The Facts of the Matter: Reader Reaction
by on Oct 22, 2012
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Views
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The first time I ever really thought about Roger Ebert it was because I knew he was warm, dry, and celebrating and I was cold, wet and furious. It was January 2005 in Chicago, and unsurprisingly it was snowing on me and members of Not Dead Yet as we staged a protest outside the Union League Club, surrounded by a row of news trucks.
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"Essay" enters into English untamed.
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Here is how it happened: The door to the suite was open that night when I walked past and saw her splayed across a couch, one foot on the floor, one leg hooked over an arm rest.
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On that Monday at the end of January, Jack Blevins, a questionable young man of twenty-five, rides his blue bicycle beneath the flurry, with tape recorder in hand.
Interviews
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"We’re quite rightfully concerned by the level of unemployment in the United States and the ways people were devastated by the financial crisis of 2008, but in the circumstances people face in a place like South Africa, 10 percent unemployment would be heaven."
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“We all change; the things you want from writing, at a certain age, become different from the things you want later. I’ve avoided any obligations, and I still live like a child. I don’t have a wife and kids. I’m on my own. It’s a choice.”
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"Blurring the Boundaries was inspired by my own frustration with facts."
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My poetry won’t suit everyone. It has been described as dense; I’m aware of that response, so I wouldn’t say “I hope everyone reads it.”
Reviews
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Ryan G. Van Cleave’s new anthology of Chicago poetry, City of the Big Shoulders, succeeds in displaying the essentials as defined and described by a diverse crowd of Chicagoans.
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At the heart of this collection, Barnett’s second, is an engagement with Kant’s idea of the sublime, namely that the self experiences both terror and dread in the face of the infinite—whether death or, as the Romantics understood it, the implacable force of Nature.
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The memoir, like the artist herself, swerves between cutting-edge installation art, the ancient passages of the Bible, and centuries-old Jewish law and tradition.
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This fascinating book, edited by Prof. Harold B. Segel of Columbia University, presents a rich sampling of writings by people imprisoned in the jails of the former Eastern European Soviet colonies...
Blog Posts
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Apr 25, 2013
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Apr 23, 2013
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Apr 18, 2013
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Apr 17, 2013
Comments
The nature of CNF
http://triquarterly.org/nonfiction/los-huevos-del-se%C3%B1or
Confession: I wish I'd had the balls to really step in front that a car. Would it have made a difference?
The essay's odious meta-message
I concur with the author's stance on adhering to facts, though of course something can be factual and completely untrue—as well as untrue in other ways. Like the odious overarching message of this essay itself.
I began to despair when the author began to present himself as unrepentant in middle age about having raped a drunk, passed-out girl, albeit while drunk himself. While the rape as presented is believable, the perpetrator's perspective is not. He is meant to be typical, a typical male, that is, as evidenced by statistics about many males' desire to rape and by the crude comments they supposedly make to each other routinely in private about women. In other words, this essay is deeply flawed by its real agenda, showing how bad, at their core, are men.
Yet the fictional narrator of this piece is not a typical male but a sociopath. No shame, guilt, remorse? Not believable. Unless you believe that men, or a sizable percentage of them, are this soulless. I know NO men, let alone college professors, who speak like this fantasy projection and his buddies. Sure they exist here and there, across the world, but this essay's message about men distorts reality.
Imagine the response if a man—or posing as one—wrote an essay this hateful about women.
After reading the additional
After reading the additional notes of the essay, I am left scratching my head as to the what the author wants me to think. And clearly she wants me to think about something since she needs an alert at the end saying she is a woman and we are given her 5 points of order about the content of her piece.
Does nonfiction have a requirement to be factual? Sure.
Do we as readers need to be aware that at times writers manipulate memories, create composite characters/images? Yes.
But the piece loses me in its characterization of a narrator, a narrator that is purely fictional, not a narrative voice of the author but a voice of an imagined male figure who lacks guilt or empathy or any amount of character to make him a reality. Is the author just looking for a new name to title her work under “meta nonfiction” where you can make up facts and people as long as you are trying to make a point about lying in creative nonfiction.
And my final point: the "horror" of playing with facts in nonfiction is equatable to a man not feeling remorse at rape? That’s your metaphor? (PS. I'm a woman.)
