Read The Use and Abuse of Literature Online
Authors: Marjorie Garber
The Use and Abuse of Literature (30 page)
Daniel Mendelsohn, the author of a book on his quest for the story of his great-uncle and other Jewish victims of the Nazis, dismissed this empathetic banality with brisk contempt: “ ‘Felt Jewish’ is repellent; real Jewish children were being murdered however they may have felt.”
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Mendelsohn thus countered De Wael’s claim of an alternative reality with his own deployment of
real
, then followed it up with an extended discussion of what it means to say “my reality.” “It’s not that frauds haven’t been perpetrated before,” he observed. “What’s worrisome is that, maybe for
the first time, the question people are raising isn’t whether the amazing story is true, but whether it matters if it’s true.”
Mendelsohn drew attention to the borderline between memoir and fiction and on the differential value that modern readers and writers seemed to place on them as bearers of emotional and historical truth. Why do we feel so outraged and bamboozled when a memoir turns out to be a fake? Is our indignation moral, ethical, aesthetic, stylistic—or, indeed, feigned? Does the
use
of the memoir change or disappear when it is proved not to be true?
The number of hoax memoirs on all topics has been on the increase, with the claims ever more extravagant and exploitative.
Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival
was the title of a “heart-wrenching” memoir of gang life in South Central Los Angeles that turned out to be a fabrication. “Heart-wrenching” was how the book was described by a feature-article writer in a profile of the author, “Margaret B. Jones,” later revealed to be the nom de laptop of Margaret Seltzer. Here is how
The New York Times
feature story on the author described the book:
Her memoir is an intimate, visceral portrait of the gangland drug trade of Los Angeles as seen through the life of one household: a stern but loving black grandmother working two jobs; her two grandsons who quit school and became Bloods at ages 12 and 13; her two granddaughters, both born addicted to crack cocaine; and the author, a mixed-race white and Native American foster child who at age 8 came to live with them in their mostly black community. She ended up following her foster brothers into the gang, and it was only when a high school teacher urged her to apply to college that Ms. Jones even began to consider her future.
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The following week this personal biography was exposed as a hoax, the publisher, Riverhead, recalled the book and offered refunds to purchasers, and the editor and publisher said they had never met the author prior to publication, relying instead on the word of a literary agent and the author’s signed statement that she was telling the truth.
Margaret Seltzer, it turned out, had grown up with her biological family in the wealthy L.A. neighborhood of Sherman Oaks and attended Campbell Hall, a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. When interviewed on the radio in connection with book promotions, Seltzer/Jones had spoken in an African-American vernacular, although she and her family are white. The publisher, editor, agent, and newspaper profiler all faced public criticism, and the press drew the expected comparisons with other hoax authors: James Frey, who fabricated the story of his supposed memoir of drug addiction,
A Million Little Pieces
(powerfully promoted by Oprah Winfrey), and Laura Albert, the real author behind the memoirist “J. T. LeRoy,” whose invented personal narrative described him as an addict and the son of a West Virginia prostitute. Albert went to the extreme length of having someone impersonate “LeRoy” in public, confessed to the hoax in a
Paris Review
interview in 2006, and was successfully sued for damages. A movie contract made with “LeRoy” was found by the courts to be null and void.
More than one commentator, including the novelist Anne Bernays, asked why Selzer didn’t just forthrightly declare her work fiction. Bernays wrote a letter to the editor of the
Times:
It’s clear that Margaret Seltzer, author of “Love and Consequences,” is a gifted writer with a soaring imagination. It seems perverse, then, that she chooses to deny her destiny as a novelist.
Ms. Seltzer’s insistence that only nonfiction can “make people understand the conditions that people live in” is way off the mark.
Has she never read Charles Dickens—or even Jane Austen?
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It’s tempting to reflect on Seltzer’s title, since
Love and Consequences
obliquely echoes “Truth or Consequences,” the name of a long-running American quiz show. “Love” rather than “truth”; “and” rather than “or.” Is this the contemporary fantasy of “having it all,” with no repercussions? Or an example of Freud’s dictum about dreams: there is no
no
in the unconscious?
James Frey had written a memoir that turned out to be a fiction. In his op-ed piece for
The New York Times
Daniel Mendelsohn, citing Frey as the standard for contemporary authorial deception, described Frey’s book as a “novel—er, memoir.”
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Mendelsohn’s phrase may remind us of how oral written speech has become; this slip of the tongue that is not a slip of the tongue playfully performs the act of false naming that, on a far more serious scale, Mendelsohn was determined to expose and condemn.
The early history of the novel in English, interestingly, could be described—if inelegantly—by a reverse formulation as “the memoir—er, novel.” The original title of the 1722 Defoe novel we call, for short,
Moll Flanders
, was
The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders, &c.: who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu’d variety for threescore years, besides her childhood, was twelve year a whore, five times a wife (whereof once to her own brother) twelve year a thief, eight year a transported felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv’d honest, and died a penitent: written from her own memorandums.
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In other words, the claim of truth or reality was part of the publishers’ apparatus and, presumably, part of the appeal:
written from her own memorandums
. Moll’s story of suffering and redemption, even if it does not include cohabiting with wolves, seems to fit in rather nicely with the preferred narrative of the modern best-selling memoir. Yet Moll’s first-person narrative was written by a man, and one whose own personal adventures did not resemble hers.
Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
(more properly
The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe; of York, mariner: who lived eight and twenty years, all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque, having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself: with an account how he was at last strangely deliver’d by pyrates in two volumes, written by himself
, published in 1719) had likewise presented the author as editor
of a “true” account: “The Editor,” Defoe wrote in his preface, “believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.”
