Wed., Oct. 6, 1999
55.8% of licensed drivers
admit running red lights.
Humans consume 45,000
tons of aspirin every year.
Ohio farmers devoted
4300 acres to pumpkins this past growing season.
The yellow Star of David
that the Nazis forced Jews to wear was made of a cheap rayon material which
tended to fray at the points....
Those were four of the things I learned yesterday. The first three
came courtesy my newspaper. The last one was mentioned in a lecture
I heard last night at a local university.
Yes, I've actually had another out-of-house experience. I even managed
to sit for an hour in the middle of a packed auditorium without suffering
a single anxiety attack. I think it helped that I was about 20 years
older than the average person there, and not in danger of flunking a class
if I got up and walked out. Whatever the exact causes, I ended up
feeling closer than ever before to being that totally unnoticed fly on
the wall I've wanted to be all my life....
The guest lecturer was Ursula Hegi. I'd never heard of Ursula Hegi
before yesterday but a lot of others apparently have. Her novel,
Stones
from the River, was Oprah's book of the month back in March, 1997.
She's written more than a hundred articles for such things as the New York
Times Book Review. She's taught creative writing at Eastern Washington
University since 1984. I'm not sure what made her decide to spend
a Tuesday evening in Ohio after all that, but I figured that if she was
foolish enough to do so, I was foolish enough to go listen to whatever
she had to say, even if our fair state had reduced her to silent screaming.
Turns out she did considerably better than that.
The topic Ms. Hegi chose to speak on was "Research and Novel Writing."
She was a good speaker, calm and confident for the entire time she was
seated behind a single small table in the center of the stage, her only
companion a water glass, her slight German accent only adding to her natural
charm. Although she had evidently typed out everything she was going
to say beforehand, I got the sense that she really need not have bothered.
Alas, Hans was not nearly as impressed with her as I was....
Hans, of course, is my imaginary overeducated and underemployed European
friend. Like most members of the post-modern avant garde, he has
very strong opinions on writing, fiction, and most everything else.
No matter what Ms. Hegi had to say, no matter how well she said it, Hans
was there in my ear with an impolite objection. Bothersome, to say
the least, but when one decides to bring an imaginary overeducated and
underemployed European friend into one's life, one gets exactly what one
deserves.
Ms. Hegi stressed several main points. First and foremost was her
belief that novel writers must get their facts right. Getting a fact
wrong does violence to the special bond of trust which exists between writer
and reader, and that's bad - very, very bad. Consequently, she does
an immense amount of research before she writes. If she has a character
flying from Nantucket to New York, she calls up the airlines and asks about
times and planes and prices and everything else short of the likelihood
of the pilot's having stepped on gum sometime during the month before take-off.
If she has a scene with a grease fire in it, she calls up the fire department
and cross examines the fire chief about the best ways to start one.
It was in the course of doing the research for Stones from the River
- a novel which details what life was like in Germany between 1915 and
1952 - that she discovered that those yellow stars frayed easily and often....
"This is such bullshit!" Hans yelled in my ear. "All fiction is bullshit!
That's why they call it fiction - right? If she's so into Truth,
why doesn't she write non-fiction??"
I squirmed uncomfortably. A quick glance revealed that his yelling
had failed to disturb the sleep of the students around us, but that did
little to relieve me of the knowledge that this was only the beginning.
Past experience told me that any time he started off in that tone of voice,
the end of his rant was days away....
"Suppose the stars had been made of cotton? Would that have made
the Holocaust any more understandable? If we want to reduce racial
hatred in America today, should we ban synthetic patches??"
I politely and calmly pointed out to my friend that Ms. Hegi was merely
trying to be authentic - certainly a respectable goal of any writer.
"But it's trivial!" Hans asserted. "Here she is, demanding that writers
get the fabrics of their historical characters right, while completely
overlooking the basic inauthenticity of all writing. All writing
is just words on paper, you know? Black ink on white paper, most
often. And in what sense can black ink on white paper ever really
capture what it was like to be in Nazi Germany? At best it's an illusion,
and it's a dangerous illusion if you don't even know it's an illusion!"
