[Quick summary for those who've never heard of LeRoy (as I hadn't) and who are too lazy to travel to link.... Or not; this shit's so complex; please travel to link and read and come back.]
And it's all so crazy, right? It's all so crazy and complex. I can't hold any of it in my mind, I can barely understand the first steps of these messes, and I know there are endlessly more. Layers inside layers. An enigma wrapped inside of Churchill's belly. Being made all the more complex by my having to now stand behind that rash call to arms of three months ago. To refresh everyone's memory:
What if we write non-fiction that's fictional? No I'm serious. This is kind of like my earlier post, the one about adding fiction to this world, little lies, small sparkles that aren't true.So yeah--there's that.
.... Give them non-fiction, yeah, but make the shit up.
But what did I mean by that? Oh fuck I meant, in so many words, in four to be exact, A Million Little Pieces. But why do I not mean that now, and why does it feel like there's no way I could have meant it then? And why do I think what Frey did was wrong, and why am I uncomfortable, right now, with saying that?
His book had meaning, it meant something to me and it meant something to millions.
He lied.
How do I reconcile the two? How do we all?
On the one hand, it's so simple and it goes like this: The whole reason we are here to write--or the whole reason I am, and the whole reason I hope we all are--is to tell the truth, there is no point in writing if we are not revealing what we know to be true. This is why I don't read things that help me "get away," because "away" is not where I want to be, "away" is not at all where I want to be, I want to see things and help people and help people to see things. And if these things are true, and if what James Frey wrote is not, then no matter how much good his book effected, and no matter how much people may have been helped, he lied, and so he did not tell the truth, and so he did not effect good. His readers were lied to. His readers were disrespected.
But then there's this, from a December article on LeRoy in the Chronicle:
[Paul] Greenberg called the LeRoy debate a symptom of celebrity culture. "Celebrity has become a way of moving up to a higher class. Lesser writers, lesser artists are going to their real experience and to their memories just to promote their social ambitions."
...
Either way, Berkeley critic and author Greil Marcus sees something insidious behind the debate.
"What it all signifies to me is a deepening mistrust of the imagination, or the driving out of fiction by nonfiction," Marcus wrote in an e-mail this week.
"People will read fiction about a gender-confused teenage or preteen parking-lot hustler -- but only if they can believe that what they are reading is true. Then they can celebrate the person as an artist while avoiding having to actually engage with art."
A "driving out of fiction by nonfiction"--this is exactly what jesmimi was talking about in November. But I want to move past that and get to this: "Then they can celebrate the person as an artist while avoiding having to actually engage with the art." To wit, if people picked up AMLP and read the first few pages as a novel, as fiction, why, in this cultural milieu, would it have been so much less compelling? I'm culpable in this, too--I'll cop to that, I have to, I read it (the first several pages) in a store in Berkeley two summers ago and was transfixed--I can't at all guarantee that I would have bought it were it registered as fiction; I was riveted because it was memoir, because it was true. Because I could say to myself, every time I turned the page, This happened, this happened to someone, this happened.
But why is this? Of what is this a sign? Earlier in the article, there was a mention of a post-9/11 turn to reality, that somehow the incident--or perhaps the fallout--or what have you--somehow called for "the verity of non-fiction," in some fashion created "a tremendous thirst for authenticity." Leaving aside metaphysical inquries into the derivation of this feeling--viz., could this not just as easily have led to an avoidance of reality, a burrowing in, and away?--its existence can't be denied: jesmimi pointed to it this fall, Frey enacted it three years ago, and we all know how reality ('reality') TV has exploded in the past 5 years....
Oh, man, this fuckin post is everywhere, all over the place and of course it's also nowhere. But I'm gonna post it because I think there's at least something to wrestle with, and I'd love it if you all would take up the baton, even for just a few steps. This all is really blowing my mind, and I probably should have sat down for a minute before writing, probably should have laid down. So that's just what I'll do right now, and write more, maybe, in my morning.
4 comments:
I'll answer myself a little. Because I want to talk about this:
"People will read fiction about a gender-confused teenage or preteen parking-lot hustler -- but only if they can believe that what they are reading is true. Then they can celebrate the person as an artist while avoiding having to actually engage with art."
For those of you who have read neither AMLP nor the recent spate of articles in/re: same, one of the climactic scenes in it is when Frey is rushing to Chicago reunite with Lily, his rehab, crack-whore (no joke) girlfriend after serving three months in an Ohio prison. They have been speaking frequently by phone, and just the night before his release, her grandmother--personal savior, only contact in the real world, only family--finally died, and so Lily now is distraught, on the verge/edge. He arrives in Chicago...several hours too late--she has hung herself, she is hanging in the shower.
Now, I bring this up because I think it a perfect example of what can work in non-fiction, and what can't work in fiction. If I had read that in a novel, my reaction would have been something like, Oh please, or, This is ridiculous, or, [sound of book being thrown across the room]. But because this was non-fiction, because I was reading it as something that was real, something that had happened, I did not throw the book across the room, groaned only in sorrow, in pity. That is, because it was non-fiction--true--I said to myself, It is what it is, accepted it, and moved on.
This gets back to that 9/ll remark that came in the article I excerpted above. Something about people wanting non-fiction in response to it, something about people wanting true stories. I don't know that the author ever expounded upon this remark--or if he did I've forgotten what s/he said--but the idea that comes to me is that in the wake of the attacks this country faced a crossroads: think about what it means that people want to inflict this kind of harm on our people, question why people would want to do this, or turn away, or say, to ourselves or out loud, It is what it is.
