On Dickerson, Wallace, Nonfiction, and that Whole Postmodernism Thing.

I was going to write this as an open letter to my favorite political reporter, the redoubtable John Dickerson, of CBS, the Slate Political Gabfest, and right here on Tumblr*. The reasons for that will probably become a little more obvious as we proceed, but let me pause here to explain what it is about Dickerson that I like so much.

*It appears Dickerson hasn’t updated his Tumblr since late September, which makes sense — things have been hot and heavy on the campaign trail the last three months, and if you listen to the Gabfest, you know he’s spent most of that time in Iowa and New Hampshire.

My main exposure to him is through the aforementioned Gabfest, on which Dickerson plays a sort of neutral wonk as foil to the more advocational Emily Bazelon (Slate's law expert, and my totally inappropriate online crush) and David Plotz (Slate's big cheese, in essence). Bazelon and Plotz are both bright Ivy League sorts with appropriately liberal-ish attitudes about things for East Coast Press Types. (Plotz has a certain contrarian streak — with which I can identify — which occasionally causes him to take slightly more conservative opinions than his co-workers do — with which I can also identify). They're sort of intermittently convincing and irritating, in the way that people who agree with you loudly frequently are, and a good portion of the show is given over to one or the other of them making an impassioned argument about one thing or another.

Dickerson, on the other hand, very rarely advocates a position on policy matters. His fundamental mental instincts tend toward fairness and neutrality. This may be a matter of training (Dickerson, 43, was a bit of a wunderkind and has been reporting on national politics practically since he could walk); but it seems to me more a result of some kind of wiring that causes him to see all sides of every issue and to resist the human instinct toward confirmation bias. A typical exchange on the Gabfest consists of Plotz & Bazelon advancing impassioned, learned arguments in favor of one position or another, followed eventually by Dickerson posing a question that cuts to the heart of the issue but which remains essentially un-answered by the impassioned and learned arguments which have been brought to bear. When he does take a position on something — it’s almost never something political that Dickerson takes a position on, but rather something ethical or moral, some kind of Big Question as embodied by the public life of one famous American or other — his understanding of the issue at hand tends to be one or (usually) both of the following:

(A) Totally unexpected;

(B) Overwhelmingly convincing.

The man has that rarest of gifts: the ability to have thoughts that are both new and true.

Anyway. I’ve been reading DFW*’s Consider the Lobster, a book of essays & reportage in which DFW discourses on subjects as various as the Academy Awards of Pornography and John Updike**’s reprehensible Toward the End of Time. Perhaps the most pivotal piece of reportage in the whole book, the one which made Wallace’s name as a nonfiction writer and captured the zeitgeist in a way that even Infinite Jest did not, is “Up, Simba”, an 80-page monster that began life as a Rolling Stone article about John McCain’s strange, and strangely disappointing, run for President in 2000 — the year Little George Bush swept to the Republican nomination and then fundamentally hijacked American democracy, with a thousand tragic consequences.*** For a brief, shining moment, it seemed as though McCain might have the heft to inject a little honesty and accountability back into American politics, and part of the mystique of that moment is almost certainly the fact that Wallace, that totem of American intellectual liberalism, seemed to have been caught up in that strangeness.

*David Foster Wallace, if you need to be reminded

** Wallace accurately anticipates that a person of my age would despise John Updike, which I do, because he’s narcissistic old fart, and a sexist to boot. Also, I’ve never once read one of his books and thought, Oh, hey, that’s me. Not that that’s the only project of fiction. But it’s clearly supposed to be one of the things you do when you read one of his books. He typifies a great deal of what was loathsome about 20th Century America: its self-absorption, its relentless maleness, the way even its more beautiful achievements feel kind of pointless.

***An interesting counter-factual is not the usual — What if Al Gore had been President on 9/11, as the law and the voting public clearly indicated he should have been? — but one implicitly posed by a piece like “Up, Simba”, which takes McCain’s 2000 campaign so seriously†: What if John McCain had been President on 9/11?

