my question: this book might be a memoir. As I was saying, these three journeys took place in real life, the author is the main character and all the other characters in this work are persons he knows. All the facts he narrated happened sometimes in the past. So, yes, it could be a memoir, but… it’s just not as simple as that.
These three journeys did take place for real, but the author realized while writing the three parts of the book later on in life that his work was not only about the journeys that he tried to recall (as he had intended at first) but rather about memory itself and all its quirks. In other words, this book was not only about the journeys but much more about how the author remembered them.
When telling a story that has actually happened, we choose what to emphasize and what to omit, we are telling everything from a certain point of view, while the others are left out. So, writing about one’s memories is not like recording something and then playing the video, but rather more about sifting memories from a single point of view and then editing them to make a story.
Memory is fiction. I came to this conclusion in the writing of the book. All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. If you actually consider it, the memory of any particular moment or set of moments consists of a whole lot of really disparate impressions and perceptions. There isn’t really a narrative thread to memory […]. So, the act of narrating a memory is an act of creating a fiction and I wanted to convey that fact.³
Can’t it be both a novel and a memoir?
Are you still with me? So, there’s a fine line between memoir and novel. Or at least there is a fine line in this case.
I must say that I was inspired to investigate this issue further after reading a brilliant piece here on Medium about how our memory works. Is the act of remembering an accurate retrieval of how the original events happened or do our memories change every time they are retrieved and expressed?
As Martha Manning, Ph.D. puts it so well in her article published in The Writing Cooperative “our emotional memories are not static experiences. They are mediated by thoughts and experiences that have happened between our original experience and the process of our remembering.”⁴
So, narrating a memory is actually reinterpreting it in numerous ways under the influence of current emotions, moods, present convictions, surroundings, and so on. The original events become something else when going mediated by both our inner and outer world, they turn to stories, and… aren’t stories fiction?
Going back to the novel (memoir?!) I am basing my discussion on, there is a persisting sense of alienation throughout it. Adding even more to the confusion that I had when trying to decide whether it was a novel or a memoir, there was a constant shift in the point of view that I had to deal with while reading the book.
The author who tells the stories (“the he”) is the same as the main character of the stories (“the I”), but is he really? This fact alone begs the question: is our present sense of self the same as our past ones? And since we seem to edit our memories so heavily each time we retrieve them, aren’t our past selves fictional to a high degree as well?
So, yeah, it seems that I am not getting closer to answering the question. Was it a novel or was it a memoir?
Was it a travelogue?
While I took my time with the previous two questions, I’ll be short(er) when it comes to this one. Can this book be considered a travelogue as well?
It would have been too simple to be only one or the other of two options, so why not complicate matters a bit? The classical “the more, the merrier” sort of turns on its head and only adds confusion when it comes to categorization. “A travelogue is a film, broadcast or piece of writing about travel.”⁵
This is definitely a piece of writing about travel as Galgut describes three journeys that he made at different times in his life (as I was saying at the beginning of the article). He talks about traveling in Greece, different countries in Africa, some countries in Europe, and India.
His journeys are all strange and highly influenced by his companions. You definitely get a sense of all the places he is passing through. The first one conveys the dynamics of power between two individuals, the second a strange, but quite touching love story, and the third the difficulties of being stranded in a foreign country with a highly unbalanced person.
Final Thoughts
So, I rest my case: this book is not only a novel. It is definitely a memoir and a travelogue as well, but it can also be none of them. The thing is if the writing is good (and it really is in this case), does it matter how the book is labeled? Also, there doesn’t have to be any creative invention at work in order to write fiction: even writing about one’s own memories can easily turn into fiction and that’s what some of the best writers seem to be really good at.
Damon Galgut won the Man Booker Prize in 2021 with his book “The Promise”. While this one (“In a Strange Room: Three Journeys”) was only on the shortlist for the same prize (in 2010), I consider it better. The title “conjures what’s at the heart of the book which is being away from home, somewhere strange”⁵, in strange rooms.
References
¹ Dictionary.com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/novel
²Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/memoir?q=memoir
³ Damon Galgut, The Guardian, “Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room”. https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2010/sep/07/booker-prize-shortlist-damon-galgut
⁴Martha Manning, Ph.D., The Writing Cooperative, “‘I Remember It Like It Was Just Yesterday…’ Really?” https://writingcooperative.com/i-remember-it-like-it-was-just-yesterday-really-75a9ab4c9c69
⁵Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/travelogue?q=travelogue
⁶Damon Galgut, The Guardian, “Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room”. https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2010/sep/07/booker-prize-shortlist-damon-galgut