This past summer, I read the novel Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (note: this blog post will contain a spoiler about this novel). This book inspired several conversations that I had with my friends who borrowed the book about fact, fiction, and memory. The book is about students at a highly competitive performing arts high school and their experiences at the time. The reader is taken by surprise when on the 131st page, the story ends and a new perspective is given from a woman at a book signing. We find out that the first hundred so pages were from a book written by her classmate and was about their high school experience. We are challenged as the truths that we read in the first third of the novel are challenged by a new perspective. With the element of sexual assault coming in to play in the story, it causes readers to think a lot about what and who we can trust. Our discussion in class about Voices of the Chicago Eight, A Generation on Trial reminded me of some of the conversations I had over the summer. As we discussed if we could trust Tom Hayden’s memory and compared it to the other literature, my perspective shifted. I used to focus on if it was true or not and the importance that had, instead of paying attention to why the author chose that to be their truth. There were moments in the courtroom that were not included in the play. Some of the moments may have been dramatized, and more. The question for myself has now changed to why was the story shared that way? What was the goal? The trials in real life consisted of a lot of theatrical protesting, and this has been confirmed by transcripts, and we see the same thing in the play. Yet, why skip all the “boring” stuff. For the purpose of storytelling or something more? Personally, I trusted the play because I took it as the author’s truth and since he was there and experiencing it, his perspective is valid. The highlighting of the theatrical moments may have been to bring back the theme of reclaiming power, owning their rights, and that the fight never ends. The actions of the defendants were symbolic and they reflected their sentiment of not feeling like they belonged in the United States due to the treatment of the system and them trying to assert their rights. I am curious to see what other people in the class believe, do you think it is more important to focus on fact/fiction or the stylistic purpose of sharing the experiences in the ways the author did? If your answer is the latter, what is your take on the message the author is trying to send, do you think he was effective?
2 Replies to “Storytelling: Fact vs. Fiction”
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I think your ideas on this topic of fact/fiction are very interesting. I do believe that if a writer decides to take some things out of the story then he prevents some bias but I do agree with your point that this was “his truth.” I think it is also important to note that he wasn’t just using theatrical parts of the trial because it was his truth; I think he used these parts of the trial because it showed the environment of the trail and how theatrical the whole thing was. To answer your question, I do think it is important to focus on facts and fiction but don’t believe that the idea of fact vs fiction is relevant in this text. The author is trying to depict the corruption of the trial and how intense the people involved were during it. He wanted to show the level of intense disagreement and the actions that were taken. Overall, I believe that Hayden showed the theatrical parts in this play because it was theatrical.
I think it is important to focus on both fact vs. fiction and the stylistic purpose behind the work as the factualness of the work illuminates the purpose behind it. Literature is not history. History aims to provide an objective account of events that happened, while literature is told from a certain perspective for a certain purpose. Therefore, the usefulness of history almost entirely lies in the facts it presents, much like evidence in a trial. Literature, on the other hand, is like attorneys in a trial. While one can certainly distill facts from literature by evaluating its truthfulness, the value of literature lies mainly in the motivation behind it (which is absent in history). For the Trial of the Chicago Eight, if we didn’t have the play, we could know from the trial transcript that the Eight were protesting the unjust system. We could even see the injustice by the theatricality of the transcript. However, the very fact that a play was written with almost exclusively original transcripts tells us something more about the Eight that history, or a mere fact/fiction analysis, could not. It tells that the Eight were willing to go so far to make their voices heard as to publish a book on it. Note that here our analysis of fact/fiction, which gives us that the lines were mostly original court transcripts, contributes to our understanding of the motivation. This in turn illuminates the fact that there was likely a lack of free speech that pushed the Eight to make every effort to make their voice heard.