Lewis Nordan: Humor, Heartbreak, and Hope

7. Life as a Set of Games and Invented Stories in Lewis Nordan’s Fictional Memoir

7 Life as a Set of Games and Invented Stories in Lewis Nordan’s Fictional Memoir Marcel Arbeit In every work of fiction some traces of its author’s life can be discovered, just as in every autobiography there is a certain portion of fiction. According to J. William Berry, southerners, as a result of their habit of storytelling, possess an especially strong autobiographical impulse and even “when the stories are not explicitly autobiographical, they come down to the self of the teller” (78). The border between fiction and nonfiction becomes blurred and there is a rapid and steady increase in the number of books we can label as autobiographical novels or fictional memoirs. It is useless to try to count the percentage of what really did happen, but still, there are not many authors who, on the very first pages of their memoirs, confess that not only did they change names, they also “made up some conversations” and “exaggerated some stuff too” (Nordan, Boy with Loaded Gun vii), and then, in a dialogue with their spouses, meditate on the genre of separate chapters. In his memoir Boy with Loaded Gun (2000), Lewis Nordan did exactly this, and in an interview with Edward J. Dupuy he admitted that in the book the “ratio of fiction to non-fiction is about the same, in inverse proportion, as Life as a Set of Games 43 in the novels” (Dupuy, “Interview” 103). For those who need a clear line between fiction and nonfiction it was a double transgression. If read as a novel, there are too many raw details from the author’s privacy; if taken as a life story, there are serious infringements of biographical and historical truth. As Gregory L. Morris reveals, on the one hand Nordan presents himself as “a resistant, reluctant autobiographer” (65), while on the other he is a “writerposeur ” (74) whose self-fashioning might be too stylized but nevertheless shows “his journey as an authentic writer” (76). Neither fish nor fowl, Nordan ’s memoir does not fit traditional genre concepts and consequently was not received warmly by reviewers. WhenThomasÆrvold Bjerre asked Nordan how he felt about being a subject of literary criticism, the author said: “Well, my favorite subject is myself, so I like it. I’m always a little surprised at what is discovered in it. And by that I don’t mean that I reject what is discovered; it’s just that when you write so much from the right brain it takes left-brain thinking to clue you in that this is what you do” (380).The form of a fictional memoir presented a new possibility for Nordan: to write a story with himself split into several narrative personas , a story based equally on fact and imagination. In Boy with LoadedGun, Nordan concentrated on those autobiographical situations during which he was, at the time when he lived them, driven primarily by his storytelling instinct .This explains the vast omissions, as well as the almost total lack of coverage of some spheres of his life in the book, including his successful teaching career and his road to regional and later national literary renown. Most of the events that made it into Nordan’s memoir are deeply personal, and the courses they took significantly influenced his subsequent life. In presenting his life story, Nordan surprises readers by suggesting that his behavior at the time of an event, including the selection of language he used, ignored the possible consequences and followed only one criterion: whether or not the narrative could potentially draw the attention of an audience—long years before any audience gathered to listen to him, long before the idea that he might become a writer even flickered in his mind.That is why his focus is primarily on proper structures and endings and his autobiographical self only seldom ceases to be a full-fledged literary character. To understand how this technique works, it is necessary to discuss Nor- ARBEIT 44 dan’s use of various distancing strategies, all of which, paradoxically, draw attention back to him.That is why I distinguish three authorial personas, three Buddies. The first Buddy (Nordan’s nickname) is the “narrating I.” This authorial persona tries to reconstruct autobiographical situations from the past as faithfully as possible, but still abandons complete truthfulness: some details are changed deliberately, others because of memory lapses.The second Buddy, the “commenting I...