Given what you know about the book, where do your sympathies lie: with Fingal, who says the essayist may not alter facts or with D'agata, who says "it's art, d***head."
Given what I know on The Lifespan of a Fact my sympathies lie with John D’agata. I believe D’agata to be right, because he attempted to relate and make an impact on his readers through “art.” He believed his writing was not journalistic and factual but something more; it was art. D’agata made this clear to his fact checker, Jim Fingal, who constantly struggled with D’agata. Fingal questioned the factual evidence of almost every little detail in D’agata’s essay on the 2002 suicide of Levi Presley. His nagging ranged from the color of the brick on a building, to the number of strip clubs in Las Vegas. Beyond these miniscule incongruities between what was said in D’agata’s essay to what was fact, Fingal addresses the lack of truth in multiple other places. For instance he points out the many exaggerations and lies associated with Tae Kwon Do, the martial arts studied by Levi Presley. D’agata is stern and harsh in his responses to Fingal’s claims, and I believe he is just in doing so. With his exaggerations he intends to draw the reader in and relate him/her to the story of Presley. With his exaggerations he intends on making an impact on the reader through his writing. I believe he is creating art and Fingal is a critical “fact checker” that makes the efforts of D’agata more difficult than they need be.
My sympathies lie with D'agata. He is attempting to write a piece that has meaning, and because of this, he should be allowed to take liberties with the truth. He does not claim to be a journalist so he shouldn't be held to the standards of completely reliable facts that journalists are. As an essayist, it is his job to represent the truth as he feels it would impact the most people. This means that if he feels outright lying will help get his point across emotionally he should be allowed to do this. To use a cliche the ends justify the means here. The essay that he constructs is supposedly very poignant and moving, so he succeeded at his job and did this by manipulating the facts. In addition to this I found D'agata to be a more appealing character than Fingal. Throughout the article D'agata is portrayed as sarcastic, bold, and insightful. On the other hand Fingal is seen as being overly critical. Fighting D'agata on such meaningless facts as the color of bricks and whether or not he took notes. These incidences make paint a picture of D'agata as a free spirit, while Fingal is shown as pedestrian and boring. Overall the essay made me favor D'agata more because he is an essayist doing his job and comes of as a more likable character.
My sympathies lie with Fingal. D’agata has no right to manipulate facts to fit a narrative that doesn’t exist. By doing this, D’agata is supplying meaning when there isn’t any. The paragraph about Presley’s martial arts class is completely false and is just a portentous effort to supply meaning. It is an author manipulating the suicide of a young man to fit his argument and the truth that he is trying to convey. His truth is so important that he is willing to lie to prove it. D’agata is just not creative enough to prove his truth through facts, that he has to manipulate things to pull a meaning out of them. Would you want a political or historical writer lying to you? Abraham Lincoln was killed by his cousin, John Wilkes Booth, George Washington really never told a lie, Benjamin Franklin was a tall, black man. Also, having an essay riddled with lies causes the essay to be less credible. Readers will begin to wonder if all of the truth he is trying to communicate is true at all. When he lies about the origins of tae kwon do, he renders a truth pointless. The entire insight that he was trying to provide with that is pointless because it isn’t true. For example: Whitney Houston was found dead in her house of a crack overdose. This day was the anniversary of her and Bobby Brown’s wedding. She had pictures of her performing dramatically displayed all around the bathroom. This perfectly shows the contrast between her as a clean superstar and her as a drug addict, and of Bobby Brown’s responsibility for her addiction. This could be a nice insight if any of it were true. Whitney Houston was found dead in a hotel bathtub on February 11, 20012. She did not die from a crack overdose. All of these facts prove my insight to be completely untrue. How much lying are we willing to accept in an essay- dates, times, clothing, amounts, quizzes. Apparently, essays are a place where liars win.
My sympathies lie with Fingal. Fingal's job is a fact checker therefore he should check to make the facts are correct. D'agata is writing on an event that actually occurred; he is not writing fiction. With this in mind, it is unjust for D'agata to manipulate the facts to make his work more entertaining. Had D'agata been wringing fiction a fact checker would not have been necessary so Fingal was just to point out the errors made by D'agata so the public receives the correct message. Fingal was correct to point out the erroneous facts because it is his job and because facts should not be changed in non-fiction writing.
