Pop Redemption

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Initially, my reaction to the James Frey affair was more or less the same as everyone else's: Frey purported to be telling the truth and didn't. He works in a literary genre - memoir - which makes a claim to be factual, and his willful contradictions of the facts discredit his work in its entirety.

     It seems to me, however, that the relation of memoir to truth is considerably more complex than the mechanical backlash represents it as being. A memoir or autobiography is a factual story that has the shape of a novel. It introduces characters: primarily of course the person of the author. Then it develops a plot situation: a series of conflicts or complications. Then it resolves these in a moment of realization and leaves you feeling good about the author and about yourself.

    Even the most classic autobiographies have something of this structure: Augustine's Confessions and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, for example are tales of sin and redemption. Indeed, some commentators have wondered whether Augustine and Malcolm, like Frey, exaggerated their sins to make their redemption more dramatic.

    The contemporary memoir - under the aegis of Oprah and her television and magazine empire, as well as a million little Oprahs - gives this a therapeutic twist. Sin and redemption becomes sickness and cure. But the form is pretty stable, even if the resolutions and the insights they generate become so hackneyed that you could recite them in your sleep.

     Oprah selected Frey's book precisely because it has this shape, and she professes to be indifferent to the details precisely because of the narrative shape, because for her, anyway, or for her staff or whatever, Frey's redemption feels real even if the details of his degradation are false.

     But I suggest to you that the falsity resides not only at the level of detailed facts but in the overall shape. Human lives are not stories, and are not shaped like novels. Not, I want to say, ever, at all.

    To make a life into a memoir, you had better begin by eliminating almost everything: if you started to describe what your actual experience is actually like, you'd have an incredibly boring and incoherent book. Mostly, it's matter of trying to walk around without banging your shins, driving to work through badly synchronized traffic signals, nodding off on the couch, eating cereal, listening to your children whine, etc.   

     Indeed, the reason that stories appeal to us is precisely their contrast with actual life, and this is at least as true of the memoir as anything else. That you are moving in a meaningful arc, that all the incoherences and nonsense will pay off in the end, etc: these are the wishes that memoirs help us entertain.

    But after your Oprah moment, the kids are still whining.

    There are complex memoirs, memoirs of "searing honesty" and so on. But to one extent or another, simply in virtue of having a narrative shape, they are all false.

    At the far outside, a personal narrative can have a structure almost as incoherent as life: the essays of Montaigne are the classical example. But Oprah and her ilk create a commercial narrative culture where the neatness of the story overwhelms any connection to reality.

    A James Frey knows, as he begins to think of his story, what is required in order to see that story in print or to sell 3.5 million copies. All the suffering described in a book like this is flimsy and unreal: a mere necessity for the inevitable transcendence of suffering we all know enough to expect.

     Now the fact that you read three of these narrative redemptions in each issue of O, or see a couple every afternoon on the talk show, or that there are six of them on the bestseller list should tell you something. Oprah needs not a single redemption, but a redemption every few minutes. Precisely because she, and we, have to go back into the complex irreducible incoherent muck of life after we finish each story, precisely because there is no moment that genuinely redeems our struggle, Oprah and we need the same story, again and again and again.

     That we want to tell or believe these stories is poignant testimony to our difficulties. We need the Frey-shaped story, the Oprah moment, over and over and over, precisely because it is false.