3 - Veracity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2010
Summary
Memoirs raise issues of veracity that are even more complex than the issues of authenticity I have just considered. For the basic question that they involve is no longer simply: Was the memoirist really there? It becomes: If the memoirist was there, is he reliable? And this question cannot in most cases be answered in the form of “yes” or “no.” Thus, the essential problem about such people as Sajer and Gilles is to find out whether they fought in the Soviet Union or not. If they did not, their writings are definitely disqualified from the discursive and epistemological category “memoir.” If they did, the matter is to determine to what extent the stories they tell are dependable, and on what points they can be challenged. In brief, what is at stake now is not the text as a whole; it is part of the text, whose overall status as a valid testimony basically is not at risk. James Frey's best-selling A Million Little Pieces (2005), to take another well-publicized example of “fraud,” was exposed as questionable not in the area of authenticity, but in that of veracity. Frey undoubtedly had a drug habit; but he made up or exaggerated several items in the account of his journey from addiction to recovery, distortions to which he admitted when confronted with such evidence as police records of his arrests.
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- The French Who Fought for HitlerMemories from the Outcasts, pp. 53 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010