The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [106]
Authorship may not seem to be one of the key reality principles so much as a matter of truth in packaging. Nonetheless, for the time being, let’s note that these nonfiction books are jostling for public favor with books described as memoirs, autobiographies, meditations, or spectacularly—and unexpectedly—posthumous accounts. The attraction of these real-life narratives and their “ripped from the headlines” appeal seems undeniable, a symptom of the times (and the Times). Thus, on the same best-seller list, we find:
Manic by Terri Cheney. A memoir of life with bipolar disorder.
Hope’s Boy by Andrew Bridge. A memoir of foster care by an advocate for poor children.
Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell. The only survivor of a Navy Seals operation in northern Afghanistan describes the battle, his comrades, and his courageous escape.
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead by David Shields. A meditation on mortality, focused on the author’s ninety-seven-year-old father.
Reconciliation by Benazir Bhutto. A posthumous look at Islam, democracy, and the West, by Pakistan’s former prime minister and assassinated opposition leader.24
Presumably, considerations of space in this last item produced the verbal compression “a posthumous look,” suggesting that Bhutto is writing after her own death—a development that would have made her the literal ghostwriter of her own book.
What might be the use of such personal accounts of the self? Let’s recall Philip Sidney’s dictum: “a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example.” We might likewise note that a bad example has as much force to teach as a good example. The good example is a model for conduct, in the mode of Plutarch’s Lives or the lives of the saints, where allegory displaces mimesis and acts are symbolic in the first instance, real only—or preeminently—in their power to induce imitation. In a more modern sense, this is the Profiles in Courage, ordinary-hero snapshot, the inspirational feature story writ large. The obverse is schadenfreude, or the bad example. Triumphs over adversity, addiction (drugs, alcohol, sex, fame, chronic lying, you name it). It doesn’t take much to see that this is itself a seductive mode. If St. Augustine—or Rousseau—had had nothing to confess, would we read their memoirs?
Under a strict definition of literature, few if any of these memoirs, real or false, would qualify. Conceivably, if any had surpassing literary merit—however we were to determine that elusive criterion—it might somehow transcend the dialectic of truth and lie. But faked and false and lie and wholesale fabrication are damning terms when the public is deceived and not delighted.
Fact into Fiction
The best-selling book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (Free Press, 2002) was made into a successful film entitled 21 in 2008. The book, by Ben Mezrich, was listed as a work of nonfiction, and he went on to produce other books in the same vein with similarly explanatory subtitles: Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions (2005), Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees (2005), and Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai (2007).25 (Are we sensing a pattern here?)
Questions about the truth value of Bringing Down the House resurfaced with the opening of the movie and the concurrent revelation of several less than fully truthful memoirs. The public was now on