The Use and Abuse of Literature (29 page)

“Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality,” T. S. Eliot wrote in the first of his
Four Quartets.
¹
Variously misremembered and misquoted as “Mankind cannot bear very much reality” and—with a deplorable indifference to the rhythms of blank verse—“Mankind cannot bear too much reality,” this phrase, lifted from its context, has achieved the status of an aphorism, and—what seems always to follow—a truth. Since this chapter will offer a resistant account of reality as it has come to be valued in the world of literature and writing, we might begin by asking how much is “too much”—or, alternatively, what is it that makes “reality” real or reality “real”? The problem is already apparent.

What is the use of reality in literature? Sometimes contemporary writing is itself referential—pointing toward or running parallel with actual events and persons, as, for example, in novels by E. L. Doctorow or Don DeLillo, or in the genre of the “occasional poem,” written to commemorate an event. But what happens when reality becomes a trait, or a criterion, for the success, excellence, or sincerity of a piece of writing?

The brief celebrity of the nonfiction novel in the 1960s, following the publication of Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
, presented real events narrated in the style and using the techniques of fiction. My interest here, however, is in the converse situation: works that present themselves as true and that disclose themselves, or are forcibly disclosed, to be invented.

The normative distinction on best-seller lists is between fiction and nonfiction. But like all binaries, this one is difficult to sustain. What is interesting about the fiction/nonfiction divide is precisely the formal
pretense that these things are opposites, or alternatives, to each other, rather than versions of each other, or aspects of a larger category of writing and reading. There is a certain irony in the fact that we praise works of fiction for being true-to-life, and condemn works of nonfiction when they turn out to be fabrications. I have sometimes found myself sharing the ethical outrage of those who feel duped by false memoirs. But from a critical rather than a moral or ethical standpoint, should these deceptions be telling us something about the nature of writing?

We might also want to consider the curious status of a term like
nonfiction
, which implies that the standard kind of writing—what linguists and anthropologists would call the unmarked term—is
fiction
. Why is the true-story narrative for modern readers defined in terms of a double negative? Is nonfiction the equivalent of “not untrue,” and how is that different from “true”?

The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris offered some thoughtful commentary on the vexed question of reenactment in film and television:

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.

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 New Republic
, noted dryly that the publisher had advertised
Angel at the Fence
(subtitled
The True Story of a Love That Survived
) as “a perfect Valentine’s Day gift.”
⁷
Not only the astonishing coincidences, but also the on-the-ground facts, were quickly put in doubt by persons familiar with the geography of Buchenwald. No such fence, it was noted, existed; it would not have been possible for a civilian to gain such access to a prisoner in the camps. The result, as Sherman reported, was—unsettlingly but unsurprisingly—backlash not against Herman Rosenblat, but against those who questioned the verisimilitude of the story, including Deborah Lipstadt, a distinguished professor of history and Holocaust studies and the author of the 1993 book
Denying the Holocaust
. Doubters were lambasted as “going after a Holocaust survivor without any proof.”
⁸
In effect, they were pilloried as
Angel
deniers.

What was the scandal here? What was the crime? Had Rosenblat called his narrative a fiction, would Oprah have been interested in it? Would a publisher have put it under contract? Would the advance have been less?

The excuse given for the support of the book’s claims were in some ways more problematic than the claims themselves, since, as the Valentine’s Day publication date suggested, the story was supposed to be all about love. Love, it was said, clouded memory and embellished it. Love, Rosenblat himself asserted, made him do it. Why did he invent the story about the girl and the apples? “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many.”
⁹
Although he and his brothers were in fact interned in the camp, what “brought hope to many” and attracted the attention of an agent, a publisher, and Oprah Winfrey was not the survival but the love story.

The next step seems, in retrospect, inevitable. Within days of these revelations, a publisher began negotiating to issue the book as a work of fiction. What was to be published, though, was not the original text but a version based on a screenplay already in production. The book thus became the secondary partner in a book-and-movie tie-in deal. The publisher, York House Press, issued a statement that tried to explain, as well as to explain away, what had happened:

In this interesting mix of popular psychology (“coping mechanisms”), guilt-trip apologia (“it is beyond our expertise”), and resistance to the facts (all accounts suggest that there was no fence that bordered on public
access, so that even “a whole crowd” of apple-tossing empathizers would have been unable to perform the rescue operation as described), the publishers sought to rehabilitate, even to reenoble, the author-fantasist. The problem with the “false memoir,” they implied, did not lie with Herman Rosenblat but with the tragic fact of the Holocaust itself, and the refusal of history to make his fantasy retroactively true. “Mr. Rosenblat’s motivations were very human, understandable, and forgivable,” they wrote. What does
human
mean in such a context? Or
very
human? Fallible? Exculpable? Full of pathos? Compare this to “for humanity’s sake,” in the paragraph above. Rosenblat is human, all too human. So is his story, whether fictional or factual. It is history that is, and was, inhumane. In fact, it might be the case that it was not love but
history
that made him do it.

And after the apologia, the assertive declaration: “York House Press is in serious discussion to publish a work of fiction in early spring that is based on the screenplay, tentatively called
Flower at the Fence
, about Herman Rosenblat’s life and love story, that is grounded in fact and that rises to the proper levels of artistic value, ethical conduct and social responsibility.” Here, presumably, is the claim to literary legitimacy, however oblique. Whatever the “proper levels of artistic value” may be construed to be, how do they intersect with ethical conduct (on whose part? author? publisher? screenplay writer?) and social responsibility? What is the social responsibility of a work of fiction? And in what sense is the work to be “grounded in fact”? Pretty clearly, the publishers want to have things both ways: the unutterable truth of the Holocaust and the forgivable fiction of the love story.

Furthermore, the “serious discussion” in which the putative publisher is engaged (presumably a conversation about contractual issues) becomes linked, by a kind of rhetorical slippage or legerdemain, to an implied seriousness of the work. What is being discussed is a “work of fiction” that is also based on “fact.” Because if it were not—if, for example, the entire narrative had been invented by a twenty-five-year-old creative-writing student with no personal link to the Holocaust—the commercial possibilities for both the film and the book to be derived
from it (“can we now call it a ‘novelization’?”) would be much more limited. Was the Rosenblat scandal really just a category crisis, readily resolved by resituating the book on a shelf marked
fiction
?

With perhaps predictable regularity, hoax memoirs have returned again and again to the topic and the ground of the Holocaust, the overdetermined historical locus of witnessing, testimony, survivors—and deniers. But the tendency persists in all testimonial, confession, autobiographical writing, even in the writing of other lives. The claim of truth invites not only the suspicion but perhaps even the formal inevitability of the lie. “There is no testimony,” writes Jacques Derrida, “that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie, and perjury.”
¹¹

Yet another supposed memoir,
Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years
, told the story of a Jewish child who killed a Nazi soldier in self-defense, trekked over a thousand miles through Europe in quest of her deported parents, and was adopted by a pack of wolves. And this entire story, too, it developed, was a fabrication. The author, Misha Levy Defonseca, acknowledged that she was born in Belgium to Roman Catholic parents who were arrested and killed during the resistance; her birth name was Monique De Wael. Despite the revelation that the claims made in the book—which had been translated into eighteen languages and made into a movie in France—were false, De Wael deployed the language of “reality” to justify what she had done. “The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” she said in a statement released by her lawyers.
¹²
She asked forgiveness of “all who felt betrayed” and said she “felt Jewish” and had felt so “since forever.”