For more, check out the anthology this essay appears in
I was floored by this essay last spring, when I read it in the anthology "Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction" (ed. Jill Talbot). It's packed with some of the best CNF writers out there today, full of essays as wonderful and engaging as this one.
D'Agata
I was preparing a response to this piece for the blog of a literary nonfiction journal and doing a very close reading of it for that purpose. As I worked, I became increasingly aware of how familiar certain moves in this piece were to me. The inclusion of the editorial voice as a sort of "dupe" to the clever, clever author. The carefully planned opportunities for outrage embedded into the narrative. The gleeful way the author reveals having lied to the reader.
I feel as certain as one can, without having anything but a textual analysis to go on, that this was authored by John D'Agata himself.
Which, frankly, means that as far as I am concerned, we can once and for all give up talking about him in any meaningful way. Sometimes, the only decent thing to do is look away.
Great
I think this is a great way to get us thinking about the topic of facts in nonfiction. This essay is unusual and inventive.
Frankly I would like to see this type of factual account written by a man. Who will be the guy who dares to write about being on the other side of sexual assault?
Charles Bukowski.
Charles Bukowski.
The "Facts"
November 22, 1963. Dallas, Texas, of course. You ask 200+ witnesses each to write a nonfiction account that relies purely on the facts. Some will write that they heard shots coming from the Book Depository. Others will write that they heard shots coming from the grassy knoll. These accounts are in direct contradiction, and yet both varieties of recollection are publishable as nonfiction--not even creative nonfiction, but straight nonfiction. No question about it. Right next to each other on the same shelf in the library. So, what do we do with this problem of a "fact"? You can get right up into a writer's face and call him or her a liar, but if the writer believed it when it was written, the work is probably unassailable.
facts v. witness statements
In the spirit of dialogue, not confrontation:
It is true that such eye-witness accounts can be published as non-fiction, but they shouldn't be confused with facts. The only facts in the example JFK accounts are the fact *of* these accounts--i.e., it is a fact that Witness X alleges hearing shots fired from _________.
In a forensic context, eye-witness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially in traumatic situations (see studies by Elizabeth Loftus & Katerine Ketchum, Stephen J. Ceci & Maggie Bruck, Brian Clifford & Ray Bull, Daniel Yarmey, Richard Ofshe, et al), and the Innocence Project and others attest that eye-witness identification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions. Amusingly, some studies by the aforementioned show that the more confident a witness, the more likely they are to be wrong.
Not that any studies are needed to confirm that any number of witnesses will recall any number of sometimes conflicting, even mutually exclusive, details about the same event. Witnesses don't need to be lying to be wrong.
In the absence of physical evidence or a signed confession (the former possibly planted, the latter possibly coerced, says the defense lawyer in me), eye-witness testimony remains, however, the third most popular item with juries to this day (Osterburg & Ward, Criminal Investigation, 3rd ed.).
Mea Culpa
An interview following this piece in the anthology in which it originally appears eventually names the Anonymous author. It is not John D'Agata.
Disagreeing with the Premise
My response to this provocative essay, which I think is based on faulty assumptions, is too long to post here, but I thought I might share the link if you're interested http://jessstoner.com/2012/10/30/on-the-facts-of-the-matter/
A roundtable discussion with
A roundtable discussion with Anonymous, Ned Stuckey-French, Matthew Ferrence, and Sonya Huber at Brevity: http://brevity.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/as-a-matter-of-fact-a-roundtable...
EJ Levy
Am I right in thinking Anonymous is EJ Levy? She's billed as a contributor, but not mentioned on the contents page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1609380894
And wasn't this whole thing better done as fiction in one of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men?
What I think it all comes
What I think it all comes down to is that everyone hates the idea of being lied to, but more than that, they hate the discovery of the truth. Knowing that someone has lied to you is possibly worse than being lied to in the first place. The feeling of deception is a belittling one. Take James Frey--the backlash he received when it was revealed that A Million Little Pieces was a lie demonstrates something that keeps us from being able to tolerate dishonesty. Maybe it's the American value placed on integrity that does it. Maybe it's just that it makes us feel stupid when we finally figure it out. Either way, if you can't lie well, you should not do it.
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