RPF, book fair style
Oct. 13th, 2007 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakOne minor theme of this book fair seems to be the roman a cléf. It probably doesn't make the headlines anywhere outside of Germany, but our supreme court has just confirmed that writer Maxim Biller's novel Esra is violating Billar's ex-girlfriend's rights and hence can't be distributed. Background: some years ago when the novel got published, the ex girlfriend sued, stating that there were too many details taken from her life for anyone to mistake that this character was based on her. As she never was a person of public life, her right to privacy was upheld by the initial court decision, and now the supreme court has backed it up, though with a minority vote against it which argued for freedom of artistic expression over personal rights. There is just one precedent in post war German history, i.e. only one other instant where a fictional text, a novel, wasn't allowed to be distributed. Which was a very complicated case of its own. Back in the late 30s, exiled writer Klaus Mann wrote a novel called Mephisto which was an intended as an indictement of the German artists who chose to stay and compromise/benefit with/from the Nazi state in general, but also had the main character very obviously based on his former brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens. Fast forward some decades, to the early 70s. Gründgens is dead, Klaus Mann is dead, Erika Mann, his sister, wants to republish Mephisto, and Gründgens' adopted son promptly sues. That was the only other instant where a court decided for the (dead) person depicted in a novel and against the (dead) writer. However, the publisher Wagenbach went ahead some years later and republished Mephisto anyway. As most people had predicted, Gründgens' adopted son didn't invoke the court decision, and Mephisto never went out of print.
However, that case involved the whole thorny issue of What Did Who Do During The Third Reich. Esra, by contrast, "just" involves Biller's ex girlfriend (and her mother, who also sued, as she, too, is depicted in the novel, but the court only decided for the ex, not the mother), and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Nazis. Which makes the whole debate about it trickier. My instinct is to go with the freedom of expression argument, especially in a fictional context, but then of course I've never been made the subject of a novel, with everyone and their dog in my acquaintance realizing it's me, so that's easy for me to say.
Meanwhile, outside of Germany nobody seems to have a problem with romans a cléf anyway. Hugely presented in both the German translation and the English original is Robert Harris' new novel Ghost, in which our narrator is hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of a certain recently retired British prime minister. I've rushed through it, and while it's solidly entertaining, my overall impression was that it wants to be Primary Colors and fails at it. Mind you, both novels have a different premise from the start, so maybe the comparison is unfair. Primary Colors is a satire and narratively framed around an election campaign; Ghost is a thriller and kickstarted by a mysterious death, with the full resolution not being presented until the last pages. Still, with the respective politicians at the center being based on Clinton and Blair respectively, it does invite contrast and compare.
I think what it comes down to is that the narrative voice in Primary Colors is eternally torn between loving and loathing its Clinton avatar, Jack Stanton, which results in a compelling portrait, as both emotions come across quite vividly. (Reading Joe Klein's non-fictional take on Clinton, The Natural, one gets pretty much the same impression, only with some more weight on the love side of the scale. The Natural pretty much could be subtitled: Bill, You Bastard, I Love You Still.) Meanwhile, Ghost is neither bitter nor enamored enough, and Adam Lang, the Blair avatar, is, indeed, ghostly pale as a result. Harris gets in the expected digs (such as the "when did Lang/Blair make a foreign policy decision that didn't benefit the US far more than it ever did Britain?"), does one set piece of Lang getting vivid when imitating other politicians and showing what a brilliant actor he is if he cares to be, and serves up some wish fulfillment for many of us when he has the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for war crimes. But ultimately, he fails to commit, and not just because the question whether Britain would actually extradite (Lang is on visit in the States when the ICC makes that decision, and the US, as the narrator tells us in another dig, along with various nasty dictatorships does not recognize the International Criminal Court) doesn't get answered. Nor do we find out what makes Lang tick, or how culpable/sincerely motivated the author wants him to be. What is answered is the whodunit part. It's not quite the most obvious explanation, but almost. Though I do wonder how seriously Harris wants us to take one particular theory there.
Something that irritated me about both "Primary Colors" and "Ghost" is something they do have in common. Both fictional politicians have steely, ambitious and brainy wives. Who at one point of the novel feel immensely let down by their respective husbands and as a consequence have a one night stand with the narrator. This does not have any consequence on the plot in either case. In both cases, the authorial voice goes out of its way to point out how cold and unerotic the woman in question is anyway, and doesn't describe the actual event, so it can't be the need for a gratitious sex scene involving the narrator. Which leaves me to conclude that it's either meant to "humanize" the female characters or on the contrary to make them come across as even more ruthless (sexually exploiting the apparantly defenseless male narrators in their husband-caused depression, tsk). Either way, it grates. And that's not even touching the problem of the entire thing being taken as RPF, which brings me back to the beginning.
