‘Writing Lies’: The Role of Fiction in Research

Dr. Steve Hicks
Senior Lecturer in Social Work & Welfare
University of Central Lancashire, UK

‘Writing Lies’:
The Role of Fiction in Research

As I crossed the Maitland-Eatonville township line I could see a group on the store porch. I was delighted. The town had not changed. Same love of talk and song... "Hello, boys," I hailed them as I went into neutral. They looked up from the game and for a moment it looked as if they had forgotten me. Then B. Moseley said, "Well, if it ain’t Zora Hurston!"... "You back home for good, I hope." "Nope, Ah come to collect some old stories and tales and Ah know y’all know a plenty of ‘em and that’s why Ah headed straight for home." "What you mean, Zora, them big old lies we tell when we’re jus’ sittin’ around here on the store porch doin’ nothin’?" (Hurston 1935:7-8).

‘Writing Lies’: I’ve called the seminar ‘writing lies’ because I want to focus on questions of ‘authenticity’ in social research; that is, what I see as extremely problematic ‘truth-claims’ made by social researchers in a post-positivist frame. ‘Writing lies’ both refers to questions of textual representation in research (a reference back to Clifford & Marcus’ 1986 volume ‘Writing Culture’) and to questions of legitimation (what counts as a ‘truth’, and here I refer to ZNH’s folklore research in 1935 ‘Mules & Men’ and 1938 ‘Tell My Horse’). I want to draw upon some recent, but also not-so-recent, research examples which deliberately blur ‘fact/fiction’ boundaries in order to examine some problems with ‘authenticity’-claims, as I see them.
Norman Denzin’s 1997 ‘Interpretive Ethnography’ raises just these debates when he suggests that we are now moving into a "6th moment" of ethnographic research:

researchers can no longer be seen to ‘capture’ lived experiences - instead these are created in the research text - this is the crisis of representation (which I think has been around for quite some time)

we need to rethink the ideas of ‘validity’ - this is the crisis of legitimation - we cannot trust the ‘truth’ of a research text anymore (once again, something that has been around for quite some time, certainly in feminist writings on research and science)

Indeed, Sandra Harding’s (1998) arguments about ‘science’ can be applied to the idea of positivist social research - it has tended to rely upon the need to distinguish itself from superstition, magic, everyday thought, folk explanations etc... and I think the way that it has done this is via claims to objectivity, detachment, removal of politics or bias and so on, but also crucially by attempts to establish the validity of claims made...so what happens when a researcher becomes deeply implicated in all of these things? [In fact, I’m going to suggest that all reseachers are deeply implicated in all of these things...]
I will refer to my own handling of some of these problems in my PhD research on LGFA - but, as my main point of illustration, let me introduce you to the folklore research of Zora Neale Hurston:

SHOW THE GRAVE
     ZNH was a novelist, anthropologist, playwright, essayist, and key figure in what is now termed the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and political movement of black people centred around Harlem, NY in the 1920-30s. I don’t have any time to talk about the HR, but certainly it is very problematic to present it, as it tends to be, as an homgenous group of black people and ideas - for example, Hurston, along with writers like Wallace Thurman and Langston Hughes, objected strongly to the version of ‘black’ being promoted via Alain Locke’s work on what he then called ‘the new Negro’ (Locke 1925).
     Hurston went on to study anthropology with Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas at Columbia University in the late 1920s-1930s, and spent considerable amounts of time researching black Southern folklore (Florida, Jamaica), Voodoo (New Orleans, Haiti) and politics (Haiti, Jamaica). She was one of the first US black women to study black folklore, and one of the first to give any serious attention to the beliefs and practices of voodoo (or hoodoo), which she studied via observation, initiation and participation.
     The picture shows Hurston’s gravestone, placed in the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida by Alice Walker in 1973. Before Walker, and other black feminist/womanist writers, began a concerted effort to ‘reclaim’ the history and works of ZNH, she had lain buried in an unmarked grave in the segregated and rundown cemetery, and was - to a large extent, a neglected black writer. There are 2 things about this picture that I want to pick up on:

the 1901 birth-date is a ‘lie’ (deliberately promulgated by ZNH who loved to tell ‘tales’ in every sense of the word and was evasive on the question of her birth date) - she was actually born 1891 in Alabama, not 1901 in Eatonville as she so often claimed (Bordelon 1999:3)

the grave itself stands roughly where she may be buried - it’s really impossible to tell if it’s the right place (this is described in Walker’s very moving account ‘Looking for Zora’ 1983). Just because something looks like the ‘truth’, it may not be...

