the case against faction

The Case Against Faction

Oliver Conolly, Bashshar Haydar

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 32, Number 2, October 2008, pp.347-358 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/phl.0.0027

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Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar

THe Case againsT FaCTiOn

a friend lends you a novel. You read it, and are disappointed. its main characters are unsatisfyingly thin and the plot does not have

a neat beginning, middle and end. You tell your friend about your objections to the novel. He says, “Oh, sorry, i should have told you, it’s a non-fictional novel.” it turns out that the novel is an example of fac-tion, the literary genre which purports to aim at, among other things, complete factual accuracy. This makes immediate sense of the flaws you had identified. The deficiencies of the “plot” and the thinness of the “characterization” are comprehensible, given the absence of any freedom on the part of the author to forge the plot into a neat pattern or to create his own characters. This realization however raises the question of whether you ought to make allowances for the restrictions which factual accuracy places on its ability to satisfy one’s expectations with regard to plot and characterization—at least the expectations one traditionally has in relation to the fictional novel.

in this article, we explore the tension between factual accuracy and literary form. First, we examine whether the requirement of factual accuracy impedes the aims of literary form. We argue that it does. The next logical question is whether factual accuracy is a literary value or not. For if it is a literary value, then any tension between it and “other” literary values would not necessarily entail that the genre of faction is flawed, merely that some of its literary values are in tension with one another. We argue that factual accuracy is not a literary value and that this method of rescuing faction as a genre therefore fails. Finally, we consider the question of whether faction is a good medium for the com-munication of facts regardless of whether factual accuracy is a literary value or not. We argue that it is not.

Philosophy and Literature, © 2008, 32: 347–358

348 Philosophy and Literature

I

Many fictional novels aim at communicating knowledge of different kinds, such as knowledge about character, psychology, morality, historical milieu, and the various themes that tend to recur in literary works. all knowledge can be formulated in terms of knowledge of facts, such as facts about the above categories. Unlike fiction however, faction aims at capturing facts about the lives of flesh-and-blood individuals and real events which occur in those lives. This does not necessarily mean that faction cannot also aim at capturing facts about character types, morality and so forth. But the distinguishing feature of faction is that it aims at accuracy about facts concerning particular states of affairs, real individuals or a set of individuals and their qualities—facts of the who-did-what-when variety. When we use the term “factual accuracy” and “facts” below it is to these kinds of facts that we refer to.

Faction aspires towards the condition of literature, and seeks to distance itself from journalism, in the following ways. First, there is no mention by the author of faction of the fact-finding process. The facts are presented as such, without our knowing how the author came by them. second, and closely related, no mention is made of the evidential basis for the facts. it is understood that they have an evidential basis, although it is not clear what it is.

Third, fictional novels make use of scenes. The use of scenes in Tru-man Capote’s In Cold Blood, the founder exemplar of faction and the focus of this paper, is one of its most noticeable features.1 For example, the book first introduces us to the Clutter family, inhabitants of a small town in Kansas, who are in due course murdered by two killers after a failed attempt to rob them in their home. We are first initiated into the goings-on in a particular day in the Clutter household. Then, there is a sudden change of scene to the killers, which is intended to be con-temporaneous with the events described in the Clutter household on what turns out to be the day of the murder. We are told out of the blue that “Like Mr. Clutter, the young man breakfasting in a café called the Little Jewel never drank coffee” (ICB, p. 25). The narrative describes the scene of one killer (Perry) waiting for the other (Dick) in a café. There is a great deal of shifting between scenes containing the murder victims and those containing the murderers, particularly at the beginning of the book. There is a self-consciously literary quality to these scenes.

Fourth, fictional novels use descriptive physical details to tell us about

349Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar

characters. ICB appears to engage in the same kind of exercise. For example, when we are introduced to Perry smith in the café scene, Capote tells us that

He paid for the root beer and stood up. sitting, he had seemed a more than normal-sized man, a powerful man, with the shoulders, the arms, the thick, crouching torso of a weight-lifter—weight lifting was, in fact, his hobby. But some sections of him were not in proportion to others. His tiny feet, encased in short black boots with steel buckles, would have neatly fitted into a delicate lady’s dancing slippers; when he stood up, he was no taller than a twelve-year old child, and suddenly looked, strutting on stunted legs that seemed grotesquely inadequate to the grown-up bulk they supported, not like a well-built truck driver but like a retired jockey, overblown and muscle-bound. (p. 27)

The description of Perry’s physical attributes is embedded into the nar-rative in a manner similar to that of a novel. it is not isolated from the narrative flow, but dictated by it. and his physique is supposed to tell us something about his character, in the same manner as in a fictional novel.

