The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [99]
The engine of uncovering truth is not some special lens or even the unadorned human eye; it is unadorned human reason. It wasn’t a cinéma vérité documentary [The Thin Blue Line] that got Randall Dale Adams out of prison. It was a film that re-enacted important details of the crime. It was an investigation—part of which was done with a camera. The re-enactments capture the important details of that investigation. It’s not re-enactments per se that are wrong or inappropriate. It’s the use of them. I use re-enactments to burrow underneath the surface of reality in an attempt to uncover some hidden truth.
Is the problem that we have an unfettered capacity for credulity, for false belief, and hence, we feel the need to protect ourselves from ourselves? If seeing is believing, then we better be careful about what we show people, including ourselves, because regardless of what it is we are likely to uncritically believe it.2
This chapter will focus on the memoir boom and its discontents, including a proliferation of hoaxes so numerous, and so successful, as to create what is essentially a new literary genre. I want to explore the complicated relationship of the memoir style not only to the genre called autobiography but also to a certain kind of imagined, artful, or speculative biography, all of which make claims to truth. What interests me is what is called real and what is called literary, and what the two might, or might not, have to do with each other.
On Truth and Lie
Sir Philip Sidney had declared in his Defence of Poesy (1595) that “The poet nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.”3 In my edition of the Defence, the headers at the top of the page reinforce the point: “The historian captive to truth,” reads one, and another says with equal directness, “The poet is least a liar.”4 For Sidney the word poet, or maker, meant the writer of imaginative literature, whether in verse or in prose. The goal of poesy was not factual accuracy, but something else, something different, something more like Horace’s famous dictum that art should both delight and instruct. Thus, comparing the usefulness of history and poetry, Sidney could assert that “a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example.”5
But today it seems to be the real (or the faux real) that is actively, and avidly, sought. Let’s consider an example that is also a cautionary tale—although, as will quickly be evident, it is hard to decide who, or what, is being cautioned. The story of Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust “memoir,” Angel at the Fence, hit both Oprah Winfrey and the publishing world with dismaying force when the “truth” unraveled in December 2008. Oprah had welcomed Herman and Roma Rosenblat as guests on her show in 1996, after Herman won a contest sponsored by the New York Post for “the best love story sent in by a reader.”6 The story he told was of his internment as a boy in a Nazi concentration camp, and how he was sustained by a young girl who threw apples over the fence to him. Many years later, in Israel, he went on a blind date with the same girl but did not recognize her. Subsequently, they met again in New York and married.
When the Rosenblats returned to The Oprah Winfrey Show eleven years later, Winfrey lauded their romance as “the single greatest love story, in twenty-two years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air.” The story was picked up in the “couples” volume of Chicken Soup for the Soul and was ultimately sold, in book form, to Berkley Books. Then the scandal broke. The story turned out to be a fantasy, an embellishment, or a lie (depending upon who you asked), and Berkley canceled the book before its scheduled release.
Reporter Gabriel Sherman, who raised significant questions about the Holocaust “memoir” in The