However, that case involved the whole thorny issue of What Did Who Do During The Third Reich. Esra, by contrast, "just" involves Biller's ex girlfriend (and her mother, who also sued, as she, too, is depicted in the novel, but the court only decided for the ex, not the mother), and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Nazis. Which makes the whole debate about it trickier. My instinct is to go with the freedom of expression argument, especially in a fictional context, but then of course I've never been made the subject of a novel, with everyone and their dog in my acquaintance realizing it's me, so that's easy for me to say.
Meanwhile, outside of Germany nobody seems to have a problem with romans a cléf anyway. Hugely presented in both the German translation and the English original is Robert Harris' new novel Ghost, in which our narrator is hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of a certain recently retired British prime minister. I've rushed through it, and while it's solidly entertaining, my overall impression was that it wants to be Primary Colors and fails at it. Mind you, both novels have a different premise from the start, so maybe the comparison is unfair. Primary Colors is a satire and narratively framed around an election campaign; Ghost is a thriller and kickstarted by a mysterious death, with the full resolution not being presented until the last pages. Still, with the respective politicians at the center being based on Clinton and Blair respectively, it does invite contrast and compare.
I think what it comes down to is that the narrative voice in Primary Colors is eternally torn between loving and loathing its Clinton avatar, Jack Stanton, which results in a compelling portrait, as both emotions come across quite vividly. (Reading Joe Klein's non-fictional take on Clinton, The Natural, one gets pretty much the same impression, only with some more weight on the love side of the scale. The Natural pretty much could be subtitled: Bill, You Bastard, I Love You Still.) Meanwhile, Ghost is neither bitter nor enamored enough, and Adam Lang, the Blair avatar, is, indeed, ghostly pale as a result. Harris gets in the expected digs (such as the "when did Lang/Blair make a foreign policy decision that didn't benefit the US far more than it ever did Britain?"), does one set piece of Lang getting vivid when imitating other politicians and showing what a brilliant actor he is if he cares to be, and serves up some wish fulfillment for many of us when he has the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for war crimes. But ultimately, he fails to commit, and not just because the question whether Britain would actually extradite (Lang is on visit in the States when the ICC makes that decision, and the US, as the narrator tells us in another dig, along with various nasty dictatorships does not recognize the International Criminal Court) doesn't get answered. Nor do we find out what makes Lang tick, or how culpable/sincerely motivated the author wants him to be. What is answered is the whodunit part. It's not quite the most obvious explanation, but almost. Though I do wonder how seriously Harris wants us to take one particular theory there.
Something that irritated me about both "Primary Colors" and "Ghost" is something they do have in common. Both fictional politicians have steely, ambitious and brainy wives. Who at one point of the novel feel immensely let down by their respective husbands and as a consequence have a one night stand with the narrator. This does not have any consequence on the plot in either case. In both cases, the authorial voice goes out of its way to point out how cold and unerotic the woman in question is anyway, and doesn't describe the actual event, so it can't be the need for a gratitious sex scene involving the narrator. Which leaves me to conclude that it's either meant to "humanize" the female characters or on the contrary to make them come across as even more ruthless (sexually exploiting the apparantly defenseless male narrators in their husband-caused depression, tsk). Either way, it grates. And that's not even touching the problem of the entire thing being taken as RPF, which brings me back to the beginning.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-13 09:13 pm (UTC)nautical" about Jack Rackham and Mary Read, who at last glance have been dead since the early 18th century!
It seems the line is moving toward "does the author expect the reader to believe these events are true?" I mean, if I read a novel you had written about Jack Rackham, I would assume that it was as factually true as the source material would allow you to make it, but that obviously you had invented dialogue and any number of events in the story. I would not believe you were standing by his bed, or "knew" who he really loved or didn't! That seems to me the contract between historical writer and historical reader.
RPF, on the other hand, seems much more complicated. There's the school of "we know the secrets" where it seems that the reader is meant to believe that the author is privy to her subject's secrets, and is telling us things that are too delicate or salacious to present without the cover of fiction. Primary Colors seems to fall into this category, along with a bunch of tin hat LOTRIPS, and a great deal of band fic where people insist that there is no canon and they are writing "The Truth" about the people in the band.
The other school of RPF seems to be that this is crackfic. Lord Mountbatten and EM Forester? Why not? Bjorn Borg and Gloria Steinem. Queen Elizabeth and Hernando Cortes. Napoleon and Nelson sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g....
It's for fun, and nobody is supposed to take it seriously as any kind of historical representation. It's just teh pretteh. Which is an entirely different thing.
All of which confuses me immensely.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-13 09:50 pm (UTC)Seriously?! (Sorry, had to budge in for a second. Wow, that's crackilicious.)
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 03:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 08:25 am (UTC)(am I really debating likely boyfriends for Morgan Forster?)
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 01:12 am (UTC)... and I usually loathe RPF, except that of course I came across a brilliant Peter O'Toole/Leni Riefenstahl set in Kenya in 1964, Black and White, Still (http://community.livejournal.com/rphurtsmybrain/932.html) which made it all work. So it's, as usual, a matter of talent.
