Sunday, February 05, 2006
Not Another Headline Pun on Frey
Of course he duped those of you who bought his book and believed him. Of course Oprah was wrong to at first defend him. Of course his detractors should be angry. What’s most interesting to me about the Frey controversy is what it reveals about the contemporary fetish for tell-all nonfiction. According to the Smoking Gun Web site’s expose, Frey had originally tried to publish his manuscript as fiction and failed. It wasn’t until he "recrafted" it as a memoir that he was able to get it published, and undoubtedly, its nonfiction status clinched Oprah’s endorsement. It’s possible that he could not publish it as fiction because its strengths as a story and his skill as a writer were both lacking. Which means that publishers rather sell and readers rather consume a badly written "true" account than a well-written fiction. What a shame.
It’s interesting, too, to see Frey’s loyal readers say they do not care that he lied. And oh, how he lied. We’re not talking about mere writerly embellishments here; we’re talking about a privileged, inebriated frat boy passing himself off as a True Criminal and Bad Boy. He does a disservice to those who really have lived as criminals. But his readers put blinders on, and that is because they want to believe the story is true. For them, the book exhibited the verisimilitude that makes fiction the enduring art that it is. Of course, in an ironic example of art-becomes-life, Frey is now known to the world as a Criminal -- albeit a literary one.
As a teacher, I often observed in my students this same need to believe that the stories we read were true. My students almost always assumed that whatever events they were reading about had actually happened to the writer, no matter that what they read was fiction. When I gave them author interviews that attested to the difference between the story in the book and the real life of the author, students would often reject the facts; they would insist that the author was lying or downplaying the autobiographical nature of his or her text. The fact that so many cannot or will not grasp the distinction between life an art, to me, reveals a certain hostility toward imagination and creativity. Somehow, it’s a relief to readers if the events really happened. That they can handle. But to think that a human being can create an entire world on paper using mere symbols is too much for them. They reject it. They want to think the writer simply described events that had occurred. They don’t want to think that an individual imagination can conjure wholly believable worlds peopled with realistic characters.
All writers draw upon life experiences – hence the cliché, ‘write what you know.’ But life doesn’t translate to the page day-for-day, hour-for-hour. Otherwise, the great works of literature would read more like too many of the 'what I did today after brushing my teeth' blog entries on the Web. That would indeed be a shame.
It’s interesting, too, to see Frey’s loyal readers say they do not care that he lied. And oh, how he lied. We’re not talking about mere writerly embellishments here; we’re talking about a privileged, inebriated frat boy passing himself off as a True Criminal and Bad Boy. He does a disservice to those who really have lived as criminals. But his readers put blinders on, and that is because they want to believe the story is true. For them, the book exhibited the verisimilitude that makes fiction the enduring art that it is. Of course, in an ironic example of art-becomes-life, Frey is now known to the world as a Criminal -- albeit a literary one.
As a teacher, I often observed in my students this same need to believe that the stories we read were true. My students almost always assumed that whatever events they were reading about had actually happened to the writer, no matter that what they read was fiction. When I gave them author interviews that attested to the difference between the story in the book and the real life of the author, students would often reject the facts; they would insist that the author was lying or downplaying the autobiographical nature of his or her text. The fact that so many cannot or will not grasp the distinction between life an art, to me, reveals a certain hostility toward imagination and creativity. Somehow, it’s a relief to readers if the events really happened. That they can handle. But to think that a human being can create an entire world on paper using mere symbols is too much for them. They reject it. They want to think the writer simply described events that had occurred. They don’t want to think that an individual imagination can conjure wholly believable worlds peopled with realistic characters.
All writers draw upon life experiences – hence the cliché, ‘write what you know.’ But life doesn’t translate to the page day-for-day, hour-for-hour. Otherwise, the great works of literature would read more like too many of the 'what I did today after brushing my teeth' blog entries on the Web. That would indeed be a shame.
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lack of critical thinking appears to be a universal student trait thesedays. the fact that someone could make up something believable and it be strictly fiction means that the person obviously put a lot of thought into it. students seem resistant to the mere notion of deep thought. or is it we're just getting old?
I've wondered the same. But we're not THAT old; things couldn't have changed that much. When I talk to my undergrad profs, they tell me I was one of the exceptions and that the deterioration of critical thinking was something they saw in the early 90s that has only become worse.
Tim O'Brien's narrator in "How to Tell a True War Story" explains, "Someone tells a story, let's say, and, afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer." For millions of James Frey's readers, the answer mattered. By O'Brien's math, however, readers should have doubted the veracity of A Million Little Pieces from the start. Now readers from Oprah Winfrey to my students at the community college where I teach are crying foul. "Duped," they say.
