Las Vegas, as a city, has long been a reliable creative irritant to the sensibilities of travel writers who work in a genre called “literary”, “narrative”, “nonfiction-creative”.
The city’s shiny surfaces candy-shell over a variety of social cankers, plus real people live their lives there, and any of these conditions alone, or all of them together, make for a good subject. See, for instance, Stilettos in Paris, In the Neon Boneyard, The Las Vegas Imposter, Road Trip.
Two years ago, I read John D’Agata’s “What Happens There”, an essay about Las Vegas in The Believer, and About a Mountain, the same essay at book length.
I found them both satisfying, which is a high compliment. D’Agata articulated much of what I’d perceived in my visits to Vegas. His writing allowed my experience to make larger sense.*
A couple of weeks ago, I picked up The Lifespan of a Fact, by D’Agata, and Jim Fingal, who fact checked the essay at magazine length. The book is the back-and-forth between the two, as Fingal reckons with the “liberties” D’Agata took with facts.
The liberties are myriad — massaged quotes, multiple elisions, and many changes for poetic reasons: the rhythm of thirty-four works better than thirty-one; a description of a van as pink instead of purple, because purple has two beats and pink has one; four deaths from cancer on a particular day instead of the factual eight, because it worked better in a list for the numbers to descend.
At first, reading this made me feel a little uncomfortable. As everyone who has written about Lifespan is apparently obligated to point out, I have had some experience with the fact-checking process — I’ve been fact-checked many times and have fact-checked a bit myself. I would not like to be in D’Agata’s defensive position. In my own writing, I do try to get things right: not just because I have spent most of my career in journalism, but because even when I write essay, narrative, nonfiction-creative, or whatever you want to call it, I think the facts are an interesting and appealing creative constraint. You have to make the art work inside the narrow band of fact, and I like that.
As I read Lifespan, I was reminded me of how I felt when watching the movie Shattered Glass, which would be how I’d feel watching anyone caught in an dishonest act.
But D’Agata repeatedly insists that he is not being dishonest, because he was never trying to be accurate. He was not a journalist, trying to commit journalism. “The facts that are being employed here aren’t meant to function baldly as “facts”. The work that they’re doing is more image-based than informational.”
I wanted to object to the possibility of a fact having something other than its “bald function”, but I realized that I couldn’t, and that I thought D’Agata was right. As I said, after I read D’Agata’s work, I understood something about Las Vegas that I hadn’t been previously able to articulate. Even though they were rife with factual errors.
Still, the journalist in me was still irritated by his manipulations. She said, oh come on, John, please. Couldn’t you have created the same image-based effect without taking quite so many factual liberties?
I’ve since decided to withdraw the question.
The reason lies in Fingal’s black-inked sections, the relatively few passages of D’Agata’s essay that he was able to confirm. Fingal would apply the black ink in a few instances: when he was able to find a fact repeated in another news source, an article in a newspaper, magazine or website, or in a book; when there was some mention of an event in D’Agata’s notes, or, in a sort of fact-checker superhero maneuver, by going to Las Vegas and checking things out for himself.
This is standard fact-checking procedure: if you can find a “fact” replicated in another source, or possibly more than one other source, if you can get a source to agree that they said something like what is written between quotation marks (because everyone who has ever written nonfiction knows you can’t possibly quote someone both accurately and intelligbly, just try reading a transcript), if you can get some consensus, in other words, and it doesn’t have to be much, you’ve got a fact. Bring on the black ink.
But fact validated by consensus doesn’t always equal truth. In fact, if you’ll forgive the expression, it’s often the opposite. And this is a very big problem for anyone who believes that that they’re writing factually, and a problem of immense philosophical complexity for me.
It’s hard to get through the day, much less the writing of a piece of nonfiction, if you don’t believe that facts, beyond the very simplest, actually exist. But when you seriously try to determine the accuracy of a fact, when you are not satisfied by mere consensus, things get slippery fast. ( “Considered historically, any fact is just a hoax that is believed until it is debunked”.**) And if you’re relying on memory, yours or someone else’s, for a factual account, good luck: as I’ve previously reported, the chances are very high that you are heavily into fiction.
This is the point of Lifespan, of course: it’s not about fact-checking, or the meaning of nonfiction, or of art, it’s about the basic instability of fact.
This is a terribly unpleasant notion for all writers of nonfiction, including travel writers, to contemplate.
So I suggest that we never speak of it again.
*For more on this, see The Art in Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts.
** John Tresch, “Extra! Extra! Poe Invents Science Fiction”, in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe.
Sorry Alison but this just makes me angry.
I have no idea about how fact checkers do their work. I am a journalist with 15 years experience but fact checkers are an American thing. We don’t use them in Australia and they don’t use them in the UK and I wasn’t subjected to them on the handful of times I wrote for American newspapers and magazines. What you describe sounds painful and not necessarily about ‘truth’ – I agree that consensus does not equal fact.
However, there is no excuse for D’Aguta changing facts to suit his own convenience, artistic or otherwise. Zero. He should have zero credibility and never be published in the non-fiction genre ever again. That makes me really angry. I don’t care if he was illuminating a broader truth – he should have done so within the constraints of the facts. It’s not the fact-checking process that should have constrained him but his own integrity. I don’t care if he doesn’t think he’s writing journalism. If it purports to be non-fiction then every word needs to be literally true or there need to be suitable disclaimers that make it clear that certain elements have been fictionalised.
If writers don’t understand that, then publishers need to make them understand it.
No wonder we have a trust problem.
Bah!
I hear what you’re saying. There are all sorts of good arguments to make about labeling work appropriately, and I want that to happen too. I don’t like writing fiction, and I’m not that interested in reading it.
However.
For me the point of Lifespan isn’t the absurdity of a writer changing facts to suit some purpose, like changing thirty-one to thirty-four for the sake of poetry — which itself may or may not have actually happened: http://www.kenyonreview.org/2012/02/doubling-down-an-interview-with-john-dagata-and-jim-fingal/ –but what has troubled me for a long time, which is that a piece can be “fact checked” and still be wrong. (Weapons of mass destruction, anyone?) And that a piece can be completely f*d factually and still be correct in the bigger picture.
It’s something for nonfiction writers to think about, if they can manage the headache that will definitely follow.
(Oh and in the book, apparently, D’Agata details the facts he massaged. I don’t remember that from when I read it; I don’t have it handy just now.)
The dealbreaker for me was learning that D’Agata had lied about the details of another young man’s suicide on the same day (if I remember right, he changed it to a car accident) so as to make his own main character more unique. That’s not art, that’s cruelty, and breathtaking arrogance.
Yeah, that’s pretty appalling.
If it’s true.
Since I wrote this post, I read an interview (link in my last reply) that suggests that the whole factchecking back-and-forth was itself manufactured…so it’s hard to know what actually happened versus what the fact checking revealed. It’s hard to take any of the details seriously at all. Which may well be the point of the whole book.
I’m just back from AWP, where this book was a hot topic. I walk away from all these conversations feeling like they’re missing the point, or at least, the nub of what bugs me, which is that as a journalist, you have to operate on the basis of consensus — there’s no way to do journalism otherwise. But consensus does not always equal truth — in fact, often quite the opposite. For just one example of how consensus of statement did not add up to truth, see this story on the Central Park jogger case.
And if larger truth is the point of literature, which I think it is, then as nonfiction writers we have an important conversation to have about using consensus as the sine qua non of “fact”.