January 26, 2007
The Lies of Ryszard Kapuściński
Jack Shafer in Slate:
John Updike worshipped him. Gabriel García Márquez tagged him "the true master of journalism." But there's one fact about the celebrated war correspondent and idol of New York's literary class that didn't get any serious attention this week. It's widely conceded that Kapuściński routinely made up things in his books. The New York Times obituary, which calls Kapuściński a "globe-trotting journalist," negotiates its way around the master's unique relationship with the truth diplomatically, stating that his work was "often tinged with magical realism" and used "allegory and metaphors to convey what was happening."
Scratch a Kapuściński enthusiast and he'll insist that everybody who reads the master's books understands from context that not everything in them is to be taken literally. This is a bold claim, as Kapuściński's work draws its power from the fantastic and presumably true stories he collects from places few of us will ever visit and few news organization have the resources to re-report and confirm. If Kapuściński regularly mashes up the observed (journalism) with the imagined (fiction), how certain can we be of our abilities to separate the two while reading?
Should we regard Kapuściński's end product as journalism? Should we give Kapuściński a bye but castigate Stephen Glass, who defrauded the New Republic and other publications by doing a similar thing on a grosser scale? Do we cut Kapuściński slack because he was better at observing, imagining, and writing than Glass, and had the good sense to write from exotic places? Exactly how is Kapuściński different from James Frey in practice if not in execution?
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 04:29 PM | Permalink
Comments
Around 1980, Carlos Castaneda was pressured to reveal that the "Don Juan" books about the teachings of an actual Yaqui sorcerer whom the writer had befriended were filled with fiction, that Don Juan himself was a composite character -- at best. Nothing that Kapuscinski or James Frey (I don't like mentioning them in the same breath) wrote could compare in in sheer counter-cultural clout to the Don Juan opus, one of the Zeitgeist-driven publishing coups of the late Mid-century, and there's been lots of fudging, gaming and outright fraud meanwhile. But it's interesting to ask if it mattered then as much as it does now that a beloved, well-compensated writer of non-fiction is exposed as untruthful. While there were a number of furious Castaneda cultists across the land, there were at least as many apologists who claimed that if the teachings of Don Juan were products of the writer's imagination, then that was "even better" than if a veridical Don Juan had ever lived and taught him. Certainly more magical, more truthful in spirit to the experience of non-ordinary reality these books had initiated so many readers into.
The injury felt by the angrier readers, however, was perhaps not about shamanism being represented as different from what the writer found, but about friendship being both mocked and mocked up. It was crucial that these books be founded on a real friendship -- on the idea that such a friendship could and did exist -- between a questing youth and a sage, that there was, truly, a Don Juan for Castaneda and for young people without quite his access to that opportunity. I write as a non-cultist (of Castaneda, at least), but as one who saw how disheartening it was that the myth was not real; we know when we're being appealed to on a mythic basis, but we also want the myth to be real. And if it's truly important, we want to hit bedrock when we read.
A journalist who records what he never saw and notes that untidy fact elsewhere in his writings needs to be understood quite differently from non-fiction writers who think they are telling the literal truth. Kapuscinski made us believe that he was a man who traveled far and saw wonderful things, that it was a unique property of his soul and fate that he saw and did them, and wrote of them. Is it a trifle that he occasionally wrote without seeing or doing? He tipped us off, after all. And he wrote marvelously, did he not? The disappointment lies in his being not quite the man who witnessed remarkable occurences, who attracted them into his orbit and gave them to the world. We need to believe in that man, and instead, there's what he imagined and wrote -- no small thing.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 26, 2007 10:45:20 PM
I think Shafer is off the mark. At the least he has a case to make. He provides no evidence that the press reports RK filed for the Polish news agency were in any way compromised. And he allows that we can read RK's books as something other than journalism. So what is Shafer's complaint? We can judge speech acts, like other sorts of acts, only when we properly grasp their point. Is the point of RK's books to provide journalistic reports? Not in amy obvious sense.
http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2007/01/liar-liar-tempest-in-journalistic.html
Posted by: JJ | Jan 27, 2007 8:33:41 PM
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