Title: Having and Being Had
Author: Eula Biss
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Date: September 2020
Form: Curated nonfiction
Keywords: Money, Capitalism, Work, Writing
Within the last decade or so’s groundswell of literary nonfiction, there’s a specific subgenre that’s notable for its breadth of citations. These essays and books are often by writers with links to both literary and academic communities, and they are often published by indie presses like Graywolf, theory-driven university presses like Duke, or independent publishers with links to academia like Semiotext(e) (distributed by MIT Press) and The Feminist Press (based at CUNY). The ur-example is probably Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, with its mass of quotations from philosophers, queer theorists, visual artists, poets, and more, but you could also point to the work of writers like Kevin Young, Kate Zambreno, Claudia Rankine, Anne Boyer, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, or Leslie Jamison.
Lauren Oyler, in a phrase I’m surprised hasn’t been picked up on more widely, calls this genre “curated nonfiction.” She coins the term in a review of Having and Being Had, the most recent book by one of the genre’s earliest and most stylistically recognizable practitioners, Eula Biss. Oyler is a little circumspect about this kind of writing’s effectiveness: “while reading it,” she notes, “I always reach a point at which I wish I were reading the books being extensively quoted.” I see what she means—after I read Having and Being Had, I went out and bought books by Elizabeth Chin and David Graeber—but I’ve always admired the particular way that Biss’s writing gathers a period- and genre-spanning gaggle of “paper soulmates” (as Kate Zambreno calls her literary interlocutors in Heroines).
Part of what’s effective about Biss’s approach is her writing’s looping, associative logic, and part of it is the way she flips between modes, moving fluidly between a conversation with a friend or neighbor and microeconomic theory. But as I read her new piece on resistance and the Resistance in The Paris Review, I wondered whether it might also be something smaller and potentially more imitable: the range of verbs she uses to introduce quotations from her sources.
Now, I’m not convinced by this theory: I don’t think Eula Biss or any of her fellow writers of curated nonfiction use a substantially greater variety of dialogue verbs compared to writers in other nonfiction genres. But, after paging through Having and Being Had with an eye to this detail, I do think there’s something to be learnt from looking at the verbs she uses.
Having and Being Had, for the most part, sticks to relatively plain dialogue tags. The most common verbs are the ones you’d expect: say or tell, sometimes argue or ask, and, most frequently, write. Which makes sense for a book that’s partly about writing. But when Biss does depart from this selection, what I noticed was how consistently the choice of verb communicates something about what kind of text she’s quoting, or what the text is doing.
Some of her verbs indicate the genre of the source. For a piece of journalism, the verb is “reported.” For a manifesto, it’s “proposed.” For a polemic, it’s “argued.” And for a piece of speculative theory, it’s “imagined.” Other verbs—like “warn” or “insist” or “complain”—indicate the tone of the quotation. In both cases, this is important: in a text that’s dense with quotations from a wide range of sources, the reader doesn’t always have the necessary context in order to be able to discern things like a quotation’s relationship to empirical truth (different for journalism than for poetry), or its emotional tenor.
Sometimes too, the choice of verb helps the reader triage the importance of information: a line that’s “noted,” “remarked,” or “observed” is likely less urgent than one that’s “insisted.” And if you were confused by a quotation taken out of context, it’ll sometimes (as in the Paris Review piece) be followed up by some further explanation where the writer being quoted “clarifie[s]” something.
There isn’t a grand theory of dialogue tags here, but for writers grappling with multiple sources, I’d absolutely recommend looking closely at the work of skilled writers of curated nonfiction like Biss—and considering how dialogue verbs can communicate to readers the contextual information that you, the one who’s done the reading and research, are familiar with but which your readers might not share.