ZNH’s work, including the folklore research, has been criticised over the years for a number of reasons, some of which have to do with my concerns about ‘authenticity’ today:

some of the key ‘race leaders’ (as she called them) of her time - men like Richard Wright, Alain Locke - criticised her for not presenting the version of ‘black lives and black politics’ that they favoured

her anthropology was seen as ‘inauthentic’ because it wasn’t scientific enough, and/or was ‘gossip....or misinterpretation’

she was criticised for being present in her research texts - that is, both MM and TMH have ‘Zora’ as a character-narrator running through them

she was accused of mixing ‘genres’ in a way that suggested that some of her fiction used folklore facts, and v.v. - some of her folklore used fictional data

there were questions about whether she could or should be ‘objective’ in her research - her first fieldtrips were back to Eatonville, Florida, an all-black, self-governing town where she grew up - indeed, she herself struggled with this point

Here are, then, suggestions of the spectre of "fiction", that supposed anathema to social research, and the taint of ‘untruth’. As Banks & Banks have noted in their work on fiction and social research:

"Fiction threatens the whole research enterprise. Research, no matter how qualitative and interpretive, rests on fundamental beliefs in reliability, validity, and objectivity in reporting...a need for the narrative to be free of the reseacher’s imagination." (Banks & Banks 1998b:17).

I’m going to look, then, at some of what I see as classic and problematic claims to ‘authenticity’ made by social researchers in a postpositivist frame - what I mean by that is paradigms which reject the idea that research should, or can, be: objective, based upon neutral observation of facts, value-free, untainted by bias, non-political...

Authenticity in Research?

Denzin (1997) has referred to a crisis of representation in ethnography, which suggests that research writing is actually narrative production

however, even when this is acknowledged, the research ‘text’ may still be taken as a ‘truth’ - the data in the form of transcript extracts or visual and documentary materials are assumed to be mimetic and therefore believable - but what if we deliberately write as fiction?

as I have said, Denzin’s observation is not new and certainly has a long history, that I know of, in feminist and later ‘postmodern’ writings on the research text (see examples like Clifford & Marcus 1986; Smith 1987; Stanley & Wise 1983; Wolf 1992).

an example would be the work of Susan Krieger, whose 1983 ‘The Mirror Dance’ is an ethnography of a lesbian community - what is most interesting about it to me is that Krieger deliberately writes in novelistic style: she tries to remove any ‘authorial voice’ and instead present her observations ‘exclusively’ through the speaking voices of the various characters in the community. The work has a methodological Appendix in which Krieger advocates the use of fictional methods in order to: admit that research writers often do what novelists do (character, scene etc.), to present conflicting evidence, and to avoid describing the social world through the lens of ‘currently fashionable sociological threories’. However, whilst I loved reading the book, I also found Krieger’s claims to be ‘absent’ as a narrator or author unbelievable - how could she be absent? how could she just present the ‘voices’ of her subjects when she is fictionalising? how could she not be ‘theoretical’? What is interesting about her text, though, is the way that it helps us to see how research texts ‘persuade’ via fictional or narrative devices.

this is dealt with in a more sophisticated way, I think, in the work of Christine Elizabeth Kiesinger (1998a,1998b) who writes the lives of anorexic and bulimic women through her research. In ‘Portrait of an Anorexic Life’ (1998b), she uses ‘evocative narratives’ which "read much like good fiction, with plot lines, well-developed characters, vivid scenes, engaging dialogue, and thick description" (1998b:129) - which is exactly the kind of writing that raises doubts about truthfulness or validity. Kiesinger analyses what makes a good ‘story’ - structure, gripping, engaging, evocative, persuasive, convincing, context, style, character, voice, tense, selection of scenes or episodes, use of dialogue (1998a). She writes about her work as being "based on the histories and experiences of real women" (1998a:88) because they are not realistic representations:

"As interpretive ethnographers, the sentences we construct, the images we paint with our words, the characters we depict, and the scenes we bring to life are the products of our own experiences as well as the products of the relationships we foster and share with our participants." (1998a:89).

there are examples from my own work which fit here: in my PhD, I wanted to use some ‘fictionalised’ accounts of my research interviews and did include one short ‘fictionalised’ extract. This was because I do not see the research interview as a straightforward ‘truthful account’ in the ways that many other social researchers do:

Dictionary of Sociology: "the interview is an important research technique...Doubts have been expressed concerning the reliability of the interview. Thus its very formality may mean that the respondent does not act ‘typically’. The interview is not a neutral social relationship and the respondents’ perceptions of the interviewer may well affect replies." (Abercrombie et al. 1994:221).

In the same volume, ‘reliability’ is defined as the extent to which repeated measurements using the same test under the same conditions produce the same results - when could two interviews ever do that?

