Many years ago, I had a conversation with the fiction writer Lore Segal about the difference between our enterprises, doing ethnography and writing fiction. Our conversation came down to the question of what it means to “get it right.” For the ethnographer, getting it right can mean understanding a cultural group as they understand themselves or contextualizing representations so they make sense for a particular group in a particular situation. For the fiction writer, however, getting it right is an aesthetic question, not only about the truth of what happened but also, and more, about the integrity of the representation. Bruce Jackson has taken up the same question in a book that combines assessments of literary narrative with discussions of narrative in everyday life. He argues, “One key difference--maybe the key difference--between narrative fiction and real life is narrative fiction usually has to make sense but real life is under no such obligation” (108).
Bruce Jackson’s book gets at the heart of the question of getting it right. The title, The Story is True (taken from a Robert Creeley poem), combines the truth of experience with artistic sensibility, form, and meaning. As he argues, “the facts of the past are of far less importance in our stories than the construction of the past in the present” (36). Jackson explores the complex and sometimes contested facts of what happened in several stories; he discusses the vested interests of different tellers and participants when multiple versions collide.
Throughout the book, Jackson articulates a struggle to understand stories beyond the information they convey. How, he asks, do stories convey what is unspeakable, and how do stories end being about far more than the experiences they describe? He addresses both of these issues in his discussion of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Any book that praises Let Us Now Praise Famous Men so well deserves praise itself in my view. He describes Agee and Evans’ project as “a book by two men who believed in reality and the possibility however difficult, of documenting some portion of it” (181). As Jackson notes, “The book is no more and no less about cotton tenant-farming than Moby Dick is about whaling” (181). To read for the information is to miss “precisely the experience of what matters.”
Jackson’s book is informative the way legend is informative. Jackson has the inside story on, for example, the legend of Bob Dylan’s electric guitar performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Jackson was one of the festival directors, and as he says, he has the tapes to prove his story. But Jackson doesn’t stop with the insider’s connections. His point is to explore how we become attached to alternative versions of events. In this sense, the book sits at the heart of legend scholarship, or at the crossroads of legend and personal narrative. But Jackson doesn’t hold to sharp genre divides. He’s far more interested in the grey areas between myth, personal narrative, and legend, or between everyday life and popular culture, or between celebrities and ordinary people. I’m especially fascinated with Jackson’s treatment of the celebrities he describes, all of whom are connected to him, usually by far fewer than six degrees of separation. Jackson not only knows a lot of people, he knows a lot of stories about them. These stories assert Jackson’s connections and make the larger point that storytelling is about connectedness.
Without question, Jackson’s book advances our understanding of personal experience narrative, especially if we interrogate each of those words rather than assume we know what they mean. Jackson writes, “The wonderful thing about a good personal narrative is this: its message isn’t exhausted all at once. You hear it and you think or ask, ‘What does that mean?’” (78). Jackson asks good questions. I’m wary of the claims made for storytelling, especially the claim that “stories...are our primary device for...making sense of the world” (188). In my own work, I’ve argued that stories just as often fail, and that we do better to understand a promise rather than a claim to make sense. But I think Jackson would agree with me; in the quote above, I think he’s saying that the meaning eludes us, and what sustains storytelling is its inexhaustiveness.
This is not a book that outlines the elements of narrative form; it might not be an easy book to teach, though I think students would be compelled by it and would be drawn into its inquiry. They would certainly be drawn into the stories.
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[Review length: 752 words • Review posted on May 22, 2008]