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Marina Budhos on Fiction and Nonfiction
March 4, 2008
Have you all been reading about the revelations that the highly praised adult memoirs "Love and Consequences," by Margaret B. Jones who is really Margaret Seltzer, and "Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years," by Misha Defonseca, were complete inventions? If not, here are a couple of links, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20181835,00.html and http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/107290.html
As I've mentioned, my wife Marina is a novelist and professor of English, and she felt that the initial reception of the supposed memoirs tells us something important about how we evaluate the "truth," the reality, of non-fiction. Here's her guest column:
"It seems these two recent ones are actually far more egregious than James Frey's infractions--where there was an essential truth or story, and he embroidered, but it was his story. These two have taken it much further--they themselves are fake, have created fake identities, and channeled a kind of fictive fantasy where they are reinvented as either a Holocaust survivor or a gang member.
We've become so involved, so invested in the art of concrete fiction writing, its evocative narrative techniques in the service of truth, that we forget that truth slips away. In the process of evocation, we get so involved with these techniques, nonfiction disappears. Because we do not value truth or nonfiction as central, we allow it to be eroded, compromised, until finally it vanishes, and does not exist. The seduction of writing, the powerful pull of fantasy in all its concrete glory, is something every writer knows. But in a culture that places such a value on storytelling, and not enough on knowledge, we unwittingly become the eroders of truth.
I think that we, as a culture, or as a publishing culture, have become so invested in the 'raw,' the 'real' and the 'authentic'--we need our concrete, voyeuristic journey to America's underbelly--be it alcoholism, addiction, or gangs. What we don't realize is how much that craving is abetted by the artificial fuel of MFA-style techniques that can be disturbingly careless with truth. We forget that the 'confession' is a literary device, a trope, like any other."
Through Marina is speaking about the adult world, I see a direct link to ours. For we are constantly told that non-fiction can be good so long as it is a good story. Over and over authors are praised for those MFA techniques, the telling details. Marina is reminding us that we mistake the craft of creating the aura of the real for the devotion to seeking out truth.
Posted by Marc Aronson on March 4, 2008 | Comments (0)
