Critics as Makers of Works of Art (Contra Colin Burrow)

Colin Burrow, in his absorbing review of Christopher Ricks’ new essay collection Along Heroic Lines (London Review of Books, October 7, 2021), says, “Critics see things, but do not make things.” Really? Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman isn’t made? T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death isn’t made? Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment isn’t made? Howard Moss’s The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust isn’t made? Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue isn’t made? Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida isn’t made? I could keep going, but I think I’ve made my point. There are works of criticism that are as much works of art as the subjects they consider. It’s time to drop the condescension and recognize them as such.  

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. 

Movies and the Matter of Fact: Denby v. Lane

Does dramatic development trump fidelity to fact? David Denby has addressed this issue at least twice. The first time he appears to say yes it does; the second time – no it doesn’t. In his review of David Fincher’s The Social Network, he writes,

A debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun: Doesn’t the actual Zuckerberg have a girlfriend? Is it fair to portray him as arrogant and isolated? And so on. But Fincher and Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created an irresistibly entertaining work of art that’s definitely suggestive of the way personal relations are evolving – or devolving – in the Internet Age. Spiritual accuracy, not literal accuracy, is what matters, and that kind of accuracy can be created only by artists. The Zuckerberg of the movie is the Zuckerberg who matters to us because he’s become part of us. [“David Fincher and The Social Network,” Do The Movies Have a Future? (2012)]

Spiritual accuracy, not literal accuracy, is what matters – this contrasts with what Denby says, in this week’s New Yorker, about Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty:

Yet, in attempting to show, in a mainstream movie, the reprehensibility of torture, and what was done in our name, the filmmakers seem to have conflated events, and in this they have generated a sore controversy: the chairs of two Senate committees have said that the information used to find bin Laden was not uncovered through waterboarding. Do such scenes hurt the movie? Not as art; they are expertly done, without flinching from the horror of the acts and without exploitation. But they damage the movie as an alleged authentic account. Bigelow and Boal—the team behind “The Hurt Locker”—want to claim the authority of fact and the freedom of fiction at the same time, and the contradiction mars an ambitious project. [“Dead Reckoning,” The New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2012]

Denby’s appreciation of the importance of factual accuracy appears to be evolving. He now seems to be saying that “literal accuracy” does matter where the movie is claiming “the authority of fact.” I agree. The crucial question is that of the terms on which the movie offers itself. Christopher Ricks, in his “Literature and the Matter of Fact” (Essays in Appreciation, 1996), says, “The difference between Crime and Punishment and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is not that the latter is based upon a murder which happened but that it proffers itself as a record of a murder which happened.” Zero Dark Thirty proffers itself as an account of the C.I.A.’s hunt for Osama bin Laden. By proffering factuality, it enters into an obligation to be factually accurate.

In my view, Ben Affleck’s Argo, is similarly damaged. It proffers itself as a true story of the C.I.A.’s 1980 rescue of six Americans from Tehran. Yet, as Anthony Lane points out in his review of Argo, the climactic airport scenes are fabricated:

If you visit the C.I.A. Web site, you can read Mendez’s account of events in January, 1980. “As smooth as silk,” he calls the hostages’ passage through the airport, whereas Affleck, chopping up the action and spinning it out, insures that no nails remain unchewed. This is absolutely his right as a teller of tales, and “Argo” never claims to be a documentary. [“Film Within a Film,” The New Yorker, October 15, 2012]

Lane’s view that the tale-teller has a right to distort the real-life event that he purports to represent in order to tell a good story must be considered in conjunction with Denby’s opinion, as expressed in “Dead Reckoning,” that such distortions “damage the movie as an alleged authentic account.” My own view is that historical events such as the killing of bin Laden and the rescue of the six Americans in Tehran happened one way and one way only. It’s only their meaning that’s open to interpretation.

Credit: The above artwork is by Concepción Studios; it appears in The New Yorker (December 24 & 31, 2012) as an illustration for David Denby's "Dead Reckoning."