Just because writing isn't the same thing as living doesn't mean it doesn't
have value, I replied. And it doesn't mean that a writer can write
whatever he or she wants to with utter disregard for reality.
"And what's the value of accurately describing how to start a good grease
fire, huh? What's the value of knowing that a certain hideous description
of a fire victim's burnt flesh is as accurate as an interview with medical
professionals can make it? If that's what makes writing 'authentic',
I'll take inauthentic writing any day, thank you very much."
But inauthentic writers don't deserve our trust.
"No writer deserves our trust!" Hans almost wailed. "First, because
of all the limits and distortions inherent in any writing whatsoever.
Second, because even the best and most conscientious writers might unknowingly
be using inaccurate sources. Third, because we're separated from
even conscientious, accurate writers by editors, typesetters, printers,
and who knows who else, and unintentional and intentional errors can creep
in every step of the way. Fourth, because in the case of fiction
writers like Ms. Hegi, the need to tell an engaging story about engaging
characters trumps everything else and inevitably distorts true facts like
funhouse mirrors. Otherwise she'd be writing so-called non-fiction,
right? Fifth - "
Enough, enough! I'd like to hear what she's saying about how awful
it is when the bond of trust between writer and reader is broken, if you
don't mind.
"But that's a bond that should be broken!" Hans declared flatly.
"What do we mean by that word 'trust'? Do we mean that we may turn
our minds off now and blindly accept whatever author X is feeding us without
having to worry about its accuracy? Well, life isn't like that.
Life is about learning to live in a world of tentative conclusions and
assumptions that are always doubtful and problematic and always open to
revision. The trust that she's talking about sounds more like what
got the Germans into trouble with Hitler in the first place rather than
a proper medicine for that trouble."
I hardly think it proper to say that a well-intentioned humanistic novel
writer is uncomfortably similar to the supporters of the Nazis.
"All I know is one can't trust people blindly, whoever they are," Hans
stood his ground. "Writers, Nazis, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Swaggart....
Forget what I say at your own risk."
So, all writers and writing is untrustworthy shit? And we shouldn't
read any of it? Is that what you're saying, O Wise One?
"No, what I'm saying is Truth is a very tenuous thing, and if you're gonna
base the quality of your writing on the quality of the Truth it contains,
you're fucking yourself at square one. The best you can do is say,
'Here's a small part of reality as I see it.' And then let the non-trivial
truths emerge and be put to the test. The fabrics the Nazis used,
described truly or not, is trivial. The non-trivial truths depend
less on research than on logic. If you need to go out and interview
people before realizing that it's bad to throw people into ovens, you're
in far more trouble than even I think you're in."
Erm....
"Look, take The Diary of Anne Frank, ok? Suppose we found
out somehow that it was an incredible hoax written by some old guy in New
Jersey, circa 1953. If that destroys its value to us as literature,
well, what value did it ever really have as literature? It's the
same sequence of words in both cases, right? But we don't read it
as literature, really - we read it as an historical document, as evidence
- and that's a completely different thing. As evidence, its value
is utterly dependent upon its context.
"There's a better kind of writing - a kind which transcends context with
the strength of its argumentation or the ease with which its facts can
be checked. A book which logically and scientifically demolishes
all the beliefs of the Nazis is going to last longer and in the end have
more influence than a book which basically says, 'Please don't be like
these people who were terribly mean to this one little girl.' You
know, people are mean to people all the time. If they think that
meanness is justified, they can even revel in it. But if you point
out that many white people have more genes in common with many black people
than they do with many other whites - if you detail exactly how modern
science has rejected the very idea of race as a meaningful concept - well,
how can meanness be self-righteously administered on the basis of race?"
So, when can I expect to read your book on the subject? I pointedly inquired
of my know-it-all phantom friend.
"Ah, my writing is of a third kind - neither historical document nor the
literature of logic. My writing seeks to escape reality rather
than reflect it. You want reality, put your damn books down and go
poke your head out your window."
Oooo, nice phrase! Let me write that down....
"Jesus, what a hopeless fool you are! And to think I passed up the
chance to be Oprah's imaginary friend for THIS gig!"
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