A reader kindly points me to the essay “False Documents,” by the great E.L. Doctorow. It is of course through Doctorow that many readers now know of Sherman’s march or the Rosenberg trial; which is to say that Doctorow’s gripping narrative of these events has in those readers’ imaginations a place that is somewhat surer than the pure recitation of known historical facts. This is of course just as Doctorow would want it.
In the essay Doctorow uses Walter Benjamin to assert the decline of storytellers, who once had pride of place by the communal fire. The tales they told there gave a people their communal experience and sense of who they were.
Now the storytellers have gone, banished to the margins and recast as novelists, their prideful place taken by politicians and reporters and social scientists, who rely on a language of fact to develop a much attenuated version of a people’s shared experience.
Doctorow spends a fair amount of time in the essay on the relatively commonplace understanding that factual writing is simply another species of fiction, a composed narrative with just as much of the unreal in it as any novel. I think by now if you are a practitioner of nonfiction this sort of argument is either something you get very upset by, or accept and recognize that it does not really change the rules of your discipline — nor is it really an attempt to change those rules; it’s an effort to change the balance of authority between fiction and nonfiction.
Which is the really interesting part of the essay; Doctorow notes that Cervantes and Defoe, among other early novelists, were at pains to deny their own place as authors and asserted rather that they had come to their stories through memoirs or manuscripts, themselves collected perhaps by another person altogether. The denial of authorship gives the text authority.
And why would a writer of fiction want to claim for his text that kind of authority? Well, to Doctorow the language of fact is the language of the regime, of power; the language of fiction is therefore a language of freedom capable of restoring to our attention the experience storytellers once purveyed. We know, we everyday see, how the language of fact gets used to corrupt, exclude, exploit what we know, or knew before we watched the news, to be true. The creation of false documents is at its best an act of liberation, to tell something truer than the established truth.
The Edge of the American West 
10 comments
June 15, 2010 at 9:31 am
Jason B.
I love this post and want to have its babies. I need to re-read that essay, as it addresses the conflict I’ve had for the last few years. I finished my MFA as a fiction writer, but find myself valuing fiction less a little every day. I’m still writing fiction (novel and screenplay), but I’m more drawn to nonfiction. And I’m sad for that.
June 15, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Vance
The creation of false documents is at its best an act of liberation, to tell something truer than the established truth.
Doesn’t rather a lot turn on what you mean by “truer”? Your closing sequence is roughly (1) false documents can give a valuable experience; (2) the devil can use “true” documentary means to his own purpose; (3) false documents can serve a higher truth. This last comes a bit out of the blue. Do you think that Doctorow’s version of the Rosenbergs is truer than a sober historian’s?
(Maybe it’s just that I’m pedantic enough that not only humor but hyperbole eludes me.)
June 15, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Vance
See also George Herbert:
June 15, 2010 at 8:43 pm
ben
Doctorow spends a fair amount of time in the essay on the relatively commonplace understanding that factual writing is simply another species of fiction
which is an extremely tendentious way of putting it, though I guess everything depends on what you take the fictionality of fiction to be. Though my reading on the subject is pretty much limited to one essay each by Paul Roth (“Narrative Explanation: The Case of History”) and Noël Carroll (“Interpretation, History, and Narrative”).
June 15, 2010 at 9:54 pm
OPINIONATED RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI
HEAR HEAR, OP!
June 16, 2010 at 12:00 am
Dave
All narrative writing is fictive, in the sense that it is made by a process of selection, exclusion and representation. In being fictive, it can also be either more or less faithful to established fact; it can hold to one interpretation, or suggest many; it can proclaim itself ‘factual’ and be a flat-out lie, or an ideological distortion [when viewed by those of an other ideology]; it can do the old suppressio veri suggestio falsi trick in a thousand ways. Whether it does any of those things depends on the choice of the writer; how they are regarded depends on choices made by the readers. This ought to be so obvious that it would be ‘tendentious’ to argue different.
