February 9th, 2006
Banville’s The Sea not entirely fictional…
I don’t know whether it’s because of the James Frey/literary fakers post or because I’m a John Banville fan, but writer Kenneth J. Harvey emailed me his wry take on Banville’s Booker winnerThe Sea. It appeared in last Saturday’s (UK) Times and ponders whether “too much fact in Banville’s book raises questions about its authenticity as fiction”. It’s a humourous observation on the literary fact versus fiction debate and an antidote to the Frey debacle - or are we over that already?
February 9th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
We’ll never get over Frey; but surely the issue is that he presented his fiction as fact not vice versa. Semi-autobiographical writing, of course, constitutes a very significant proportion of what we have come to view as great literature; especially in the last 100 years and especially since modernism, post-modernism and the subjective exploration of “truth”; arguing from the particular to the universal, if you like.
The term “novel” contains multitudes anyway, so Harvey makes a good absurdist point. Case in point, McGahern’s Memoir is not least a great novel.
Facts may have to be fitted together a certain way to arrive at a philosophical truth which would otherwise not have been so obvious or telling; novelisation (er, not in the blockbuster movie to text sense) provides the writer of talent with the latitude he or she needs to engage in this exercise with his or her subjective experience while excluding his or her liability for criticism based on a more pedantic reading of a real-life narrative. Or something.
February 11th, 2006 at 12:24 am
Surely Frey’s sin was false advertising. Apparently, he originally submitted it (and had it rejected) as a work of fiction. If Oprah hadn’t been instrumental in kickstarting its sales, there would have been relatively little bruhaha about the whole thing. At the end of the day, should whether it’s fiction or fact determine the work’s literary value?
His publishers are now preparing themselves for lawsuits from readers who are going to seek compensation for time lost reading what they thought was a memoir!!!!
The veracity of Laurie Lee’s tales of his adventures during Spain’s civil war (As I Walked Out One Sunny Morning, I think is the name of that part of the trilogy) is also contested but that’s seen by nobody as anything more than a literary spat.
February 11th, 2006 at 10:47 am
I agree, if I enjoy a book, its veracity being questioned wouldn’t bother me.
A case in point is JT Leroy’s Sarah, which was recently revealed as being penned by a 40 year old woman, not by an ex-prostitute guy with HIV. I read it for bookclub last year and loved it - it’s a rollicking nightmare cartoon- and the author’s real identity being revealed hasn’t changed my view of the book.
February 12th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
A very interesting and challenging example of the phenomenon of the literary fake was the book of short-stories purporting to be by a young asian woman but in reality written by an English vicar published by women’s press Virago.
Theodore Dalrymple (not everyone’s cup of tea admittedly) writes about it here -
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/may05/dalrymple.htm
I remember reading about the fake Aussie poet, Ern Malley, invented by two real poets to “expose” the modern poetic forms fashionable among their contemporaries. According to Clive James the fake was a failure, because the work of Ern Malley stands up to scrutiny as good poetry. So the chaps succeeded merely in proving that good work was possible in the forms they had set out to denigrate.
The fake like any other work has to be judged by its literary quality. By all accounts, that’s the hurdle at which Frey falls, whether presenting fact or fiction. Literary writing certainly doesn’t have to be fictional viz memoirs (McGahern, Robert Graves) and travel writing (Jonathan Raban, Norman Lewis) which work hard to reveal something of the human condition. I call it the “human condition” test.