On (Creative) (Non)-Fiction and Accurate Facts

In this article from Slate Magazine, Dan Kois reviews the book The Lifespan of a Fact, which involves the fact-checking of an essay written by John D'Agata and includes the essay, the comments by the fact-checker, and D'Agata's responses to the fact-checker (Jim Fingal). As if the book itself weren't confusing enough, Kois includes his own story about meeting Tim O'Brien in this review, and subsequently fact-checks the review here. Although the majority of Kois's review seems to imply that D'Agata is a jerk for fudging facts to suit the aesthetics of his essays, his own fudging of facts in his review suggests that the exact truth is undesirable in a creative essay, if not impossible. Kois takes both sides in the argument for truth in non-fiction, and leaves his reader (or at least this reader) suspicious of all authors' veracity, not simply that of D'Agata.

D'Agata's argument in terms of his essay's lack of truth is that "it's called art, dickhead," but why write in a nonfiction genre and then make things up? Why was it important for Kois to pretend he had interviewed D'Agata and Fingal rather than simply read their book? I understand that the non-fiction writer wants to arrive at a particular, perhaps essential, truth with his essay, but changing the facts in order to point to this truth seems to me to undermine everything. Furthermore, what's the point of having a fact-checker at all if you simply don't plan to write facts in your work? People want to read essays and memoirs because they purport to tell true stories, amazing or poignant or moralizing, but true. No one's preventing D'Agata from writing fiction about teen suicide and tae kwon do, and this type of realistic fiction would certainly sell. Maybe these little manipulations of fact don't matter, but if not, why manipulate facts at all?

Translation and Truth

I've been thinking a lot about translation lately, perhaps because I've been reading a lot of fiction translated from other languages (mostly French). Several times in the class in which the translated work was read, we have glanced over or mostly ignored the problems that must arise when this highly stylized experimental French or Italian fiction is rendered into English. A Spanish language edition of William Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic has also just been announced and reviewed, and this translation of one of my favorite authors into a language I also (mostly) read makes me further consider the necessity of and problems with fiction and poetry translation. I have no doubt that translators are extremely skilled and often brilliant to be able to capture the ideas of any writer in a language not his own, but are they often brilliantly inventing their own works of art?

Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler somewhat whimsically tackles some issues that arise with translations. In the novel, you, the Reader, read parts of almost a dozen different novels translated from various languages in search of the ending to If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. The enigmatic "translator" of the novel, Ermes Marana, is the character who could perhaps best be called its villain because he produces fraudulent and unauthorized translations of books with no apparent concern about their authenticity whatsoever. This character is an abuser of both good faith and ignorance, but is he also the closest of all of the novel's characters to being its true author? As the fringe groups searching for him ask, is there an absolutely true Ur-text, or an absolutely false one, and what's the difference? Furthermore, what am I to do with the fact that the entire novel has been further translated for me to consume?

As Good as We Pretend to Be

A few days ago, this story appeared on Yahoo! (and very likely elsewhere), about a senior admissions official at Claremont McKenna College who has been falsifying SAT score reports to U.S. News and World Report and other places for several years. The inflation of scores was apparently not extreme (10-20 points), but may have increased the liberal arts college's desirability and (perhaps) ranking among other colleges, leading to increased revenue for the school. The official has resigned and the school has launched a formal investigation.

Though not as severe, the case is reminiscent of the Atlanta Public School scandal that unfolded last summer, when it was revealed that "at least 178 teachers and principals in Atlanta Public Schools cheated to raise student scores on high-stakes standardized tests." One wonders what kind of incentive students have to do well, when officials will fudge things to make both themselves and the students look better. In both cases the cause probably involves money, but there also seems to be a sense, at least in the Atlanta case, that the teachers were acting for what they believed to be positive ends. I won't start the argument about the (legitimate/illegitimate/high/low/) importance of standardized testing in secondary school, but all of this does seem a lot of time wasted that could have been spent actually teaching students. Perhaps no one attended Claremont McKenna because of its students' test scores, but the school will certainly have the stain of dishonesty on it for several years now.