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| Hearsay: |
‘Ninja fav (and interviewee) Guy Gavriel Kay, writing at the Guardian, considers carefully whether novelists are entitled to use real people in their works. What a great writer this man is.
I’m not arguing, as Jonathan Dee did years ago, that this is a problem because of any failure of imagination. These works can be ethically troubling but some are superbly imaginative. My own net is cast more widely: this trend in fiction reflects a change in the way we address each other and the world. And it is happening, for the most part, by stealth. Most people – until very recently – haven’t even thought about this.
Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace … all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to – certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art – novelists are buying into it wholesale.
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August 20th, 2009 at 9:19 am
I wonder how this argument changes when you look at something like Being John Malkovich, in which the subject sanctions and actively participates in the fiction.
August 20th, 2009 at 10:07 am
As a reader, I’m usually not impressed when an author inserts himself in to his work. For example Douglas Coupland did it in his novel The Gum Thief and the whole thing just smacked of smugness to me. Completely turned me off the novel.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Yeah, I’m not sold. All respect to Kay, but do people really require the shunt of fantasy to recognize that the Hoover of DeLillo’s Underworld is a fiction? And though I’m no psychiatrist, I’d also suggest that “identification” with characters is the common link between mooning over celebrities, historical recreations, and fiction. We imagine what it would be like to be person X – Conan, Sherlock Holmes, someone with travelling pants whatever that means. Writing out of that imaginative act amounts to a best guess at what it would be like, one that might be persuasive but still has no claim or traction on the person who served as its catalyst.
As for putting yourself into your fiction, that’s goes back to the Golden Ass, Beroul’s Tristan and Isolde, Fielding’s Tom Jones. Perhaps the smugness of the gesture is more inherent in the age than the device?
August 20th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Kay should have just republished his piece from Queen’s Quarterly (”Privacy and the Ethics of Literature.” Issue 108.1, Spring 2001, pages 47-55, if anybody is interested in looking it up) a few years back. I think it made a far better case for Kay’s full opinion on the matter. He used this particular bit of space to shill for fantasy literature, but he only presents it as one option among many in the QQ piece. I think what’s most important to take away from this is that writers need to be aware that using such techniques will have consequences on our social consciousness, and it’s important to understand and acknowledge the ethical implications of the practice.