Fifthly, fictional novels incorporate the thoughts of its characters into a seamless whole. ICB attempts to achieve the same effect. immediately after we are introduced to Perry as he waits for his friend Dick, while looking at a map of Mexico, we are given the following description of events:

He [Perry] looked out of the window at the silent small-town street, a street he had not seen until yesterday. still no sign of Dick. But he was sure to show up; after all, the purpose of their meeting was Dick’s idea, his ‘score.’ and when it was settled—Mexico. The map was ragged, so thumbed that it had grown as supple as a piece of chamois. around the corner, in his room at the hotel where he was staying, were hundreds more like it—worn maps of every state in the Union, every Canadian province, every south american country—for the young man was an incessant conceivor of voyages. . . . (p. 26)

The narrative interweaves description of Perry’s physical movements and his thoughts, and then takes us to a description of his room, which itself tells us about his character, in a manner reminiscent of the tra-ditional novel.


II

Faction has, however two principal limitations in comparison to fic-tion. The first is its inability to explore themes. The most obvious dif-ficulty for the writer of faction who wishes to explore a given theme is that he is constrained by the facts, whereas the writer of fiction is not. When starting writing ICB, for instance, Capote did not know all the facts, and was to some extent at their mercy. in this connection, it is interesting that while most of ICB is scrupulously based on fact, Capote felt the need to make up a scene at the very end because, as he put it in a letter, he “felt [he] had to return to the town to bring everything full circle, to end with peace.”2 The final scene depicts a chance encounter at the local cemetery between detective alvin Dewey and susan Kidwell, a friend of nancy, the murdered daughter of Mr. Clutter, who tells him how she has since gone to college. she also tells him that nancy’s boy-friend at the time of the murder, Bobby, has since gone on to marry. she leaves rather abruptly because she has things to get on with, “a pretty girl in a hurry” (ICB, p. 343). Mr. Dewey walks away “towards the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-dent wheat” (ICB, p. 343). The point of this scene is that even after a terrible murder, life goes on: people continue to be absorbed by their own pre-occupations, seen with greater detachment by those with more experience under their belt. The scene is itself absurdly sentimental. However, it is interesting to note that even Capote felt that in order to bring closure to his narrative, he had to make up a scene at the very end.

This is not say that the author of faction does not have any freedom at all. The author of faction has freedom, at two stages: first at the stage of selecting the story to tell, and second at the stage of selecting the facts within those available to him in relation to that story and how to arrange and recount them. it might be said that these restrictions give rise to a form of ingenuity with which only the author of faction can be ascribed, the ingenuity of how to present a story in a literary manner that is constrained entirely by fact. an analogy would be the cleverness needed by a poet who is given 100 words and told to compose a poem out of them. not all forms of ingenuity are aesthetically admirable, of course.

authors of fiction, such as Flaubert in Madame Bovary, often use real life stories as the basis for their novels. But the author of fiction has two advantages over the author of faction. The first is that he is not limited


to the facts, even though he may use them as a basis. and the second is that there is no issue for the author of fiction with regard to access to facts about the inner life, which are the most problematic facts for the author of faction. Fictional novels have access to the inner lives of characters, and convey the texture of their experiences. Faction cannot do this. in ICB, it sometimes looks as though Capote is putting forward a hypothesis about the inner life of his characters when in fact he is rather cleverly avoiding doing so. For example, when describing the sparsely decorated bedroom of Mrs. Clutter, who slept in a separate bedroom to her husband (and suffered from psychological problems), Capote says: “it was as though by keeping the room impersonal, by not importing her intimate belongings but leaving them mingled with those of her husband, she lessened the offence of not sharing his quarters” (ICB, p. 40). By using the phrase “as though” Capote avoids putting forward a hypothesis as to Mrs. Clutter’s thoughts and motives, while insinuat-ing one into the minds of the readers. The same phrase is used when describing the individuals who attended the auction that took place of the Clutters’ belongings a year or so after their murder, at their home: “The fine lawn around the Clutters’ house was also newly green, and trespassers upon it, women anxious to have a look at the uninhabited home, crept across the grass and peered through the windows as though hopeful but fearful of discerning in the gloom beyond the pleasant flower-print curtains, grim apparitions” (ICB, p. 271).

assertions about the inner life in ICB do not go beyond the kind of statement about an individual’s thoughts which is uncontroversially ascertainable from interviews and so forth. For example one doesn’t object to reliance on Perry’s testimony as to his impatience with Dick’s lateness in the above café scene. similarly, ICB makes it clear what the killers’ immediate motives for the murder were, namely a desire to rob, frustration at the fact that there was no cash in the property for them to steal, and a desire to eliminate all witnesses to the attempted robbery. so much was ascertained in the legal process, but it does not go beyond that.

We have framed the tension between fidelity to facts and literariness in terms of the radically low probability that an author stumbles upon, and has reliable access to, the facts of a story that answer to the needs of plot, character, and theme characteristic of the novel. it is possible however to advance the stronger claim that faction is inherently inca-pable of generating thematic significance, even if the author happens to chance on such facts. On the strong view of the relation between


thematic significance and the intentions of the author, the former is dependent on the latter.3 One can see the argument behind the strong view. There is, on the face of it, a world of difference between a novel in which a character is killed off half-way through in a seemingly arbitrary manner because the author wanted to make a point about the unpredict-ability and transience of human life, and a novel in which a character was killed off in the same way because that is what as a matter of fact happened. On the face of it, the former has significance of sorts, which the latter lacks. We do not however need to arbitrate between the two views, for the weak thesis is sufficient to demonstrate a fundamental tension between fidelity to fact and thematic exploration.

indeed, the weak thesis may not even be necessary for a critique of faction. For if faction aspires to treat themes in a literary manner, then the question arises of what exactly the requirement of factual accuracy is doing in faction. There is no doubt that the failure of great works of fiction to refer to facts does not in any way detract from their ability to engage with themes. so what would factual accuracy add to the mix, even if the two were compatible? There are only two possible answers to this question for the defender of faction. The first is that factual accuracy is a literary value in itself, and therefore that it adds to the literary value of the work. The second is that factual accuracy is not a literary value, but that faction is very good at communicating about facts. We turn to these two defences of faction in the following two sections.

III

There is a tension between factual accuracy and literary form. a defender of faction might acknowledge the existence and nature of this tension but argue that, within the genre of faction, the achievement of factual accuracy is itself a literary value, and that therefore any tension between it and other qualities amounts to a tension between different literary values. The importance of the assertion that factual accuracy is a literary value lies in the fact that, if one accepts the existence of the tension between it and “other” literary values, it follows that there is an inevitable trade-off between different literary values in faction. it would not follow that faction was an inherently flawed genre. it would simply be the case that certain literary values are incompatible. if by contrast factual accuracy is a non-literary value, then it appears that faction must be a flawed literary genre, in the light of the tension between that value and truly literary values.


in order to determine whether factual accuracy is a literary value, one needs to grasp what a literary value might be in the first instance. a literary value is a value of a work qua literary object. When we praise a novel for its formal values, such as style or plot structure, or for their emotional qualities, such as being moving or affecting, we are plainly praising them as literary works. not all values of a work of art are liter-ary, of course. an uncontroversially non-literary value, which is none the less real for all that, is financial value.

it appears at first sight that factual accuracy does not add to a work’s value qua literature. if we were informed that Anna Karenina was in fact, by coincidence, factually accurate would that add to its literary value? The answer appears to be no. it could of course be objected that the test is misguided on the grounds that there is no such thing as “literary value” in abstraction from particular genres, and that at least some, if not necessarily all, literary values are genre-specific and furthermore that factual accuracy is a virtue specific to faction. it would follow that the above thought-experiment is misleading, because it assumes that if factual accuracy is a literary value, it must be a value across other literary genres, such as the fictional novel, to which value ought to be added by the presence of factual accuracy.

The counter-argument is not implausible. Other qualities could be claimed to be genre-specific. Funniness, for example, is a literary merit in comedy. it might be claimed that in a tragedy funniness might be a vice, in the sense that there may be too much of it, thus detracting from its value as a tragedy, so that it would become a flaw in that genre. The situation is on all fours, it might be claimed, with factual accuracy, which is a virtue in faction but neutral at best in fiction.

