Fact v. Post-Fact

Photo by Victor J. Blue

Stephen Marche, in his “David Shields’s Reality Hunger in the Age of Trump; or, How to Write Now” (Los Angeles Review of Books, August 5, 2017), claims, “Nobody believes that journalists are communicating reality.” What? Nobody believes Luke Mogelson, in his extraordinary “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017), is communicating the reality of war against ISIS? Nobody believes Ben Taub, in his brilliant “We Have No Choice” (The New Yorker, April 10, 2017), is communicating the reality of the African refugee crisis? Nobody believes Danielle Allen, in her searing “American Inferno” (The New Yorker, July 24, 2017), is communicating the reality of her fifteen-year-old cousin’s descent into crime, prison, and eventual death? What are these pieces – imitations of reality? No, they’re the thing itself – life as it actually is. Marche is right to complain about writers’ “willingness to blur fact and fiction.” He calls it “profoundly willfully stupid.” But he fails to allow for the abundance of great factual reporting still being written today. His rant against “post-fact” writing is too sweeping. 

Credit: The above photo by Victor J. Blue is from Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017).       

December 19 & 26, 2011 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It’s the last issue of the year, and it’s terrific. It contains at least a half-dozen excellent pieces. The two that I’ll comment on here are Burkhard Bilger’s “The Great Oasis” and James Wood’s “Reality Effects.” Bilger consistently produces some of the magazine’s best writing. His “Towheads” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010) was one of my “Best of 2010” picks (see my December 28, 2010, post). This year, his “The Possibilian” (The New Yorker, April 25, 2011) and his “True Grits” (The New Yorker, October 31, 2011) were both tremendously interesting and enjoyable. Now we have his brilliant “The Great Oasis.” It’s about reforestation in desert lands. Among its highlights are: (1) a visit to Oman where a Dutch inventor, named Pieter Hoff, is testing an experimental tree-planting device called the Waterboxx; (2) a description of the Great Green Wall, a massive project in which “eleven African nations have agreed to erect a wall of trees across the dusty shoulders of the continent” for the purpose of halting the spread of the Sahara; (3) a trip to Burkino Faso to meet Chris Reij, an agroforestry specialist, and learn about the African Re-Greening Initiative, in which farmers are reforesting vast stretches of the Sahel; and (4) a search for “one of the last baobabs in northern Oman.” The piece is beautifully structured, beginning and ending with the search for the baobab tree. And it is artfully written. Bilger gives us interesting facts in words we can picture. Here is rainfall in the Al Hajar Mountains of northern Oman: “When the clouds burst, as they do a few times a year, the rain skitters from the slopes like oil from a griddle, gathers into rivulets and swiftly moving sheets, and tumbles into wadies that wind between the peaks.” Here is the baobab tree that Pieter Hoff was searching for: “In the deepening dusk, it looked like an apparition out of ‘The Arabian Nights’ – a fat caliph surrounded by his fan-fluttering harem.” And here’s the sound of two men praying: “Their voices came to us as a steady murmur mixed with the rustling of the leaves.” The Sahara (“the only traces of green are a few umbrella-thorn trees, Acacia tortilis, anchored to the bare rock”) and the Sahel (“the grasses were parched brittle and sere, the red soil baked hard beneath them”) are evoked with a specificity that puts us squarely there. Bilger’s details are wonderful (e.g., “The only signs of life were a few Senegalese fire finches, darting like sparks among the shea trees”). “The Great Oasis” is a marvelous piece. I enjoyed it immensely.

I kept thinking of Bilger’s writing as I read James Wood’s “Reality Effects.” What does Wood think of Bilger’s work? Does he even read it? To be frank, until I read “Reality Effects,” in this week’s issue, I suspected that Wood was blind to the merits of literary journalism. For example, in “Keeping It Real” (The New Yorker, March 15, 2010), Wood calls David Shields’ promotion of “reality” over fiction “highly problematic.” In reply to Shields’ preference for essays and memoirs rather than fiction, Wood advanced the example of Tolstoy, who, he says, “so often reproduced reality directly from life.” Wood calls Tolstoy “the great ‘reality-artist.’” I share Shields’ skepticism regarding fiction, even fiction as consummate as Tolstoy’s, as a representation of reality. Fiction is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie. I much prefer factual writing. Now, in “Reality Effects,” an admiring review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay collection Pulphead, it appears Wood is starting to see the light. He says of Sullivan’s pieces:

It is obvious enough that they are by a talented storyteller, who has learned from fiction (as well as from the essayistic tradition) on how to structure and ration his narratives. He seems to have in abundance the storyteller’s gifts: he is a fierce noticer, is undauntedly curious, is porous to gossip, and has a memory of childlike tenacity. Anecdotes fly off the wheels of his larger narratives.