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The first edition of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel
Pamela
(1740) credited him as the “editor” of what was presented as an authentic set of letters, with only names and places altered. Nothing else, it was claimed, was done to “disguise the Facts, marr the Reflections, and unnaturalize the Incidents.” As a result, what was offered to the public was
“Pamela
as Pamela wrote it, in her own Words, without Amputation, or Addition.”
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Here the claim to historical accuracy, coupled with the immediacy of the letters’ apparent composition (Pamela “breaks off” writing when interrupted, her tears fall on the page, etc.), created a form in which it became problematic to separate truth from fiction—or, as Michael McKeon describes it, “the epistemological status of
Pamela
is difficult to disentangle from that of Pamela—from her claims to, and her capacity for, credibility.” Since Pamela’s story was that of an attempted rape by a wealthy squire (“Mr. B.”) of a young female servant in his household, the plot is, and was, sensational enough to elicit accusations of licentiousness. The only side of the story we hear is Pamela’s: her account of her employer’s initial kindness, the attempted seduction, her imprisonment in his country house, the illegitimate child he had with a former lover. Pamela periodically talks about her writing supplies—her pens, paper, ink, and wax—especially when she is imprisoned and worries that her access to writing will be curtailed.
I don’t want to overemphasize the commonalities between the emergent-novel form of the eighteenth century and the resurgent real-life memoir of the twenty-first. But there are some striking connections. Richardson’s
Pamela
was modeled on the conduct books of the time, forerunners of today’s self-help manuals (and yesterday’s etiquette books). Like the memoir, these genres now appear with great regularity among weekly best sellers and are prominent in displays at airport bookstores and chain stores. By combining the risk of personal hazard with notions of virtuous conduct and putting both into the epistolary first person,
Pamela
anticipates some of the hardship tales of privation, suffering, addiction, or rescue that still captivate readers today.
The phrase
false memoir
has obvious analogies with the notion of false memories, or false memory syndrome, and repressed or recovered memory. Much has been written on this phenomenon, comparing such false allegations to the witch trials of past centuries and chronicling the capacity for abuse by psychotherapists and other counselors. Pursuing this analogy may well land us in the murky territory of writing as pathology or writing as therapy. Researchers like James Pennebaker have worked on the problem from the side of psychology;
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Freud and Breuer long ago called it abreaction, the liberation of repressed ideas by reviving and expressing them.
The injured person’s reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely “cathartic” effect if it is an
adequate
reaction—as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be “abreacted” almost as effectively. In other cases speaking is itself the adequate reflex, when, for instance, it is a lamentation or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g., a confession. If there is no such reaction, whether in deeds or words, or in the mildest cases in tears, any recollection of the event retains its affective tone.
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Catharsis
, which means
purgation
in both a medical and a theatrical sense, was used at this foundational moment in psychotherapy as a way of describing a purgation of the emotions. Psychotherapy, in this sense, is theater performed for an audience of one.
When Freud abandoned his so-called seduction theory in favor of the idea that fantasy, not real experience, was at the heart of many patients’ accounts of child sexual abuse, he developed the theories about infantile sexuality that became central to psychoanalysis. As he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in a letter announcing his change of heart (“I no longer believe in my
neurotica
”), this decision was based partly on the unlikelihood that actual abuse was so widespread (“in all cases, the
father
, not
excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse”), but even more importantly, on the impossibility of distinguishing truth from fiction: “there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect.”
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Cathected with affect: that is, highly charged with emotion.
The unconscious, Freud says, has “no indications of reality,” so when a patient describes past events it is not possible from such internal evidence to distinguish between things that really happened and things that feel as if they happened. Indeed, these events have, we might say, “happened” psychically, even if they have no basis in external fact. This theory was controversial then, and it is certainly not less controversial now. But it is, as you can see, closely related to the phenomenon of the false memoir. And—even more directly—it is related to the larger question of creative writing, the literary imagination, and the use and abuse of literature. Indeed, the coincidental presence of the word
abuse
(borrowed from a celebrated translation of Nietzsche’s essay on history writing) offers a convenient hook or hinge. Is literature a use or an abuse? Is it caused by abuse?
Manifestly not all memoirs are alike. Many have become memorable—and indeed have become
literature
—because of their style at least as much as their content. Among these works are, for example, the
Confessions
of St. Augustine and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau but also more recent writing—say, the nonfiction of James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tobias Wolff, or Elie Wiesel. But rescuing the baby doesn’t mean bottling and selling the bathwater. The fact that something really happened isn’t any guarantee of its credibility in a piece of writing. And some of the most famous memoirs, of course, have been fictional, like John Cleland’s erotic novel,
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
(1748), better known as
Fanny Hill
.
The word
memoir
only gradually began to mean reminiscences (often in the plural, as in “writing one’s memoirs”) and then biography or autobiography; the original uses were more legal or official, related to the memo, or written account containing instructions or facts to be judged. So the memoir has moved, perhaps inexorably, from fact to narrative embellishment, from other to self. But what is this addiction for books
about addiction—or gang warfare, or child abuse, or deprivation? Not surprisingly, this kind of personal privation and struggle has often had appeal, and not only in the twenty-first century. It is not enough to say we live in hard times. Nor have other literary genres skated lightly over pain, loss, illness, conflict, betrayal, murder, or untimely death: this is a fair catalog of some of the central incidents of Greek tragedy, early modern English drama, and many classic works of nineteenth-century fiction. But the memoir craze, like
American Idol
and reality television, makes everyone a hero. Pathos, once a key ingredient in the response to tragedy and lyric, is now evoked in and by the memoir, the personal story, “my” story even if, in written form, it is occasionally “as told to” someone else.
