Thinking About Epistolary Fiction

Getting Away with It: Epistolary Fiction comes from The Cincinnati Review. I believe the first example I ran across of this was back in high school when I read Dorothy L. Sayers' The Documents in the Case. Since I never was one for Twitter, I have probably missed out on ideas for using documents in a story. The essay makes a case for the style:

Epistolary fiction is replete with contradictions. It’s bold and voice-centric, foregrounding the narrator’s own perception of their experiences; it’s indirect and sly, speaking volumes about the overall setting, cast, and thematic or philosophical project through its relationship to the text as a whole. It’s bluntly expository—what other form could stand up to a textbook-like, matter-of-fact description of an alien species’ reproductive infrastructure?—and maddeningly obscure, pushing us to get directly involved if we are to have any hope of understanding what’s happening on the page. It’s fiercely authoritative, demanding that we accept the testimony of its speakers (Parable of the Talents); it declares, over and over again, that narrative authority should not be trusted, by providing us with voices that cannot be reconciled with one another (. . . also Parable of the Talents). It’s this last characteristic that, I think, lies at the root of epistolary fiction’s cultural dismissal: its simultaneous claim to and critique of narrative authority is ambiguous and unsettling, and, more importantly, it renders epistolary fiction especially attractive to many writers who aren’t automatically granted such power in a literary or a social context. That means writers who belong to marginalized communities—particularly women, particularly white women, which is a topic for another day—that means writers who work in genres with less literary clout, such as speculative fiction, thrillers, or humor. (It’s not lost on me that all of the examples I’ve provided of ‘experimental’ epistolary work are by white men, and that the books themselves have made their reputations largely based on their looks, which in turn implies a significant budget underlaying their production, one not afforded to the other books I’ve discussed: readers oohed and ahhed over S.’s code wheel and letter-inserts, House of Leaves’s intricate, multicolored type, and Griffin and Sabine’s paintings and glossy ‘handwritten’ letters.) The tools epistolary fiction has to offer may not be easy or fashionable, but I’m grateful as a reader and as a writer for their curious, complicated claim and challenge to authority. I think we’re overdue for an epistolary resurgence—and, if anyone reading this has an epistolary short story that’s burning a hole in your hard drive, I’d love to see it in the queue come December!

sch 10/15