The verve of that last sentence is thrilling. It would appear that what Sullivan writes falls more into the category of “personal history” than it does “fact piece.” (Last night, I dipped into Pulphead for the first time; its “Mr. Lytle: An Essay” is excellent.) This is why Wood says Sullivan’s talent “is beautifully for the real” and why he immediately qualifies this observation with “or, rather, for the real fictions that people make of the real, and which they live by.” Bilger’s art is “beautifully for the real,” too. But it doesn’t move between reality and fictionality the way Wood says the contemporary essay often does. Bilger’s writing is factual. That’s what I like about it. “Factual” is a word Wood seldom, if ever, uses. Maybe someday he’ll see its value. I find it promising that, in “Reality Effects,” he’s at least showing appreciation for something other than fiction.

March 15, 2010 Issue

I’m fascinated by the strategies that great writers use to make fictional reality appear real – sometimes so real that it appears to be, in John Updike’s memorable phrase, “the thing itself.” One such strategy, powerfully advocated by the realist critic James Wood, is free indirect style. Wood, in his How Fiction Works (2008), describes its effect: “The narrative seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character, who now seems to ‘own’ the words. The writer is free to inflect the reported thought, to bend it around the character’s own words.” Wood has long admired this style. In “What Chekhov Meant by Life” (included in Wood’s 1999 essay collection The Broken Estate), Wood says of Chekhov, “He sees the world not as a writer might see it but as one of his characters might.” In “At Home in the World” (The New Yorker, February 5, 2001), he says, “In Tolstoy’s fiction, as in Chekhov’s, reality appears as it might appear not to a writer but to the characters.” At the same time as Wood has advanced this notion of fictional reality, he has argued against (rightly, in my opinion) magical realism (see “Toni Morrison’s False Magic” in The Broken Estate), and what he aptly calls “hysterical realism,” a style of writing “not to be faulted because it lacks reality – the usual charge – but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself” (see “Hysterical Realism” in his 2004 collection The Irresponsible Self).

Now, in a piece called “Keeping It Real,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, Wood trashes “the rather lazy stock-in-trade of mainstream realist fiction,” including “such basic narrative grammar” as “the cinematic sweep, followed by the selection of small, telling details,” “the preference for the concrete over the abstract,” vivid brevity of character-sketching,” and several other mainstays of conventional fictional narrative. “Keeping It Real” is a review of two realist works: David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel, The Surrendered. Wood pans them both. He says of Shields’s book, which is an argument for realism, that, “His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken.” But he goes on to say that Shields’s “unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling “reality” over fiction, is highly problematic.” Wood provides only one extended quote from Reality Hunger, and based on my reading of it, I would have to say that it’s hard to judge whether Wood’s use of “rant” and “imprecise and overwrought” to describe the book is fair or not.

With respect to the other book under review, Lee’s The Surrendered, Wood provides only snippets of quotation. So again it’s difficult for me to form my own impression regarding the quality of its writing. Apparently it’s a far-ranging narrative (Manchuria, 1934, the Korean War, 1950, New York City, 1986, and ending with a pilgrimage to Italy). Wood says it is “utterly conventional,” “stagy, even bookish, a livid libretto.” But he also says it has many scenes that are “piercingly evoked” and that it is “spacious in design and reach.” In what are perhaps the most memorable words of the review, Wood calls The Surrendered “this slabbed magnificence.” He doesn’t say whether it or any part of it is written in free indirect style. Given Wood’s intense fondness for such a style, I suspect that if there were any evidence of it in the book, Wood would have mentioned it, and that he wouldn’t have been so quick to condemn the novel as “utterly conventional.” I confess I’m not familiar with Lee’s writing. But Wood’s review has aroused my curiosity about it. I see there are several stories by Lee in The New Yorker archive. I intend to access one or two of them and check out for myself what kind of fiction writer he is.