Instead:
it depends on what an interviewee will say to whom
opinions change in different contexts and are not fixed
events are re-counted in an interview, from particular perspective which may embellish, add drama, make the teller look favourable etc.
interviews are dialogic
meanings are achieved between interviewer/ee in that setting and then re-interpreted by the researcher

So I wanted to use fictional forms to enable the reader to get away from the idea of the interview text as truth. However, I felt constrained by the PhD form and expectations here! Would this really be accepted in a discipline called ‘applied social science’ - well maybe, but I compromised because I wanted the PhD after 5 years work!

"Dear Dr. Boas, I am full of tremors, lest you decide that you do not want to write the introduction to my ‘Mules and Men’...Mr. Lippincott likes the book very much and...wants a very readable book that the average reader can understand...So I hope that the unscientific matter that must be there for the sake of the average reader will not keep you from writing the introduction. It so happens that the conversations and incidents are true. But of course I never would have set them down for scientists to read... (Zora Neale Hurston, letter to Franz Boas of Columbia University anthropology department, Aug. 20 1934, from collection of the American Philosophical Society Library; in Hemenway 1977:163-4).

the point I have just raised relates to the idea that, if a text does seem to contain elements of ‘fiction’, then it is likely to be seen as ‘unscientific’ - ZNH’s concerns expressed in her letter to Boas show just this. She was worried that her folklore research for MM would be dismissed by anthropologists (something, I think, that has a particular significance for one of the few black women within that discipline in the 1930s). Yet Lippincott, her publisher, required frequent revisions to the manuscript so that it would appeal to the ‘average’ reader - so here we need to remember that there is a context to the way that texts are written. Yet this worried ZNH because she felt her work would be written off: "I want to leave no loop-holes for the scientific crowd to rend and tear us" (letter to Langston Hughes, 30 April 1929). But she also wanted to write good stories in the style of her participants, the "big old lies" that she heard and collected, and to retain what she actually saw as ‘authentic’ black folklore forms. Thus, although she did write more ‘scholarly’ articles for the ‘Journal of American Folklore’, the text of MM does depart from a standard ‘scientific’ approach - this led to some of the criticisms of the text: too much ZNH present, doubts about whether her data was ‘collected’ or ‘recalled’ (‘made up’). So here there were doubts about the ‘authenticity’ of her data, which I’ll come back to...
is data real or fictional? - as I have said, in a postpositivist frame, research texts often make points which are then supported by quoted extracts from transcripts, documentary or visual materials (we all do it!) - readers tend to accept these as ‘truthful’. In the recent film, ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (Moreno et al. 1999), however, this is played around with - a piece of fiction (a film story) is presented in a style which is associated with ‘documentary’ (and indeed there was a ‘mockumentary’ made about the ‘Blair Witch’ legend and the disappearance of the student film-makers), so that some audience members actually mistook fiction for fact and thought that the film was real found footage left after the students had disappeared. So as opposed to ZNH’s research (fact) being seen as ‘inauthentic’ (fiction), here we have fiction mistaken for fact, and I am saying this is in large part down to the form in which a text is presented, rather than its content.
in her earlier folklore career, ZNH interviewed Cudjo Lewis, one of the last surviving black men brought over to US as a slave on the ship ‘Clotilde’ in 1859, for an article ‘Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver’ (Hurston 1927). Yet later it was suggested that ZNH plagiarised Emma Langdon Roche’s ‘Historic Sketches of the Old South (1914), so ZNH’s work is seen as a ‘lie’ - it is possible that she did plagiarize, but there is another point here: the idea of ‘authentic data’ and ‘owning the story as a truth’ (either the teller owns it or the researcher owns it) doesn’t fit with black story-telling forms of that time - Cudjo Lewis’ story was probably retold many many times by him in a fairly similar narrative form (Lewis had been interviewed by many folklorists and historians); the idea of ownership doesn’t hold - who ‘owns’ Cudjo? do Roche or Hurston ‘own’ his account? I do not think that ZNH would have seen it in this way - she came herself from a community in which stories were everyone’s property to tell, embellish and re-tell (the ‘big old lies’ became ‘lying contests’) and I think she saw herself as recording, but not ‘owning’, them - certainly she challenged the racism in Roche’s account. This is one of the reasons that her work is so ‘problematic’ - she ended up in anthropology yet, I think, never accepted anthropological form for what she wanted to do - hence her other work - novels, plays, theatre pieces, essays, articles - all uses folklore, and the stuff she wrote that gets called ‘anthropology’ actually greatly problematizes anthropological form.
this brings me to the last point under the topic of representational crisis, that of the ‘voice’ in research - again, researchers attempt authenticity by claiming to ‘allow the voices of their research subjects to be heard...’ (more significant if this is an ‘oppressed group’). Lugones & Spelman’s 1983 piece is a critique of this...
In my PhD, however, I used the concept of the ‘shape-shifter’ (a being that can take on the form of another being or object), to argue that, although I presented other characters/voices in my text, and although I attempted to use the words that they used, the research voice was still mine, and I must take responsibility for doing this - I interpret the data, I make sense of it, I choose what to focus on etc. (see also Stanley & Wise 1983 here). Thus although I wrote a case study, it was ‘fictional’ in the sense that it read better the more I worked on it! Although I attempted as far as I could to include the voices of my subjects, Nita & Clare, through in-depth interviews, using their words, seeking feedback and allowing them to dispute my points in detailed footnotes, none of these is an ‘easy solution’ to the question of voice - the research text is not them speaking, it is my version even though it can always be contested.
another way in which authenticity is sometimes claimed is via notions of ‘epistemic privilege’, the idea that researchers who come from the same ‘oppressed group’ as their research subjects will have an automatic, privileged and truthful access to understanding the lives of their subjects - in many ways, this is very problematic, tending to reduce groups like ‘gay’ to an homogenous mass, something which has clearly been objected to by black gay writers, for example. So I cannot and do not claim to have a privileged understanding of other gay men, though I will have a different understanding from someone who is not gay, I’m sure. Similarly in ZNH’s work, she writes of an intial distrust of her by the people she was researching, even when she returned to research amongst what she called her ‘home folks’. Later she ‘lied’ to gain access, and this has to be because the category ‘black’ is fractured by gender, class, wealth. Her anthropology ‘mentor’, Franz Boas, was excited by the idea that a black woman would have better access to black folklore ("she entered into the homely life of the southern Negro as one of them and was fully accepted as such..." Boas 1935:xiii). But -

