While reading this post, you should be listening to Little Brother by ‘O’rang.
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It’s time to admit that being published by Granta – even if only online – was one of my teenage ambitions. Granta published “The Coup” by Bruce Chatwin, the first piece of travel writing I remember reading, as well the first truly beautiful writing that I can remember. It was around the time that I started to wake up to the world, and Chatwin’s reports reassured me that one of the things that I wanted in my own life – the possibility of perpetual arrival – was out there, somewhere.
As I got older, I realised that the Chatwin that I read about was a fictionsuit1 for the real Chatwin, and that he was dreaming himself into the world in much the same way as I was. It seemed that his world was far grander than mine until I got older still, and realised that the world that I read about in Chatwin’s books was also a fabrication – in the nonfiction as much as in the fiction.2
Bruce Chatwin flat out made shit up, and he never got seriously called on it. He was in a position of privilege – a published writer that would get the benefit of the doubt from the establishment – and those who would call him down had none of his resources. The playing field has changed since Chatwin was a literary superstar – the internet has made it possible for nearly anybody nearly anywhere to read my work, for which I am thankful. At the same time it’s created a feedback loop which makes it possible for nearly anybody nearly anywhere to point out any egregious errors in my writing.
I’m under no illusions that I’m half the writer that Chatwin was, but once my piece on northern Iraq in 1998 was published, I began to wonder whether my own recollections would stand up to scrutiny. My memories – shaky at the best of times – are over 10 years old now; I wasn’t able to check with Segwan, a key character in the piece, whether my memories of him were accurate, because I have no idea where he is now. Nobody has yet popped up to tell me that the Turkish army were never in northern Iraq (of course they weren’t, of course), but if I was a bigger fish (or Granta was a smaller pond) then I’m sure that they would.
Truth and accuracy are not the same thing, but unfortunately there’s a legion of pedants on the web who beg to differ. The internet has made it possible for us to (re)create ourselves on a scale that Chatwin would have envied, whether it’s as a serious blogger with serious thoughts or a firebreathing transexual avatar in Second Life.3 Following close behind, though, is the reverse of possibility, the closing down of possibility; the anti-possibility that we might be tracked all the time, whether in the anthropological enclosures of Facebook or further out in the wilderness, and that all of our creative acts of the self – all of our lies – might be hunted to extinction.
Chatwin was a genius because he sometimes let his imagination run away with him. What else do we lose if we lose that capacity for running away?
- Grant Morrison coined the phrase, he didn’t invent the concept. [↩]
- Recommended reading: Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Bruce Chatwin. [↩]
- That’s not me – my avatar is a heavy-set bloke with a beard and hawaian shirt. [↩]