Just the Facts, Ma'am

How would you respond to the news that a piece you read in a favorite magazine contained factual inaccuracies? Would you feel any differently if you knew that these inaccuracies were aimed at providing you with a "better and truer experience"?

This was the reasoning of a University of Iowa professor confronted with accusations of factual inaccuracies by his fact-checker.

In 2003, an essay commissioned by Harper's from writer John D'Agata was later rejected by the magazine by reason of factual inaccuracy. The piece was later published by The Believer after seven years of revisions and arguments over its factual infelicities.

"Aren't you worried about your credibility with the reader?" asked Jim Fingal, the fact-checker for The Believer. "Not really, Jim, no," said D'Agata. "I'm not running for public office. I'm trying to write something that's interesting to read."

The battles between The Believer's meticulous fact-checker and the author of a lyrical but factually "free" meditation on a Las Vegas teen suicide are presented in The Lifespan of a Fact (2012). While there is also reason to question the veracity of the exchange as recorded in the book (it too prioritizes the creation of something "interesting to read" over a strict historic record), this should not be the standard by which it is judged.

The Lifespan of a Fact provides a comprehensive snapshot of a demanding and often unseen aspect of the publishing process. It is valuable in its critical depiction of fact-checking as a contested space, particularly for writing that bridges the scholarly and creative worlds.

Some may label this writing "creative nonfiction" or simply "nonfiction," but D'Agata snarls at these designations. He prefers a more rarified term—one with a well-established canon tracing back to antiquity: the essay.

"And indeed, if we dig down into the history of essays," writes D'Agata, "we will find writers like Natalia Ginzburg and Mary McCarthy and George Orwell and Henry Thoreau and Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey and Daniel Defoe and Christine de Pisan and Sei Shonagon and St. Augustine and Plutarch and Seneca and Cicero and Herodotus and dozens of other masters of this form who regularly altered facts in order to get a closer understanding of what they were experiencing."

Why then does Harper's need a fact-checker if Cicero did without?

Because readers expect it. Magazines worth reading place a high value on factual integrity. A great deal of time, effort, and resources are put into verifying the veracity of sources and statements. Without fact-checking, publications run the risk of jeopardizing their intellectual and scholarly integrity—if not opening themselves to accusations of slander and libel.

Harper's is Harper's because it takes this care.

Still, as the D'Agata argument illustrates, there exist historically significant and currently vital forms of writing that are irreducible to statements of fact. Nor are they pure products of authorial invention.

The essay is one of these forms. But what is it?

I admire Robert Musil's thoughts on the genre because he incorporates the essay form into a way of life. In The Man without Qualities (1930), the Austrian novelist wrote that

an essay is rather the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man's inner life in a decisive thought. Nothing is more foreign to it than the irresponsible and half-baked quality of thought known as subjectivity. Terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable, and yet the essay is subject to laws that are no less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable. There have been more than a few such essayists, masters of the inner hovering life, but there would be no point in naming them. Their domain lies between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry; they are saints with and without religion, and sometimes they are also simply men on an adventure who have gone astray.

Musil's critical question remains vital: "A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants...