“We hear a lot these days about two opposing tendencies in literature. On the one hand, there’s a tendency away from the novel, toward nonfiction. On the other hand, there’s a tendency away from objective journalism, toward memoiristic or essayistic nonfiction. They’re opposing tendencies, but they both reflect an anxiety about how much we can trust facts. We expect facts to give us objective truth, but objective truth keeps eluding us. We move away from the novel, because the novel isn’t factual; but in our nonfiction writing, we feel constantly compelled to cast doubt on our access to objective facts. We hire teams of fact-checkers to track them down. Fact-checkers do a lot of great work, but they can’t solve the nature of reality for us.”
Seems like there is less trust around town these days. Some people say that life in general is “not like it used to be”. Humph, that doesn’t sit well with me either cause there was lying going on all the time regardless of the decade. Computers, Internet connection getting information plays a big part in judging and fact finding. Too bad more people in general just don’t seem to take responsibility for actions whether it’s written or not.
Too true – I find it really fascinating that ‘true-life’ stories are such a huge market these days; and so many, many movies that are either ‘based on real events’ or ‘inspired by real events’ (neither of which phrases actually MEAN much of anything so far as accuracy or fidelity go); while at the same time, as you say, memoir and essayistic journalism is growing. I think in the Western world at least, people are so cynical about the validity or veracity of writing presented as ‘fact’ that they’ve more or less given up on hard information in favour of opinion pieces. ‘Everyone has an agenda’, ‘what’s the angle?’ – we no longer trust journalists to be impartial, we no longer trust just about anybody not to slant information in a way that benefits them or their credo or their business, to our detriment.
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