Fact-Checking Fiction

Unlike NdGT, Isaac Butler believes there’s no need for checking the facts:

In real life, people don’t talk the way they do in movies or television or (especially) books. Real locations aren’t styled, lit, or shot the way they are on screen. The basic conceits of point of view in literature actually make no sense and are in no way “realistic.” Realism isn’t verisimilitude. It’s a set of stylistic conventions that evolve over time, are socially agreed upon, and are hotly contested. The presence of these conventions is not a sign of quality. Departure from them is not a sign of quality’s absence.

The Realism Canard is the most depressing trend in criticism I have ever encountered. I would rather read thousands of posts of dismissive snark about my favorite books than read one more blog post about something that happened in a work of fiction wasn’t realistic or factually accurate to our world as we know it. … [W]e’re talking here not only about the complete misreading of what something is (fiction vs. nonfiction), but the holding of something to a standard it isn’t trying to attain and often isn’t interested in (absolute verisimilitude). We’re talking about the reduction of truth to accuracy.

Alyssa Rosenberg concurs, adding:

Given the power of mass-market fiction, I think it’s reasonable to note if a show, or a movie, or a book presents something as a fact that is untrue, and that its creators must know to be untrue. But the motivation for those sorts of untruths – as with the motivation for all the untruths that make up fiction – is often actually more revealing than the substance of the deception itself.