By now, you may be aware of the tale of Mike Daisey. Mr. Daisey is a monologuist and performer who produced a piece entitled “The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs”, in which he reported his investigation of working conditions in the Chinese factories which produce various Apple products. He performed this piece on NPR’s “This American Life”, and in theaters around the country. He maintained that his tale was entirely true, and in one theater insisted that the playbill bear the documentation “This is a work of non-fiction”. NPR and the various theaters took him at his word; but his word was, briefly, crap. It turned out, once the belated fact-checking was done, that while the issues Mr. Daisey highlighted were important and were indeed issues which Apple needed to address, his work was fabricated in almost every significant detail. He did not meet the people he claimed to meet; he did not see the things he claimed to see.
Hold that thought.
In a surprisingly related development, I recently read a review of a book entitled “The Lifespan of a Fact” by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. Jim Fingal is a fact-checker for a magazine in which a piece by John D’Agata appeared; John D’Agata, unfortunately for Mr. Fingal, is a proponent of “creative non-fiction”, and the book is a history of their correspondence about the various “facts” in Mr. D’Agata’s article which weren’t actually facts; for instance, he changed the color of a fleet of vans because “purple” has a better rhythm than “pink”.
So now, I ask you: what the hell is wrong with these people?
I write songs. My songs are stories. They involve fictional characters. These characters do fictional things. At times, they’re inspired by my own experiences, or by experiences that friends of mine have had, or public figures, or historical events. But the presence of a smattering of facts in my songs does not make them journalism. It does not make them “true”. Fact cannot baptize fiction.
I wonder how we got here, but I’m pretty sure I know. The disillusion with the federal government over the lies of the Vietnam War; the dismantling of the temple of expertise via the Internet; the focus on relativism in postmodern literary criticism – all these things conspire to devalue the idea of truth. There’s no doubt that objectivity is hard, and perhaps even impossible; but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s idea of truth is equally valid – it just means that we have to work that much harder to recognize and tease out the biases. But sometimes it seems that some people have just given up, in ways that are just a little bit too convenient, claiming validity for things they simply want to be true.
Some of the folks like Mike Daisey may try to hide behind the idea that art can be “true” in a larger sense, where the overall point that they’re making is valid, or the story they’re telling has a universally-accessible moral. But this isn’t what “true” means. If I tell you, falsely, that I was a drug addict and a criminal, as James Frey told us in “A Million Little Pieces”, and I managed to redeem myself, my story might be “true” in that larger sense – but if I claim that it’s simply true, that’s another matter entirely.
And honestly, I think these sorts of claims demean the value of art, too. Art is hard. It involves imagination, and discipline, and – this is important – it doesn’t have to be false. Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the Depression are true. And powerful. And they’re art. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. My friend Jon Waterman’s song about the sinking of the Sultana at the end of the Civil War. These works do their best to be historically accurate, and they choose the story they tell to make a larger point, and they stand on their own as art, and their status as art is enhanced by their historical accuracy. People like Mike Daisey are trying to take the easy way out; they’re trying to burnish their art with the sheen of journalism. And they’re cheating.
If there’s a saving grace here, it’s that Mike Daisey and John D’Agata and James Frey and their ilk are almost universally scorned once their dishonesty is revealed. They might not accept that they’ve done anything wrong (apparently, Mr. Daisey is having a very hard time with that bit), but just about everyone else recognizes that they’ve been self-servingly misleading, and rightly condemns them for it. We might not agree on what is true; but clearly, we still value the notion of truth itself.
There’s nothing wrong with mixing fact and fiction. But fact and fiction form a continuum, and fact is one of its endpoints. Those people who use the word for some other point on the continuum are simply wrong, and in most cases they’re exploiting the word to gain credibility they wouldn’t otherwise have. When people insert themselves into stories in ways that never happened; when people change details as an aesthetic preference; when people create narratives out of thin air to make a point; when they call themselves journalists, we ought to call them what they really are: liars.