I know that this whole reality TV/memoir mania was already at least half in vogue before the terrorist attacks happened--A Heartbreaking Work came out in '98 or '99, and of course Survivor and its ilk were spawned in 2000--but still I think it interesting to consider that the fall of 2001 gave a shot in the arm to this social phenomenon. Faced with such horror and such hard truths, and with a president and an administration that was actively reactionary and anti-contemplative, many aspects of our society turned away from everything that could make us wrestle with intention, anything that would make us ask, Well, but why did this happen?
And so, Lily hangs in that shower stall, twisting and twisting, and instead of dealing with this on anything like an intellectual level--well, wasn't that convenient, Mr. Formerly-drug-addled Narrator, and now you don't have to deal with this mess after jail...--there is no disappointment, there is no questioning, there is no doubt, there is only credulity, warm, soft credulity....
I'm so much more fascinated by the JT LeRoy thing because it's just so wonderfully fabricated, so orchestrated and bizarrely arranged, such a media stunt. And, as his/her book was marketed as fiction; it was the potential appeal of equating the author with the character that made things so exciting, right? which is perhaps why we like memoirs, or blogs, this urge of voyeurism. but it doesn't bother me on an ethical level as much, just because the whole thing was just so incredibly bizarre. I remember some time, perhaps this summer, when "LeRoy" allegedly made his first appearance in a horrible blond wig and sunglasses (though I'm still unclear who was playing him at the time, the daughter of the real author? the daughter of the author dressing as a man in drag? its so bizarre and convoluted that I can't even keep my facts straight), and it caused this whole media frenzy. Yes, it's deceptive, but in such a circus way that I can just marvel at its complexity and the time it took to come up with such a scheme.
But Frey, just the audacity to say that people make up much of their memoirs, and Oprah's and his publisher's comment about "emotional truth." Emotional truth is writing "He told me to Fuck Off" when perhaps he really told you to get lost, or screw yourself, but you're not totaly sure of the exact words so you capture them in an artful, honest way, or you say you were wearing your favorite jeans and blue wool sweater when it might have very well been the green one or the red one. But being in prison for a few hours versus 90 days in which you befriend a blind inmate and read to him? I mean, this shit is priceless. And to say this is emotional truth? Man, that's FICTION. Fiction! Not memoir! And Frey intended it to be, except it WOULDN'T SELL as a novel, and perhaps if we had read this shit as a novel, we'd react like you did, you people: i.e., "Oh, Come On!" (I haven't read the book).
What is also interesting to me is that it seems that writers are the ones so angered by this whole thing, while the publishers and Oprah (I do love Oprah and all she's done for books, so I'm not bashing her here, per se, but I do think perhaps she could have come up with some better comments on the matter; perhaps the Franzen debacle from years back just has made her reticent to get too involved?)
And I did notice on Publisher's Lunch that Frey, if that indeed is his name, has sold another book, a novel this time. Sigh.
Well here are some things. Because on the one hand Frey and Orwell would seem to have much in common, at least in so far as these two pieces are concerned, but on the other hand they would seem to have little in common, though I'm not sure what's concerned there.
But first let's get this out of the way: we can be pretty well assured that whatever force money played in Orwell's decision-making process to both write and publish this essay/story, it was minimal (both force played and money considered) compared to Frey's. So there's that.
And also there's this: as far as the merits of these two works, and how they could and/or should be read differently depending on the genre, I don't think that Orwell's is nearly so greatly effected, if it is effected at all, as is Frey's. I'll let stand my comments above about this issue in AMLP, and for comparison I'll merely state that there seemed to be no turns of events, no narrative flourishes or rhetorical gestures, in Orwell's work that would be unsustainable or insufferable if it were a piece of fiction. Now, this all must be taken with the grain of salt that is the two hundred fewer pages of Orwell's essay to Frey's memoir, but then--well, Exactly, I'd like to say, Orwell only saw fit to write an essay about it, and perhaps would have been squeamish about writing an entire memoir on elephant hunting, if you catch my drift....
Still though--and not just so that this isn't a strictly Frey-bashing exercise--a lie is a lie, and we should all be very much aware of what we compromise when we compromise it. Because if Orwell lied there, how are we to ever again trust him entirely? How can he ever again write an essay that we, as readers who count on writers to report back from their travels in the world, as readers who count on writers to see the world, and process it and come back to us with their observations--as engagers in this discourse that must be impoverished by any half-truth, and all innuendo--would take seriously, would believe him at his word? And if we don't believe him, then what is it worth...?
So call me a stickler, but if Orwell lied then he's only so much better than Frey--better for sure, but only so much better. I mean, he didn't do it for the money, and he didn't do it for fame, and he almost certainly did it to speak a truth...but there's the rub, now isn't it?
I'm just gonna sneak this in here, where maybe no one will notice, but that last story on n+1= what the fuck?
As in, it's bad, abstruse, facile, and, dare I say, yes I'll say, childishly banal. It's stupid, it's idiotic, and if they keep on publishing shit like that it will be their demise--as in, I can actually picture them full of themselves thinking how clever and winning and fullofimport it is. In their Brooklyn fucking two-bedroom.
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