"being more precise would be less dramatic"

[snousle]

How negotiable is a fact in nonfiction? In 2003, an essay by John D’Agata was rejected by the magazine that commissioned it due to factual inaccuracies. That essay—which eventually became the foundation of D’Agata’s critically acclaimed About a Mountain—was accepted by another magazine, The Believer, but not before they handed it to their own fact-checker, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D’Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction.

This excerpt from their correspondence got me surprisingly riled up.

I don't know how the dialogue ended, but IMHO, D'Agata's protests portray him as just the kind of writer I don't want to read. And I wouldn't want to read him because he's being lazy, shallow, and self-serving. The idea that being precise would be "less dramatic" is one of those things that turns good writing into crap. 

Truth matters, and it matters a lot, even in its tiniest details. A commitment to truth enriches writing in ways that the author could never anticipate. Being "dramatic" or "sounding good" is a petty, small way to make the writing superficially more palatable while inflating the author's ego. Which is fine - particularly for writers that aren't very skilled - just don't call it nonfiction anymore.

Whether you're writing an essay, taking a photograph, or running a particle accelerator, it seems to me that the appropriate attitude for the artist is surrender. Stop arranging facts for your own convenience, stop creating "drama", and let the world speak for itself. Because the world is infinitely fascinating, while you're just plain boring. Sorry, but it's the truth. The highest achievement for an artist is to become a messenger from the gods - which is why the ones that we really admire so often report that their creativity is more akin to taking dictation, that they are merely pulling down great truths from on high and delivering them at ground level.

High fidelity data sources are fantastically richer than they appear on the surface - which is why convincingly "faking" information ranges from very hard to impossible. A truthful transcription of the world, whether in prose or in numbers, has a kind of holographic depth that makes it more than the sum of its parts. It's something that entrusts the viewer with the right and privilege of drawing his own observations, ones which might be unimaginable at the time its recorded. 

I demand truth, also, from fiction. Fiction is the art of saying something that is superficially untrue to achieve something that is profoundly true. The un-truth is a necessary evil whose boundaries should be obvious. If the un-truth is not superficial and the truth is not profound, then it's just wankery. One might say the same thing of non-representational painting and sculpture, even the most abstract. 

I don’t think readers will care whether the events that I’m discussing happened on the same day, a few days apart, or a few months apart... The facts that are being employed here aren’t meant to function baldly as “facts.” Nobody is going to read this, in other words, in order to get a survey of the demographics of Las Vegas..."

Stop, you're making the baby Jesus cry. Some of us read essays with the computer right at our side, and when we come across something surprising or new - no matter how trivial - we follow it up with a little hunting trip on Google or Wikipedia. I might do this as often as two or three times per page. So of course I'm going to care about the "demographics of Las Vegas". You have NO IDEA what tiny little factoid we will pivot off of. And if you fill your writing with shit, we will KNOW. 

Rant over!

Comments

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

the appropriate attitude for the artist is surrender ... let the world speak for itself

Problem there is that I'm part of the world. There is no such thing as a candid photo.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Not sure why this constitutes a problem? Surrender doesn't mean that you aren't also representing yourself. It means that you aren't placing yourself in opposition to the subject of the photograph and forcing the subject to conform.

FWIW I would say your photography is completely successful in this regard.

[paulintoronto.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. The linked exchange got me riled up too.

D'Agata sounds like a pompous asshole who works sloppily and then becomes condescending and nasty when he is called out on it.

I'm enough of a post-modernist to accept that "truth" is not a simple concept, but it is precisely because assertions of truth are so assailable that I think (like you, although perhaps for a different reason) that it is important to get right the things that can be gotten right. Especially in a text that purports to be non-fiction, one needs to have confidence that the details are accurate so that one can be confident that the conclusions one draws are justifiable.

If a writer has to lie about where someone comes from to maintain the idea that Vegas is a city of tranisents, it seems to me that he should find a new subject to interview or refine his understanding of the city, for example.

I've just been teaching Book Ten of Plato's Republic to my philosophy class, and I have to say that behaviour like D'Agata's inclines me to agree with Plato that society would be a lot better off if representations were outlawed.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Service top at your, um, service?

I think it's a continuum, and your complaint with D'A (which I'd agree with) is actually that he's not trying hard enough to represent things as he experienced them. Not that there's an absolute that must be reached, but that it would have been relatively easy for him to put a little more effort into it.

