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• Saturday, August 16, 2008 06:20 AM

  Gosh, Bill E.

  The distinguishing characteristic of fiction--even historical fiction, even romans à clef--is its fictivity. Using fiction to make historical or journalistic points dishonors fiction, history, and journalism. The latter two are about facts, while the first is about truth. (See Aristotle's Poetics re: "poetry is a higher and more philosophical thing than history" because poets, and other artists, have the right and responsibility to make art, i.e. lie.)

  Thus, while it is interesting to bring up McInerney, doing so is not the same as journalism. Literary biographers know that they can go just so far with fiction and then have to stop. (This is, once more, to the credit of fiction, although many of us have found it nigh impossible to make the case with freshmen.)

  Let us take, for example, the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by the recently deceased novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., son of Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. You may have heard of him, Bill E.

  It is a work of fiction and yet--startlingly enough!!--includes a character named "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." who visits with friends in the "Introduction" and appears, shitting his brains out, about halfway through. "That was I," he says, and the naive reader thinks Hey, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was there!.

  Here's the thing: the actions ascribed to that character are not necessarily those that the author himself undertook. (You may also want to see the next novel by that same novelist, Breakfast of Champions, in which the novelist interacts with one of his clearly fictional characters.) I am not saying that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was not in Dresden (and check me here--my copy of the novel is not in the office, where I am drawing up syllabi--doesn't "Vonnegut" say that he shits his brains out not in Dresden but in the British POW camp? whoa) during its firebombing, only that it would be foolish to write about him biographically as doing such without documentary evidence confirming that that particular fictive event has roots in fact.

  So, yeah: Justin took a grad-studentish shortcut that, as a grad student, he ought to avoid if he intends to write for careful readers.

  —prytania Read prytania's other letters
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