Lingering
On the topic of written material; an essay by Le Guin titled "Fact and/or/plus Fiction" addresses things a bit differently. She was musing about how people are less credulous about "real life" reporting and writing, having been burned so often by trumped-up stories, and seem to want to garner more "truth" from fiction. This is a nightmarish scenario to me. She is adamant about objectivity in work that claims to be nonfiction, with which I agree, but she also allows as how that may be impossible to guarantee any more.
posted by isabelita at 10:01 AM
2 Comments:
I think objectivity was never guaranteed. "All journalism is yellow."
Journalism as one kind of "nonfiction", yeah, not guaranteed to be objective. Even the best of them, like Robert Fisk, can't avoid subjectivity creeping in. The worst, like Faux and C-Span, flat out lie and churn out proganda.
From Ms. Le Guin:
"Lincoln's aphorism about fooling people applies, as usual. The writer who reports inaccurately or presents invention as fact is, consciously or not, exploiting the reader's ignorance. Only the informed reader is aware that the contract has been violated. If amused enough, this reader may privately rewrite the contract, reading the so-called nonfiction as mere entertainment, hokum - fiction in the OED's fifth definition.
Perhaps the terms of the contract are currently being rewritten by the writers. Perhaps the idea of a contract is hopelessly prepostmodern, and readers are coming to accept false data in nonfiction as calmly as they accept factual information in fiction.
...If this nondistinction of the fictive and the factual is a general trend, maybe we should celebrate it as a victory of creativity over unimaginative, indiscriminate factualism. I worry about it, however, because it seems to me that by not distinguishing invention from lying it puts imagination itself at risk.
Whatever 'creative' means, I don't think the term can fairly be applied to falsification of data and memories, whether intentional or 'inevitable.'
Excellence in nonfiction lies in the writer's skills in observing, organising,narrating, and interpreting facts - skills entirely dependent on imagination,
used not to invent, but to connect and illuminate observation."
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