Documentary and fiction or how to document fiction and fiction-like objects
Zornitsa Garkova （Bulgaria）
It was about twenty years ago, when I first met the genus of beetles Ips Typographus. Or I should say, when I first found the traces of these creatures. They live under the pine tree bark and reveal themselves to the human eye only after the tree has died, cut into pieces, its smaller branches left on the forest floor, decomposing slowly and revealing a whole new language with its own alphabet under their bark.
As a young humanitarian, with little to no knowledge about Nature, it took me several years to fully understand their life. I was almost at the peak of my understanding for them, when my marriage started to decline. It was 2018 when I wrote the story “Ips Typographus”, giving my heroine a similar experience to mine with these beetles, and also making her refuse to be with the man she thought she loved. A year after the story was published in a book, I learned more facts about the life of those beetles: they live in a symbiotic relationship with a genus of fungi, Ophiostomatales.
I felt cheated by Nature, I felt a deep lack of knowledge about Nature, and, of course, I started reading more scientific literature. The Nature Documentary, as I prefer to call it now. Four years after the book was published, my life changed significantly, my husband was not near anymore and I was still asking myself – what’s missing in the short story “Ips Typographus” and what more could I add to it, should I decide to rewrite it.
Then, in the winter following the biggest change in my life so far, I started writing another story – “Ophiostomatales” – to show not only the whole story of the symbiosis between the Beetles and the Fungi, but also a kind of truth about myself.
Let me state it again – I started writing a story, not a document. Although based on facts, it was still pure fiction. Why did I choose this form? Because I wanted to hide myself behind the story, behind the main character; I was looking for a safe place for myself.
There is another story, much bigger than this one and much more difficult to tell.
In one of the chapters in The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel, Marina Mackay writes about the “seductive proximity of the novel to the real world” in the eighteenth century, at the dawn of industrialization in the Western world. This seductive proximity continues throughout the whole nineteenth century, when the realistic novel flourished. Something else happened via the course of the nineteenth century, according to Barbara T. Gates, the author of Kindred Nature: the extinction of species, noticed publicly and documented in the time of Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theory. What did we have at that time? Higher than ever interest in botany, resulting in collecting specimens and developing the taxonomy, writing about Nature, including fiction and non-fiction hybrids, poetry books and more. And extinction of species. It was like the human was trying to get hold of something already half dead and describe it before it is too late. The time of botany was also the time of the realistic novel.
From the nineteenth century on, literature and botany, the latter being only a small part of the nature sciences, took different paths. Literature developed many new notions and different approaches to describe its point of view of the real world. The same is true about botany, but both took different directions and ended up unable to help each other. With the realistic novel, however, we see the opposite: the living world is mere décor for the human condition or, in some cases, appears anthropomorphized.
In the middle of the twentieth century, two books were published almost subsequently and, unfortunately, posthumously – The Idea of Nature and The Idea of History, both by the British philosopher Robin George Collingwood. The order of publishing follows the idea of their author – the idea of History comes after the idea of Nature, the first transforms into the second in the human mind and imagination, reflecting the way the societies changed over the course of the twentieth century.
The twentieth century is the century not only of a variety of different approaches to fiction, but also of industrial agriculture – the invention of the herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers shows lack of knowledge about Nature. And even though we think that the natural sciences have progressed to in utmost extent – that is only part of our delusion that we know Nature. It’s yet another illusion, similar to the illusion of photography, motion pictures and television.
In my mind the phenomenon of documentary has two sources today – the first and probably more important is the visual memory of humans, the strive for the visual, which comes together with the strive for the real, for truth, if you prefer. The other source is the chain of events marking the twentieth century. How can we write truthfully about those events, being honest to full extent? Svetlana Alexievich’s books document the madness, but the same could be said about Margaret Atwood’s or Angela Carter’s books, or about any other fiction, no matter if it’s a short story or a full-length novel with many characters and many narrative layers.
Let’s remember again what distinguishes the realistic novel – its proximity to the real world. Today we have the genre of the faction, of the documentary, of the real story, which someone has actually experienced, and we find that particular experience interesting. What is the difference between real events and imagined ones? And if there is a difference what does that difference look like today?
These questions are akin to the questions R. G. Collingwood rises in the “Idea of Nature” – is Nature a real thing outside of our minds and if it is – is this real thing a constantly changing process, so vast and so beyond of our imagination, that it appears easier for us to imagine it.
I believe my “Ophistomatales” could tell something about it. And about myself, of course, because telling stories means getting to know yourself, to document yourself and to imagine yourself in the same time. Pure symbiosis, like the one in Nature, isn’t it?