thedarkages | Fictionalization

In the current issue of the New Yorker, there is a letter from one Mandee Wilton, of Ridgeway, New Jersey, who complains that Joyce Carol Oates lifted all the particulars from a grisly crime to use in her own work. Huffs Ms. Wilton, "Oates could have just as easily created a fictional piece of her own, rather than incorporating such significant details wholesale from a well-known real-life tragedy." If Ms. Wilton had been in charge, G-d forbid, of the publishing industry, the careers of James Michener and E.L. Doctorow, to take two examples, would have been untimely and unseemly foreshortened. But her comment illustrates an interesting dichotomy in the relation between fact and fiction. We are now more than familiar, thanks to Mr. Frey, with the idea that marked deviations from the truth in a narrative labeled as factual bring the piece into the realm of fiction. (Note that Mr. Frey tried twice to sell his manuscript as fiction before rebadging it as memoir.) So, fictional details "pollute" fact. Yet Ms. Wilton is advancing the converse: that factual details "pollute" fiction, and that as their proportion grows larger, they pull the work uncomfortably close towards non-fiction. It is a dilemma that the writer, if he or she accepts the terms, cannot win.

Of course, the fact/fiction binarism is endlessly violated. Many, many autobiographies, to take one disputed genre, have shaded the truth, omitted crucial truths, or invented portions altogether (see Salvador Dali). Many writers do as Ms. Oates has done -- taken numerous factual details and filled them in with fictional content (see Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, etc.) So why the sudden shock and outcry over both practices, and why has this outcry moved into the public realm from the Letters column of the New York Review of Books? ("I'm shocked, shocked to find that there's fiction going on here!") After all, Judith Miller's fictions played as fact for years on the front pages of the New York Times, and there has been nowhere near the level of outcry for Miller as there has been for Frey -- let alone a publishing house soliciting her for a ("second") novel. How is the reader made to feel cheated by the presence of a mixed work? Is it simply a matter of expectations set up by the shelf tag? In the 90's, I worked for many years at a bookstore, and I always got a warm feeling when an assistant in the General Book department would say of a title, "Oh, it could be in Biography... or Memoir... or History... or African-American Studies... or Non-Fiction." The implicit refusal to be of help in sorting out the type of book, though not a bright spot on the escutcheon of Customer Service, was to my mind the only way to be truthful to the nature of a book. (Jonathan Lear's recent work Radical Hope, which could be filed in Philosophy, in Cultural Studies, or in Native American Studies, is a case in point.) To my mind, it's this kind of truth that readers ought to be encouraged to seek.

Aristotle distinguished between the true, the probable, and the persuasive . For him, truth was a matter of scientific, syllogistic demonstration from universal first principles. Any assertion could be traced back to these principles in an unbroken chain of deduction. The probable was a category in which the genealogy of an idea could not be traced back fully, but in which it stretched back far enough to satisfy the understanding. The persuasive need only hew to what is "commonly known" -- ideas not rooted in fact but in the perception of fact. Two millenia later, we are much less sure of these terms and categories. Scientific "truth" can be altered by a more "persuasive" theory, one more "probable" to explain the "true" state of affairs in the universe. News, history, and current events are "probable," but may not represent reality on the ground -- does forbidding photographs of flag-draped coffins mean that our war dead are not returning in number? And then we have fiction. Good fiction is persuasive; it provides enough internal consistency to make you "believe" in what is going on, even if what is going on is improbable in the broader sense. (When children clap their hands to indicate that they "believe" in magic and Tinkerbell, it is Barrie's fiction, compounded by Disney's, that has made this "belief" possible.) The persuasive is a lesser standard than the probable, but everything that is probable is also persuasive; the probable simply has more "authority" behind it in the form of antecedents.

Is it the responsibility of the writer to address this overlap between the probable and the persuasive? Does the authority of the text solely rest on the authority of the author? On the authority of his or her footnotes? On the authority of the works cited in those footnotes? Does everyone who uses Peter Pan in his or her stories have to put in: ¹ Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. -- and check to make sure that Peter's attributes match the source's completely? On the other hand, can we let Bob Woodward, Sy Hersh, and other journalists off with "undisclosed senior officials" running through their footnotes?

The inadequacy of such expectations does not mean that we can collapse the probable and the persuasive into one. If someone were, G-d forbid, to publish a revisionist history of the Holocaust, the need for a reliable concept of truth immediately would become evident. And yet there would be many besides the author -- in Russia and Poland, among other places -- who would reject the "corrections" of the many who would denounce and disprove such a work as improbable, because they believe that anti-Semitism comes from anterior first principles. True "for us" is the probable, not the true.

What needs reinforcement in our culture is that, these days, we are first in the realm of the persuasive, and only then of the probable. This is a principle which Ms. Wilton would do well to learn -- that verisimilitude is as much the quality of history as fiction, and that the one cannot "taint" the other. Yet this principle is the despair of all who teach cultural literacy and who try to get their students to analyze all sources, whether archives, the media, or books. It is much easier to live with the certainty of the persuasive than with the doubt of the probable. Oprah is proof positive.