It was another day on the internet: a critic expressed her shock that the hit film Tár was not the true story she’d believed it to be. There is no Lydia Tár, and never was.
The ensuing ridicule was to be expected. The critic’s response encapsulated, however, exactly the way a decade of literary culture has taught audiences to receive the realist narrative arts. An implicit agreement has been forged between publishing houses and readers: the following events were experienced by someone, most usually the author herself. Google to corroborate; revel in the gossip; revolt if it’s made up.
In his 2010 manifesto, Reality Hunger, David Shields offered a controversial diagnosis for the sustained Anglophone allergy to invented fictions. “Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any,” he wrote, alluding to the invented, “nonfictional” near-realities then proliferating on reality TV, regular TV, the lyric essay and the memoir. In such a world, novels become redundant: “Since to live is to make fiction, what need to disguise the world as another, alternate one?”
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