My sympathies lie with D'agata. D'agata is writing to appeal to his audience in an artistic way rather than to be a journalist writing a news story. Fingal was just over analyzing small and irrelevant facts such as the color of bricks on a building or taking a right or left in the city to get to a certain place. Fingal was overly critical in his assessment of the essay. He attacked D'agata for skewing a few facts to give them meaning such as Levi Presley falling for 9 seconds instead of 8 so he could tie that into his martial arts class metaphor. D'agata even admits to changing his facts to make the essay more interesting and in doing this he justifies the essay because as he said, he is not a journalist. Essays are not necessarily a place for liars but rather a place where the writer can be an artist and express a meaning through his creative writing. Maybe he wasn't writing a factual essay with a few creative additions, but a creative essay with a few factual additions.
Is it right to change the story of someone’s life to create art? Can you take correcting the facts way too far and way to seriously? D’Agata uses the story of Levi Presley to create art, not throw away societies morals to disturb a deceased person’s life accomplishments. Therefore my sympathies lie with him. Fingal takes his job of correcting fats way to far, even as far as wanting to change the brick color, while D’Agata only wanted to strengthen the flow of his art. D’Agata was simply making the life of Presley more enjoyable and worthwhile, only to be scolded by the inartistic Fingal who could only focus on the truth.
I believe that D’agata has a stronger argument over Fingal concerning the importance of facts in an essay. In a creative piece, the purpose is to impact the reader emotionally. Sometimes it is necessary to slightly change some of the facts in order to make a stronger story. Normally the things that may be changed by a writer like D’agata are of little importance, such as the exact number of strip clubs in a city. The point D’agata was trying to make was that there are a lot of strip clubs in the city. It doesn’t matter whether the city actually has thirty-one or thirty-four of them. I think that most readers would agree that they don’t care about the exact number if slightly changing the fact will make the essay flow better.
Exaggeration of facts is among the literary tools an author can use. Obsession over fact correctness can lead to literal interpretation of literature. For example, people might start objecting to metaphors because they are not true. In Richard Stelzar’s essay, “The Knife”, he compares a knife to a flower. Literal-minded people might object to this because knives are not, in fact, like flowers in almost any way. This metaphor is used as a literary tool to get the message across that you must hold a flower delicately. Slight manipulations of the facts get the same thing accomplished. It’s not the actual fact that matters, it the message that the fact is trying to get across.
My sympathies lie with the author, John D'Agata. How many strip clubs are in Las Vegas? What exact date did Levi Presley die? You don’t know, do you? And why don’t you know? It is because you do not truly care; if you did, you would have taken the time to look it up. These facts not, in any way, relevant, unless you are considering taking up Vegas stripping, in which case, intellectual debate may not be for you. As Fingal challenges the veracity of D’Agata’s statistical claims, D’Agata concedes his falsities, but maintains the pointlessness of such precise accuracy. As D'Agata mentions, it isn’t his problem. Why should it be? He captivates the reader. He engages the reader. He fascinates the reader. He moves the reader. D’Agata is not a scientist, nor a statistician, nor an accountant, nor a stockbroker, nor an auditor, nor a journalist. He is an essayist, as he makes abundantly clear to Fingal. D’Agata sacrifices preciseness in order to shape his essay into a work of art. Art, he claims, justifies a degree of fabrication. How would you feel if you poured hours upon hours upon hours into an essay and some pesky “fact-checker” emailed you with a list of discrepancies in your work? Your thoughts would probably go something like, “I don’t have to prove myself to this guy!” D’Agata is absolutely justified in brushing off Fingal, as one would push away an annoying little brother. D’Agata has no incentive to work with Fingal, and after their spirited exchange, all the reason not to. He has done nothing wrong. As long as and people are not expected to rely on the exact facts of an article and the changes made are not offensive or disrespectful, there is absolutely no problem in tweaking the details in your favor.
In D’agata’s argument with Fingal on the importance of a factually accurate essay, I side with D’agata. He argues that the author has the liberty to present hypothetical details in a situation to greater the essay’s impact on the reader. Fingal’s does not condone this type of writing because he believes the the writer would be violating the readers trust by doing this. Who cares if the author, a person you don’t know, changes details in his story, a story of characters you don’t know? Is the fact that false information was given going to affect ideas presented? Seeing the infinite possibilities of social interactions, anything could happen. And maybe what the author is saying didn’t happen, but what is wrong with pretending it did. The essence of art is to explore the possibilities in all of us. Regardless of if the events were tediously recorded or not, if they present a new view of the reality, they have value. D’agata understood that seeing the world from oscillating frames of reference is healthy.
