I note that there has recently been a fair bit of tension between the African-American and Mexican communities, and I wonder how much of this post that explains.
Yeah, I like Alameida more. Sorry, cracka.
Dolan's crit is just as macho as Frey's; I liked Ed Tarkington's point that it's not the accuracy but the macho that's the problem:
"Having a messed-up life and a brash manner might make one marketable, but it doesn't make one an artist. Let's hold out on big, bad Mr. Frey until he produces "a big fat book" that requires something other than ego and persistence—like talent, imagination, vision . . . any of the aforementioned would be a good start. And stop wasting your time promoting arrogant hacks who exploit the public's taste for confessional diarrhea and brazenness and give the space to the real literary artists outside the New York boys' club."
Aha! But you see, this whole argument--Frey is lying, and he's not bad-assed enough--is a central problem for literary realism (which is what's at stake here). One of the primary components of realism is that it's not about "high" characters, but "low" ones--you know, normal, everyday people. (Even if it is about elites, it portrays them as normal, everyday people by focusing on their problems, internal psychology, emotional upsets, etc.)
Having gotten used to literary realism, we tend to see things as more "realistic" the "lower" they are. Which is, I strongly suspect, both why people praised his memoir and why they are so betrayed and angry that it turns out, in fact, to be fiction. Frey, very cleverly (though who knows if he realized what he was doing or not), took advantage of our naivete as readers and the transparency of literary conventions. Writers have done that ever since the advent of popular writing (and their doing it has been controversial, too).
I find the whole situation fabulous, myself.
very cleverly (though who knows if he realized what he was doing or not)
You know, if all this was intentional, a sort of Fargo-esque "This is a true story" yanking of our collective chains, it was very well-executed. However, my impression is that he did it because he suspected a "true" story would sell better than a novel. Interesting results regardless of his motivation, but his financial/fame-increasing reasons for doing all this just make him look like a little punk.
But who cares about him? Whereas the situation is brilliant.
B, this is really interesting. Are you saying that F's book can be read as a sort of manipulation of the conventions of memoir? The anger seems to result from lower-is-better + must-be-real coming into conflict.
Dolan's problem isn't that Frey doesn't have a bad enough life. He's not saying that in order to write a book you either have to be the dregs of white society or be black (there's a lot going on behind the scenes in what everybody writes about this stuff). He's saying that if you're going to claim you're a badass you'd better really be a badass. And no matter where you come from, a middle class white kid smoking pot and listening to Green Day, or whatever the equivalent was for Frey's generation, isn't badass.
Do you really think it's new for somebody to show that people are more likely to believe something that supports their preconceptions than something that tells the truth?
A manipulation of the conventions of both memoir and novel--which overlap considerably. In fact, potentially, a manipulation of the conventions of narrative itself (biographies, histories, all of it effectively have to pick and choose, magnify and minimize, to shape things into a coherent story with a sense of cause & effect). Let's all go see the Tristram Shandy movie and then come back and talk about it some more!
And I don't mean just F's book (which I haven't read). The entire situation; I think the broad critical reaction is part of the thing as well. I should write a paper on it. I'll add it to the list of shit I should do....
Wait, is there seriously a Tristram Shandy movie? How?
A few minutes of blank film, so we can all imagine something else on the screen, as suits our fancy?
Frey's writing was sickly, as Dolan pointed out, and he trimmed his imagined / second-hand experiences to a lowest-common-denominator audience. Dolan also pointed out that episodes in Frey's book were pretty implausible (not just non-actual.)
In hsort, Frey's book would have been bad even if there had been no questions about authenticity.
But the questions about authenticity aren't bad! They've saved his otherwise mediocre book!
I don't think it's just the faux badassedness that pisses Dolan off. (Caveat: I haven't read either Frey or Dolan.) One of the things that Dolan picks up on that is interesting to me is that Frey (re)wrote his life into the conventions of the addiction-memoir: the descent to the bottom and the redemption into sobriety. Dolan's complaint is both that the bottom was exaggerated and that the redemption was forced and silly. Frey's exaggeration of these extremes appeals to the reader's sentimentality about drugs--while pretending to present itself as really fucking 'core.
My sister works with bottomed-out alcoholics and druggies and they're mostly hapless, pitiful, uninteresting people. I've run into career criminals during my life, and if they're not ruthless businessmen, they're usually pretty pathetic too. The larger-than-life evil superman type is pretty rare. (A lot of them have these superstitious, sentimental, homemade religious beliefs that they think of as Deep Thoughts.)
Let me get a jump on next month's controversy and note for the record that I don't believe Norah Vincent really fooled her bowling buddies into thinking she was a man, either.
