LORD Chancellor
. Now, sir, what excuse have you to offer for having disobeyed an order of the Court of Chancery?
STREPHON
. My Lord, I know no Courts of Chancery; I go by Nature’s Acts of Parliament. The bees – the breeze – the seas – the rooks – the brooks – the gales – the vales – the fountains and the mountains cry, “You love this maiden – take her, we command you!” ’Tis writ in heaven by the bright barbèd dart that leaps forth into lurid light from each grim thundercloud. The very rain pours forth her sad and sodden sympathy! When chorused Nature bids me take my love, shall I reply, “Nay, but a certain Chancellor forbids it”? Sir, you are England's Lord High Chancellor, but are you Chancellor of birds and trees, king of the winds and prince of thunder-clouds?
Ld. Chan. No.
It's a nice point; I don't know that I ever met it before. But my difficulty is, that at present there's no evidence before the court that chorused Nature has interested herself in the matter.
Streph. No evidence? You have my word for it. I tell you that she bade me take my love.
Ld. Chan. Ah I but, my good sir, you mustn't tell us what she told you; it's not evidence. Now, an affidavit from a thunder- storm or a few words on oath from a heavy shower would meet with all the attention they deserve.
Streph. And have you the heart to apply the prosaic rules of evidence to a case which bubbles over with poetical emotion?
Iolanthe, Act I
Gilbert and Sullivan, 1882
I am very frustrated with John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact. The four stars are because there is a lot here for a reader consider. The material is engaging and intelligent. There are words that may keep this from being read by many people and the suicide of a teen age is not likely to be a topic for family night reading.
I first heard of John D’Agato and Jim Fingal’s book The Life Span of a Fact was in a review of the New York stage, I understood this to be about the problem of wiring a story in the age of “False News” and the apparent righteousness of body slamming a reporter. The media has a long history of self-critism and this looked to be a chance to read some intelligent arguments about the way the media have been politicized (actually it has been for many decades going back to when newspaper publishers routinely ran for and won office), and what has morphed into weaponized divisive argument that defies what America should be about.
The Life Span is about none of that. In fact it is a debate who time has either gone or cannot be vital until more immediate public concerns have been brought down from the precipice of bombing, (here in the US, mass shooting (In France) and the deliberate state sponsored murder of a reporter (Jamal Khashoggi). In Life Span the case is made that by calling your product an essay, the author has infinite freedom to rewrite prosaic history in the name of whatever esoteric poetical emotional truth that fits the writer. At the time my used edition was published in 2012 this may have been an important topic. In 2018 it adds poison to a well where the water already been made bitter.
The book itself is a dramatization of an actual series of exchanges between an essayist and a fact checker. The essay in question is about the Las Vegas suicide by jumping by a teenager, Levi Presley. We are not told if the editor intends to publish the essay as a literal recitation of the facts or as a dramatization of the facts.
John D’Agato is a well-established essayist. He has definite beliefs about the term. In this book he will argue passionately that the writer must serve art in preference to fact if by doing so the essayist helps the reader to experience a deeper and more aesthetically meaningful appreciation of the events under discussion. In fact the essay is a poorly defined medium of expression and it is legitimately plastic in the matter of content. A case can be made that it occupies literary space between fiction and non-fiction.
D’Agato goes further; insisting that the term Non-fiction is new and that facts are rarely absolute. He tosses out several famously named essayists arguing that the history of the essay is the history of exactly his understanding of the rights and duties of the essayist. Earlier he established that in taking this assignment he made it clear to the editor that he is not a reporter and that he will not be bound by the rules of journalism.
Perhaps on the strength of this warning, Jim Fingal is tasked with fact checking the proposed article and in writing is ordered to “comb through this marking anything and everything…” In taking the assignment, Jim is at once literal and increasingly meticulous and unforgiving. His questions everything from the number of seconds given for the boy’s fall to the color of bricks and the exact routes between locations.
The author comes off as an arrogant, defender of his every invention and demonstrably wrong statement. The Fact Checker become so focused on his mission he will even challenge the facts as given in the report from the Coroner’s office.
Ultimately I had little patience with either person.
D’Agata will on two occasions make appeals to authority. In logic this argument can count as a fallacy or not. The way D’Agata applies the technique it is fallacious. He states the rules were set out by the ancient Roman orator, Cicero, among other and does not state those laws.
Worse the writer states that If his reader feels betrayed when they realize how often an ostensibly nonfiction article is in fact fictional, he turns on the readership, complaining that they are too poorly educated to understand the writer’s rights. D’Agata could have made a reference to the failure of the 1913 audience to appreciate Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. There the portion of the audience that was known to reject anything new were when presented with ultra-modern music and lacking appreciation for the non-traditional choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky; they rioted.
Instead the 2018 reader has the peculiar juxtaposing of a writer arguing for “Fake News” if the fakery is in service of art, and a time where the press is under increasing demands to clear not only the kinds of niggling fact checking of Fingal, but the creation of elaborate, fictional conspiracies to replace the prosaic, researched and fact checked.
The Lifespan of a Fact is good writing. It is not apropos to the moment and does not serve D’Agata. It is a good book, but a prospective reader needs to know that this is not about journalism. It is a high-level discussion of a very particular type of writing, the essay.
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