My sympathies lie with Jim Fingal. Fingal’s job is a fact-checker, which essentially means he is paid to read through nonfiction articles and look for errors in the facts presented. D’Agata’s article was in fact a nonfiction piece in which Fingal had every right to critic it. D’Agata’s argument for submitting his work with falsehoods because he was pursuing to create a work of art would be completely valid if his false statements had consisted of contrite statements such as calling a brick brown when in reality it was in fact red. D’Agata’s false statements instead consisted of completely blatant lies such as stating Tai Kwon Do was invented by some Indian prince who practiced on slaves by paralyzing them and what not. This type of information is simply not true and should not be allowed in nonfiction writing. When people read D’Agata’s “nonfiction” article, which is about a sixteen year old boy who commits suicide, they expect to learn the truth of what happened. Instead they are bombarded by numerous falsehoods, and by the end of the piece can’t trust the author about anything he said. Should D’Agata real have used an example of such a sad and tragic story to simply take advantage of it to convey a certain message? D’Agata had no write to fill such a fragile story about a child suicide with “rife inaccuracies, altered quotes, half-remembered events, and outright falsehoods.” People are reading his article for information about what “really” happened to poor Levi Presley. Instead they read a complete, ironically, fictional account about what never really happened on the day Levi Presley took his life. What is the point of reading nonfiction if it is, in fact, fictional? As a society we need to be able to trust authors and reporters when they state that they are telling the complete truth and not making up any of the story they are conveying. When writers say they are writing nonfiction and then make up the majority of it we as a Nation are in trouble. We will never truly know how events really happened and will not be able to trust any information without seeing proof for ourselves which would turn the country into completely chaos. For this reason I think D’Agata should have respected these principles of nonfiction writing before losing his credibility and trust of his readers and also bringing uncertainty from readers of nonfiction writing everywhere.
D’agata had every right to put anything in his narrative, and every fact he had in it. His goal was not to convey the exact truth, but to express his feelings toward the subject matter, and to engage the audience in a way that would impact them greatly. D’agata never claimed to be a journalist and thus did not have to follow their rules. In this case, the end definitely justified the means. Fingal pushed things too far. His job was to provide a fact checking service, he could have done that without telling D’agata how to write his paper. That wasn’t his job. The color of bricks can be used as a signal or message in a paper, and D’agata changed the color to suit his mood and tone, there was nothing wrong with that. Fingel couldn’t see what D’agata was trying to accomplish, and waged a pointless war against him. D’agata stood out as a man with a purpose, and that goal he had to complete was what made me favor him the most.
My sympathies lie with D’agata on the argument of the importance of facts in essays. D’agata uses fictional information to appease his readers. He considers his writhing to be “art”. Jim Fingal gave D’agata a hard time by critiquing one of his essays about Levi Pressley’s 2002 suicide in Las Vegas. He criticized the way D’agata said there were 34 strip clubs in Vegas while the source he was using said there were only 31 in the area. D’agata uses exaggerations like that one all of the time in his writing to draw readers to be more interested in what they are reading. D’agata’s work is not supposed to be used as a factual source, so he has the right to make exaggerations in his writing.
My sympathies lie with Jim Fingal. While he may be a bit of a nag on the smaller issues such as the amount of strip clubs in Las Vegas, which is insignificant in any article because whether the number is thirty-one or thirty-four no reader is going to go out of their way to make sure the writer is exact. But when it comes down to the bigger issues such as the Tae Kwon Do reference which raises meaning where meaning doesn’t lie, Fingal has a reason to make sure the facts are straight. D’agata claims he is manipulating the facts as an art form, but if this is true he may as well make up the victim as well and make his art a complete work of fiction in order to spare the feelings of those close to the dead. If D’agata is going to write an essay on a real person, he should capture meaning where it really exists and shouldn’t simply make it up where he feels it should be. In this case the fact checker is just in making sure what D’agata writes is fact and not fiction.
