Oprah and the Truth

I'm glad Oprah has chosen Elie Wiesel's Night as her next book club selection. It's a good choice -- it's also a clever and provocative one. But she's made the choice for the wrong reasons.

As me True Ann-Sister points out, Night was published as a novel but has widely been recognized as autobiographical -- a haunting retelling of Wiesel's harrowing childhood experiences in the Nazi death camps.

Wiesel's book seems the truer for being fiction -- it helps us place ourselves in Wiesel's unimaginable frame of reference, from which we'd distance ourselves if it were told as fact.

On the other hand, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, posturing as raw truth, has been exposed as composed of faulty memory, myth, actual experience and exaggeration -- in other words, it's fiction.

Oprah is making a point -- good writing is instructive, and to become preoccupied with what literally happened and what didn't misses that point. She's also defending Frey, and herself, by moving to a landmark work about a kind of suffering that defies exaggeration (unless you think the whole thing never happened).

This brouhaha also sheds light on the relationship between truth and suffering. A lot of my suffering is composed of stories I tell myself -- a mottled fabric of fact and fiction, a mythopoetic take on my own importance thrown in to add a tragic element. That doesn't mean it's not suffering -- that just means it's largely within my control to minimize or even put an end to it.

Then there's physical pain. Minor pain can be lived with -- you can even train yourself to experience it as just a sensation -- a buzzing string of impulses sent from a part of the body to the brain and back. If you unwrap the story of suffering from around it, it's inconvenient, but not tragic. Major physical agony can't be treated in this way: it is too urgent and too real a message to be moderated.

Nor can extreme psychological or physical abuse. Such suffering -- whether individual, like an addict's or a prisoner's, or collective, like that of European Jews or victims of genocide in Rwanda, Darfur, or Cambodia -- to the narcissitic mind seems impossible. No suffering worse than mine, the narcissist says, can possibly exist.

Individuals who deny collective suffering are narcissists in this way. But so are individuals who exaggerate their own suffering in order to get attention (and money). They're good at convincing others that their suffering is unique, and authentic, worthy of elevation to art.

Oprah seems to be saying, OK, if Frey is lying, then Wiesel is, too. She's trying to put the natterings of a narcissist alongside someone whose suffering is -- must be -- legitimate, emblematic enduring and urgently instructive.

Her tactic will sell books. But will it help us understand what's art and what's history? What's authentic and what's counterfeit? What's real and what's not?

--T.A.

Comments

[Vikki]

Given O's defense of Frey, which is charming but misses the point that making up shit and calling it truth is generally referred to as fraud, it's not surprising that her next choice would be a sort of nice, Oprah-style "fuck you" to her critics. She just rolls that way, it seems. (Remember the whole Frazen deal, when she just shut down the club altogether?)

Anyway, I wasn't expecting her to pick "Night" next. My money was on "In Cold Blood."

[sara]

One of my favorite books, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Briens, deals heavily with this issue of "truth". I love this quote, and I immediately thought of it in reference to the Frey "scandal", which I find to be sort of... well... stupud.

"It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt."