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Peter D. Kramer and Andrew Solomon

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from: Andrew Solomon

Living With the Knowledge of Who We Really Are

Posted Monday, July 9, 2001, at 3:56 PM ET

Dear Peter:

The luxury of fiction is that it needs to mirror the world but not to report on it. I hate fiction that is sloppy or that is internally inconsistent; I think fiction should be rigorous and correct. On the other hand, I also hate fiction in which the research shows. There's nothing so tiresome as a novel in which the author seems to want to establish his credibility by informing you about the details of a certain kind of gun or a particular climatic system. Part of what's so wonderful about War and Peace is the casual quality of Tolstoy's perfect knowledge of the Napoleonic wars. The bits he's made up and the bits that are known history are seamlessly woven into one another, and the whole communicates the truth of what those wars were like and what war is like. Nothing in them is wrong in its essence, though much in them is fictional and a certain amount is probably inaccurate. If one were given lots of footnotes saying which bits are Tolstoy's extemporizing and which bits are actually as recorded and what is really known of every battle and what kind of boots probably wouldn't have been given to cavalry, it would increase the accuracy at the expense of truth and spoil the book, I think. Accuracy, which is what footnotes bestow, must be there in non-fiction, while fiction should be concerned only with truth. Anyway, one of the things that's terrific about your novel is how you've spun your research into a complex story that's not dominated by information. Well done. Save the footnotes for your future biographer to reconstruct.

But I am clearly getting away from the news. Did you catch the story about the Frenchman (one Jean-Claude Romand) who was living a lie? Pretending to everyone--his family, his friends, his neighbors--to be a doctor but actually spending his days sitting in his car in a parking lot? Ultimately, concerned that his ruse would be exposed, he murdered his wife, children, and parents. The story's in the Times' arts pages because Emmanuel Carrere has written a book about him. Curiously enough, a friend of mine briefly went out with a guy who had a totally fictitious life, in which he claimed to be a doctor and an ex-Marine who had gone to Columbia on a military scholarship after a tough childhood in the rural south, when in fact he had grown up and gone to college in Chicago, had never been in the military, and was not a doctor. It all came out when he was arrested for impersonating a doctor by dressing up in scrubs and walking into an emergency room, something that, disturbingly, he had apparently done many times without anyone noticing. Anyway, the whole thing was very weird, but at least he wasn't married to my friend for eighteen years and I believe that he was doing something with his spare time besides sitting in a parking lot and I should also add that he never murdered anyone.
The story of M. Romand speaks to my most primal fears. Is anyone who he presents himself as being? One places so much faith in people, believes so much of what they say because one cannot know better. When I read stories such as this one, I'm tempted to withdraw into the small world of people I feel certain about. Bourgeois prejudices come bubbling up in my liberal mind, and I want to hang with chums whose parents I know and whose schools I know and whose complete contexts are familiar to me and confirmed by numerous eye witnesses, and not with the people I've got to know through my writing, the assortment of Russian artists and Greenlandic inuit and poor women with acute depression in rural Virginia. I suddenly feel afraid of anyone I know only by his or her own account.

Andrew

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718
from: Andrew Solomon

Living With the Knowledge of Who We Really Are

Posted Monday, July 9, 2001, at 3:56 PM ET
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Peter D. Kramer is a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of Listening to Prozac and the new novel Spectacular Happiness. Andrew Solomon is the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (read a "Book Club" discussion of it here) and also of the recently reissued novel A Stone Boat.
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Reader Comments From The Fray

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[Notes from the Fray Editor... or perhaps we should call them footnotes. There was a recommendation for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest here, and a splendid line from Tim Button here: "Footnotes are justifiable in philosophy, but philosophy as a whole is very hard to justify." KC is expecting footnotes to these exchanges. The Fray team would like to recommend Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as having the best footnotes ever. We were glad to see that the poster Shark agreed with us: he is looking like the new star of the "Breakfast Table" (eat your hearts out Neill Hamilton and Amber) with his cutting-edge offer of a Kaus-like Star Poster skipping service. Find it here, on the WillV post below, and here.]


You wrote about anarchists who capture the popular imagination? Obviously, you didn't know about the merry band here in the Fray, a group that perfected popular anarchy long ago. Come join us as those from the left, center, and right are terrorized for intellectual pretensions, grammar and punctuation, and bourgeois status symbols. Your sequel could write itself.

--WillV

(To reply, click here.)


It has been suggested that liberals backing down on their opposition to nuclear power is equivalent to conservatives backing down on the rights of children who cannot yet defend themselves against abortions. I'm not going to bother with the actual debates, but I would like to say that liberals and conservatives alike view the nuclear power question as a balance of risk vs savings. Nuclear power is cheap, plentiful, and the electricity is the same either way. The only questions are these: can the plants be run safely, can the waste be disposed of safely. These are practical concerns, and as the need for power increases, the risks seem less ominous. If we were to suddenly find unlimited sources of sulfer free oil, or a way to cheaply produce reliable solar energy, conservatives would find the risk of nuclear power unpalatable. Nobody opposes nuclear power on moral grounds, everybody has practical concerns.

Abortion, infanticide, pornography, etc: These are moral issues, not practical issues. No conservative would say that he opposes abortion because there are too few babies being produced. Moral issues are fundamentally different from practical concerns.

In any case, conservatives and liberals frequently change their positions on practical issues, as things become palatable or circumstances change. When they start giving up moral positions, there had better have been a revelation, because abandonment of a moral position out of expediency is ... immoral

--Ben Kirkup

(To reply, click here.)

 (7/9)

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