In the argument between Fingal and D'agata on the importance of factual accuracy, I side with Fingal. D'agata is incapable of using factual data in order to capture the readers interest long enough to keep them from simply flipping the page in whichever magazine he may have been writing for. By making it up as he goes, D'agata brings meaning into events that would under normal circumstances would be completely insignificant to the story. He shows to us that truth doesn't matter in nonfiction, and that it is perfectly fine to, for example, take the suicide of a young man and manipulate it to better fit his perversion of an argument and the “meaning” he tries to convey through it. In reality, it shows us the lack of credibility that D'agata displays in his work. At what stage does this become a problem? When lies are written as fact. When something as harmless as the color of the bricks or the number of strip clubs in the area becomes the falsification of entire historical events. A bit farfetched? Maybe so. However, that is why people like Jim Fingal exist. In order to keep people like D'agata from publishing complete fabrications as the 100% indisputable truth.
D’agata was within his rights to put whatever he wanted in HIS narrative, whether it was hyperboles, opinions, facts, or utter nonsense. It's HIS narrative and his mission wasn't to convey the truth word for word, but to express his feelings toward the subject at hand, and to spark the audience's interest in what he was talking about. D’agata, to my knowledge, has never claimed to be a journalist which qualifies to stray from their guidelines. Fingal's blowing everything out of proportion. He started a pointless war in which his chances of winning were next to none. This is D'agata's art and he's painting a certain image for his audience that Fingal takes out of context. You need to read into and uncover the underlying meaning of every artist's work. In this case Fingal did his job, but not in the right way. That's why D'agata was infuriated with Fingal when he (Fingal)critiqued his essay about Levi Pressley’s 2002 suicide in Las Vegas. D’agata said there were 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas while the source he was using said there were only 31. D’agata claimed the number 34 was more wholesome than the number 31. D'agata also changed the color of the bricks, and Fingal griped about that. The color of bricks was changed to suit D'agata's mood. The man felt like changing the color of the bricks and since it's HIS narrative and it's not exactly a factual resource, I don't see why he can't. It's his job to interest readers with his writing so as to keep them interested thus inclining them to read more. It's not like he's writing an essay on the number of Cattleya Orchids there are in Colombia where the facts are expected to be correct. Therefore I agree with him exaggerating a few facts to spark his audience's interest. Bottom line, Fingal was out of line.
Nicholas Carbo
ReplyDeleteGiven what I know on The Lifespan of a Fact my sympathies lie with John D’agata. I believe D’agata to be right, because he attempted to relate and make an impact on his readers through “art.” He believed his writing was not journalistic and factual but something more; it was art. D’agata made this clear to his fact checker, Jim Fingal, who constantly struggled with D’agata. Fingal questioned the factual evidence of almost every little detail in D’agata’s essay on the 2002 suicide of Levi Presley. His nagging ranged from the color of the brick on a building, to the number of strip clubs in Las Vegas. Beyond these miniscule incongruities between what was said in D’agata’s essay to what was fact, Fingal addresses the lack of truth in multiple other places. For instance he points out the many exaggerations and lies associated with Tae Kwon Do, the martial arts studied by Levi Presley. D’agata is stern and harsh in his responses to Fingal’s claims, and I believe he is just in doing so. With his exaggerations he intends to draw the reader in and relate him/her to the story of Presley. With his exaggerations he intends on making an impact on the reader through his writing. I believe he is creating art and Fingal is a critical “fact checker” that makes the efforts of D’agata more difficult than they need be.
My sympathies lie with D'agata. He is attempting to write a piece that has meaning, and because of this, he should be allowed to take liberties with the truth. He does not claim to be a journalist so he shouldn't be held to the standards of completely reliable facts that journalists are. As an essayist, it is his job to represent the truth as he feels it would impact the most people. This means that if he feels outright lying will help get his point across emotionally he should be allowed to do this. To use a cliche the ends justify the means here. The essay that he constructs is supposedly very poignant and moving, so he succeeded at his job and did this by manipulating the facts.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to this I found D'agata to be a more appealing character than Fingal. Throughout the article D'agata is portrayed as sarcastic, bold, and insightful. On the other hand Fingal is seen as being overly critical. Fighting D'agata on such meaningless facts as the color of bricks and whether or not he took notes. These incidences make paint a picture of D'agata as a free spirit, while Fingal is shown as pedestrian and boring. Overall the essay made me favor D'agata more because he is an essayist doing his job and comes of as a more likable character.
