By Ryan Habermeyer •

My mom used to say I hated getting my hair cut. I would cringe, squirm, fidget, even cry out of an irrational fear the barber might cut my ears off. I was allergic to idleness, always drawing, cooking, playing basketball, building LEGOs, and cosplaying He-Man. About the only thing I would really sit still for was a good story. I loved Story Hour at the local library, reading in the car, and my mother’s dinner table tales. The local barber knew this, and so to cut my flopsy little boy hair with seventeen cowlicks, he’d tell me stories about Chuck Norris. This was around the time of Sidekicks, Karate Kid, Bloodsport, and Ninja Gaiden, when martial arts in Southern California were all the rage. The barber assured me he was friends with Chuck. They were in the Air Force together, supposedly. Or he’d been a student at his nearby karate studio. Or, Chuck lived not far from the barbershop and often frequented the Swedish restaurant in the plaza next to my dad’s dentistry office. If I sat still for the haircut, the barber promised, he’d get me a signed photograph.

Believe it or not, he kept his promise. The photo was a production still for Invasion U.S.A. with Norris deadeying the camera like a denim Übermensch, his unbuttoned shirt displaying a wild crop of chest hair as he wielded dual Uzis that were almost as potent as his mullet. I remember bringing the photo to school and all my friends huddling around it like the Holy Grail. I was king for the day until someone said the signature was a fake. To Ryan, Chuck Norris. No, my friends rallied behind me with utter sincerity, how could anyone fake that? Who would dare to fake Chuck’s signature?

I was a gullible kid. Part of me suspected the barber was making things up, just like I suspected my mother’s bedtime fairy tales were lies. For a while, I couldn’t bring myself to entertain the idea the autograph was a forgery, but once the thought was planted, it was impossible to shake. Still, I clung to the belief it was real because there was something about those fictions that dazzled me, like a bee waterskiing a stinger full of honey across my heart. It was the first time I experienced the famous Camus quote—“fiction is the lie that tells the truth”—and so I turned a blind eye to the facts.

Except Camus never said that. There’s no real proof of it, anyway. It’s a fake quote popularized by the great fraudulence machine of the twenty-first century: the internet. 

When aliens excavate the ruins of this century, I like to imagine they won’t be surprised by the corruption, cruelty, and indifference. As an advanced species, they’ll have seen all that before. What will give them pause is this golden age of fakery. Even before AI, catfishing, and Photoshop, we were never a sincere species. Discontent with truth and lie, we invented exaggeration, fabrication, embellishment, bullshit, truthiness, untruth, falsehoods, facts, and fictions. We obsessed over and were confused by presidential birth certificates, emails from Nigerian princes, Balloon Boy, Rachel Dolezal, I-did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman, Andy Kaufman wrestling matches, the War of the Worlds broadcast, and the Fiji mermaid. Misinformation is our gospel.

Art, of course, is bedfellows with artifice. Before Joe Wenderoth’s fast-food comment card novel Letters to Wendy’s, there was Mary Shelley’s epistolary Frankenstein. Before Borges started inventing imaginary books within books in the form of pseudoscholarly essays, Rabelais invented hypothetical libraries in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Camus might never have actually said fiction is the lie that tells the truth, but he did write in his philosophical novel, The Fall, that truth is a light that blinds, whereas falsehood “is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.” Humans love artistic fictions. And we especially like them when they masquerade in nonfiction drag; what Matthew Vollmer and David Shields call fraudulent literary artifacts. Another way of saying literary found forms. A kind of fictional cousin to the hermit crab essay. 

But, given our current cultural atmosphere, I’d like to amend Vollmer and Shields’s original nomenclature and call them post-fact literary fictions: fictional narratives that experimentally embedded themselves within nonfiction forms to problematize our shared perception of truth, reality, and how we make and write history. For example: an imaginary encyclopedia of a nomadic people at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and the Middle East (Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars); the pseudo-biographical confessions of a Nazi who might not have been a Nazi (Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night); and letters to God confessing an inner world of trauma and resilience of the Black experience (Alice Walker, The Color Purple). Even Don Quixote, ostensibly the first novel, is framed as a pseudohistorical transcription of a lost text as chronicled by Cervantes’s narrator, the Arabic scribe Cide Hamete Benengeli. Which is to say, at the birth of the modern novel there is formalistic trickery that blurs our perception of fiction and nonfiction and gets us talking about what is real and what isn’t; about what has happened, what is happening, and what is to come.

