Michiko Kakutani: Runaway Relativism and the Fictional Memoir

...We live in a relativistic culture where television"reality shows" are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics, where academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history, where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the"reality-based community," can assert that"we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." ...

Around the same time [as"our culture's enshrinement of subjectivity], biographies became increasingly infected with personal agendas. There was biography as pretentious exercise in deconstruction (Wayne Koestenbaum's"Jackie Under My Skin"), biography as spin job (Andrew Morton's"Diana: Her True Story"), biography as philosophical manifesto (Norman Mailer's"Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man") and biography as feminist polemic (Francine du Plessix Gray's"Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet"). While some of these authors were candid about what they were up to, Edmund Morris's ludicrous 1999 book"Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" - which recounted Ronald Reagan's life through the prism of a fictional narrator, who liked to talk about himself - was sold as"the only biography ever authorized by a sitting president."

Equally egregious was"The Last Brother," Joe McGinniss's speculative portrait of Senator Edward M. Kennedy - a book in which the author acknowledged that he'd"written certain scenes and described certain events from what I have inferred to be his point of view," despite the fact that he did not even interview the senator for the book."This is my view, and perhaps mine alone," Mr. McGinniss wrote,"of what life might have been like for Teddy."

While books like these were further blurring the lines between fact and fiction- a development that had begun years before with the rise of the new journalism, which appropriated the techniques of fiction without assuming its prerogative of invention - academics were questioning the very nature of reality.

By focusing on the"indeterminacy" of texts and the crucial role of the critic in imputing meaning, deconstructionists were purveying a fashionably nihilistic view of the world, suggesting that all meaning is relative, all truth elusive. And by focusing on the point of view of the historian (gender, class, race, ideology, etc.), radical feminists and multiculturalists were arguing that history is an adjunct of identity politics, that all statements about the past are expressions of power and that all truths are therefore political and contingent.

Variations on these arguments were used by Janet Malcolm, who disingenuously suggested in"The Silent Woman," her highly partisan 1994 portrait of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, that all biographers share her disdain for fairness and objectivity.

The dangers of such relativistic theories are profound. As Deborah Lipstadt, the author of"Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," has argued, the suggestion that no event or fact has a fixed meaning leads to the premise that"any truth can be retold." And when people assert that there is no ultimate historical reality, an environment is created in which the testimony of a witness to the Holocaust - like Mr. Wiesel, the author of"Night" - can actually be questioned.

In her 1994 book"On Looking Into the Abyss," the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb argued that historians have always known"what postmodernism professes to have just discovered" - that any historical work"is necessarily imperfect, tentative and partial." Yet postmodernists do not merely acknowledge the obstacles that stand in the way of objectivity but also celebrate those obstacles, elevating relativism into a kind of end in itself. They strive to be imaginative, inventive or creative, instead of accurate and knowledgeable....