What does imaginative or fictive work do versus nonfiction?
I think that both fiction and nonfiction works (and pictures) can provide us with great insights into the times and the places that they are depicting, and they both offer us unique ways of interpreting the information being given to us. One of the main differences between the two genres (besides the obvious difference that fiction is a story that comes from somebody’s mind and nonfiction is just presenting information) is the fact that works of fiction offer us the perspective of the narrator, protagonist, or some combination of the characters present in a story. We, as the readers of fictitious writings, get to experience and perceive the world through the lens of the characters, and we can allow ourselves to kind of default to see the world the way that they do. In many ways, the characters in a fiction work are probably more informed about their own world than we are about it, especially if we are reading a story about a long-ago time like the Harlem Renaissance. They are informing us of their own experience and making the relevant observations that inform us of the attitudes and everyday life experiences of the times.
Conversely, nonfiction works provide us with information, and often give us some kinds of historical backgrounds with hopes of providing the reader some necessary context, but the interpretations are often left up to us. Nonfiction does an excellent job of telling us what a place may look like, what was happening in the time and what the names of the significant historical characters were, but it doesn’t always tell us what the times felt like the way fiction does (autobiographies and opinion pieces being exceptions). This is not to say, however, that nonfiction doesn’t have its merits. The picture I included above is from the chapter article “The Making of Harlem” by James Weldon Johnson in Survey Graphic. This nonfiction article is informative about the history of the Harlem Renaissance and daily life at the time of publication. The picture shows the scene outside of a subway station at 135th and Lenox, and we can get an idea of what the area looked like at the time and what people would have been doing at rush hour on a normal weekday in the neighborhood. So, while the article and the picture did not inform us how it would feel to be there at the time, we can still use our own sense of perception to try and get an idea.
In the same way that the photograph gives us a sense of what Harlem looked like at the time, which I liken to a work of nonfiction, so too can works of art give us a visual representation of a fictive version of how a time and a place felt. When we look at Jacob Lawrence’s classic painting This Is Harlem (above), we get a different sense of what the neighborhood was like than we do from the photograph of 135th and Lenox. The boldly painted advertisements for a beauty shop, dance studio, bar and funeral home, and the central placement of the church in the painting give us an idea into the institutions of the neighborhood at the time, and the people walking in all different directions give life to Lawrence’s picture. Both the photo from Survey Graphic and This is Harlem use their genres, nonfiction and fictional, respectively, to give us a snapshot of what Harlem looked and felt like around the time of the Renaissance.
#ThisIsHarlem
Works Cited
- Survey Associates. (1925). Harlem, Mecca of the new negro. Yale University Library. Retrieved February 17, 2022, from https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/17368696
- Magazine, S. (2017, September 5). Why the works of visionary artist Jacob Lawrence still resonate a century after his birth. Smithsonian.com. Retrieved February 22, 2022, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-works-visionary-artist-jacob-lawrence-still-resonate-century-after-his-birth-180964706/