Labs,
I think you're right -- Dolan does think Little's cool. So do I. the guy is a badass, and badasses are cool. Vin Diesel is pretty sweet in my opinion, and it mainly has to do with things like the fact that if you rearrange the letters of his name it reveals his credo: "I end lives." everybody likes a badass, and as your post pointed out, everybody wants to be one. So what's the problem again?
There are two separate issues here to be dealt with. First, is frey's book any good? No, it is untrue, badly written, and Frey is a pussy. Second, why does Dolan like Little? because he's a badass. Frey wants to be Little but isn't.
Dolan seems fairly normal to me. He's not asking that all writers be badasses, he's just appreciating a real life badass. (I could go on about Achilles and the possible nobility of an early death, but who cares?).
An early death is not in itself noble. Proof: even if Thersites had died early, his life would still have been ignoble.
But there is often a temptation to associate an early death with some sort of ignoble life. "Little was clearly living a horrible life and he got what was coming to him." All I'm trying to say is that the early death in itself, even if it was inevitable, doesn't make his badass-dom ignoble or immoral. Really, if Frey wants to regain his credibility, his only option is probably to go out and od in a bathroom somewhere. Maybe dying after sniffing too much glue and killing a stripper by stuffing a bunch of dollar bills down her throat. Or something sufficiently badass.
Meh, I had a long comment here, but I just want to say: You know what is hardcore? Department meetings on a Sunday, that is fucking hardcore!
Ever since Odysseus made the best seller list people have been writing the same book: I went someplace terrible and awful. I had adventures. I have returned to tell you about it.
Now we call them ethnography.
My upcoming best seller is of the same form: I went someplace terrible and awful. I ate tuna hot dish and jello salad with tiny marshmallows, and talked about the weather. I have returned.
I'm afraid that the terror of Sunday department meetings may push me off Oprah. Time for a re-write.
Argh, correction to my 19: "I haven't read either Frey or Little"; the Dolan, which I'm reacting to specifically, I should hope I had read.
Michael, are you trapped in Lake Wobegon?
I alone have returned to tell you about it.
Not trapped, no. I have returned to tell my tale of terror and awe. And to appear on Oprah. I am authentic. I have been there, and I have seen. I sing of redemption by tiny marshmallows. Coming soon to a cineplex near you.
Ah yes. Good point. Alone. Of all who sailed on that ill-omened ship, I alone have returned. Call me Gilligan.
Has anybody done a mash-up of Gilligan's Island with Moby Dick?
No, but I'm about to do a mashup of YOUR FACE.
Or, a la Nerval, I would have returned alone to tell you about it except that I committed suicide midway through and now don't know whether I'm redeemed or damned.
The phrase you're looking for is, "I am the man, I suffered, I was there." And who liked him some macho any better than Walt Whitman?
Yeah, authentic first-person observation is generally bogosity; you need only ask any cop the value of eyewitness testimony to find out. Or since we're all such overachieving highbrows, we should consult Marc Bloch on the true gen in wartime, "Réflexions d'un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre."
Or, to read Bloch as a gloss on Labs (why, what else do you do in your spare time?), "Une fausse nouvelle naît toujours de représentations collectives qui préexistent à sa naissance," which I read more or less as, "A false news item is always born from collective representations that preexist its birth." Those collective representations have to be of the sort "qui flattait l'imagination romantique des foules," which I puzzle out roughly as "which flatter the romantic imagination of the masses."
Hatred of false humility in translators. (unascribed)
A true news item is also always born from collective representations that preexist its birth. That's what makes it newsworthy. The concept always comes before the observation.
39: It's not false humility when you make mistakes.
40: Yeah, but Bloch's point is, what's interesting about this is not the falsity itself, but what it reveals about the culture that is prepared to believe it. Which is what Labs is pointing to, innit? Not Frey, but the underlying culture that leads us to have an interest, probably an unwholesome one, in both him and Little?
True. I think we're all agreeing here. JM pointed out in 19 that Frey was following the convention of the addiction memoir. I think B was talking about the same thing (backhandedly) in 12. And Ian D-B in 10. As Matt F pointed out, he "suspected a "true" story would sell better than a novel"
It says that we're interested in transgression and redemption, and the return of the prodigal (a/k/a/ reaffirming or reinscribing norms). We like true stories because we think they have more weight in confirming our collective representations. As someone said, we like stories that tell us how the world works, and we best like the stories that tell us the world works the way we think it should work. We like Odysseus to return home just in time to kill his wife's suitors. This country's creation myth is all about transgression and redemption: rebellion, 1776, establishing justice, and all that. Am I off the wall again, or just slow to catch on?
Shorter slol:
A discussion of eyewitness testimony from some stuffy English translation of The Historian's Craft? Fuck that shit. I'm going original language, maybe even texte integrale. It's a little thing I like to call Bloch-quoting.
