Forum / Perspective, understanding people, a moral imperative

James Lloyd Davis
Oct 13, 04:41pm

My current novel utilizes a few actual historical events and a also includes real people in fictionalized scenes and roles. Because the people are no longer alive and the events more or less historical, my research was supposed to be subordinate, limited to the validation of notions and recollections I already possess as it relates to the people and the times.

I've never been so wrong.

I understand that fictionalizing historical events and placing real people into imagined scenes and dialogue precludes the necessity for great accuracy ... and that, an author's intent and bias notwithstanding, a work of fiction is often produced and read for purpose of entertainment alone. However, in the course of writing and researching, I came to understand that my notions and remembrances are seldom as accurate as I would have thought, that the fog of time and attitude can often confuse the truth.

I'm fully awayre that fiction does have the power of influence and one reason I chose this era and these people for my novel was to make a statement about similar situations that exist today. Nonetheless, because I am making such a statement, I do have a responsibility to the reader, other imperatives to consider, one being a moral responsibility to portray the real people in my novel with as great a measure of sincerity as possible in regard for their character, and to portray the events with some measure of accuracy, even though my novel is a work of fiction.

Which is my point here and my question:

Beyond the portrayal of historical events ... even in a fictional work placed in contemporary context, I think we have a responsibility to be accurate.

To be sure, unless fantastical in premise, any novel or story that rings false will probably fail, but a writer's gift for fiction can often transcend the need for accuracy. But is that dishonest?

Is honesty even a consideration for you as a writer of fiction? It's a valid question and not a supposition that the lack of factual or accuracy of perspective is, by definition, dishonest. It may simply not be a priority. But, to what extent does an author have a moral responsibility in the content of his or her work? Do you write with an understanding that a writer of fiction even has such a moral responsibility?

Darryl Price
Oct 13, 05:32pm

I think it moves into dangerous territory when we start imposing limitations on the creative process, even linguistic or philosophical ones. Responsibility to any idea or sets of internal feelings about right and wrong is the individual's freedom of choice at work.It's a question of balance. Of course the way the universe works there are always karmic kick backs to every set of actions taken, some would say to our thoughts, too. Okay. But if you're not free to make mistakes, you are not free. And if you think you're done growing as a human being, you most certainly are not,would be my guess. People shouldn't be told what to write or how to write, but given the chance to discover what they want to do with the unique and wonderful opportunity to write.It's a very fine line you're talking about there. Better have the right shoes for the job ahead. Still I wouldn't spend too much time judging all those who have fallen off the wire before crossing to the other side yourself.

James Lloyd Davis
Oct 13, 05:48pm

Darryl, I think the questions speak to a personal moral responsibility and how it applies to a writer's work, not to censorship or 'limitations.'

I do not advocate either and did not think I even suggested thus.

Bill Yarrow
Oct 13, 05:49pm

"Art is a lie that tell the truth." (Picasso)

"In the long run the truth does not matter." (Wallace Stevens, "Adagia")

Jim V
Oct 13, 06:40pm

"Beyond the portrayal of historical events ... even in a fictional work placed in contemporary context, I think we have a responsibility to be accurate."

Hahaha. Tell this to Dan Brown.

There is a difference, I believe, James, between being factually accurate, which is not entirely necessary, and being mythically accurate, which for a writer always is.

I mean by this that the emotional truth of the piece must ring true while the factual truth of the piece need only not ring false.

It is the difference between finding someone not guilty beyong a resonable doubt(factual narrative) and finding someone innocent (emotional narrative). One is a higher standard than the other.

However, there is a moral danger, that if you screw with the facts too much, without the admission you are creating fiction, then you have moved into propaganda and a dispicable disregard for the decent truth. See: anything by Oliver Stone.

Hope that makes sense.

Ann Bogle
Oct 13, 06:43pm

I prefer fiction to be historically accurate -- details in the world outside the story correlate (do not contradict/cohere) to events as they occurred, but, I also tend not to like historical fictions. Henry James in a g-string, the secret sex life of Emily Dickinson, Hitler's mistress. These types of stories (about great writers) degrade their subjects, and stories that humanize the Fuhrer upset me.

Accuracy in personal fictions is another matter, and I can see how faithfulness to it might limit the artistic reach of a story.

