September 13, 2021 Issue

In this week’s issue, Ruth Franklin, reviewing Benjamin Labatut’s novel When We Cease to Understand the World, writes about the blurring of the line between fact and fiction. She says,

There is liberation in the vision of fiction’s capabilities that emerges here—the sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men. But there is also something questionable, even nightmarish, about it. If fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to find language for those things we know to be true? In the era of fake news, more and more people feel entitled to “make our own reality,” as Karl Rove put it. In the current American political climate, even scientific fact—the very material with which Labatut spins his web—is subject to grossly counter-rational denial. Is it responsible for a fiction writer, or a writer of history, to pay so little attention to the line between the two? [“Into the Void”]

Franklin is right to raise these questions. Does a work of fiction have any obligation to be factually accurate? The stock answer is that in the domain of fiction, artistic license prevails, anything goes, no matter how distorted it may be. But there’s another view. Christopher Ricks, in his absorbing “Literature and the Matter of Fact” (included in his 1996 collection Essays In Appreciation), argues, 

A writer’s responsibility might be put like this: you can’t both lean upon historical or other fact (this being not only permissible but indispensable to many kinds of literary achievement) and at the same time kick it away from under you. You can’t get mileage from the matter of fact and then refuse to pay the fare.

As an example of what he means, he refers to Tennyson’s worry that the figure of six hundred that he used in his “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (“Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward, / All in the Valley of Death / Rode the six hundred”) might be inaccurate. Such was his concern that he asked the editor of the paper in which the poem was to appear to put a note at the bottom citing the 607 horsemen mentioned in another newspaper. Ricks comments:

But what is admirable in Tennyson – and it fortifies the honour of this poem which honours the brave mis-commanded soldiers – is the awareness that the slope is slippery. For if we were to start messing with the actual figures, and to say that it really doesn’t matter exactly how many soldiers there were in the Charge of the Light Brigade, where would we stop? Seven hundred is all right, say; so would it be all right if in fact the British had had 50,000 men, up against a few Russian old-age pensioners armed only with pitchforks? For at some point the realities of the engagement would simply be left behind and disgraced. And Tennyson, let us remember, did not write a poem which comes before us saying, Let us imagine an act of doomed absurd military prowess; he wrote about the meaning of such an act as had just been witnessed by the world. It would have been a derogation from the Brigade’s courage to have done anything other than contemplate, with imagination, the very facts.

For at some point the realities of the engagement would simply be left behind and disgraced – that, to me, is the risk that novelists run when they mess with the facts.