Today I am missing James Baldwin. I’d like to know what he would have to say about the rash of false memoirs, several of them Oprah-centric, starting with James Frey, and continuing today with the canceled publication of Herman Rosenblat’s wildly improbable–and as it turns out (tada!) untrue–Holocaust romance. Rosenblat got the book deal in part because he’d told his story on Oprah’s show.
I do not think Oprah can be held accountable for the veracity of every anecdote told by every guest, but that’s a technicality. What disturbs me is that the Oprah industrial complex seems to be promoting a particularly voracious brand of sentimentality that, when applied to the truth, has the approximate effect of a flesh-eating disease.
Baldwin summed up this tendency best in Notes of a Native Son, when he wrote: “Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.”
So we are treated to a macho drug addict, a white girl in the ghetto, children raised by wolves and a boy saved by a girl with an apple, and told to marvel at these “true stories”–to what end? What do they teach us? Or are they meant merely to distract us?
Storytelling is our culture’s digestive system. We process experience by trying to recombine it in ways that make sense and provide us with mnemonics–myths, legends, tragedy, comedy, fiction. My 16 year-old son asked for two things this Christmas: Nietsche and Dostoyevsky, so I know that this tradition, this healthy process, is alive and well. Anyone who watches Battlestar Gallactica or The Wire knows that myth-making can be as powerfully cathartic and uplifting today as it was for those who first took in Shakespeare’s plays.
The “true stories” that have been exposed as false lately aren’t stories that carry the moral weight of powerful fiction; instead, they are reductive and sentimental. There is a stench rising from these stories; they are rotten. We spent the first part of the Bush era debating whether or not we were lied to about weapons of mass destruction, which was the wrong debate: The question wasn’t whether or not this were true, but whether it were plausible. Was it salient, or just noise? We were so caught up with the “truth” that we failed to look at the real story.
The truth is synergetic, it’s more than the sum of a collection of “facts.” The truth has weight and momentum. Not all facts weave into our stories, and not all improbabilities are created equal. The existence of weapons of mass destruction was a mere improbability. The election of our first black president was a miracle–one that Oprah has every right to celebrate, and will and should. It’s crucial that we understand the difference as we move forward. We need to tell the stories, both true and fictional, that allow us intelligence and complexity, not those that gloss over and sentimentalize that which is difficult to digest, or distract us from our pursuit of our own betterment.
Oprah isn’t always a sentimentalist–to declare her such would be needlessly reductive in itself. I think she’s usually more genuine than that, and displays an emotional intelligence that keeps her from straying into this kind of maudlin exercise. But she spawns a lot of secondary sentimentality, the way Hemingway spawned a lot of bad macho fiction, that is dangerous and needs to be called out.