Meanwhile, others are trying to make sense of the grandscale public furor. Arguments range from the political to the ethical to the literary. Here are a few questions percolating to the tops of blogs, book reviews and news shows: Why are people outraged about this but not about more egregious lies with higher stakes? Why has the publishing industry sacrificed honesty in the service of sales? Why should we, in a nihilistic culture that values "perception" above "truth," be surprised by the fictive memoir as a new development? What does this new controversy signify about Oprah’s cultural clout? Even when jumping into the infinite regress of these unanswerable questions, I can’t find a satisfactory explanation why, Oprah’s wrath notwithstanding, so many people are so very angry at one small, shy man who wrote a book with tall tales and bad prose.
Sure. No one likes to be fooled. But if it’s really about truth and lies, why aren’t people screaming in the streets every day about Diebold and Enron and WMDs? If it’s really about the mercenary nature of big publishing houses, why aren’t independent media outposts now the sudden beneficiaries of a windfall? The causal connection between nihilism and lying seems, at best, quaint. If we call for an end to the consciousness of perception and relativism, what are we asking for? Empiricism and essentialism? Haven’t decades, if not centuries, of critical thought exposed those views as even graver lies than any that could be constructed by a single human’s perception? And Oprah. Is it really about Oprah? I know that many of my students, for example, know more about Jennifer Aniston’s divorce than they do about our government, but no single item of celebrity gossip—not even Martha Stewart’s incarceration—has ever instigated their indignation to this extent. Indeed, this is only the second time in my eight years of teaching that students have brought up a current event for discussion before I could. The first time was 9/11.
My best analysis is that the outrage isn’t about truth. It isn’t about politics or publishing or the nature of perception. Anyone who’s read even a page of Frey’s book knows it sure as hell isn’t about literature, either. It isn’t even about Oprah. James Frey’s lies garner widespread and widely publicized outrage because, in Frey’s lies, we recognize ourselves. His behavior reminds us of our own insecurities. Who among us has never tried to make ourselves look better than we are, even if we haven’t done so in "memoir" form? Maybe Frey lied for the same reasons many people do: because he didn’t believe that he was good enough or interesting enough as he was. Maybe even those of us who don’t lie use other questionable tactics to try and make people like or even love us. Maybe we do favors we don’t have time to do or give money that we don’t have to give. And maybe we want to loudly punish James Frey because he reminds us of something we’d like to forget: That we all make dubious ethical choices when compensating for our own feelings of inadequacy.
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Meanwhile, others are trying to make sense of the grandscale public furor. Arguments range from the political to the ethical to the literary. Here are a few questions percolating to the tops of blogs, book reviews and news shows: Why are people outraged about this but not about more egregious lies with higher stakes? Why has the publishing industry sacrificed honesty in the service of sales? Why should we, in a nihilistic culture that values "perception" above "truth," be surprised by the fictive memoir as a new development? What does this new controversy signify about Oprah’s cultural clout? Even when jumping into the infinite regress of these unanswerable questions, I can’t find a satisfactory explanation why, Oprah’s wrath notwithstanding, so many people are so very angry at one small, shy man who wrote a book with tall tales and bad prose.
Sure. No one likes to be fooled. But if it’s really about truth and lies, why aren’t people screaming in the streets every day about Diebold and Enron and WMDs? If it’s really about the mercenary nature of big publishing houses, why aren’t independent media outposts now the sudden beneficiaries of a windfall? The causal connection between nihilism and lying seems, at best, quaint. If we call for an end to the consciousness of perception and relativism, what are we asking for? Empiricism and essentialism? Haven’t decades, if not centuries, of critical thought exposed those views as even graver lies than any that could be constructed by a single human’s perception? And Oprah. Is it really about Oprah? I know that many of my students, for example, know more about Jennifer Aniston’s divorce than they do about our government, but no single item of celebrity gossip—not even Martha Stewart’s incarceration—has ever instigated their indignation to this extent. Indeed, this is only the second time in my eight years of teaching that students have brought up a current event for discussion before I could. The first time was 9/11.
My best analysis is that the outrage isn’t about truth. It isn’t about politics or publishing or the nature of perception. Anyone who’s read even a page of Frey’s book knows it sure as hell isn’t about literature, either. It isn’t even about Oprah. James Frey’s lies garner widespread and widely publicized outrage because, in Frey’s lies, we recognize ourselves. His behavior reminds us of our own insecurities. Who among us has never tried to make ourselves look better than we are, even if we haven’t done so in "memoir" form? Maybe Frey lied for the same reasons many people do: because he didn’t believe that he was good enough or interesting enough as he was. Maybe even those of us who don’t lie use other questionable tactics to try and make people like or even love us. Maybe we do favors we don’t have time to do or give money that we don’t have to give. And maybe we want to loudly punish James Frey because he reminds us of something we’d like to forget: That we all make dubious ethical choices when compensating for our own feelings of inadequacy.
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