There is, however, a key difference between factual accuracy and funniness, which the following example illustrates. Take an author who has written and published a work which has been classified as faction. it turns out however that the work is not factually accurate. This may be either because the author deliberately distorted the facts, or because of factors outside his control—it matters not which. it would be open to the author at this point to remedy this flaw by reclassifying the work as fiction. now, the work may either turn out to be a good or a bad work of fiction. either way, however, the reclassification of the work will, by itself, remove the flaw of factual inaccuracy. There is no analogy with fun-niness. if a comedy is unfunny, it would not be possible to remedy this particular flaw simply by reclassifying the work as a tragedy. Of course the work might happen to actually be a tragedy, but if that is the case


then the initial classification was simply wrong. The initial classification by the author of the work of faction was not wrong however. it was a work of faction until reclassified.

now, it would be odd if a literary value (or vice) could be either attained (or obviated) through reclassification. Certainly, no other literary value operates in the same way. Only if there were other com-pelling grounds for considering factual accuracy a literary value would one accept this anomaly. in the absence of any such compelling argu-ments, it ought not be considered a literary value. so faction cannot be defended on the basis that the tension between factual accuracy and literary form is merely a tension between literary values.

IV

a defender of faction might accept that factual accuracy is not a literary value but still argue that faction is a good medium for the communica-tion of facts nonetheless. in this section we criticize this view.

at first sight, straight journalism looks like the best way of getting to the kind of facts that faction aims at. This is not to say that journalism gives us unmediated access to “the facts.” Journalism is far from an artless medium, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. a considerable amount of selection takes place in a journalistic account of a given event or series of events. To that extent journalism and faction are similar, but virtually any attempt to communicate knowledge about a set of facts will involve a degree of selection, so it is not a deep similarity. One of the important differences is that most journalistic accounts refer to the process by which the information communicated was acquired. This is not the case with faction. For example, Capote does not once refer to the manner in which he acquired the knowledge he communicates, even though his sources varied considerably.

it is a pertinent question to ask in relation to any account that holds itself out as telling us about the facts, how the knowledge communicated was acquired, and how reliable that information is. Hence the practice in both journalism and history of revealing one’s sources and explain-ing one’s reliance on them. it is as legitimate to ask the author of a work of faction “How do you know that?” as it is to ask that question of a journalist or historian. it might be claimed that there is a convention in relation to faction such that we put aside concerns about whether the facts actually happened when reading such works. But if faction is


concerned with the communication of facts, it would be most peculiar if we were obliged by the conventions of the genre to put aside all thoughts of whether the work succeeds in this aim. We should only put aside such thoughts if the work does not aim at factual accuracy, in short if it is a piece of fiction. But in ICB, some of the facts were derived from direct observation. For example Capote was present when the police investigator, alvin Dewey, was telephoned with the information that the killers had been caught, but we do not know this from the work itself. and much of the information was gleaned from less reliable sources, such as the killers themselves. in refusing to reveal its sources, faction curtails its ability to communicate effectively about the facts.

another aspect of faction which inhibits its ability to communicate effectively about facts is its inability to provide a focus for our interest in the story. a large part of the interest of ICB is, as is often the case with regard to stories of gruesome murderers, the question of what made them the kind of people who could commit such terrible crimes—in short, a question concerning their inner lives. Had Capote approached the lives of the killers with that question as his explicit point of refer-ence however, the book would have been very different. it would have become much more discursive and analytical. However, the requirements of the genre in which Capote has chosen to communicate—a genre which Capote is credited for creating—compel him to refuse to adopt such an approach to his subject matter, and tell us Perry’s biography without that question at the foreground.

The result is a strangely pointless telling of the lives of the killers. Perry’s childhood is sifted with a fine toothcomb. First there is his early childhood, in which his mother ran away and left him to be brought up by his father, who moved from one part of the country (and one job or failed business venture) to another. Then there are Perry’s years in the army, followed by his casual criminality. The difficulty with these very long and detailed excursions into Perry’s biography is determin-ing what their point is. in the case of a biography of a person famous in a particular field of endeavor, readers have a high tolerance for learning about facts which are not connected to their achievements simply because that individual exerts a powerful fascination. However, it is somewhat incongruous for the life of an individual whose only distinction is participation in a gruesome murder to be told with the same attention to detail as a Mozart or Darwin. The only reason anyone would have any curiosity about Perry’s biography would be to answer


a very particular question, which Capote does not explicitly attempt to do. Unless the narrative of Perry’s life is linked to such an explanation, it is therefore pointless.