Oh and also he's being an asshole to his intern.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I'm enough of a post-modernist to accept that "truth" is not a simple concept

What postmodernism is attacking is not really statements of the form "the thermometer reads seventy degrees", but rather ones of the form "the temperature of the room is seventy degrees". Both are what I like to call "violent abstractions", but the former is much closer to nature than the latter, and is what should be recorded. Whether it is The Truth is not so important as the scribe's commitment to being truthful.

it is important to get right the things that can be gotten right

Exactly. I'm preaching to the choir here...

society would be a lot better off if representations were outlawed

Now that was an interesting launching point for some further reading... sigh, I've had to impose a 9AM cutoff for this, or I'd be doing it all day...

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I would say he is trying TOO hard to represent things as he DIDN'T experience them! It's probably too late for that essay, since once you go down that path it's hard to reverse course. But in writing technical papers, I've found that once you get out of the subconscious habit of overlaying your own narrative, simply telling it like it is takes hardly any work at all. Of course it helps that I'm not the one trying to secure a grant. :-P

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

So I'm curious ... if it's OK for fiction to be superficially untrue, why is it so annoying here? Context? Pretence of objectivity?

[snousle.livejournal.com]

It's annoying because he is putting fiction into a nonfiction essay! If he wants to create a work of fiction, he should create a work of fiction.

[barbarian-rat.livejournal.com]

It's difficult for me to trust an author if he has this kind of attitude towards facts.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

Yes.

Also:

FINGAL: Unfortunately I don’t get to decide which facts are stupid; I have to check all of them.

FTW.

[come-to-think.livejournal.com]

For a more sympathetic view of this depravity, see the sf novel _Distress_ (hey, how do you guys access italics in this facility?) by Greg Egan (1995), Ch. 6. Journalists there edit videos to put words into interviewees' mouths that better express their meaning subject to time constraints.

Once upon a time I discovered experimentally that there was a limit to the size of comments, so I am breaking this one into three.

[come-to-think.livejournal.com]

The _locus classicus_ of D'Agato's attitude is an infamous pair of articles about _The New Yorker_ by Tom Wolfe in the Sunday New York _Herald Tribune_ magazine in 1965. Dwight Macdonald, who had worked for _The New Yorker_ for a while, detected some fabrications, and did a thoro fact check for his own amusement. It transpired that Wolfe had made up *all* his "facts" except for the magazine's address. Macdonald published a complete exposé in _The New York Review of Books_ (3 Feb. 1966), which unfortunately you have to pay to bring up on the Web. It should be noted that Wolfe actually called himself a journalist (a *new* -- that is, a fake -- journalist), which D'Agato, to his credit, refuses to do.

[come-to-think.livejournal.com]

Richard Feynman, in his autobiography _What Do *You* Care What Other People Think?_ (1988), describes his adventures in a Jewish Sunday school:

The actual crisis came when I was eleven or twelve. The rabbi was telling us a story about the Spanish Inquisition, in which the Jews suffered terrible tortures. He told us about a particular individual whose name was Ruth, exactly what she was supposed to have done, what the arguments were in her favor and against her -- the whole thing, as if it had all been documented by a court reporter. And I was just an innocent kid, listening to all this stuff and believing it was a true commentary, because the rabbi had never indicated otherwise.
At the end, the rabbi described how Ruth was dying in prison: "And she thought, while she was dying" -- blah, blah.
That was a shock to me. After the lesson was over, I went up to him and said, "How did they know what she thought when she was dying?"
He says, "Well, of course, in order to explain more vividly how the Jews suffered, we made up the story of Ruth. It wasn't a real individual."
That was too much for me. I felt terribly deceived: I wanted the straight story[...]so I could decide for myself what it meant. [...] I started to cry[...].
[...] I was trying to explain that I was losing everything at the moment, because I was no longer sure of the data, so to speak.[...]
[...]
I never talked to my parents about it, and I never found out whether the rabbi communicated with them or not, but my parents never made me go again. And it was just before I was supposed to be confirmed as a believer.

I am sure Prof. Feynman appreciated the delicious irony of that last remark.

I believe that little Dick had the right attitude -- intellectually right, emotionally right, morally right. And as for Mr D'Agata, I would rather be beaten up than shake his hand, and I would rather go to prison than do his job.