'Can one really hope to transform the material of actual life into literature without fear of consequence?' Forrest Whitaker as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, adapted from Giles Foden's novel.
Pity poor Pierre Jourde, the French writer physically attacked by the Auvergne village families he describes in his novel Pays Perdu. Stoned and assaulted, having done no more and probably less than Francois Mauriac in his seminal portrait of rural closed-mindedness in Therese Desqueyroux, he has retreated in fury to his professorship of literature in Grenoble.
It makes one wonder what are the responsibilities of writers in describing people still living, if such responsibilities exist. It was something I thought about a lot while writing my Amin book and other historical novels, but I haven't evolved anything like a position. I think probably one owes as much respect to the dead as to the living, and at the same time feel there is a real danger in becoming too po-faced about the whole thing. While there is a place for Geoffrey Hill, not everyone can be him, as evinced by the tale of a drunk Paul Muldoon, along with fellow poet Alan Jenkins, running up to Hill's door in Cambridge and pushing the bell, then running away like a pair of naughty schoolboys.
Disguising it in fair words to avoid libel, can one really hope to transform the material of actual life into literature without fear of consequence? That is a different question as to whether (viz Salman Rushdie) you should take on a fiery issue thematically, but the answer in both cases goes to the heart of why people read and write. Authors and reader alike want to escape, for the literary work to be other than the world around them. But at the same time there is also the desire on both parts that the work has an impact: that it causes some material effect in the world being escaped from, however localised that effect might be. The consequence is wished for, in other words.
Alas, as Auden knew, most literature has no effect whatsoever. But just as they flow from the real at point of origin, so books return to it, either to become classics, become forgotten, or subjects of academic interest only. I suppose you could say all novels are historical novels in that way, and I guess that would be the position of the Marxist literary critic.
But one needn't be programmatic about it. In fact one can't be. The relationship between world and word is asymmetric, elusive, hard to classify. It is both as evanescent as Shelley says it is in his Defence of Poetry and as powerful as Plato implies it is in the Republic. And it can be deceptive, vanishing where anticipated, materializing where unexpected. I bet Jourde's attackers are reading things into his book that aren't there.
In Britain, being shallow, lazy dogs, we don't get over-excited about all this. We tend to treat romans à clef as a game. And why not, indeed? Invisible prizes for all who can say in which novels versions of the following real people are said to appear. Recourse to MC Rintoul's Dictionary of Real People and Places in Fiction may prove helpful but not conclusive: Martin Luther, Byron, Leigh Hunt, Lynn Barber, David Sexton, John Witherow, Martin Amis, Leslie Stephen.