It's not just that Frey faked it, but that it was such a poor job.
This matters when a book sells millions of copies. Your typical Oprah fan doesn't have a damn clue what the realities of narcotics and prison are. This kind of nonsense can dangerously color people's perceptions.
Christ, people are going to vote based on these perceptions. How the hell are we supposed to reform prisons if milions of people think prison is someplace where white boys sit around reading their big black roomies War and Peace? Are you fucking kidding me?
Little is an important reference not because he's a badass, but because his depictions reflect reality. To anyone with the slightest knowledge of prisons, Frey's story is pure fantasy. Little's death is "authentic" because, well, it's authentic. The reality of heroin addiction is people who don't get expensive rehab often end up dead at a relatively young age.
It's a little thing I like to call Bloch-quoting.
To each his own version of the hard-core. (Is "Réflexions" in The Historian's Craft?)
Little's death is "authentic" because, well, it's authentic.
Good point, gswift -- there's a way in which Dolan is making sense in that he says that an honest depiction of a life like the one Frey claims to have led) wouldn't end in some chickenshit redemption. Still, I think there's an undercurrent of "Little's death is authentic and honest [psst -- and therefore admirable]," and it's the whispered stuff in brackets that is dumb.
Dolan's style is so overblown and excessive that I doubt that he was really praising Little very much. I doubt that he was saying more than, "Well, if you like that sort of thing, this is much better, in part because he had some first-hand information and didn't have to rely entirely on a combination of plagiarism, imagination, and overwriting." In another context his praise of Little might have been much more temperate. Like most of the eXile people, Dolan throws up this constant chaff of attitude of varying flavors, and you have to be discounting him continually.
I also think that even though real memoirists and first-hand reporters are usually or always unreliable narrators, that they're quite different than total fakes.
In light of this
Ever since Odysseus made the best seller list people have been writing the same book: I went someplace terrible and awful. I had adventures. I have returned to tell you about it.Now we call them ethnography.
and this
Michael, are you trapped in Lake Wobegon?
I feel it is my duty to mention this review, which is really fantastic, since we're on the subject of criticism-as-entertainment.
Keillor makes it sound as though the BHL is also a kind of criticism-as-entertainment, but unintentionally so.
Do you get the feeling that Frey's sin, in Dolan's eyes, is not being bad-assed enough? As if it would have been much better if only he'd done more drugs, actually endured more horrible experiences, been tough-for-real instead of tough-for-play? And this is just to buy into the most colossal bullshit of all, viz. that doing these things earns you some kind of magisterial karmic authority.
Part of the appeal of the seriously bad-ass redemption narrative is that the writer renounces something which people do (even though, sensibly, they shouldn't) see as valuable -- the experience of being a bad-ass. To pick a local example, when the mysterious Alameida just revealed (to some degree) the true extent of her bad-assedness, I would surmise that the typical reaction included both a sympathetic "Wow, good thing she made it through okay" and an envious "Coooool." It is a common desire for people to wish to have done bad scary exciting things.
Now, that's, as you say, kind of a stupid wish, but it's a common one. Given that common valuation placed on being dangerous, while being a real bad-ass shouldn't give you 'magisterial karmic authority' in general, doesn't it make sense that it gives you authority in the field of giving up bad behavior? If you see two monks who have taken a vow of poverty, the one who came into the monastery from great wealth has more to say about the value of that vow than the peasant who's eating better in the monastery than ever before in his life.
We react strongly to Frey because he claims to have renounced something that most people see as valuable (stupidly, but they do) -- being a scary, dangerous, bad man -- when in fact he never achieved dangerousness.
50: It is a common desire for people to wish to have done bad scary exciting things.
I think it's more than that. It's about vicariously confronting the other, and being reassured that we're still the coolest.
All the "I been there" tales involve going someplace strange, foreign, dangerous. Going into badassland, among the addicted. Going where there be dragons, where the natives have their faces on their bellies. Going to the top of Everest, where one must confront one's inner demons. Or, for BHL, going to a gun show. The badder and scarier the territory, the more bravery points one accumulates.
Returning, one must always (as Slo says) flatter the romantic imagination. There's no place like home. The Shire's the place to be. After all, you don't reach the best seller list, or Oprah's set, by proclaiming that France is really a better place than the US.
I think some react strongly to Frey because he casts doubt on this whole narrative. What if *all* those reports are fakes? What if, just maybe possibly, middle class life in the US isn't the best of all possible worlds? Maybe they *don't* hate us for our freedom.
That's what made Gulliver's Travels. He went to confront the other. Returning, he said that not only are they a lot like us, we're not so cool, either. But by flattering the romantic imaginations of some, by showing that regular folks are really cooler than the elites, he made the best seller list.
