Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Television, however, in its new fondness for "docu-dramas," is subject to special danger of another sort. People who go to a moviehouse expect to see fiction and accept the conventions of historical drama: no one is much worse off if everyone's image of Disraeli is George Arliss or if Gregory Peck romanticizes the legend of Douglas MacArthur. But, as a number of psychologists have pointed out, the television screen provides most people with their visual knowledge of real events, such as President Kennedy's assassination, so that truth and show-biz demands are bound...
Novelists have been poaching on real life for some time and Truman Capote didn't invent a new genre, but only gave it a name, when he called his reportorial In Cold Blood a "nonfiction novel." Alex Haley called Roots a work of "faction," blending fact and fiction, but the distinction wasn't made all that clear on TV, embarrassing Haley deeply. Far more tricky legally is Robert Coover's new novel about the Rosenbergs, The Public Burning, where real-name living people (including Richard Nixon) are put into wildly improbable situations. If suits occur...
Presumably, novelists turned to fiction in the first place as an imaginative way to conjure up reality, for, as the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer says, "The facts are always less than what really happened." But many novelists now find truth not only stranger than fiction but easier to write; it takes less effort to embellish a character the reader already knows than to create a new character in the round...
There ought to be a truth-in-labeling law to separate truth and fiction. But who could write it, and who would pass it? Since there won't be any such law, everybody concerned-and TV docu-dramatists most of all-should be held more accountable for fat content and fact content, properly labeled...
However Bounds said the press was considering for its next publication an anthology of short fiction written by college students from several universities...