Fiction and Fact

John Wilson on how the two are intertwined in surprising ways

A meaty subject: we could treat it in a Derrida-style seminar, lasting a couple of years, without running out of material. (I am manfully resisting the temptation to quote, again, the start of Volume I of Derrida’s seminar on Hospitality.) A subject, moreover, that tends to be ignored when it’s not misrepresented. There is a commonsensical dichotomy (“fact vs. fiction”), useful in limited contexts, that contributes to the muddle. In fact (we might say), “fiction” traffics with “fact” in all sorts of ways, and to the extent that it does not, it’s likely to be of very little interest, assuming it ever sees the light of day.

In last month’s column on “Fiction and Time,” Hugh Kenner came to our aid. He can do so again on the subject at hand. In The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (1968), an unclassifiable book that could be described as “literary criticism,” Kenner  observes that “The invention of Fact, early in the seventeenth century, evoked within fifty years the invention of that indomitably comic contrivance, the novel, the function of which is to incorporate a random fusillade of information into a loose system, propelled forward by narrative, the data as they accumulate moving steadily forward into a vacuum of expectation.” (Why is “the decorum of the factual comic”? Because “one can never tell from what direction a new fact may impinge.” If you decide to set this column aside for the time being so that you can get your hands on Kenner’s book, no blame.)

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Now of course in one sense “fact” was not invented “early in the seventeenth century,” and “the novel” (in one sense) can be traced back to antiquity! But the discourse of Fact that still informs our understanding and usage, and the continuous history of the novel as we generally understand it, can indeed be traced to the period Kenner identifies, and it is revelatory (as well as amusing) to see the two connected.

I’d love to read a book of literary criticism (single-authored or featuring essays by various hands) that looked at a range of novelists who in one way or another shed light on fiction-and-fact. One example would be Eric Ambler (to whom I devoted a column last year). See for example A Coffin for Dimitrios, first published in 1939 (that is the title of the American edition; the British edition is titled The Mask of Dimitrios). The protagonist, Charles Latimer, is a one-time “lecturer in political philosophy at a minor English university” who begins writing detective novels on the side and then, with several such books well-received, quits his academic job for the life of a full-time mystery novelist.

Just after completing his sixth detective novel, we are told at the outset, Latimer decides to travel to Turkey to unwind. At a social gathering in Istanbul, he meets a formidable Turkish police office, Colonel Haki, who is a fan of Latimer’s fiction (which he reads in French translation: “I get all the latest romans policiers sent to me from Paris”). Haki himself has sketched out (in French) notes for the plot of a detective novel, which he hopes Latimer will make use of. But he also wants to show Latimer a body in the police morgue: “I wonder if you are interested in real murderers, Mr. Latimer.”

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This theme—the contrast between murder and crime more generally and indeed reality at large as presented in fiction and the way things actually are—runs explicitly through the entire book. And yet, the reader can hardly help but reflect, A Coffin for Dimitrios is itself a work of Crime Fiction (it says so on the back of my blessed Vintage/Black Lizard paperback, published in 2001, with the evocative Bill Brandt cover-photo and Claire Willis’s splendid design). “Our greatest thriller writer,” says the Graham Greene quote in red letters. The rules of the game require Ambler to leave it to us to make of that what we will.

I hope you will read A Coffin for Dimitrios if you haven’t ever given it a look (or reread it if you have). It offers one (excellent) example of the wild variety of ways in which fact and fiction can be intertwined. They need to be held in tension. One reason I dislike a lot of contemporary fiction that gets widely noticed and recommended is the fashion for a cavalier disregard of “fact” (with the exception of certain privileged Facts), as if such an attitude were a badge of pride. After an encounter with writing of this sort, I often feel a need for a dose of Muriel Spark or Charles Portis or Barbara Pym or Eric Ambler or another writer in whose work both fiction and fact are indispensable.