by Steve Kenny
many seconds he fell through the air. These facts are known. These facts are undisputed.
Okay. So later, an essayist gets ahold of the facts, sits down, and types up an essay. The only thing is, in his essay, he fucked with the facts, tweaked here, changed there, until his piece, ten, fifteen pages long [I'm not sure, but then again, who gives a fuck about accuracy, right?], is finished. Satisfied, he submitted it to a publisher. The publisher put a fact checker on it [employed by the publisher, the fact checker checks submissions for factual accuracy], and before long, the fact checker had compiled a list of factual inaccuracies that would have made a politician blush, a list that was longer than the original submission.
So began, the authors of a new book claimed [at first], a ten year correspondence between the fact checker and the essayist. The essayist; arguing on behalf of the 'creative' types who would change the facts of a real suicide for the sake of their 'art'; and, the fact checker; arguing on behalf of those who value credibility and integrity and factual accuracy -especially in an essay about a real suicide- above 'artistic licence'. By the way, the author of the original essay shaved a second [or added a second; I can't remember, and who cares, anyway? Right? Let's just get rid of Fact Checkers! The essayist messed with the factual time the kid fell through the air, because the number, nine, I think it was, or eight, maybe, didn't strike the essayist as a meaningful enough number.
This is my response such egregious and egotistical hubris.
As I sat back in my chair this morning, in the dark, disappointed with the world and with myself, sipping my coffee and contemplating the drudgery of another day without sunshine, calmly listening to NPR, and a story about a book that tries to move the ethical boundaries of 'art', a book whose authors, if memory serves me correctly, originally claimed was the result of correspondences over a ten year period between an essayist [who, in this particular case, wrote an essay about a real suicide; a kid jumped off a tower and died], and a fact checker [employed by the publisher, the fact checker makes sure everything in a written work submitted for publication is, in fact, true], a book now revealed to have been completely concocted recently, a book whose authors clearly desire to be heard by whatever means necessary. As a story about a suicide, this story has done damage to the public's trust in the media. As a story about a writer with no ethics, the story has succeeded completely.
So what, you might say; the guy only took artistic license with a real suicide for the sake of dramatic effect and psychological impact. So what; the family is okay with it, because it brings the issue of suicide to the forefront. In the face of this fact, I am still compelled to ask myself, Did the story of a suicide, a real, tragic, brutal suicide seem so weak, so superficial, so humdrum, so pedestrian, so everyday, to the writer that he felt he had to take liberties with the facts? Cannot the facts surrounding a real-life suicide strike the mind of a people, of a so-called writer, anymore, as a singularly powerful event that neither begs nor needs one to look no further than the awful truths of the act itself ? Are we becoming a people that can no longer see the real-life dimensions of human dignity? of human tragedy? Is every one of us becoming nothing more than a two-dimensional paper cutout, a two-dimensional image on a screen, a completely Superficial Representation,media-created representations of our true selves, the true self being set aside for the sake of art, and the way your superficial represntation looks on the printed page or the gel screen? Is reality being subjugated by the minions of flat screen electronica? Is this new, Superficial Representation in words really what we need right now? Don't we already have enough Superficial Representation on Facebook? On television? On the big screen? In our government? Is there really no more room for truth anymore? Has it really fallen so low? I can hear the coming buzz, making its way through the overheated circuitry:
Superficial Representation takes over the world when an army of deliberately misleading authors decide to take over the big publishing houses of nonfiction and memoir, and create a world in which nobody knows nor recognizes the truth anymore, a world in which truth is art, and art is truth...
As an endlessly fascinated observer of the human condition with a soul-crushing awareness of my own conscience, and although not a big believer in warning labels, I feel the time has come for a new warning label, a publishing-house warning label, one that should be applied to certain works of 'art' that come down the pike disguised as 'memoir' or 'lifespan'. 'Superficial Representation' is the term we should apply to such works. It is an adequate phrase that should work well to warn the public; a nice, blanket-type tag, a bloviated generalization that will have no problem seamlessly fusing at the genetic level with certain media-created, corporation-approved, sensationalized and promoted works of horseshit. Now, before anybody in the room gets offended or angry about this new regulation, let me soften the blow by reminding you that the ideas of Superficial Representation and Decorative Space already exist in the visual arts, and has for over a hundred years; think Matisse.That said, this tag, this warning label, used to identify intentionally misleading writing and writers of the charlatan sort, writers of the sort that take liberties with the details of a real suicide, should be big,and should bebigger than the warning label on a cigarette pack, but smaller, initially, than the ego of the writer; this warning label should be brighter the flame of a depressed soul unable to defend itself, but less bright than the clever intentions of the snake oil salesman; this warning label should be wider the reach of the national publicity campaign attached to the product, yet thinner than the fattened wallets of the celebrating hucksters, and, finally, hotter than the warm, fuzzy feeling the writer of such a load of horseshit gets when hearing himself on a national public radio station, but definitely cooler, by degrees, than anything such a weak writer shall ever produce.
This, then, is the proposed warning label:
Superficial Representation Warning:
Warning: This story may contain Superficial Representations of the known facts of this story as we know them. Although this story is considered true, much or most of it may contain elements of untruth and complete and/or partial fabrications of pure imagination pulled directly from the author's own ass, elements that may or may not be related to the story, fabrications that have been put there to enhance the dramatic aspects of the story. Furthermore, it is the expressed wish of the author that the reader be informed that quoted sources have been intentionally misquoted, for the sake of psychological impact and/or other aesthetic considerations. It is the author's belief and will that the following be known by the reader; that the author's story and the author's writing skill alone should take precedence over and above existing fact, for the sake of the author's art, for the sake of said author's sales, and for the sake of his overly pampered and nurtured ego. The author takes no responsibility herein, except to accept any and all credit offered, including monetary, but none of the blame for this purposeful and misleading construction of artful horseshit.
So.
Does a writer have a right to take your real story, a real episode in your life, and make it the writer's story? Sure, as long as the writer doesn't identify you, a real person with a real story to tell, specifically for the purpose of establishing the writer's credibility in the mind of the reader, only to abandon the facts of your story after your credibility established the credibility of the writer with the reader. In other words, if I am the writer, and I'm writing a story about P.T. Barnum, and I am presenting a story to a reader as a truthfulstory, I can start the story by telling the reader that Barnum was a circus man [which establishes a truth and me as a credible writer in the mind of the reader, and helps establish the trust], I cannot be allowed to go on and tell the reader that Barnum captured all his circus animals bare handed in the African savanna while drunk on zebra piss. Why? Because, while this bold statement might make for a more dramatic story, a more entertaining story, and might even maintain the illusion of a truthful story in some minds, it has run off the road
of credibility, and, if such a fabrication is found out by the reader, depending on the temperment of that reader, the writer may end up kicked to the curb.
What such an author does, when apprehending such a story and bending and changing it and making it his story, only partially concerned with the truth of the individual's story, is to take that story, that statement, away from that individual. No writer, however talented, should trample around the scene of a suicide like some bumbling idiot detective, destroying or tweeking the facts of the case, the honesty of the story.
If the writer covering a suicide cannot approach and write, without purposefully creating or bending facts, a thought-provoking piece that stirs and conveys to the reader somehow the all-consuming pain of a human being willing to take his own life, then that writer is no writer at all, at least not a good one, and should probably go into politics or pac ad descriptions instead. A good writer can make a steaming pile of horseshit seem interesting to the general reading public. A good writer views the world as having such depth and breadth and