klahyatt
  • Home
  • Moving Pictures - A Novel
  • The Iris Project
  • Other Writing
  • Arts & Hobbies
  • Hat Gallery
  • About me/Contact
  • Professional site

Mistakes and Truths in Fiction

3/27/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
A couple of days ago I finished reading Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes. It was a book I’ve had on my shelf for awhile (that I took when a friend cleaned out his books prior to a move) and had put it on my rack for books to go out to my Little Free Library. Tired of genre books I’d been reading, it caught my eye. It is very literary and fairly short, so just the palate cleanser I needed. And it was a delight.
 
The story follows George Braithwaite, retired doctor, widower, and Gustave Flaubert obsessive. There is not really a plot line and each chapter has a different format, but what we get is an introspective look at the life of the famous Flaubert and insight into why Braithwaite is obsessed with him. Which, turns out, is fascinating. During the conversation, for that’s what it feels like, Braithwaite talks about irony, art imitating life and vice versa, whether or not a work of art should be viewed through the lens of the artist’s life.
 
It’s been years since I underlined so many passages in a book. There were some wonderfully clever insights into book lovers and about mourning. The idea of viewing art through the lens of an artist’s life is one that I think a lot about—especially when we find out that so many creatives have histories of being horrible.
 
But the following passage about whether or not mistakes in a work of fiction matter really intrigued me:
 
“’Does it matter?’ As far as I can remember Professor Ricks’s lecture, his argument was that if the factual side of literature becomes unreliable, then ploys such as irony and fantasy become much harder to use. If you don’t know what’s true, or what’s meant to be true, then the value of what isn’t true, or what’s meant to be true, then the value of what isn’t true, or isn’t meant to be true, becomes diminished. This seems to me a very sound argument; though I do wonder to how many cases of literary mistake it actually applies.”
 
This is an internal struggle I have. I tend to notice mistakes. Mistakes like the time not adding up correctly or ages not matching or clothing changes when there was no opportunity or people not in the room when they were a paragraph before. I try to let these mistakes go and sometimes I can, but if they build up enough then it really colors my appreciation of the story. In the quote above, George is trying to understand if it matters or not that Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, gives three different eye colors for the heroine.
 
I read a book recently that I wanted to like but the mistakes were so blatant that by the time I found a mistake in the crux of the story, I just couldn’t like the book, as nice as it was. The book takes place in Larchmont—a subsection of Los Angeles. The author kept referring to the area as East LA, which by no definition could it be. It’s firmly in midtown. The author also called the West Side, everything west of the 405 freeway. Again, untrue. The author then referred to Cal Arts as being in Pasadena. As a Pasadena resident, this was particularly annoying as it’s the Art Center of Design here. Cal Arts is north, in Valencia.
 
So when we got to the part of the book where the heroine will remeet her soon-to-be lover and the fantasy the author was relying on to make it happen seemed unrealistic, I couldn’t overlook the machinations of it.
 
As the quote states: “If the factual side of literature becomes unreliable, then ploys such as irony and fantasy [or the meet cute] become harder to use.”
 
I feel like the mistakes earlier in the book should have been caught in editing and proofreading (especially the one about Cal Arts), so that just makes it harder to overlook them. I know that this says more about me than the book, but if you can’t rely on the factual stuff being true then how can you rely on the imaginative parts being authentic?


0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Welcome!

    Thanks for visiting. If you are looking for information about  Moving Pictures or The Iris Project, click on the links above. Here you’ll find short stories and other works by me, including arts and crafts and hats. Thanks for visiting and I hope you enjoy.



    Archives

    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012

Proudly powered by Weebly