† And since we’re writing about DFW again, perhaps we should do the footnotes-within-footnotes thing again: The seriousness with which DFW treats McCain’s (failed) 2000 campaign is made both profound and ridiculous by the 2008 presidential election, in which McCain was nominated by the Republican Party, in what cannot help but seem like an act of self-flagellation, viz., “We’re so sorry we nominated that shit-for-brains 8 years ago and he ruined everything!” But then McCain, when put on the big stage, turned out to be such a pathetic case, unequal to almost every task required of him, that he was slaughtered by a black kid with a funny name and no experience. Would a McCain-Gore contest in 2000 have been that kind of bloodbath? Was the problem in 2008 that McCain was too old, like a prizefighter who has taken too many blows to the ol’ noggin? Was it that Bush had so slaughtered our taste for war that we couldn’t elect a veteran? Was it the old Clinton adage, “It’s the economy, stupid”? Was it simply that we were so desperate to feel good about ourselves that we needed to elect the black kid with the funny name and no experience? (Who, by the way, if your tone and irony detectors are malfunctioning, I voted for once and plan to vote for again, and not because he is a black kid with a funny name.)

I’ll be honest: I haven’t finished reading “Up, Simba” yet, because as I was reading it, occurred to me that I had heard John Dickerson make reference to being on the bus with McCain’s campaign that winter, and my interest was piqued: DFW was largely shut out of official access to McCain on that campaign, as he describes it, because he was a reporter for the notoriously liberal Rolling Stone, and (as he acknowledges in an forward to the piece) he wasn’t a reporter trained in the back-scratching and lever-pulling required to gain the proper access. The piece displays an overt antagonism toward more mainstream reporters, most specifically a group Wallace refers to as “The Twelve Monkeys”, a collection of highly professional reporters for big, national news outlets. I’m fairly sure Dickerson was working for Time, which is the very definition of a big, national news outlet. So I found myself wondering: was Dickerson one of the Twelve Monkeys? Wallace’s portrait of these guys is so nasty — they come off as privileged, corporate, snooty**** — that I had a hard time picturing him as one of them.

****Wallace describes one of them actually shoving his bags into Wallace’s hands at a hotel, as though the estimable author were nothing more than a witless dogsbody.

The upshot is that I Googled the phrase, “David Foster Wallace John Dickerson”, just to see if Dickerson had made any comment about the piece or his role in it. The first thing I found was a Facebook post from the Gabfest's page on which Dickerson said he “had issues” with Wallace, which sparked a maybe-kinda memory of listening to an episode of the Gabfest on which he said something similar. And then I found this Salon article, in which it becomes clear that Dickerson was one of the Twelve Monkeys, and in which he is quoted as having written in an email about the piece, “I remember there being a lot of things that were just made up … and often made up to bolster the narrative (which is different than just remembering something wrong).” Part of what he was objecting to, to be sure, was DFW’s characterization of the Twelve Monkeys, who are made to seem arrogant and uniform, all men in business suits stooging about — which Dickerson claims is incorrect both in terms of the gender count and the dress code (he in fact says that characterization was probably fair of him, but not many of the other Monkeys.)

[PLEASE READ THIS INTERPOLATION AT MY OTHER BLOG, INTERPOLATIONS}

So: this has left me with a conundrum, and several attendant questions about the nature of truth and nonfiction, some of which are especially poignant right now because in my program there’s a heavy contingent of nonfiction MFA’s who don’t really seem particularly committed to the idea that nonfiction has to be, in any meaningful sense, true. First, the conundrum:

Can I continue to read “Up, Simba”? This isn’t really a moral dilemma so much as a practical one. As a veteran of The Moth, I am familiar with the instinct to fictionalize memoir in an attempt to make it matter more; I will confess to having done so, on stage, in front of hundreds of people.***** What it really comes down to is that, having had some details thrown into doubt, I’ve had a hard time believing … really anything about the piece. Because, ultimately, I have a lot of trust in Dickerson, and it’s not blind trust that one has in an authority, but the kind of trust that is built through years of experience of another person’s trustworthiness. Dickerson is an eminently fair, and profoundly intelligent, person, and I’ve come to trust his judgements pretty solidly. If DFW is, for lack of a better word, lying, then what interest do I have in continuing to read his alleged reportage?