My sympathies lie with Fingal. D’agata has no right to manipulate facts to fit a narrative that doesn’t exist. By doing this, D’agata is supplying meaning when there isn’t any. The paragraph about Presley’s martial arts class is completely false and is just a portentous effort to supply meaning. It is an author manipulating the suicide of a young man to fit his argument and the truth that he is trying to convey. His truth is so important that he is willing to lie to prove it.
ReplyDeleteD’agata is just not creative enough to prove his truth through facts, that he has to manipulate things to pull a meaning out of them. Would you want a political or historical writer lying to you? Abraham Lincoln was killed by his cousin, John Wilkes Booth, George Washington really never told a lie, Benjamin Franklin was a tall, black man.
Also, having an essay riddled with lies causes the essay to be less credible. Readers will begin to wonder if all of the truth he is trying to communicate is true at all. When he lies about the origins of tae kwon do, he renders a truth pointless. The entire insight that he was trying to provide with that is pointless because it isn’t true.
For example:
Whitney Houston was found dead in her house of a crack overdose. This day was the anniversary of her and Bobby Brown’s wedding. She had pictures of her performing dramatically displayed all around the bathroom. This perfectly shows the contrast between her as a clean superstar and her as a drug addict, and of Bobby Brown’s responsibility for her addiction.
This could be a nice insight if any of it were true. Whitney Houston was found dead in a hotel bathtub on February 11, 20012. She did not die from a crack overdose. All of these facts prove my insight to be completely untrue. How much lying are we willing to accept in an essay- dates, times, clothing, amounts, quizzes. Apparently, essays are a place where liars win.
My sympathies lie with Fingal. Fingal's job is a fact checker therefore he should check to make the facts are correct. D'agata is writing on an event that actually occurred; he is not writing fiction. With this in mind, it is unjust for D'agata to manipulate the facts to make his work more entertaining. Had D'agata been wringing fiction a fact checker would not have been necessary so Fingal was just to point out the errors made by D'agata so the public receives the correct message. Fingal was correct to point out the erroneous facts because it is his job and because facts should not be changed in non-fiction writing.
ReplyDeleteMy sympathies lie with D'agata. D'agata is writing to appeal to his audience in an artistic way rather than to be a journalist writing a news story. Fingal was just over analyzing small and irrelevant facts such as the color of bricks on a building or taking a right or left in the city to get to a certain place. Fingal was overly critical in his assessment of the essay. He attacked D'agata for skewing a few facts to give them meaning such as Levi Presley falling for 9 seconds instead of 8 so he could tie that into his martial arts class metaphor. D'agata even admits to changing his facts to make the essay more interesting and in doing this he justifies the essay because as he said, he is not a journalist. Essays are not necessarily a place for liars but rather a place where the writer can be an artist and express a meaning through his creative writing. Maybe he wasn't writing a factual essay with a few creative additions, but a creative essay with a few factual additions.
ReplyDeleteIs it right to change the story of someone’s life to create art? Can you take correcting the facts way too far and way to seriously? D’Agata uses the story of Levi Presley to create art, not throw away societies morals to disturb a deceased person’s life accomplishments. Therefore my sympathies lie with him. Fingal takes his job of correcting fats way to far, even as far as wanting to change the brick color, while D’Agata only wanted to strengthen the flow of his art. D’Agata was simply making the life of Presley more enjoyable and worthwhile, only to be scolded by the inartistic Fingal who could only focus on the truth.
ReplyDeleteI believe that D’agata has a stronger argument over Fingal concerning the importance of facts in an essay. In a creative piece, the purpose is to impact the reader emotionally. Sometimes it is necessary to slightly change some of the facts in order to make a stronger story. Normally the things that may be changed by a writer like D’agata are of little importance, such as the exact number of strip clubs in a city. The point D’agata was trying to make was that there are a lot of strip clubs in the city. It doesn’t matter whether the city actually has thirty-one or thirty-four of them. I think that most readers would agree that they don’t care about the exact number if slightly changing the fact will make the essay flow better.
ReplyDeleteExaggeration of facts is among the literary tools an author can use. Obsession over fact correctness can lead to literal interpretation of literature. For example, people might start objecting to metaphors because they are not true. In Richard Stelzar’s essay, “The Knife”, he compares a knife to a flower. Literal-minded people might object to this because knives are not, in fact, like flowers in almost any way. This metaphor is used as a literary tool to get the message across that you must hold a flower delicately. Slight manipulations of the facts get the same thing accomplished. It’s not the actual fact that matters, it the message that the fact is trying to get across.