Shields has argued in his genre-bending manifesto, Reality Hunger, that our contemporary cultural obsession with “reality” derives from the fact that we rarely experience any. I’m not entirely persuaded by that claim, nor do I think it fully explains the increasing volume of formalistically experimental books out there. If Vonnegut is to be believed, then playfulness and practicality—not hyper-seriousness—drives many authors to adopt fake artifact forms. “It’s much more fun,” Vonnegut explains, “to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself. And it’s true: If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it’s over in a minute or so. It’s a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing [them], and I suppose I’ve now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.” But if we want to go down the road of lofty seriousness, then Dorrit Cohn makes an interesting point in The Distinction of Fiction when she distinguishes between the fictional and the fictitious. The author of the fictitious, she suggests, leads us towards lies; whereas the author of the fictional strives to point us toward truths. With this in mind, post-fact literary fictions are not escapist by design but precisely through their artifice heighten our sense of political reality and pluralistic notions of the truth. 

Consider Chris Bachelder’s novel, U.S.! (2006). At the heart of the novel is the grotesque and satirical figure of Upton Sinclair, the muckraking socialist activist who is repeatedly resurrected by helplessly optimistic liberals only to be repeatedly assassinated (shot, stabbed, even harpooned) by fanatical right-wing extremists. The first half of the novel, a self-described “Resurrection Scrapbook,” tells the story through a variety of forms: letters, radio and phone transcripts, sample syllabi, book and product reviews, obituaries, and online memorabilia advertisements. But the book is hardly whimsical. Bachelder uses this fragmented miscellany as a grotesque mirror to Sinclair’s partially decomposing corpse—and by proxy the American experiment—to signify the monstrosity and decay of contemporary politics and its failure to achieve a collective pluralism.

And most readers are surprised to discover Margaret Atwood’s infamous dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a post-fact literary fiction. What feels like a clandestine diary is revealed in the novel’s clever epilogue—a scholarly lecture at a futuristic academic conference—to be a series of transcribed cassette recordings. The epilogue doesn’t dramatically alter the reading of the book so much as it brings more urgency and fragility to Offred’s narration upon re-reading it. Although I wish Atwood had played more with the form—cutting off sections abruptly, or Offred making references to recording over segments—the epilogue lends the novel a conflicting aura of unreliability and authenticity, recasting the hypothetical and speculative future as not some far-off fiction but a tangible, terrifying present.

And then there’s Paul La Farge’s The Facts of Winter (2005), one of my favorite books that sharpens the edge between fictitious and fictional. It’s part mock biography, part pseudoscholarly dive into imaginary archives exploring the lost dreams collected by an obscure fin de siècle French poet (who isn’t real but brimming with life through La Farge’s imagination). What initially seems like a purely aesthetic inquiry becomes the search for the true identity of a man buried in the rubble of history, a plotline that echoes the post-9/11 contextual backdrop of the novella and the collective effort to locate the identities of the lost and disappeared victims, a cultural anxiety also exemplified in Tom Junod’s brilliant essay, “The Falling Man.”

Post-fact literary fictions can also act as revisionist gestures that look backwards to deconstruct and reconfigure historiographical orthodoxy. This is, I believe, the case in Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), a compendium of biographical sketches of political figures and the invented bookshelves of Nazi sympathizers. By adopting an encyclopedic form that allows him to move in panoramic fashion, Bolaño’s novel makes more visible and bears witness to the oft-ignored historical reality of Nazi sympathizing in Latin American politics in the prewar decades, as well as the extent to which North and South American governments and their citizenry were complicit in Nazi ideology in the postwar period. Refusing to craft a polemic about right-wing fanatics, Bolaño unveils the subtle and sly ways the political left conspires with, appeases, and is indifferent to fascism, something increasingly relevant to our contemporary moment.

By amending Vollmer and Shields and calling these kinds of texts post-fact literary fictions, I wish to highlight their relevance in our contemporary post-truth condition. Post-truth, or postfaktisch, the Oxford Dictionary word of the year for 2016, can be thought of as a phenomenon that not only privileges individual felt truth and the waning of collective truth-seeking, but also the decline in shared assumptions of facts that leads to social groups operating in distinct and irreconcilable information universes. To call it a condition is to acknowledge that post-fact is a chronic cultural dilemma and not something new. We have always been post-fact. The internet and social media, like the printing press before them, have merely laid bare the festering ills inflicted by an information tug-of-war. Post-fact literary fictions respond to this chronic cultural condition, and their recent uptick, I think, is less about trying to solve said condition than, to gloss Chekhov, pose questions about it. Post-fact fictions weave a tangled knot of political messiness to disquiet our convictions and encourage difficult dialogues. They are the kinds of fictions noted by Milan Kundera in a 1980 interview with Philip Roth for the New York Times, later reprinted in Roth’s Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work:  

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything…The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.”

My own novel, Necronauts, written in the form of ninety-five obituaries, is a post-fact novel asking questions about faith, family, folklore, and the limits of fantasy. It’s the story of an orphaned boy in small-town Utah with a cosmonaut helmet grafted onto his head who, after watching too many campy 1950s sci-fi movies, believes he is an alien and, with the help of a drug addict dentist, decides to build a catapult in the middle of the desert to try and launch himself into outer space.

The first drafts were hardly experimental. My stubborn insistence on conventional form and marketability led to false starts, dead ends, and a lifeless story. It was self-sabotage without knowing it. It was only after the death of a close friend that I revisited the manuscript, and that’s when I realized my previous failures were a matter of not using the right stylistic vehicle to tell the story. During the years I’d let the manuscript gestate, my friend had been a confidant in talking about our mutual faith crisis. We had both left the Mormon church years earlier—the only religion we’d ever known—and with his death, I felt existentially adrift. I started digging through the archive of my Mormon dead, writing bits and pieces about old pioneer ancestors as a way of performing an autopsy on my faith. My father, the emotionally disconnected dentist; my great-grandfather, the dogmatic bishop. As a way of processing the loss, I imagined my dead friend as my lonely cosmonaut boy and wrote his hypothetical obituary. Pretty soon, I was rewriting the entire book as a series of obituaries. It felt natural, as if hiding behind a nonfiction screen freed me from my imaginative self-consciousness. It was akin to what Borges said, echoing Vonnegut, that “it is an impoverishing madness to compose vast books…The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.” Formalistic experimentation afforded Borges a certain aesthetic distance from his material; form facilitated the craft. So it was for me. With the obituaries as my guide, I was able to explore the spectrum of faith in my fictional small town: some saints, some sinners; others unbelievers, and skeptics, and a few fanatics. It was the form that enabled me to write with grief to find the fantasy of the real.

I’ve spent some forty years believing my Chuck Norris autograph was a fake. Recently, while tumbling down an internet rabbit hole, I came across a useless factoid: Chuck Norris really did live in my hometown. Not only that, but he really did have a dojo in the shopping plaza right next to my father’s dentistry office. And he really did frequent the Swedish Corner Smörgåsbord Restaurant, five minutes from my house. Rummaging through the attic, I pulled out the old photograph of Chuck. He looked as manly as ever, a wry smirk on his face. Maybe the autograph is fake. Or maybe it isn’t. I can scour the internet for images of Norris’s handwriting, dutifully comparing the signatures. But I won’t. Maybe sometimes answers aren’t everything, and sometimes facts don’t prove anything. Maybe the fact is there is beauty in uncertainty and those ambivalent artistic lies that get us to sit still and enlarge our empathy for things both real and not quite. 

 

---

RYAN HABERMEYER is the author of the novel Necronauts (Stillhouse) and the short story collections Salt Folk (Cornerstone) and The Science of Lost Futures (BoA Editions). His award-winning stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, and others. A Fulbright Scholar who has lived, taught, and studied in Poland, Scotland, Spain, and Mexico, he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Salisbury University. Find him on Instagram @ryanhabermeyer.

Featured image by Alex Shuper, courtesy of Unsplash.