Lies That Tell the Truth and the Truths That Love Them

In Harper’s November issue, memoirist Joel Agee explores the idea of memory as art in an essay on memoir called “A Lie that Tells the Truth.” The title gives a good idea of Agee’s peregrinations in the essay. Names like Breton and Cocteau are invoked. The possible use of the “L”-word (literature, in this case) in a non-ironic fashion is discussed. Disparities between European genres and common American rubrics are observed.The essay does provide some stellar quotes…

On cultural prejudice against the illegal alien in creative nonfiction: An army of truth tellers has conquered large numbers of the dwindling faithful who still read books. Confession, in print and on TV, is fast becoming the primary public mode in which human interiority speaks and is heard. The self-avowed lies of fiction are no longer in fashion. Subjectivity and imagination, it seems, are slipping the border into the non-fiction columns, where they live as quasi-illegal aliens, poorly housed among the facts, performing thankless but necessary labors.

On the “L”-word: It amazes me that I am old enough now, and perhaps foreign enough, to remember a time and a place when people still used that word without an ironic or apologetic smile….On the art of memory: I learned that to remember is, at least in part, to imagine, and that the act of transposing memory into written words is a creative act that transforms the memory itself. This troubled me at first, because I had only recently obligated myself to a documentarist ethos under the oddly mixed influence of Andre Breton’s diatribes against fiction and my father’s demand, at the beginning of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, that the artist suspend or destroy imagination so as to perceive “the cruel radiance of what is.” But “is” becomes “was” in the blink of an eye, and memories are shadows. To recapture the radiance that had cast those shadows, I had no recourse except to imagine a host of possible and probable details, reluctantly at first and then with increasing confidence and freedom. On liars: Art is generous. The liar steals truth; the artist creates it.

…but overall, Agee can’t quite get past the definitions he seeks to transcend. He just comes off as too… effete? European? American? Too something. The real fun didn’t start for me until Harper’s most recent issue, in which Tom Wolfe, Paul West, Luc Sante, Lee Gutkind, and Lauren Slater all weigh in on the topic.Belle of the ball Tom Wolfe starts things rolling by proclaiming that “A memoir today is like Wikipedia: it is possible that parts of it are actually true.” Of course, this from the man who calls blogs “an advance guard to the rear.” The Yale alum rounds things off by decreeing that “in non-fiction it is essential that the writer never make up a single datum.”Paul West, prolific author of both fiction and memoir, carefully weighs the strengths and less-than-strengths of Agee’s “near-explicit farrago of poetic license.” He concludes that “the balance [between fiction and nonfiction] preserves my sanity, whereas it drives Mr. Agee bonkers.” Bringing another perspective to bear, Luc Sante writes in that he’s fine with blurred genre lines, but decidedly not fine with “non-fiction that has had its rough edges sanded down and been forced into a smoothly rounded mold so that it comes off sounding like a bland magazine story. […] Non-fictional literature, at its best, is porous and irregular and abrasive. It may be a pleasure, but it is not a comfort.”Lee Gutkind, editor of Creative Nonfiction and a professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, responds more directly, saying that “the factual details of memoir are considerably less important than the writer’s intentions in revealing, describing, and re-creating stories.”Gutkind further suggests that it’s the clerks of our careers, the publishers and agents, who are primarily concerned with genre classification–not our reading public. “Are we writing because we want to be considered great literary figures with the ‘L’-word endorsement, or because we want to touch the souls of our readers? Artful, meaningful expression will find its true audience and define itself.” Lauren Slater seems to agree with Gutkind on both counts. She recalls her agent’s discouragement upon hearing her plans for the aptly titled Lying: A metaphorical memoir, and she goes on to explain that “Because, on principal, I never listen to my agent’s advice, I went ahead and inked the book in six months….” However, Slater’s subsequent encounter with critics demanding a quotidian verisimilitude left her vexed: “I wonder if our persistent and perverse discussion about the line between fiction and nonfiction is not itself a kind of lie, a cover-up, a convenient way for us to chit and chat about this and that…. If we find in ten years that we are still having the same tired debate, then maybe it will be time to build a new frame, find a new angle, make our way up, and see from such a space what the world is and who we are in it as a fact, a definite, irrefutable fact, this view, and yet–how odd–based solely on where we are standing.” Upon my fourth or fifth rereading of that sentence, the odd and obvious truth of it struck me. We certainly can’t become the literal (not to say literary) liars who carelessly filch and occlude glory from “the radiance of what is,” but if we can’t take our readers past that lesson and on to more interesting, porous, fertile questions, then perhaps creative nonfiction isn’t where we’re needed.