Scandal Scandalizing Scandal

Kafka is dead!

But today the New York Times published “A Bug’s Life. Really,” an Op-Ed spoof by novelist and screenwriter Mark Leyner, supposedly discrediting Franz Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis” as non-fiction.

Fiction as truth, Oh my!

The article begins, “In a scandal that’s sending shock waves through both the publishing industry and academia, the author Franz Kafka has been revealed to be a fraud.

“‘The Metamorphosis — purported to be the fictional account of a man who turns into a large cockroach — is actually non-fiction,’ according to a statement released by Mr. Kafka’s editor, who spoke only on the condition that he be identified as E.”

How literary it is to be simply called E.!

What is Leyner trying to do? Demonstrate that the New York Times is a literary nightmare? That the recent scandals regarding fictional or historical or autobiographical integrity are McCarthy-esque witch hunts against an already marginalized and misunderstand profession? Offer his name into the coveted gated world of ping-pong-name-tossing-blaming-Oprah-interviewing-NY Times-covering-book store shelf space-rescinding publicity? Place himself at the zenith of literary genius, above the entire-museum-dedicated-to-his-work-and-life Kafka, the “con man” as he’s referred to Leyner’s article? To become a neologism, That Op-Ed piece was so Leyneresque! Wow, what a Leyneresque outfit! You are thus sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for this Leyneresque crime of treason. Don’t Bogart my Leynerism!?

But the real scandal is in the positioning that fiction cannot be fact-based. Leyner has exposed what has long been recognized; most writers write from experience.

There are numerous books on writing titled just that: “Writing from Experience”, by Richard A. Condon, “Writing from Experience” by Brian Taylor, “I Felt Like I Was from Another Planet : Writing from Personal Experience” by Norine Dresser, “A time in their lives;: Writings from personal experience” by Jerry Herman, “Writing from Experience, Revised Edition: With Grammar and Language Skills for ESL/EFL Students” by Marcella Frank, “Writing from Personal Experience: How to Turn Your Life into Salable Prose” by Nancy Kelton, “Writing from Experience: A Step by Step Approach to Freelance Writing” by Amanda Wilkins, “Talking and Writing from Experience” by Judith Atkinson and John Foster, “Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems from Your Life Experiences” by Sheila Bender, “Write from Life: Turning Your Personal Experiences into Compelling Stories” by Meg Files, and the list goes on and on and on and on.

What is so new and disturbing about experience-based, or truth-based writing? At best, it makes for tangible, palpable, unparalleled, fully realized writing. At worst, it’s self-aware, self-indulgent, and predictable. But these categories could be extended to any kind of writing.

In Leyner’s article, he quotes P., “a professor of literature at Princeton” who laments, “To find out that [“The Metamorphosis” is] actually true is devastating.”

Devastating.

And according to "A Bug's Life. Really," Mr. Kafka (despite his current state of burial) is devastated by this sudden exposure as well. He quotes a “contrite and tearful” Kafka as professing, “I know what I did was wrong. I’m very alienated from myself, but that’s no excuse to lie.”

Lies.

So we know Kafka is dead. Even if the Times doesn’t. Or maybe they were in on it. And according to Leyner, Kafka’s still living-breathing publishers are fact-checking his fiction. Fact-checking fiction, now there’s an oxymoron.

In Leyner's article, he names the man-as-cockroach condition as “entomological dysplasia.” GoogleTM this, and one finds nothing but links back to Leyner’s article. (NOTE: When I began writing this, there was one page of results for "entomological dysplasia" in Google. A few hours later, there were two.)

It doesn’t take a literary genius or a master of sci-fi to figure out that there’s no such condition and that Leyner’s article is no more truth-based than “The Metamorphosis.”

Thanks to Leyner, the question of truth's significance in writing is yet again under consideration, but with a twist. He's taken the memoir verifiability debate to extreme. Let's just hope the literary police don't turn their radar to the gloriously unverifiable genres of fiction and poetry.