Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Memoirs and Consequences
Another day, another literary hoax. There's something simultaneously unsurprising and interesting about the typical locus of this increasingly common form of fakery, which I'll call the tribulation memoir. The pattern is beginning to calcify into its own genre, with its own conventions:- Americans write about drug addiction; Europeans about the Holocaust. The explanation for this seems to lie in an equivalence between the two, but, of course, there are differences. World War II and the Holocaust were a narrower period of climatic change, an abrupt upheaval, an earthquake. Drug addiction/regulation is erosive, a stream slowly eating away the bricks, a common experience only by virtue of the fact that it occurs in many families and many places. Both appeal broadly, but differently.
- The unmasking of the hoaxer occurs in the paper of record, but not necessarily by the paper of record (it's usually accompanied by some favorable excerpt from the book review, as if to preempt the bloggers who will--make no mistake about it--dig this out of the archives within an hour or two. It says, "Look, we know we were wrong about this. We're all human. We were fooled, too.")
- The hoaxer provides a minimum of three reasons: one socially altruistic ("I did it for the voiceless, those suffering from addiction, those who can't tell their own stories, etc.", "It's the same book, whether it's truth or fiction," and, finally, the selfish one, "Perhaps I did it to get published."
- The editor and publisher rush to assure us all that they were victims, too.
- The reportage always opens with a short summary of the book, followed by the second paragraph punchline, "But none of it was true!"
The tribulation memoir plays a variation on this theme. The hoaxers make a decent argument: why are their books less worthy as fiction than as non-fiction? Ultimately, in asking this, they misunderstand what their audiences seek in reading about descent into addiction, madness, the bowels of the Los Angeles County Child Protective Services, etc. The memoir is a way to circumvent the suspension of disbelief compact, to get a hit of artfulness without the subsequent crash when you realize afterwards, in the cold hard light, that it was all made up. Memoirs are broadly novelistic--and often analyzed as novels--in the sense that they attach themes to otherwise random occurrences, but without the niggling sense of having wasted all of that time and caring on people who don't actually exist. The standards for style can be lower because the style is not, in fact, the point. The point is the suffering and redemption, underlined by a Law and Order-like declaration that this happened to real people (perhaps continues to happen to real people, in the American manifestation of the genre). Of course, no memoir is ever absolutely truthful--any piece of writing is someone's approximation and stylization of reality--but unmasking the outright hoaxes is a kind of affirmation of the memoir genre itself. It reminds us of the differences between stylization and lying, and it should remind us that even non-fiction is a compact between reader and writer. Changing a name or a place or adding an overarching theme to a life that really just is a series of random events involves an acceptable suspension of disbelief; creating an entirely different childhood for yourself to secure a publishing contract is not.
Labels: fakes
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