Friday, January 27, 2006
Not really piling on, but...
I doubt that the blogosphere really needs one more James Frey commentary, but given the recent Oprah hoo-ha what's a few more words? Anyway, one of the main issues is real reality and the representation thereof, which is kind of my point with this blog.
Non-fiction fundamentally means you're not making the stuff up - as best you know from research and/or memory, it really happened. Clearly, that still leaves a lot of lattitude. Evidence can be missing or contradictory. Memories can be false. But Frey's, it seems, were sins of commission, not omission. He said things that were not so, and that he knew not to be so. I'm going to drop the religious image now, because I don't think he should burn for eternity, Oprah's hurt feelings to the contrary notwithstanding.
But what he did is wrong, because in a world where "reality TV" doesn't show us anything more fundamentally real than General Hospital we need all the authenticity that we can get. And we don't need people passing off fiction as non-fiction, thank you very much.
Non-fiction fundamentally means you're not making the stuff up - as best you know from research and/or memory, it really happened. Clearly, that still leaves a lot of lattitude. Evidence can be missing or contradictory. Memories can be false. But Frey's, it seems, were sins of commission, not omission. He said things that were not so, and that he knew not to be so. I'm going to drop the religious image now, because I don't think he should burn for eternity, Oprah's hurt feelings to the contrary notwithstanding.
But what he did is wrong, because in a world where "reality TV" doesn't show us anything more fundamentally real than General Hospital we need all the authenticity that we can get. And we don't need people passing off fiction as non-fiction, thank you very much.