June 16, 2010 at 3:03 am
kid bitzer
dave–
“In being fictive, it [sc. factual writing] can also be either more or less faithful to established fact”
but that’s also to say: different specimens of factual writing can be better and worse, as factual writing.
there’s nothing tendentious about pointing out that factual writing requires selection, exclusion and representation, nor about the claim that some writing which is presented as factual contains flat-out lies.
but if one infers from this that there really is no essential difference between the factual and fictional genres, then you overlook that they have fundamentally different success-conditions, and a fundamentally different relation between truth and their own goodness.
if it is false that richard had a hump, this in no way makes shakespeare’s play worse as a fiction. the truth or falsity of individual historical claims in shakespeare’s play simply do not act as good-making or bad-making features of that play, as a work of art. historical truth does not make good fiction good, nor does historical error make bad fiction bad.
whereas if someone presents a piece of writing as factual, and it contains the claim that hoover was elected president in 1936 after roosevelt’s first term, then this really makes the writing worse as factual writing.
or contrast an episode of “house” with a journal article–if hugh laurie is given a line of medical mumbo-jumbo to recite that contains a factual error, this need make the episode no less funny, diverting, or successful as a fiction. the same error in the journal article utterly vitiates it as a journal article.
so i think along with ben and vance, i am inclined to think that the o.p. is a bit overstated. factual writing is not a species of fictional writing, because their success-conditions differ so radically. the fact that they both employ a common stock of techniques (e.g. selection, exclusion, representation), no more makes factual writing a species of fiction, than it makes fictional writing a species of factual writing.
June 16, 2010 at 5:15 am
Western Dave
If you ever have a chance to teach The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the chapter on true war stories gets at this. When I was at Big Midwestern U TAing 20th century American Wars it was one of the few readings that kids really engaged and many of them wrote their papers on how to get at the question of what makes a true war story. In my current gig, it’s used as the summer reading for 11th grade English classes but the crossover helps with history classes.
June 16, 2010 at 5:24 am
Dave
Hmm, and yet an episode of ‘House’ which did not meet audience expectations for verisimilitude [which, I’ll grant, may be pretty low] would not be successful – still less an episode of ‘the Wire’. Fiction which is not explicitly fantastical is implicitly realistic, and is tied to what the writers and audience share as a common factual understanding of how the world represented in the piece relates to the world as they understand it to exist.
One might posit some genres as if a ‘ring species’, where each exchanges genes with its neighbours, but the two ends have nothing in common; thus:
Hallucinatory fever-dream narratives – structured surrealistic fantasy – semi-‘realist’ fantasy with underlying explicit ‘worldbuilding’ rules [your basic sword-and-sorcery, vampires-and-werewolves, etc] – alternate histories, hard SF and other kinds of ‘what if’ – romances and other light fiction set in a recognisably ‘real’ present or historical context [with possibly a side-branch to ‘magical realism’ somewhere around here] – avowedly ‘realistic’ fictions of a multitude of kinds – pointed journalistic or political polemics intent on making a point with the ‘facts’ at their disposal – ideologically committed histories of left, right, up or down – textbook recitations of unarguable ‘facts’ – almanacs.
You can break that line anywhere you like, but to assert that the things to one side of your chosen break are all fundamentally different to the things on the other side would be tough.
BTW, as for success-conditions, best to remember Sturgeon’s Law: we all fail most of the time!
June 16, 2010 at 7:46 am
eric
no more makes factual writing a species of fiction, than it makes fictional writing a species of factual writing
I don’t want to push this point too hard, chiefly because I’m compressing and conveying Doctorow’s argument. But: it seems to me the argument is that the two forms of writing belong to a common species, and that the common species has defining characteristics—narratives constructed by an author who thereby creates a textual world that is necessarily a partial representation of the real world—which we commonly associate more with fiction than with nonfiction.