Fact, Fiction, Action Without Action

There were two extra-narrative guiding principles I kept in mind while writing for Kenoma. Around every story beat, every character, every word, these were there: no allegory, and no literalism. I believe i kept to these principles well. Kenoma has no thematic or narrative ties to an older, different story that are used to reinforce the narrative I want to convey (or vice versa). Nor does it portray itself as literal telling of real events; there are intentional moments of inauthenticity, directness, and certain gaps in the presentation’s facade that hopefully make it clear, even on a surface level, that there is no “reality” in the world around you. Nothing to arrange into some sort of solved history.

My reason for this is rather simple: I hate allegory. I hate literalism. They have no place in fiction, detract from its unique gifts, and serve only to waste the space they take up. Be that on a page, a screen, or in RAM.

Fiction is primarily interesting for its ability to offer that which does not exist. You can have any experience the human mind can conjure, without having to suffer the negative consequences it would bring if it were real. And these experiences have inherent meanings: fiction does not exist without having something to communicate. However profound or shallow that thing might be.

The only other category of writing is nonfiction, which is clearly an obverse. Nothing that happens in nonfiction has any inherent narrative meaning, nor does it exist to communicate a specific thing. Events simply occur. Of course, there is a chain of cause and effect. There are lessons to be learned, interpretations to be made. In fact, these lessons and interpretations are far more important than anything fiction provides. And unlike fiction, there is infinite depth to each event.

But you can’t play with nonfiction. Try to twist or bend it and it becomes fiction. This is not the case in the other direction: a winding tale cannot be made into a fact no matter how much you try to straighten it out. This is the real power of fiction, in my eyes. You can do anything to it, and turn anything into it. An infinitely tensile material that you can stretch, bend, expand or contract, even cut and tear without breaking. There is endless freedom in fiction.

It is for this reason i hold hate in my heart for allegory. Taking a new fiction and restricting it to the themes and messaging of one pre-established, or shackling it to nonfiction, is a total rejection of that freedom. Why tell this new story, if you want it to be the same as something already extant? Just tell that one again. And if you take your story in a different direction from your allegorical subject, then why did you choose it in the first place? Once you have your allegory, you are on the hook to deliver those same themes and messages. No matter what the story you tell comes to be about.

My hatred for literalism is more convoluted. Literalism engages with fiction, takes it in, and then ignores all the elements that make it fictional. In a literalist framework, fiction is no different from nonfiction. It has no inherent meaning, no theme, no narrative flow. Simply a set of causes and effects, that may be analyzed only to guess what comes next or learn something about the wider fictional world. This is so clearly counter to what fiction offers that I cannot understand it as a perspective. I want it as far away from me and my work as possible, and fundamentally do not respect it.

This is not to say that the underlying impulses behind allegory and literalism are bad. Taking inspiration from art that has come before yours, or finding similarities between two works and examining them under that lens, are not bad things. No art is free of the influence of what came before. Recognizing these inspirations, and examining the ways in which works differ, is an excellent tool for analysis. Nor is a story that uses the structures and aesthetics of literality, as in a historical document, inherently bad. It is only when the story being told is eclipsed by its inspirations, by that hunt for plain causality, that things turn to shit.

Which is why I decided to build Kenoma to an anti-allegorical, anti-literal standard. These two tenets aren’t the bedrock of the concept – you can’t build something just by choosing what not to build – but they guided the construction as it progressed from cornerstone to chimney. As such, the result is a hopefully interesting blend of inspirations untethered to their sources, free from a fact-first framework. Narrative built of theme, mood, and words that evoke their own set of thoughts and emotions; unlike any single thing that came before it in at least one way.

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