The Dark Potency of Nonfiction Prose
On "Weird Nonfiction"
“Why do you write nonfiction?” “Why nonfiction?” “Why don’t you write, like, a novel or something?” “Have you tried fiction?” “What even is nonfiction?” “What’s non-fiction?” “Nonfiction, like cookbooks?”
For years I’ve called myself a nonfiction writer—an essayist in the mode of John D’Agata, maybe, or Michel de Montaigne, the latter of whom got a good cameo in a recent post. But what is nonfiction? What is an essay? They teach you this crap in school, starting around 5th grade, and for most kids it fosters the first thought of self-harm.
An essay, technically, is an attempt. Not a suicide attempt, but an attempt with no certain outcome. It’s a word derived from medieval alchemy, actually, and means to weigh or measure. Montaigne’s famous motto What do I know? while exceedingly bland on the surface, carries a deeper subtext. What do I know? It is the type of inquiry that, far beyond scientific skepticism, can spur a genuine paradigm shift, lead to ontological shock, invite insanity, or beget a spiritual epiphany—the latter being the actual goal of alchemy.
What do you really know?
If you smoke DMT, you might discover that you know… not much. As Terence McKenna put it, “Occasionally people ask me ‘Is DMT dangerous?’ and I think the honest answer is ‘Only if you fear death by astonishment.’”
The spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, says that his awakening occurred when he started asking himself, basically… What do I know? “There are no ABCs of how to wake up. But when I look back, I saw these two things: stillness and silence, and the ability to be ruthlessly honest with myself, to not fool myself, to not tell myself that I knew something that I didn’t, to stay with that line of inquiry.”
Such staying power the romantic poet John Keats called negative capability. It is as good a prescription as any for a nonfiction writer or spiritual seeker. “I mean Negative Capability,” Keats wrote in a letter, “that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
And that brings me to the simple point of this brief post:
Not knowing is, for me, the essence—the secret power—of nonfiction. Uncertainty, a point of deep uncertainty, that is the secret clearing in the forest of fact that I want to find through a careful curation of nonfiction information.
It is a method, like many philosophical and spiritual traditions, rooted in paradox, and you will see it play out in China Lake and my new book YUCK.
Recently all this came into powerful focus for me reading an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books called “Weird Nonfiction” by Clayton Purdom. The essay came out in October, but it took a nudge from
to help me find it (thanks Matt). Clayton’s essay, I think, perhaps more than anything else I’ve encountered recently, speaks to what I think my writing practice has been pursuing the past 10 years, what it will continue to pursue in my third book, and why I remain stubbornly smitten with the unsexy, less prestigious literary mode of “nonfiction.”As Clayton Purdom writes:
I call it weird nonfiction: creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience. Works that are about the real world or some subject within it but also question their container or their ability to be about that thing—or which veer from the thing at hand toward the cosmic, horrifying, or absurd. Sometimes it is as if the element of unreality is chasing the author through the piece…
…Like weird fiction, weird nonfiction is built around some unknowable terror, replacing the tentacled horrors of H. P. Lovecraft with the many-tentacled horrors of being online and alive in the 21st century. It also suggests, in the process, that there is something unfathomable at the heart of reality itself, and that it is the duty of journalism to circumnavigate this terror if never speak it aloud. I humbly submit that weird nonfiction seems particularly well suited to reporting on climate change but have not seen it done with the vigor that subject deserves.
Being the self-aggrandizing solipsistic bastard only child that I am, I emailed Clayton and sent him a copy of my precious opus China Lake. Clayton, I learned, remains on the hunt for further examples of Weird Nonfiction. Send him your recs here. His essay already wrangles an impressive array of examples of this emergent—or subversive—form and he makes a convincing case that it is a genuine if largely overlooked genre.
I urge you to head over to the Los Angeles Review of Books and read the full essay. It gave me a pretty potent shot of adrenaline last week...
But maybe it’s just me, and Clayton… Two lame bros having some kind of weird encounter in digital space. Maybe we have it all wrong. Maybe nonfiction should really just stick to informing the reader, supply useful information in a trim and logical 5th grade five-paragraph package. Let ChatGPT write your dirty laundry for you. The layman on the street would say that’s the proper way, the aim of nonfiction. A grim little utilitarian genre.
But what if there is and has been a literary form that takes information and fact and applies it toward an end that vastly surpasses the sum of its truthful, ‘verifiable’ raw material? What if there is a form that in its strategic curation of information, particularly destabilizing information—like that related to anthropogenic climate change perhaps—builds toward not knowledge and understanding specifically but something else entirely. In its curation and careful presentation, it draws attention not to the genius of our species but rather our sheer unlimited capacity for producing, collecting, and amassing such facts as might flatter that faculty, and yet, in the artful, even poetic, piecing together of such endless informational bits, it tries at last to build out toward some teetering highly tenuous vantage point from which we might steal a glimpse of what all that obsessive facticity might one day illuminate… or simply be masking.
As H.P Lovecraft, patron saint of the weird, famously wrote in 1926:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Weird Nonfiction revels in this precise moment, this schism between knowledge and decay, illumination and chaos, the known and the not allowed. It is the piecing together of disparate knowledge to reveal something hitherto unseen beneath the smooth surface of our complacent, lying consumption.
“Writing is about discovering things hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no point to the process.” —W.G. Sebald
Weird Nonfiction, in its careful curation and amassment of fact, does not seek firstly to inform the reader, to edify him or her with knowledge, to offer information that might help them navigate the world’s increasing ‘complexity.’ No. It actually seeks the opposite. It has the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience.
And if there is any defense for this dubious project, well… it is that such disorientation is the true goal of art itself.
The realization that we do not know, that we did not know—that is the first step in any awakening. The human species is destroying itself and the planet it lives on and shares with all currently known extant life in the universe because it has forgotten precisely how to dwell in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. Perhaps we never really knew. We’re stuck writing our shitty five paragraphs, busy explaining everything, making arguments, proving we know.
But Weird Nonfiction, if it is anything, represents a powerful and paradoxical contemporary pathway into the abiding mystery that underpins and outstrips all our expanding networks of firm and cloud-based present and future fact. It invites you stop trying to decide what you know and asks instead that you experience all that you don’t. And it does this, quite strangely, even sublimely, by piling on all that is true and known and verifiable in the moment this very evening.
Truth is stranger than fiction, than speculative fiction, even than science-fiction. That is because unlike fiction, it is not obliged to stick to possibilities.
Scope the essay “Weird Nonfiction”, stay awake, and stay tuned.
I'm pleased to have contributed to this essay's Genesis by bringing Purdom's LARB piece to your attention. The vein you're mining here is full of dark gold. Love your perspective and your enthusiasm, Barret.
It’s about fucking time. I’ll get back to you.