The defender of faction may still insist that, because of its mimicry of the fictional novel, faction can create certain types of interest not available to a standard journalistic account. an example is the creation of suspense, as the scenes shift from depicting the Clutters on the one hand and the killers on the other. There are a number of difficulties with this argument. First, the creation of suspense through skillful story-telling is not the preserve of faction. indeed, journalism can add another layer of interest not available to faction through its reference to its sources. an interest in sources inherent in journalism is not merely a chore which we go through in the interests of getting closer to the truth. it can also add to the entertainment value of journalism, involving the reader on a collaborative quest with the journalist for the truth, as he shares with us his sources, and the manner in which he has decided upon the facts.

second, it is not immediately clear how the creation of suspense, in and of itself, heightens the cognitive power of an account. More entertainment does not entail more instruction. Furthermore, since the creation of quasi-novelistic suspense involves the suppression of a discursive attitude towards the subject matter, it to that extent curtails the possibility of effective communication about aspects of the story that are of greatest interest.

so, there are good reasons for considering that faction is not particu-larly well suited to communicate about facts. The fact that it draws a veil over its sources frustrates rather than enhances its cognitive capacity. its inability to provide an analytic framework or focus for the story renders it pointless. and the creation of suspense, not the preserve of faction, does not advance the communication of facts.

V

The use of devices such as the use of suspense give rise to moral as well as cognitive concerns, which we mention only in passing given our stress on the former. While readers do not feel uneasy about the use of suspense in, say, an agatha Christie style murder mystery, they may well do so when the subject matter is a real murder, particularly one as gruesome as that depicted in ICB. The central section of the work is the


depiction of the killing, one by one, of members of the Clutter family in their home. each victim was tied up in a separate room and eventually killed by Perry. The whole horrific episode is drawn out and graphically described. everything prior to this series of scenes leads up to it, and everything after is a consequence of it (the escape of the killers from the scene, the police investigation, their eventual arrest, interrogation, trial, and death sentences). One might legitimately wonder what the purpose or value of such a depiction is. Capote briefly acknowledges that some people may have qualms about this depiction. He states, concerning the trial of the killers, that the “aristocracy of Finney County had snubbed the trial. ‘it doesn’t do,’ announced the wife of one rich rancher, ‘to seem curious about such a thing’” (ICB, p. 302).

as so often when writing of the god-fearing inhabitants of Kansas, the sneer of the new York “writer” is never far from Capote’s lips. But is it obvious what the point might be of a recitation, with loving attention to detail, of scenes of grotesque and senseless cruelty and suffering? This is not to say that one does not, at some level, feel curiosity about such matters. But does it follow, as the rich rancher’s wife asked, that one ought to feel curious about them, or, having such curiosity, act to satisfy it? This objection clearly requires greater elaboration, and we don’t propose to pursue it, but to the extent that faction attempts to “sex up” real life events with the use of sophisticated narrative techniques in order to create suspense in the same way that a thriller might do, the morally questionable nature of ICB may be a feature of much faction.

VI

in this article we have attempted to show that the genre of faction suf-fers from inherent flaws. in the first instance, there is a tension between factual accuracy and the literary treatment of theme. secondly, it is not possible to assuage this tension by arguing that factual accuracy is a literary value in itself. and, thirdly, faction is not particularly effective at the communication of facts.

Faction is, or purports to be, a hybrid genre, straddling the fictional novel on the one hand and journalism on the other. it is this attempt to merge two genres, or modes of communication, that lies at the root of the flaws of faction. For there is an incompatibility between the aims of journalism and the fictional novel, which explains the differences in their respective structural qualities. Journalism aims at, among other


things, factual accuracy, and its structural qualities, such as they are, are conducive to that end. The novel’s partial cognitive aim of exploring themes is in turn dependent on, among other things, its freedom from any requirement of factual accuracy.

London, UK (O. C.)american University, Beirut (B. H.)

1. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (London: Penguin, 1966). Henceforth ICB.

2. gerald Clarke, Capote (London: abacus Press, 2006), p. 359.

3. see Peter Lamarque, “Fiction, non-fiction, and ‘Faction’” (unpublished manu-script).

the case against faction

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