*****But I never claimed to be a reporter, either. At least not at The Moth.

Then there’s the other stuff. One of my personal friends is a woman who TA’d a class with me last term, a woman I like a lot, who is getting her MFA in “nonfiction”. She claims to be essentially unworried about the ways in which nonfiction and fiction blend together. In the class we taught, the professor who led the lecture, an essentially worthless and irresponsible “intellectual” whose whole agenda was the pursuit of the kind of reactionary liberalism that gives academia a (well-deserved) bad name, kept referring to one of the books we read — a book which made no bones about the fact that it was an act of autobiography — as a “novel”. This annoyed me so much that I dedicated several minutes in my classes to talking about the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, where we draw the line, and what that all meant. When I brought it up with my friend, she said (roughly), “Well, I’m a nonfiction MFA, so you can understand how I might not be so concerned with that.”

I’m sorry, but what? Shouldn’t the people who write nonfiction be MORE concerned with the line between fiction and nonfiction? That’s how it seems to me. If what you do is allegedly the relation of not just truth but fact, it seems like you ought to feel equal obligation to both. (Ahem. You can tell I’m getting worked up by my application of BOLDFACE CAPS.) If the alleged purveyors of fact are so in thrall to that postmodern notion that there is no such thing as authority, what right have they to say that they’re writing nonfiction? What makes the “memoir” tag anything but a marketing gimmick? I’ve written a lot of fiction, and I can’t remember the last story I wrote that didn’t require a very great deal of research. Does that make what I write “nonfictional”?

I find this all very troubling for a couple of reasons:

(A) This woman is a good friend of mine, and very intelligent, and if people like her aren’t thinking about these matters, then nobody probably is.

(B) DFW is himself one of the great idols of American “nonfiction”, and his rejection of fact in favor of narrative, which seems to be pervasive, throws into question essentially everything that has been written in that cause. (It also makes me wonder about “Big Red Son”, his essay on the Academy Awards of Pornography, by the way.)

And as much as we can all bleat about the evacuation of Objectivity and all that shit — and DFW is a hero of a great number of people who are prone to this kind of farting about — the truth is that even DFW himself doesn’t really believe in this, as anyone who has closely read “Authority and American Usage” could attest. On some level, this whole SNAFU means that “nonfiction” is nothing more than a marketing concept, and getting an education in its concoction seems to be a disaster of recursive idiocy. It makes me sad to say things like this, but it seems irrefragable, at least to me.

The funny thing is, it doesn’t really compromise my reading of some of the pieces in Consider the Lobster, which are explicitly about the memory of events, as opposed to reporting the facts of them. (This is the kind of thinking that I wish my nonfiction friends would pursue a little more assiduously, because I think they might come up with some pretty interesting ideas.) “The View from Mrs Thompson’s”, DFW’s piece about 9/11, remains heartbreaking — and ultimately useful, because all writing about trauma, particularly one as big and public as 9/11, is ultimately about memory as opposed to reportage, meaning that it’s blurry and beautiful and sad and terrifying and ultimately unresolvable.

And I guess that’s what I come down to, in the end. If you want to claim something is nonfiction, you have two options: make clear to everybody that it is a piece, to some degree, about memory, meaning that you’re allowed some of the prerogatives of fiction but that you also have to abandon the prerogatives of nonfiction, to wit, that what you’re saying is perforce true; or to actually report what happened, and not manipulate your records to match your memory. Because otherwise? You’re just lying.