I feel when I'm lying in a story, for example, exaggerating a number or a mood, that adjusting it for accuracy improves the tonal quality of the sentence. The (fiction) writer has no moral obligation to be honest that way, but it affects the quality of the work if s/he is.

stephen hastings-king
Oct 13, 07:43pm

well, my academic self was trained as a historian. accuracy is a funny thing. the more you think about it the more difficult it is to pin down exactly what it means. once you get by the obvious, of course.

a lot of the problem has to do with the scale you want to work on/think about: so much of experience, so much of life drifts right by what's caught on paper. historians rely on paper trails and this increasingly as you move backward from the present, and paper trails that often involve little tiny dots left in the context of lives that are connected together using various patterns of inference by specialists in inferences after the fact. most of the grain of being alive, in other words, falls outside of history. not that it's not historical...and it is the stuff that informs historicity...but rather that most of the stuff of being alive falls outside the paper trail.

so accuracy--you have boundary conditions that are set up with the research you've likely done. these boundary conditions make the setting itself and not something else. so they become period continuity. you have what you're doing conceptually---if you want to play theoretical games with the notion of history (i like doing that, but i doubt i'll ever write a historical fiction, but this because i'm interested in open-endedness in a different way), or you have a view of how history as a way of reconstructing/interpreting this thing they call the past works or should work...and these positions shape your relation to the boundary conditions which, in turn, shape how you put variables into motion inside of those conditions.

in other words, accuracy is a matter of the approach that you're bringing to bear on what you're doing. there is no past in and for itself, no reconstruction. there's only fragments and patterns of organizing them and making inferences from them. then there are aesthetic matters, what pleases you to work or work with.

personally, i do a lot of writing that involves slicing stuff i encounter in the world really thinly, reducing the time-frame to a minimum and trying to be absolutely accurate in relaying the surfaces of what i encountered while at the same time letting it float in terms of meanings and associations in ways that have nothing to do with the "real" situation in which i encountered them. i like playing on that edge. and i like the grain of reality, which is far more surreal than what i can dream up on my own.

dont know if that helps. i think you're free as you think you are with this material.

James Lloyd Davis
Oct 13, 08:10pm

Just to clarify without giving away the store, I'm thinking a close historical neighborhood, one that some of us can remember and ... in terms of the type of work I'm trying to emulate, I was thinking more along the lines of Don DeLillo's "Libra" ... which I consider more of a literary work than a genre. The context of epoch, though close in time to the events portrayed in Libra, is earlier but no less intriguing.

The plot of "Libra," one of DeLillo's best, I think, is not that far from the plot line of Oliver Stone's JFK movie, which is based on Jim Garrison's book, "On the Trail of the Assassins."

It's interesting, though not really important, that DeLillo's novel was published the same year that Garrison's non-fiction work appeared.

My book, however, has nothing to do with JFK's assassination.

Jane Hammons
Oct 13, 09:32pm

I'm always concerned about honesty. But it doesn't bind me to facts or "accuracy" if I understand what you are asking. I just wrote a scene in which Coyote licks Kitty Oppenheimer's face. It's an honest portrayal in the world of my novel. As far as I know, it is not historically accurate. I did a lot of research to write this scene, so the setting, the date, the speech Oppie is delivering as Coyote licks his wife is as historically accurate as I can render it.

James Lloyd Davis
Oct 14, 09:51pm

True, Jane, art trumps accuracy in all fiction, I believe. The use of famous names and events in fictional situations has only been lightly etched so far and I think it represents enormous possibility for expression, especially in the sense that famous names and events are universally shared. I don't believe they are sacred cows in terms of historical accuracy, but in the sense of relevance, a certain degree of honest attribution of character is necessary to tap that universal recollection, even if trivial and absurdist in nature.

The first time I felt the power of the concept was in Donald Barthelme's "Robert Kennedy saved from drowning." It appeared in 1967 or '68, I believe, in the New American Review. Read it shortly after reading Brautigan for the first time, "Trout Fishing in America." That was a seminal year for me in terms of understanding what literature could really accomplish.

James Lloyd Davis
Oct 14, 09:53pm

As always, my creed is "The primary rule in fiction is that there are no rules."

Myra King
Oct 15, 12:51am

James, it’s synchronistic that you have brought this up, as I’ve been contemplating writing an historical novel and wondering just that. How honest should one be? And how accurate are historical facts, which let’s face it, are often written by those with something to gain or, as is often said, by the victor? And in the case of some ‘great’ books so long after the facts most of the latter have been forgotten.

I think moral honesty is foremost, what one writes shapes the readers’ perceptions of place or person. All we can do is research as many different sources as possible and come to our own conclusions. Then decide on what tack we will take, what will be the closest to the truth (as we know/decipher it) but least destructive to those alive or relative, and go with the fictive flow. Our characters will take us along that road.

James, as you believe too, genre writing can be literary (or character driven) as well, and going on what I’ve read of your work, I know your novel will be fine. Best of luck.

Linda Simoni-Wastila
Oct 15, 01:58am

Fascinating thread, thanks for starting this discussion, James.

I've struggled myself with portraying well-known places accurately (Harvard, Hopkins, McLean Psychiatric Hospital, Phillips Andover Academy). There's some danger in smearing institutions, or at least having your story appear to be making these places look bad.

I guess I've decided to abide to "the spirit of the law" rather than the fact; that is, to evoke the feeling of these places rather than worry about the facts so much.

Plus what Jane and Myra said. I so trust your gut judgement in doing what is "right." Peace...

stephen hastings-king
Oct 15, 02:06am

i think people have a bizarre faith in accuracy. it's all a function of the interpretive frame you bring to bear on a data set. the frame has a social acceptance--it works within a community of people who recognize it and by recognizing it legitimate it. there is no past as it really happened once you move beyond the relatively straight-forward facts of the matter. i mean, were you to write about the court of louis xiv and not take into account the rules of the social game that obtained there via le duc de saint simon or second-order interpreters like norbert elias or proust, you'd be stupid because you'd simply substitute your rationality for the rationality that obtained in the court. which would make the game you're playing tedious. BUT it might work as genre fiction because your readership might be interested in clothes and the conventions of, say, a bodice-ripping yarn and not at all be interested in twisting their ways of thinking, which you kind of have to do to move from a bourgeois framework to a culture of display. so really, "accuracy" isn't a moral question at all. it's a matter of who your audience is and the games that they are prepared to play. for example, le duc de saint simon blew the rules of court in significant measure because he was pissed off about being thrown out because he supported le dauphin and le dauphin died of smallpox at 12. so the faction at court that aligned with the future prospects of le dauphin--louis xiv's son---were fucked. but le duc de saint simon is who gives us, who come later access. if you read, say, la rochefoucault, you'd have no idea of the rules of court because they're presupposed in everything he writes. this because he aligned with different factions. so which is more accurate a picture of the court?

James Lloyd Davis
Oct 15, 04:46am

Stephen, there is truth in the moment, I'm sure, but the recollection of even eyewitness accounts are often the betrayal of truth. I have read several Rashoman-ish eyewitness accounts of just one particular event in history and came to realize that truth ... in the telling ... is often subjective. A matter of perspective, even personal opinion from the source.

Somewhere in this thread, I read the word 'propaganda' as a possible result in writing fictional stories amid hard facts ... and I'm sure that's a valid concern from an academic stance. It's hardly mine. Ultimately, since even historical facts are fodder for debate, then the point of whether or not a fiction is propaganda is moot. Fiction is not required to be fact, so it will have an inherent quality of inaccuracy and speculation in the hands and for the purpose of the author.

In my novel, for instance, I'm using near history (one generation removed) as a metaphor and a mirror for contemporary events. Of course it's propaganda. It's my perspective, my belief, my perception that will hopefully persuade the reader to draw a conclusion he or she might never have considered concerning the world both the past and the world we live in today. That's one of the great possibilities of compelling literature ... moral influence.

Personally, I don't think that's wrong. And it's hardly new, a device used by many writers in the past ... just one example might be John Steinbeck in "Grapes of Wrath" and "The Winter of Our Discontent."

I will admit, however, that in researching the period, I've discovered some historical truth that makes my fiction seem tame in comparison, some that I can use and will enhance the story, some that I can't use because ... who'd believe it? Either way and thankfully, fiction requires no footnotes.

I will say that the preponderance of the evidence from my research makes my fiction a lot closer to the truth than I imagined it would be when I started. Some of it even altered my thesis in ways I could not foresee. And, what fun, you would be surprised at some of the shocking historical secrets that are buried in quite plain sight, ripe for the taking.

And, Linda ... taking a poke at Andover puts you in pretty august company. I think they'll survive. Good luck on your work.

Darryl Price
Oct 15, 05:36pm

James--I'm not saying you did, my friend--I'm only giving you my honest response as to how I felt it. It's not about you. It's about me.How I perceived the impact of the questions on my psyche from a different day's bank. I only cast them across the waters to you in friendship like a frisbee.I wasn't trying to throw it so you couldn't catch it but so you would and could throw it back to me.From where I'm from that's called fun, although, granted a little competition does tend to light things up. But I'm more into sharing the energy it takes to enjoy one another's presence than to show off the muscle.That's just who I am.My advice, if any, comes from the heart, and is given freely, like my opinions, which are simply meant to be real, not pointed.
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