“I’m not interested in accuracy; I’m interested in truth”: Facts or fiction?
From the dawn of recorded history, we have debated about what truths to tell, and how
“I want you preoccupied with art in this book, not with facts for the sake of facts.” Essayist John D’Agata draws that line in the sand between facts and art in the preface to The Next American Essay (A New History of the Essay), the first book in his three-volume anthology. That distinction, and D’Agata himself, are at the heart of The Lifespan of a Fact by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell — onstage at Lantern Theater Company February 2 through March 5, 2023. Centering on the fact-checking process around one of D’Agata’s essays, the play’s debate between essential truth and literal truth is embodied by the artist and the incisive intern assigned to keep him honest.
D’Agata is far from the first person to mix fact and fiction. From the beginning of recorded history, the tension between veracity and storytelling has been hotly debated. Early Greek historians wanted to establish what the very nature of history was, and they looked to a stark assembly of the facts to come to moral conclusions about the world, believing that a sober accounting of real evidence is the best way to learn the truth. Chief among them was Herodotus, sometimes called the Father of History. Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian and geographer who chronicled the Greco-Persian wars, and the first of the Greeks that we know of to undertake a systematic exploration of history, covering prominent figures and coloring his works with cultural, geographical, and historiographical detail. But even the Father of History couldn’t resist making meaning out of his facts, and he was criticized by some for embellishing his reporting or including legends in his histories.
One of his major critics was Thucydides, sometimes called the Father of Scientific History. Thucydides believed that Herodotus was spinning fictions in his histories, and Thucydides wanted to present a more clear-eyed, and less personally biased, accounting of world events. Where Herodotus was recording history but organizing it into stories that the Greeks might tell about themselves, Thucydides was rigorous about including only verifiable, first-hand accounts — and where that wasn’t possible, he would note areas of speculation to avoid them being confused for facts.
But other than Thucydides, most early historians like Herodotus and Plutarch — a personal favorite of John D’Agata’s and subject of his current book project — were myth-making, trying to locate a moral or a deeper truth about human nature and the world in their recitation of the facts. This desire to find patterns, and to identify divergences, in order to reveal meaning and significance is a commonality of good histories, reporting, and storytelling — but each of these forms has distinct limits and obligations. What happens when those strictures are thrown off?
John D’Agata has his answer to that question: the essay is an art form that is nonfiction but not beholden to the facts. For D’Agata, the facts only take us so far; in the pursuit of a more essential truth, we sometimes must look past the facts to find their resonance, their patterns, their music. At a book event as reported in Politico, he responded to an audience member angry about his fast-and-loose treatment of the facts with “I don’t call this a journalistic piece, and never have…It feels, it smells, and it quacks like journalism. But there’s a moment in the essay that announces, I think loudly, that No, that journalistic mood isn’t going to work for us. [I then paraphrase] a quote by T.S. Eliot that says ‘sometimes, we replace knowledge in pursuit of information.’”
D’Agata is hardly alone in looking to flip Eliot’s construction, to replace information in pursuit of knowledge. From the ancient Greeks, creating historical records and finding meaning inside them; to essayists like Thoreau who touched deeper truths while obscuring the facts of how they arrived there; to the 20th century’s “new journalism” practitioners like Capote, Mailer, Wolfe, and Didion, melding literary sensibilities with the factual imperatives of nonfiction, the urge to spin stories out of facts, to turn information into wisdom, has persisted through the centuries.
If D’Agata is taking to an extreme an inclination that has often hidden away in historical and nonfiction writing, The Lifespan of a Fact is a multi-meta test of his hypothesis. In D’Agata’s original essay, he rearranged, remade, and recycled facts as his artistic sense demanded. In the book that D’Agata and Jim Fingal eventually wrote of their experience, they created fictionalized versions of their personas and their debates, turning up the volume on both so as to make clearer the stakes and implications of their arguments. And with this play, those fictionalized debates about a fictionalized article move even further from the literal truth. Biographical details change, in-person meetings are invented, magazines and editors are conflated, timelines are compressed. But in straying further from the facts, the core truths of the piece are crystallized, and the stakes made plainer.
Of course, The Lifespan of a Fact is a play. We expect illusion in the theater; we know information is being organized and stories crafted in ways that will produce meaning. In work presented as nonfiction, though, that proposition becomes much trickier. In The Lifespan of a Fact, John D’Agata wants us focused on the art, not the facts. Is that possible when we’re not sure we can tell the difference?
Lantern Theater Company’s Philadelphia premiere production of The Lifespan of a Fact by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell is onstage February 2 through March 5, 2023, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