My sympathies lie with the author, John D'Agata. How many strip clubs are in Las Vegas? What exact date did Levi Presley die? You don’t know, do you? And why don’t you know? It is because you do not truly care; if you did, you would have taken the time to look it up. These facts not, in any way, relevant, unless you are considering taking up Vegas stripping, in which case, intellectual debate may not be for you. As Fingal challenges the veracity of D’Agata’s statistical claims, D’Agata concedes his falsities, but maintains the pointlessness of such precise accuracy. As D'Agata mentions, it isn’t his problem. Why should it be? He captivates the reader. He engages the reader. He fascinates the reader. He moves the reader. D’Agata is not a scientist, nor a statistician, nor an accountant, nor a stockbroker, nor an auditor, nor a journalist. He is an essayist, as he makes abundantly clear to Fingal. D’Agata sacrifices preciseness in order to shape his essay into a work of art. Art, he claims, justifies a degree of fabrication.
ReplyDeleteHow would you feel if you poured hours upon hours upon hours into an essay and some pesky “fact-checker” emailed you with a list of discrepancies in your work? Your thoughts would probably go something like, “I don’t have to prove myself to this guy!” D’Agata is absolutely justified in brushing off Fingal, as one would push away an annoying little brother. D’Agata has no incentive to work with Fingal, and after their spirited exchange, all the reason not to. He has done nothing wrong. As long as and people are not expected to rely on the exact facts of an article and the changes made are not offensive or disrespectful, there is absolutely no problem in tweaking the details in your favor.
In D’agata’s argument with Fingal on the importance of a factually accurate essay, I side with D’agata. He argues that the author has the liberty to present hypothetical details in a situation to greater the essay’s impact on the reader. Fingal’s does not condone this type of writing because he believes the the writer would be violating the readers trust by doing this. Who cares if the author, a person you don’t know, changes details in his story, a story of characters you don’t know? Is the fact that false information was given going to affect ideas presented? Seeing the infinite possibilities of social interactions, anything could happen. And maybe what the author is saying didn’t happen, but what is wrong with pretending it did. The essence of art is to explore the possibilities in all of us. Regardless of if the events were tediously recorded or not, if they present a new view of the reality, they have value. D’agata understood that seeing the world from oscillating frames of reference is healthy.
ReplyDeleteMy sympathies lie with Jim Fingal. Fingal’s job is a fact-checker, which essentially means he is paid to read through nonfiction articles and look for errors in the facts presented. D’Agata’s article was in fact a nonfiction piece in which Fingal had every right to critic it. D’Agata’s argument for submitting his work with falsehoods because he was pursuing to create a work of art would be completely valid if his false statements had consisted of contrite statements such as calling a brick brown when in reality it was in fact red. D’Agata’s false statements instead consisted of completely blatant lies such as stating Tai Kwon Do was invented by some Indian prince who practiced on slaves by paralyzing them and what not. This type of information is simply not true and should not be allowed in nonfiction writing.
ReplyDeleteWhen people read D’Agata’s “nonfiction” article, which is about a sixteen year old boy who commits suicide, they expect to learn the truth of what happened. Instead they are bombarded by numerous falsehoods, and by the end of the piece can’t trust the author about anything he said. Should D’Agata real have used an example of such a sad and tragic story to simply take advantage of it to convey a certain message? D’Agata had no write to fill such a fragile story about a child suicide with “rife inaccuracies, altered quotes, half-remembered events, and outright falsehoods.” People are reading his article for information about what “really” happened to poor Levi Presley. Instead they read a complete, ironically, fictional account about what never really happened on the day Levi Presley took his life. What is the point of reading nonfiction if it is, in fact, fictional? As a society we need to be able to trust authors and reporters when they state that they are telling the complete truth and not making up any of the story they are conveying. When writers say they are writing nonfiction and then make up the majority of it we as a Nation are in trouble. We will never truly know how events really happened and will not be able to trust any information without seeing proof for ourselves which would turn the country into completely chaos. For this reason I think D’Agata should have respected these principles of nonfiction writing before losing his credibility and trust of his readers and also bringing uncertainty from readers of nonfiction writing everywhere.
