The following essay was written in response to the prompt:
Compare John D’Agata’s approach in Lifespan of a Fact with Tim O’Brien’s approach in “How
to Tell a True War Story” (and/or “Good Form”). How do you feel about artistic license in both
cases? Where do we draw the line regarding how much license we will accept and what are the
factors involved in this decision? Explain your reasoning as you analyze the two texts and
address why this is important.
Lifespan of a Fact
with Tim O’Brien’s approach in “How
to Tell a True War Story”
(and/or “Good Form”). How do you feel about artistic license in both
cases? Where do we draw the line regarding how much license we will accept and what are the
factors involved in this decision? Explain your reasoning as you analyze the two texts and
address why this is important.
When writing stories relating to what Berger and Luckmann call the paramount reality (“The Social Construction of Reality” p 25), even if only for publishing categorization, authors
must decide how much artistic license they will use. In my opinion, the line of acceptance is drawn
between these genres. That is, if someone publishes a book, an essay, or anything between, within,
or without that is labeled “fiction”, I would expect it to be a work of their imagination that has
only the possibility of incorporating real-world scientific facts, historical events, people, and
situations; if that person publishes a book, an essay, or anything between, within, or without
labeled “nonfiction”, I would expect it to be based upon facts and real-world, documented events—
not rife with misquotes and blatant fabrications. (Granted, “based upon” seems to present yet
another dimension of the never-ending mental exercises that are writing and interpretation, but I’m
going to spare a rather unnecessary tangent regarding the inefficacy of our language here and
simply say this: Facts and real-world, documented events are corroborated by producible
documents, photographs, unedited videos, and/or reproducible, falsifiable experimental evidence.)
That’s not to say that in nonfiction, thoughtful, meaningful extrapolations cannot be made based
upon presently available information. Instead, in doing so, integrity advises the use of a reasonable
amount of discretion regarding the injection of unverifiable personal opinion and anecdote in
something labeled nonfiction and requisites explicit statement of the use of such.
Having drawn the line of artistic freedom in the previous paragraph, in The Lifespan of a Fact, author John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal go head-to-head in a no-holds-barred battle
of wits while trying to flesh out the defining attributes of fiction and nonfiction. Well, I suppose
that’s not entirely accurate. Perhaps a better way to put it would be this: D’Agata wrote an essay—
I stress this because he makes abundantly clear his reasoning for such self-permissive licensing by
calling himself an “essayist” (p 53)—Fingal fact-checked it, and then proceeded to utterly destroy
D’Agata by pointing out one factual discrepancy after another—names of bars (p 16), made up
“facts” (p 85), and made up stories (p 91), among many others. In other words, D’Agata appears
to have taken unwarranted artistic freedom. So Fingal’s analysis was meticulous—shouldn’t
D’Agata have been meticulous in accurately relaying his research knowing that this was going to
be published as nonfiction? I think so. Frankly, if someone, D’Agata in this case, gets factual
accuracy called into question from the very first sentence (p 15) of their book or essay or whatever
they would like to call the words they’ve pieced together under the future categorical term
nonfiction and then proceeds to offer endless rationalizations and smartass remarks in response,
it’s not only disingenuous, after a while it’s just childish and petty. Certainly entertaining, as this
is one of the most interesting titles I now own, it’s still a bit petty for D’Agata to be so hand-wavy
with what he calls “facts”.
In contrast, author Tim O’Brien, writing in the excerpt “Good Form” from his book TheThings They Carried, takes a very different approach. First, the book itself, and hence the excerpt,
is overtly labeled fiction. Despite being written in first-person narrative style, I know that, while
there may be demonstrably nonfictional elements, the story certainly is not entirely true. But, that’s
okay because I know this from the outset—it’s literary fiction. Second, O’Brien makes a distinction
between “happening-truth”, i.e. what happened in a nonfictional sense, and “story-truth”, i.e. waxing eloquent. Regarding story-truth, he says, “I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach
faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again” (p 172).
The importance of this distinction is captured in the interactional anecdote with one of his
daughters in the last three lines: ‘“Daddy, tell the truth,” Kathleen can say, “did you ever kill
anybody?” And I can say, honestly, “Of course not.” Or I can say, honestly, “Yes.”’ (p 172).
The thing that makes fictional (story) truths so appealing is that they allow us to create a
world in which we can think and say and believe and do and be whatever we want. It’s just when
fictional truths spill over into our mutually experienced reality—the paramount reality—without
the outright fictional distinction, manifesting in book signing deals through the egregious, willful
manipulation of public opinion and funds, our society becomes more and more disjointed and
idiotic—debunked myth and baseless opinion taking precedence over reproducible, experimental
fact. I’m not the PC police. In fact, I think that is one of the most annoying trends of the past few
years: Everyone getting offended by every little thing. I personally feel that almost no sort of
speech is off-limits—save very few examples of what can be termed social-violence-inciting
speech. (I tried being straightforward in my meaning without having to navigate an entirely new
set of explanations for what that type of speech is and what intent means. I’ll assume that you
understand.) The beautiful thing about free speech is that I can say things that are offensive and,
well, who gives a shit? Being offended is the most useless thing that a human can be. I bring up
this point to clarify that taking the “no limit” approach to artistic freedom isn’t something I’m
“offended” by. Rather, I feel that the “no limit” approach and shirking labels because someone
thinks of themselves as “an artist that shouldn’t be constrained by those labels” not only perform
a disservice to the general public that have the indisputable honor and privilege of reading such
glorious literary tours de force but also reek of shameless, unfettered hipster narcissism.
