I thought about apologizing. I spent the ten minutes–while others drank coffee or smoked–trying to find words that explained why I was so angry and that I did accept that the question was valid. I failed.
We continued with a subdued discussion of voice in narrative, but it was obvious that nobody wanted to risk me losing my temper again. Finally, I gave up pretending that everything was OK and asked the workshop leader if we could return to the discussion about having the right to tell a story. With obvious reluctance, she gave me fifteen minutes to explain myself. I began by writing a list on the whiteboard:
Harriet Beecher Stowe
John Milton
William Faulkner
Toni Morrison
J.K. Rowling
J.M. Coetzee
Daniel Defoe
Agatha Christie
Thomas Keneally
Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
Robert Heinlein
Vladimir Nabakov
D.M. Thomas
The question about fiction never should be, “do you have the right to tell the story?” only “have you told the story right?”
Was Stowe a black slave? No. Did she further the cause of black emancipation in the United States with
Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Yes. It’s easy to mock her sentimentality now, but back then she was a brave woman treading a dangerous path and daring to tell the truth as she saw it. Of course, it’s great that today we have Toni Morrison telling another version of that story, but Morrison’s glorious and terrible fiction depends in part on Stowe’s imaginative leap, which allowed hundreds of thousands of white people to step into black skin and witness the horrors of slavery. Stowe spoke for black people in America at a time when they were not allowed to access public media and speak for themselves. She thought it was not just her right to tell their story as best she could, but her duty.
Milton? Yes, Milton. As far as I know, Milton wasn’t there when God created the heavens and the earth, but without Paradise Lost we wouldn’t have many of the great Renaissance ideas and revivals on religious themes, let alone the illustrations of Gustave Doré or William Blake. Did Milton have the ”right” to speak for God? To write about heaven and hell? To depict the fall of Satan? Of course he did. He thought he was divinely inspired to reveal the true glory and horror of his religious belief–and he is still one of the greatest poets and influences of the western world.
Coetzee borrowed the voice of Daniel Defoe’s shipwrecked Crusoe, but before the Nobel Prize winner accessed Defoe’s character, Defoe himself had borrowed the story of a shipwrecked Dutch sailor. Should both books be destroyed because the Dutchman didn’t get to write his own story?
What about Defoe’s Moll Flanders? Did he have the ”right” to tell the story of a female prostitute? Was Agatha Christie a Belgian man? Nope. Should she have been barred from writing the Poirot stories? What about Emma Bovary, the doomed and wonderful heroine of one of the world’s saddest romantic tales? Perhaps Gustave Flaubert should have been told he had no ”right” to tell a woman’s story.
It’s silly to think that actual lived experience is the only criterion for fiction. The main reason for writing a story, novel, play, or poem, isn’t that we want to write about facts, but that we want to say something that can’t be expressed factually. Fiction writers are not journalists–-we don’t have to check our sources or examine the validity of their claims. Our job, our duty, in fact, is to tell the truths that can’t be expressed factually. To suggest anything else is complete rubbish.
Of course many writers express lived experience, and do it beautifully, but lived experience can’t be the only reason for writing. If it were, we would have to wait for a literary pedophile before we could read Nabakov's Lolita.
A writer’s success or failure should be judged in terms of literature, not something like gender or skin tone. Like Salman Rushdie, I would defend every person’s right (or write!) to express whatever they dared, with as much truth and beauty as they could. Each of the writers I listed wrote at least one story outside their personal experience.
Let's take the ultimate example. According to the logic that ”lived experience confers the right to tell a story” only people who died in the gas chambers can write about dying in the gas chambers. No survivor can do that, because they survived, therefore they are stealing an experience they didn't have. We would lose D.M. Thomas' The White Hotel, Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark (published in the United States as Schindler’s List), as well as Primo Levi's If This Is A Man, to name three. The ultimate logical extension of this case is to end all projected fiction forever, for fear of encroaching on the territory of the currently voiceless whether they are male or female, black or white, dolphin or alien, or even stuffed toy!
