Events | 2010.03.17
Bearing witness is a sacred trust | Timothy Garton Ash
Every writer of reportage ought to learn from the Kapuscinski controversy. Creative non-fiction is a slippery slope
Had he lived a few years longer, Ryszard Kapuscinski might well have won the Nobel prize for literature. Although these things are shrouded in Vatican-like secrecy, I bet that he was on the Swedish Academy\'s rolling shortlist. Journalists in many countries would then have hailed him as the first "non-fiction" writer to win it since Winston Churchill in 1953. Now a huge row has broken out in his native Poland over a new book which suggests that his non-fiction was not so non-fictional, after all. This row has already blown round the world, because Kapuscinski\'s name is a global byword for a certain kind of literary-political reportage.
I have just read the book, which is called (in Polish) Kapuscinski Non-Fiction. Its author is the journalist Artur Domoslawski, to whom Kapuscinski had been model, mentor and friend, and it has been criticised on several grounds. These include his handling of the travelling writer\'s allegedly numerous love affairs, which I do find insensitive, and of his communist past and occasional contacts with the secret police, which I think Domoslawski handles well.
More broadly, the book is condemned as being a denunciation of a former mentor. Kapuscinski\'s widow calls it "patricide". This is not how I see it. I find that the author tries to be fair, allowing many different voices to speak. He captures the Ryszard I knew, starting with a brilliant evocation of his warm, nut-brown, disarming smile. Literally disarming in Ryszard\'s case, because that almost pantomime-humble smile got him through many a dangerous confrontation with armed men, in Africa and elsewhere. But this book is the protracted cry of a worried and even a disappointed disciple – one who, in his nearly three-year journey of investigation, found things that deeply disturbed him.
The heart of the matter, for Domoslawski, me, and probably the wider world, is the frontier-crossing between fact and fiction. Some of us have been worrying about this for years. In 2001, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy held a symposium on Witness Literature, delicately indicating that prizeworthy Literature, with a capital L, was not confined to fiction and poetry.
I gave a talk (now reprinted in my book Facts Are Subversive) in which I observed that "with Kapuscinski, we keep crossing from the Kenya of fact to the Tanzania of fiction, and back again, but the transition is nowhere explicitly signalled". In the same year, the anthropologist and writer John Ryle wrote a coruscating review essay in the Times Literary Supplement, documenting numerous inaccuracies, exaggerations and mythifications in Kapuscinski\'s writing on Africa. He argued that most of them tended towards what Ryle called the "tropical baroque", in which everything becomes more exotic, wild, savage, extreme and, dare we say, oriental. Now Domoslawski retraces some of the master\'s footsteps, to Addis Ababa, for instance, where Kapuscinski researched his famous book on the fall of Haile Selassie, The Emperor, or to Santa Cruz, Bolivia. He finds Kapuscinski\'s own witnesses complaining of inaccurate and fabulated material. There are numerous examples.
What Kapuscinski did is really no longer in doubt. The question is what we make of it. One school is represented by the American writer Lawrence Weschler, whom Domoslawski quotes as saying: "What does it matter which shelf we put The Emperor and Shah of Shahs on: fiction or non-fiction? They will always be terrific books." A schoolfriend of Kapuscinski says The Emperor is "the best Polish novel of the 20th century". And of course those books were also about Poland. They were read by Polish readers partly as allegories of their own situation, and they might have been blocked by the communist regime\'s censors had they not been firmly presented as non-fiction about far-off reactionary places.
A second school, which one might call "Ryszard\'s handwringing defenders", is well represented by Neal Ascherson, himself the author of superb reportage from Poland and elsewhere. Kapuscinski was a great storyteller, not a liar, he writes on the Guardian books blog , and there is an important difference between the news reporting and the books. But then he makes this, to me, very surprising statement: "Almost all journalists, except for a handful of saints, do on occasion sharpen up quotes or slightly shift around times and places to heighten effect. Perhaps they should not, but they – we – do." Really, Neal? And how much, pray, is "slightly"? And how far may one go in "sharpening up"? In the rest of his blog, however, Ascherson goes on to worry that Kapuscinski did not make it clear enough to the reader what he was doing.
The third school, to which I belong, says that even if there is not – as Ascherson vividly puts it – a "floodlit wire frontier", there is nonetheless a vitally important line, or frontier zone, that writers of non-fiction should strive never to cross. If we do cross it, we should put a different label on the resulting product. Domoslawski names one reason for this: simple fairness to readers. Readers need to know what they are getting. After all, at least some of the excitement of reading a writer like Kapuscinski comes from believing these things actually happened. He was there. He saw it with his own eyes. He nearly died getting the story. The rhetoric of his own writing often beats that drum.
The second reason goes deeper. There are, it seems to me, few more responsible callings for a human being armed with a pen than that of being a veracious witness to great and grave events. In introducing that 2001 Nobel symposium on Witness Literature, the then secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, suggested that "truth is initially nothing but that which a credible witness certifies". This may not work as a universal philosophical rule, but it certainly applies to what writer witnesses do, especially when they stand alone amid tragedy or triumph. To bear witness to genocide, war, revolution and human courage amid inhumanity is – forgive the pathos – a sacred trust.
Yes, in our selection of facts, images and quotations, in our characterisation of the real people we write about, writers of reportage do work in many ways like novelists. But in recognition of that responsibility to history, as well as the "non-fiction" promise we make to our readers, we must stick to the facts as best we can find them. We must not change the order of events even "slightly", nor "sharpen up" anything that appears between quotation marks. We all make mistakes. No one sees the whole picture, or can be truly objective. Everyone has a point of view. But if I say I saw that, then I saw that. It was not in a different street, at a different time, or told me by someone else over a drink at the hotel bar.
I see two ways forward. One, humorously suggested by Domoslawski himself in an post-publication interview, is that in bookshops there should be a shelf between fiction and non-fiction, with a new category marked simply "Kapuscinski". The other is to learn from Kapuscinski\'s marvellous work, but also from his transgressions – and hence to bear truer witness.
Timothy Garton Ash will be talking with Jon Snow at the Frontline Club in London on 16 March
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]iction-non-fiction-kapuscinski