But which story by Chekhov would never have been printed if the friends whose life he used could have sued? I know there's one, and a fairly famous one at that. So freedom of expression, all the way.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 04:06 am (UTC)One of the judges with a dissenting vote in the Biller case argued that by these standards, Goethe never would have been allowed to publish Werther because Lotte Kestner, née Buff certainly qualifies as an
ex girlfriendformer love, and her husband write various annoyed letters about the extent to which Werther drew on their lives when it became the big German bestseller....no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 12:43 pm (UTC)I'm leery of RPF myself, and I'm not entirely sure where the line is. I think that's what makes me somewhat reluctant to write one of the things I really want to -- because the Pattons are too recent, and I fear it would be wierd.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 03:57 am (UTC)That's how I understand it, too, although I must confess I have encountered several people who did not seem to understand it this way but asked, regarding two very different novels about Eleanor of Aquitaine they had read, which one was "the truth" and which author was "lying". I felt like headdesking, only it would not have been polite, so I tried to explain as politely as possible.
There's the school of "we know the secrets" where it seems that the reader is meant to believe that the author is privy to her subject's secrets, and is telling us things that are too delicate or salacious to present without the cover of fiction. Primary Colors seems to fall into this category
Given that it was originally published anonymously, the "here's the TRUTH" implication certainly came across by the marketing at the very least. As for the tinhats, I'll never forget that idiot writing to Ian McKellan at his website and insisting he should explain what he meant when calling EW a "heterosexual actor" in the FotR audio commentary because surely couldn't mean HETEROSEXUAL?
...and I see you have an audience for Mountbatten/Forester. *g*
Anyway, all of these people have one thing in common: they're famous before anyone decides to write about them. One of the arguments in the Biller case is that his ex girlfriend is not famous, has never, including during their time together, given interviews or in any way courted publicity, and thus can't be said to be a person of public life, which means she's not fair game the way the Clintons (alive) or the Mountbattens (dead) are. Otoh, this kind of reasoning leads you to wonder just how famous/not famous someone can be before he/she becomes fair game? Where is the line?
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 04:32 pm (UTC)Heh. I can't imagine how to explain that.
Given that it was originally published anonymously, the "here's the TRUTH" implication certainly came across by the marketing at the very least.
Oh yes. That it was speaking truth to power under cover of fiction for fear of reprisal. Not that I think there was any actual fear of reprisal, except perhaps as a journalist for some of the things that were incredibly unsubstantiated.
As for the tinhats, I'll never forget that idiot writing to Ian McKellan at his website and insisting he should explain what he meant when calling EW a "heterosexual actor" in the FotR audio commentary because surely couldn't mean HETEROSEXUAL?
I think the line gets very blurry when you use people you actually know in a fictional context. Whether or not they're public figures. But how this is the same thing as writing about Romans or people in the 18th century is baffling to me.
One reason I try to write as truthfully as I can is that given that most people know more about history from novels than they do from research, it's likely that people will believe the novelist. And since I don't believe history is irrelevant in the least to current events and issues, to do something like 300 which casts the conflict between western and middle eastern cultures in a light which is not only entirely ahistorical, but is a complete cultural distortion is irresponsible. While I know fiction has some leeway, it seems to me responsible to present the past as best I can, knowing that of course I am colored by my own time and prejudices.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-13 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 01:13 am (UTC)*notes carefully*
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 07:04 am (UTC)Sidenote: it occurs to me that Citizen Kane is another case in question. I mean, of course Hearst didn't sue (he just used his "if you ever want to work in this town again..." influence), and today he's famous for being one of the templates for Charles Foster Kane more than for anything else, in a nice irony. But Welles felt uneasy not where Hearst but where Marion Davies was concerned (in Bogdanovich's book, he's quoted on the subject), because Susan Alexander Kane, "singer", certainly qualifies as a cruel depiction if you look at it from Davies' pov rather than from film histories.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 08:35 am (UTC)I have to admit that I'm not a great fan of Biller, so I am unwilling to make that sacrifice in the name of science, but I will try and find some reviews to clear this up. I'm nothing if not curious. *g*
But Welles felt uneasy not where Hearst but where Marion Davies was concerned (in Bogdanovich's book, he's quoted on the subject), because Susan Alexander Kane, "singer", certainly qualifies as a cruel depiction if you look at it from Davies' pov rather than from film histories.
Yes, definitely, though at least she isn't shown as mean, which easily could have happened given her background, etc. On the other hand, being known to history as a slightly trampy, untalented dimwit with substance abuse problems certainly isn't a great prospect, unless you're as rich as Miss Hilton. And Davies wasn't even untalented, was she?
This does, on a tangent, remind me of poor Antonio Salieri of Amadeus fame, although I guess he really is fair game due to lapse of time.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 02:07 pm (UTC)Davies: no, she wasn't. Chaplin no less says in his memoirs that she was one of the best comediennes he ever saw, but Hearst wanted her to play in romantic epics, which was so not good for her.
Salieri - true, true, but at least he was long dead when the play was written...