PEN America - PEN America Issue 4: Fact/Fiction (PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers)

Published by PEN American Center,
an affiliate of International PEN,
the worldwide association of writers
working to advance literature
and defend free expression.

PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers

Issue 4 (Volume 2)

PEN American Center

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New York, NY 10012

This issue is made possible in part by the generous funding of The Lillian Goldman Charitable Trust and The Kaplen Foundation.

Copyright 2002 PEN American Center.

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ISBN: 0-934638-21-7
eBook ISBN: 0-934638-41-1

ISSN: 1536-0261

Fortune Teller / Santa Cruz, California, 1991 (cover); Coaster Painting (detail) / Denver, Colorado, 1990 (p. 8); and Operation Thunderbolt / Santa Cruz, California, 1992 (p. 211) by Jeff Brouws, from Inside the Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of the Carnival Midway (Chronicle Books, 2001). Copyright 2001 Jeff Brouws. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Because of limited resources, at present we are unable to review unsolicited submissions of writing except from members of PEN American Center. We do, however, seek color photographs for the cover and blackand-white images (single photos as well as photo essays) for the inside. The theme of issue 5 will be Silence. See www.pen.org/journal/submit.html for guidelines. No manuscripts, requests, or artwork will be returned without the inclusion of a self-addressed stamped envelope. We do not accept unsolicited submissions of any kind via e-mail; these will be deleted unopened.

See page 233 for text acknowledgments.

CONTENTS

LAGNIAPPE

Charles Simic sees the worlds.

EDITORS NOTE

R eality, Nabokov wrote, is one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes. Now more than ever, it seems: watching NBC Nightly News has begun to feel a lot like watching Comedy Centrals Daily Show . Terms better suited to comic books and Orwellian dystopiasAxis of Evil, Homeland Security, Patriot Acthave taken root in what most of us call the real world. At my house the line between fact and fiction is further obscured by Harpers Weekly , an e-mail summary of world news written by Roger D. Hodge. With a poets taste for compression and startling juxtaposition, Hodge strings together fragments from stories reported by the media each week. The absurdities in his narrative, and ours, sometimes make me giddy. Heres a sample:

The Department of Justice added Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Armenia to the list of countries whose adult male citizens residing in the U.S. must register with federal authorities but later dropped Armenia after it was pointed out that most Armenians are Christian. It was reported that the Bush Administration will propose a new centralized system for monitoring all activity on the Internet. White House officials downplayed reports that the Pentagon is planning a propaganda assault on allied countries and emphasized that the president would never condone anything that involved lying.

Lies, both political and literary, preoccupy the writers whose work appears in this issue of PEN America . Some of them ground invented worlds in historical fact; others rely on fictional strategies to create the illusion of factuality; still others use deception to trawl for truer truths. Im telling you stories. Trust me, Jeanette Winterson writes. William Maxwell observes that writers keep trying to explain the past even as it makes liars of us all and quotes Flaubert, who believed that whatever we invent is true, even though we may not understand what the truth of it is. Your history gets in the way of my memory. Your memory gets in the way of my memory, writes Agha Shahid Ali. Charles Simic, who provides our Lagniappe, was born in Belgrade, a city bombed by Austria during World War I, Germany in 1941, the Allies in 1944, and NATO in 1999. Simic, often labeled a surrealist poet, describes himself as a hardnosed realist. After what weve been through, he once remarked, the wildest lies seem possible.

M. Mark

Subject: Distrust

From:

To: PEN Members

When you hear the term unreliable narrator these days, who or what comes to mind? Why?

EMILY BARTON: George W. Bush comes to mind, of course, because he is doubly unreliable in his narrationnothing he says bears any relationship either to the truth or to what he intends to say.

DOROTHY ALLISON: George Bush, for obvious reasons

GENE MIRABELLI: George W. Bush. Who else?

MICHAEL LASSELL: George W. Bush, the putative president of the United States. As the narrator of Americas story, he unfolds a tale that is equal parts fact, dream, imagination, rant, legend, personal myth, inherited lore, sampled opinion, emotions concocted in committee, and metaphors not so much mixed as shaken. Self-cast as omnipotent and omniscient if not yet omnipresent, he allows no room in his narrative for dialogue (think of the novels of Beckett), only monologues with the statements or misstatements of others inserted between the ingenuous (dare we say cynical?) constructions and deconstructions that are quoted without critical comment in the daily press. In his world words are not signs or symbols of something substantial, concrete, or even fanciful. Rather, his idiom, his genre, is verbiage itself. Content, plot, structure have been forsaken in a semiotics of clichs, in which the denoter of an event in the past is simply transposed to an unlike situation in the present without regard to time, place, or sequence, untranslated as if the entire universe of its connotation could be reduced to an aphorism. In tone folksy and confidential, his tactics are in fact pyrotechnical and conspiratorial. Plainspoken by his own account, he is in fact a master of the covert, leading us willy-nilly to places unsubstantiated by character, experience, or humanity.