D’agata had every right to put anything in his narrative, and every fact he had in it. His goal was not to convey the exact truth, but to express his feelings toward the subject matter, and to engage the audience in a way that would impact them greatly. D’agata never claimed to be a journalist and thus did not have to follow their rules. In this case, the end definitely justified the means. Fingal pushed things too far. His job was to provide a fact checking service, he could have done that without telling D’agata how to write his paper. That wasn’t his job. The color of bricks can be used as a signal or message in a paper, and D’agata changed the color to suit his mood and tone, there was nothing wrong with that. Fingel couldn’t see what D’agata was trying to accomplish, and waged a pointless war against him. D’agata stood out as a man with a purpose, and that goal he had to complete was what made me favor him the most.
ReplyDeleteMy sympathies lie with D’agata on the argument of the importance of facts in essays. D’agata uses fictional information to appease his readers. He considers his writhing to be “art”. Jim Fingal gave D’agata a hard time by critiquing one of his essays about Levi Pressley’s 2002 suicide in Las Vegas. He criticized the way D’agata said there were 34 strip clubs in Vegas while the source he was using said there were only 31 in the area. D’agata uses exaggerations like that one all of the time in his writing to draw readers to be more interested in what they are reading. D’agata’s work is not supposed to be used as a factual source, so he has the right to make exaggerations in his writing.
ReplyDeleteMy sympathies lie with Jim Fingal. While he may be a bit of a nag on the smaller issues such as the amount of strip clubs in Las Vegas, which is insignificant in any article because whether the number is thirty-one or thirty-four no reader is going to go out of their way to make sure the writer is exact. But when it comes down to the bigger issues such as the Tae Kwon Do reference which raises meaning where meaning doesn’t lie, Fingal has a reason to make sure the facts are straight. D’agata claims he is manipulating the facts as an art form, but if this is true he may as well make up the victim as well and make his art a complete work of fiction in order to spare the feelings of those close to the dead. If D’agata is going to write an essay on a real person, he should capture meaning where it really exists and shouldn’t simply make it up where he feels it should be. In this case the fact checker is just in making sure what D’agata writes is fact and not fiction.
ReplyDeleteIn the argument between Fingal and D'agata on the importance of factual accuracy, I side with Fingal. D'agata is incapable of using factual data in order to capture the readers interest long enough to keep them from simply flipping the page in whichever magazine he may have been writing for. By making it up as he goes, D'agata brings meaning into events that would under normal circumstances would be completely insignificant to the story. He shows to us that truth doesn't matter in nonfiction, and that it is perfectly fine to, for example, take the suicide of a young man and manipulate it to better fit his perversion of an argument and the “meaning” he tries to convey through it. In reality, it shows us the lack of credibility that D'agata displays in his work. At what stage does this become a problem? When lies are written as fact. When something as harmless as the color of the bricks or the number of strip clubs in the area becomes the falsification of entire historical events. A bit farfetched? Maybe so. However, that is why people like Jim Fingal exist. In order to keep people like D'agata from publishing complete fabrications as the 100% indisputable truth.
ReplyDeleteD’agata was within his rights to put whatever he wanted in HIS narrative, whether it was hyperboles, opinions, facts, or utter nonsense. It's HIS narrative and his mission wasn't to convey the truth word for word, but to express his feelings toward the subject at hand, and to spark the audience's interest in what he was talking about. D’agata, to my knowledge, has never claimed to be a journalist which qualifies to stray from their guidelines. Fingal's blowing everything out of proportion. He started a pointless war in which his chances of winning were next to none. This is D'agata's art and he's painting a certain image for his audience that Fingal takes out of context. You need to read into and uncover the underlying meaning of every artist's work. In this case Fingal did his job, but not in the right way. That's why D'agata was infuriated with Fingal when he (Fingal)critiqued his essay about Levi Pressley’s 2002 suicide in Las Vegas. D’agata said there were 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas while the source he was using said there were only 31. D’agata claimed the number 34 was more wholesome than the number 31. D'agata also changed the color of the bricks, and Fingal griped about that. The color of bricks was changed to suit D'agata's mood. The man felt like changing the color of the bricks and since it's HIS narrative and it's not exactly a factual resource, I don't see why he can't. It's his job to interest readers with his writing so as to keep them interested thus inclining them to read more. It's not like he's writing an essay on the number of Cattleya Orchids there are in Colombia where the facts are expected to be correct. Therefore I agree with him exaggerating a few facts to spark his audience's interest. Bottom line, Fingal was out of line.
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