My wife sent me that Keillor piece today, and I thought it was pretty good. The thing about Keillor is that he's not always terrible, which is apparently maddening from my point of view. Dr.B. once commented that she hated Keillor, and I can understand why. I've never enjoyed listening to the program, even when it's had good things on it. I would never choose to spend the time sorting out the good from the bad, and I can't just let the bad pass under without feeling the effects.
On the other hand, there's a snob issue, and my wife likes the program, without, I'm sure taking it seriously or in any way thinking of it anything other than better entertainment while cooking or driving than any alternative and what is my problem?
And I have to wonder whether that isn't best. Last Memorial Day he "quoted" Orwell, you know the "while we sleep, rough men..." trope, and I just went ballistic. Looked it up, found to my relief that O didn't say it, thought it relevant to the whole torture business, and so on. And what do I get out of this? The feeling I've blown it out of proportion, that I'm being an asshole? Keillor is just good enough that he can't be dismissed, can't be ignored, at least by me, where I am.
And therefore, I actually welcome it when he is good, because I'm at least a bit verified in my ambivalence, that my Keillor thing isn't just a scab I can't stop scratching.
Y'all are just a bunch of prejudiced crackers. Minnesotans and Canadians are the only Yankees left. Fie on you.
I love the Flambeau family:
When I was ten, I got absorbed in the Flambeau Family novels in the Lake Wobegon library and devoured them all in one summer, one by one, sequestered in my bedroom (The Flambeaus and the Case of the Floating Barolo, and the Flippant Bellhop, and the Flying Bonbons, and the Floral Bouquet, the Flagrant Bagel, the Flamboyant Baritone, the Broadway Flop, the Flustered Beagle, and, finally, The Flambeaus' Final Bow). They were all about Tony, a boy of Manhattan, and his socialite parents, Emile and Eileen. Tony is a junior at St. Trillin's on West Eighty-ninth, All-City in tennis, an honor student, adored by his girlfriend, Valerie. Tony and his mother, an actress still beautiful at forty-one, and his father, the famed microbiologist, live happily together in their art-filled duplex apartment on the twentieth floor of the San Remo, overlooking Central Park, and solve crimes as they go about their elegant lives, hanging out in swank restaurants among high-rolling dudes and chantoozies, knowing who is real and who is from New Jersey. The neighbors across the hall, Elena and Malcolm Strathspey, a Scottish laird and his ballerina wife, come over for gimlets and to talk about ballet, opera, the O'Connell sculptures at the Guggenheim. For a boy whose dad ran the grain elevator in a small town where nobody had ever seen a ballet or knew a gimlet from a grommet, the Flambeaus were an inspiration. They were my secret family. Nobody else took out the Flambeau books, especially after I reshelved them under Foreign Language.
Re 52's - "All the "I been there" tales involve going someplace strange, foreign, dangerous. Going into badassland, among the addicted. Going where there be dragons, where the natives have their faces on their bellies. Going to the top of Everest, where one must confront one's inner demons."
What about those of us who grew up somewhere pretty shitty anyway? i.e. where the badass and the addicted are your neighbours or, for that matter, your family members?
That's good for a bestselling Oprah book too, McGrattan.
What about those of us who grew up somewhere pretty shitty anyway? i.e. where the badass and the addicted are your neighbours or, for that matter, your family members?
You get extra points for authenticity, for Overcoming Obstacles. You get the Horatio Alger narrative. You get to be the brave immigrant from badassland, here to affirm that there's no place like the good ol' US of A, land of Opportunity.
Or you can try the 'America Sucks, there's no escaping the oppression' narrative. But don't expect to get on Oprah with a story like that.
That came out a lot more sarcastic than I intended. I don't mean to be insulting. But that's the way the narrative is normally (normatively?) constructed. Personally, I think our narrative options suck, but then, I'm a crazy old man.
Hah.
I'm not really in the habit of milking it. These things are all relative after all. It all ends up like the Monty Python 'yorkshire man' sketch...
"FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us."
etc.
The point was more that for a lot of people living in shitty places surrounded by mad violent bastards is the norm.
The world historical significance of Garrison Keillor is that he solved the artistic problem of writing about a place where, by intention, nothing exciting ever happened. (Heaven is a place...., etc.) Is that not an awesome achievement?
I gave up on the idea of writing fiction about my homies for that reason, but Keillor pulled it off. (John Updike's early stories tried, but rereading them I realized that he compensated for the lack of eventfulness with excruciating overwriting.)
45: I don't think the Reflections (which I have not read because I'll have to set aside a long time to sit down with a dictionary to get through the French) appear in the Historian's Craft, but there are sections on memoirs/memory and eyewitness testimony.
