Some interesting recent twists in the saga of fiction versus fact. Apparently, celebrity novels are selling better than celebrity memoirs, since people know that under the guise of fiction celebrities can spill far more beans.
While this may seem to indicate the power of fiction over fact, what it really implies is that people are reading fiction as fact, and therefore for the wrong sort of truth.
As a result, the veil of fiction is no longer in any case protecting authors and their work. As I wrote last week, I have had my own problems with this and with people questioning my authorship and thus the 'authenticity ' of my work. The current row in France, in which novelist Marie Darrieussecq has been accused by Camille Laurens of plagiarising in her latest novel Lauren's own experience, is similarly symptomatic of this leakage between fact and fiction. While Laurens' experience was detailed in her 1995 memoir, it is interesting to note that it is the experience, not the words, which Darrieuseq is accused of filching, just as, if I had turned out to be a man as my feminist publishers suspected, then I would have been guilty in their eyes of stealing 'women's experience'.
As the Guardian's Richard Lea points out, you can't steal experience, unless empathy and imagination constitute stealing, though you suspect with a sinking heart that in this topsy-turvy media world of fantasy and 'reality' they do.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
It's a fascinating question! And after reading the excerpt in the Sunday Times from Robert Harris's THE GHOST (which he strenuously denies has anything in common with real goings-on in Downing Street) I am certainly agog to read more for very nosey, wanting to know what went on kind of reasons!!
Well, yes, it's only human....
Hi FB
There was a famous incident in Australia where Helen Darville, writing as Helen Demidenko, published a novel whose protagonist discovers a shameful war record in her family. Admittedly Darville did little to diabuse a fauning literary establishment of their notion that this lovely, young ethnic girl had written a work of astounding literary value. When her true identity was revealed, miraculously the work of fiction lost its literary quality and there were calls for the prizes it had done to be revoked.
xxx
Pants
Post a Comment