Pundits, critics continue chiming in on Frey imbroglio

Today Michiko Kakutani in the NYT registered her opinion on the issue of whether a "non-fiction memoir" must actually be "true." It raises most of the good points and may be considered a definitive run-down of the issues. My favorite passage was this:

If the memoir form once prized authenticity above all else -- regarding testimony as an act of paying witness to history -- it has been evolving, in the hands of some writers, into something very different. In fact, Mr. Frey's embellishments and fabrications in many ways represent the logical if absurd culmination of several trends that have been percolating away for years. His distortions serve as an illustration of a depressing remark once made by the literary theorist Stanley Fish -- that the death of objectivity "relieves me of the obligation to be right"; it "demands only that I be interesting."

Nice quotation, cited in many places on the web. What's interesting is if you click on that last link -- a Google search on the string "demands only that I be interesting" -- you see that various people quoting Fish have taken the subject of his statement to be, variously: deconstruction; deconstructionism; modern literary criticism; critical theory; the death of objectivity; postmodern critical theory. And that's just the first page of results.

But finally toward the bottom of that page you get to a link to a paper that, at least, cites the source of Fish's statement: an article entitled "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'".

I can't find that paper online anywhere -- I found one excerpt but it doesn't contain the quotation in question, so I'll accept Kakutani's use of his bon mot and leave it to others to figure out exactly what the subject of Fish's sentence was. But I did find this interesting piece by Fish himself in the NYT, written in response to another literary hoax: Professor Skokal's Bad Joke, published 21 May 1996. (Free NYT reg. req.) This is about that guy who intentionally made up a paper full of fine-sounding nonsense about literary theory and submitted it to an academic journal which published it enthusiastically; Skokal's goal was to show the bankruptcy of postmodern critical vocabulary and discourse.

In what now seems a sad comment, Fish suggests that Alan Skokal's point -- that truth is not, must not be, utterly subjective -- is obvious and that "none of his targets would ever make such statements... (statements which) no sane person would credit." By enacting his hoax, Fish says, Skokal eroded the sense of trust upon which academic discourse depends; such pranks have a corrosive effect.

Skokal's "targets" were academics; Fish and Skokal were arguing about objectivity and subjectivity in the academic realm. This was before Clinton's famous statement about "the definition of 'is'" and before the neo-Orwellian assaults on journalism and the concept of objectivity by the Fox News Channel and the Bush Administration. The year 1996, when only ivory-tower academics argued about such things as truth and objectivity -- it all seems so quaint now!

James Frey, Michiko Kakutani, Stanley Fish, postmodernism, hoaxes