Over at The Utne Reader, Keith Goetzman asks a question originally posed by John D’Agata, “Do we read (nonfiction) to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?”
Goetzman said the question ate at him most while reading D’Agata’s recent essay in The Believer about a teenage suicide in Las Vegas. “I was immediately drawn in by D’Agata’s deft, artful writing, and yet as the tale unfolded I was stopped cold at several junctures, mostly because as a journalist I had certain expectations about what I perceived as, first and foremost, a piece of journalism.”
The article in The Believer is journalistic. The first part of the story is written in an authoritative voice, complete with lots of statistics, but very quickly, it becomes a piece of memoir, too, and one, as Goetzman points out, that gets a little sloppy ethically. He doesn’t make the time frame clear, for apparently no reason. He hires a private detective to do his research and describes her in a bit of a stereotypical way. The list goes on.
Says Goetzman: “I for one hope we remember that some subjects, like a teenager’s suicide, seem to demand a deep and abiding respect for facts and clarity. At first impression D’Agata appears to be honoring the memory of Levi Presley by speaking the unspeakable—yet by the story’s end, at least to this reader, he appears to have done just the opposite.”
It seems to me the problem is that writing personal memoir about someone else’s tragedy is a dangerous, dangerous game. It’s not impossible, but you have to put empathy for the victims and those that surround them above all else, and playing loose with that, whether it manifests artistically or factually, is what can get you in trouble.
8 responses
It’s a dangerous game if you write about yourself, too, evidently, and perhaps especially if there is no explicit tragedy involved. See The Rumpus review of Rooney’s For You For You I Am Trilling These Songs.
There’s also a danger in writing about books that you’re not familiar with. D’Agata isn’t writing memoir, he isn’t writing journalism, he’s writing nonfiction essay that is exploring how fact is misleading, and how by playing with it we can shatter its supposed permanence and reliability. His piece in the Believer was a part of that, as is the book it’s drawn from. There’s more empathy and urgency in that task than reporting a suicide as newsworthy. What are we to do with that story? Gawk?
Set aside that I’m disturbed by the idea of reporting a suicide isn’t either urgent or empathetic. That diminishes that part of the endeavor short. There is a place for hard journalism, certainly?
There’s also a place for essaying and speculation. What needs to be sussed out, and I’ve read The Believer piece and not the whole book, is getting the facts and full disclosure and ethics correct before the (un)reliability argument rubber hits hermeneutic highway. Making fun of a lowly private dick with classist humor, for example, while paying same to do one’s reporting doesn’t amp up the empathy for this piece’s writer and undercuts the piece besides. In other areas, external facts, no matter how one might feel about them, needs to well-researched and put out there–it’s called defining one’s terms–before one negate, speculate upon, play with, and debunk. It’s no fun to play with a Google-able truth that isn’t defined in the first place.
Part of what’s the problem in writing about this type of nonfiction is that reviewers realize that what they have on their hands is a real live, unsurrogated (Gornick’s term) narrator, one they get to play ad hominem don’t-pile-on-the-rabbit games on all day long. It’s a made bed many nonfictionists lie in.
Gladys, Thanks for the comment, but I feel like I need to stand up a little here, though I’m not sure if its for myself or Goetzman. I did read the Believer article, and I’m very familiar with D’Agata’s project, though you got me on one thing: I haven’t read every word of this book, but I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the Believer article. I don’t know for Goetzman. All I’m saying, and I speak for myself here, is that sometimes I wonder if it might be more effective to just tell the kid’s story “honestly and artistically” than to make a postmodern point that has been made a few times before. I’m not asking for a boring, just-the-facts journalistic story. But when I was reading it, the kid’s story is what I cared about. Not D’Agata’s reaction to the whole thing. Or the nature of fact and truth.
Lying in my nonfictionist’s bed, on top of the nails, I guess, after spending two hours with the Papers of Benjamin Franklin, in my seemingly endless quest to tell the stories of the slaves he affected in some way, I’m almost feeling sorry for myself after reading these scathing comments. OW!!
I guess, Seth, that I think an honest and artistic reporting of suicide is really more exploitative than using the suicide (with the parents’ full cooperation) as a way to talk about a larger, more pervasive sadness. That’s news. One kid dying is a tragedy for his family and his community, as news it’s sensational. I say this as someone who has serious ethical and artistic problems with even the idea of metaphor. I guess we read the piece differently — I don’t see it as postmodern, or about the author’s feelings, and I’d be grossed out if he were using Levi’s death and the serious, private nature of that loss to, what? Let other people feel sad about a dead 16-year-old? What purpose does that serve? As for Nester, I think he’s a decade or so at least behind the curve when it comes to nonfiction. There is a place for hard journalism, but it’s not in the essay as art. That’s a different beast.
Let’s try this another way.
It’s a false dilemma in the first place, Gladys, to think of an essay as the agent by which we ‘receive information’ *or* ‘experiencing art’ and not somewhere in between; from its inception, not just in the last 10 years, the essay has negotiated between “philosophical legitimacy” and “belletristic ancestry” (Kauffman). The debate will never be settled, and that’s why the essay draws from so much power.
To say an essay is just art, and is not about a “specific object” (Good), makes it something other than an essay entirely. In this case, D’Agata’s “specific object” was this young person’s suicide, and at issue is whether the essayist did his due diligence in getting the facts of this subject/object straight. Put another way, did the essayist get the “objective/factual” part of the the essay’s “three-poled frame of reference” (Huxley: http://a.aaaarg.org/text/8431/preface-collected-essays) correct before going onto the “abstract-universal” and “personal-autobiographical” parts.
I appreciate the Adorno point of view, of “nothing can be interpreted out of a work without at the same time being interpreted into it.” I am not saying the essayist doesn’t think of art first, facts second when writing. I myself have been taken to task and taken many for the team for saying we are addicted to veracity in our nonfiction. But since when does an essayist get to outsource and pay for reporting, Nick Broomfield-style, and still get to cloak himself with this arts artis gratia argument? Is it in the last ten years?
I don’t think so. In the last ten years, we’ve had some superb worls–Joan Didion, D.J. Waldie, Goldbath, fricking Chuck Klosterman–that have accomplished the balance of both fact/work/object/information as well as art/philosophy, research and reverie, at the expense of neither.
If we looked to the essay for just art, then we’re looking at the prospect of a subject-less essay. To suggest the D’Agata essay is subject-less is even more damning of an assessment than what the Utne Reader writer brought up.
Sorry for the typos as usual.
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