Ain't it the Truth.
I have noticed a cloud of dumbfog rolling in around our country. It seems to be around the media flowing from the cities to the country like a morning dew. " Good Morning" has been replaced by "Duh" in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
This article ain't going where you think it is.
A few years ago a guy named James Fry wrote a book about his experience with drug addiction. He got on Oprah. She made it a book of the month club selection and he sold a million volumes. I read the book. It is really good. Then some pointy headed intellectuals started digging around and found that Mr. Fry's prison experience was actually a couple days in the county jail. William Bastone with "The Smoking Gun" wrote an expose' that eventually got Fry back on Oprah to "Apologize" for misleading the public. 2000 people asked for and got their money back from publisher Random House because Oprah told them what to think.
What is missing from all this hoopla is the book is the best account of the devastation of alcohol and drug abuse that I have ever read. Literalismist (e.g. people who study literature as science) say that the lack of quotation marks in Fry's remarks indicate an artistic license to move freely from his internal and external discourse. This is Acadam'e talk for what we used to call fiction. If it don't have quotes it is not literal. Not intended to be.
However, when the mind is involved. Particularly a troubled drug and disease ravaged mind, the internal prose can be a more accurate window into the suffering of a person than "The Truth".
When I saw all this I thought of Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues, and Bill Wilson and the Big Book. Neither were under oath when they penned their work. Neither were filled with facts. But both were filled with immense truth.
One wonders if writers like Thomas Pynchon, Robert Bly, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S Thompson, or even Kahlil Gibran could have survived the Oprah expose'
I personally doubt it. But I wasn't covered by the cloud of dumbfog. I read, enjoyed, and forgot Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Da Vinci Code and, Catcher in the Rye without once considering if the fact was more important than the truth the volumes contained.
Can you Imagine a Sixty Minutes team outside Kurt Vonnegut's house demanding the "truth". I think they might have met a double barreled shotgun. " I got your truth right here buddy".
NPR recently ran an article on Carlos Castaneda. It seems that currently there are many young doctoral students working on a thesis to disprove and discredit Castaneda's work. These young academics are setting out to prove that Castaneda was not entirely honest when he said that he could shapeshift into other animals, fly like the crow or teleport to any place in the universe with the power of his mind. On his Time cover he was listed as "An Enigma wrapped in a Mystery" Which is also acadam'e talk for the byproducts of male bovine digestion.
I read the books, saw the movie, and never once shapeshifted. I immediately brought to mind a toothless old gentleman from Phil Campbell who once told me "I ain't say'n it happened, I'm just saying I seen it."
Never mind the facts - this gentleman knew the truth. Be on the lookout for it.
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"What is missing from all this hoopla is the book is the best account of the devastation of alcohol and drug abuse that I have ever read." Why would considerations of a memoirist's publishing fiction as biography take into account your reading habits? Why is it significant that the book is the best one YOU have read on the topic; for all the general public knows, it might be the only book you have read on the topic.
ReplyDelete"I read, enjoyed, and forgot Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Da Vinci Code and, Catcher in the Rye without once considering if the fact was more important than the truth the volumes contained." You can't compare three books of fiction to a book that presents itself as nonfiction. A reader should expect from a nonfiction book something different from a book of fiction.
The term lieralismist is more likely to be found among those who discuss the bible. But what you say they assert makes no sense. "The lack of quotation marks in Fry's remarks indicate an artistic license to move freely from his internal and external discourse. This is Acadam'e talk for what we used to call cues to fiction. If it don't have quotes it is not literal. Not intended to be." Fry's internal discourse told him he was in prison for more than a couple of days, while the external discourse contradicts that? Are there quotes around the accurate parts of the memoir; surely, we are supposed to read some parts of the book, a memoir, as a story about what really happened, and if the fictional parts don't have quotes the nonfiction parts must have. There is a memoir, one that is better written than Fry's called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; it has fictional elements, meant to illustrate the atmosphere of the situation being written about, but the fictional cues are clear and no investigation is necessary to determine the difference between fact and fiction.
"Never mind the facts" should be a campaign slogan.
God Bless you.. :-)
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Jim
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ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more.
ReplyDeleteThe Bard did make that stuff up, when he didn't use the plots that other people made up. You are failing to distinguish between material facts--what happened on such and such a date or did such a person do a particular thing or not--and the deeper, or universal, Truth that can be expressed through fiction. Perhaps Fry expresses a deep truth, but he should not have said it was a biography, pergaps a semibiographical novel would have been truthful.
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