A Rogue Book Review (Dean)

Stanley Fish is a national treasure. He has managed seemingly effortlessly to review favorably—quite favorably!—Sarah Palin's book, and with only the slightest hint of irony.

My assessment of the book has nothing to do with the accuracy of its accounts. Some news agencies have fact-checkers poring over every sentence, which would be to the point if the book were a biography, a genre that is judged by the degree to which the factual claims being made can be verified down to the last assertion. “Going Rogue,” however, is an autobiography, and while autobiographers certainly insist that they are telling the truth, the truth the genre promises is the truth about themselves—the kind of persons they are—and even when they are being mendacious or self-serving (and I don’t mean to imply that Palin is either), they are, necessarily, fleshing out that truth. As I remarked in a previous column, autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say will truthfully serve their project, which, again, is not to portray the facts, but to portray themselves.

In one paragraph we are treated to a supremely skilled critical sensibility informed by a life of deep and wide reading. How often has a book reviewer bothered to distinguish biography from autobiography for purposes of adjusting the reader's expectations? This sort of nuanced hair-splitting usually occurs in dreary literary critical elaborations of "texts" and "intentions," "rifts," "abysses," and "interruptions." Fish made his scholarly career participating in and engaging those elaborations, not to mention famously impressing and pissing off his audience at once.

That there are readers of this latest column among the comments who just don't get it is not surprising. (One example: the fellow from Des Moines who fails to recognize that by announcing he doesn't mean to imply Palin is lying, Fish may be promoting that very thesis.) Sure, it's hard to swallow the possibility that the book could be at all artful, but Fish does a fair job of explaining how so. He's a master, a brilliant reader, the craftiest of writers.

Comments

[Ruchira]

Palin is on a roll, I must say. She gets the literary and the political nod (Reaganesque, coming to town, watch out etc.) from Stanley Fish. Now she has an op-ed in the Washington Post on climate change. Of course, she is against Copenhagen. It is a socialist plot. But she seems to be on two sides of the issue. In the first part of the piece she says:

The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics

So, the climate is cooling. Then she goes on to explain:

That's not to say I deny the reality of some changes in climate -- far from it. I saw the impact of changing weather patterns firsthand while serving as governor of our only Arctic state. I was one of the first governors to create a subcabinet to deal specifically with the issue and to recommend common-sense policies to respond to the coastal erosion, thawing permafrost and retreating sea ice that affect Alaska's communities and infrastructure.

But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes.

So the earth is warming. But it is not due to anything humans are doing. It is in God's hand, of course.

Drill, Baby, drill!

[a comment]

Ruchira, the paragraph you have quoted bears traces of the maddening antirealism Fish used to exhibit in his earlier works.

True, an autobiography is a "truth about oneself." But since an autobiography will invariably identify itself as "non-fiction," it cannot claim immunity to fact-checks and charges of falsehood - especially in matters concerning the world and other people

[Term Papers]

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