Truth and consequences

Although my own reading tends to favour fiction over non-, one pet peeve I’ve always had is the notion – usually put forth by novelists – that made-up stories offer access to some kind of “greater truth,” one that’s missing from mere reportage. Sure, fiction can be more vivid, more compelling, more satisfying than real life – but to claim some inside track on “the truth” is nothing more than presumptuous self-flattery.

So I was gratified to read Mark Bowden’s recent Atlantic Monthly article on The Wire, the streets-of-Baltimore TV show created by former newspaper reporter David Simon. At one point, Bowden writes:

Every reporter knows the sensation of having a story “ruined” by some new and surprising piece of information. Just when you think you have the thing figured out, you learn something that shatters your carefully wrought vision. Being surprised is the essence of good reporting. But it’s also the moment when a dishonest writer is tempted to fudge, for the sake of commercial success—and a more honest writer like Simon, whose passion is political and personal, is tempted to shift his energies to fiction.

Which is precisely what he’s done. Simon is the reporter who knows enough about Baltimore to have his story all figured out, but instead of risking the coherence of his vision by doing what reporters do, heading back out day after day to observe, to ask more questions, to take more notes, he has stopped reporting and started inventing. He says, I have figured this thing out. He offers up his undisturbed vision, leaving out the things that don’t fit, adding things that emphasize its fundamentals, and then using the trappings of realism to dress it up and bring it to life onscreen.

The essential difference between writing nonfiction and writing fiction is that the artist owns his vision, while the journalist can never really claim one, or at least not a complete one—because the real world is infinitely complex and ever changing. Art frees you from the infuriating unfinishedness of the real world. For this reason, the very clarity of well-wrought fiction can sometimes make it feel more real than reality. As a film producer once told me, “It’s important not to let the facts get in the way of the truth.”

Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case of The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside an entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair.

This is so well put and convincing that it almost seems as if Bowden is arguing that reading/writing fiction is flat-out morally inferior. I certainly don’t believe that, and I don’t think he’s trying to say it, either. But it is worth keeping in mind that although fiction offers us many wonderful things, it has no monopoly on insight into the world, and that the authority it claims is an illusion.

An illusion we accept willingly and eagerly, of course. I still think The Wire has all kinds of insight into the world and that it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on a screen. The fifth and final season, which focuses on the newsroom of a Baltimore newspaper, kicks off tomorrow night, and since I have no cable and will be seeing it at some undefined future point, I’m writhing impatiently.