Very little was said directly to me and when I tried to be friendly there was a noticeable disposition to fend me off...The men would crowd in and buy soft drinks and woof at me, the stranger, but I knew I wasn’t getting on...Then one day after Cliffert Ulmer, Babe’s son, and I had driven down to Lakeland together he felt close enough to tell me what was the trouble. They all thought I must be a revenue officer or a detective of some kind. They were accustomed to strange women dropping into the quarters, but not in shiny gray Chevrolets...The car made me look too prosperous. So they set me aside as different...I took occasion that night to impress the job with the fact that I was also a fugitive from justice, ‘bootlegging.’ They were hot behind me in Jacksonville and they wanted me in Miami. So I was hiding out. That sounded reasonable. Bootleggers always have cars. I was taken in. (Hurston 1935:60-61).

so here I am saying that reseachers who claim ‘truth’ on the basis of epistemic privilege alone ought not to be trusted! That does not mean that questions of sexuality, race, gender etc do not matter - of course they do, but a text is not more ‘truthful’ on that basis.
so what is ‘authentic representation’ - is this possible? why should we accept it when presented in traditional forms (eg how articles are edited for journals - must have a ‘methodology’ section which usually means ‘method’; must not use ‘I think...’ etc.). I’m not suggesting that we abandon all ethical commitment to recording what research subjects think, feel or say, but claims that this is ‘how the world is’ rely upon the idea that there is only one ‘truth’, and I believe that fictional forms can help to highlight how research texts are researchers’ truths. ZNH revolutionised the form of folklore research, I think, because she did things which - in more recent years - feminist and latterly postmodern ethnographer-researchers have been advocating: locating a self in the text, not claiming overarching knowledge, fracturing the narrative so that competing versions of a story are apparent, announcing a sense of politics, highlighting the power relations between researcher/ed.
what is a ‘lie’ then? is claiming objectivity and non-bias ‘lying’? As I have noted, it’s often the form of a research text that persuades, and that is why ZNH’s work was seen as problematic, because she did not stick to accepted ‘form’. However, "truth" is not straightforward but is always claimed and politically situated: thus someone like ZNH, as a black woman, had less access to the discourses of research ‘truth’ contemporarily defined by those around her - white men, black men, white people. That is, women, black people, lesbians and gay men are frequently tainted with the idea of partiality.
This point is echoed in Donna Haraway’s work on ‘science’ - that it is frequently the work of black, lesbian, gay or female researchers that is seen to be ‘tainted’ with ‘falsehood’. But actually all science is situated knowledge:

"The point is to make a difference in the world, to cast our lot for some ways of life and not others. To do that, one must be in the action, be finite and dirty, not transcendent and clean. Knowledge-making technologies, including crafting subject positions and ways of inhabiting such positions, must be made relentlessly visible and open to critical intervention." (Haraway 1997:36).

As I’ve said, all researchers are implicated in this ‘dirty business’ of ‘lies’ - small truths, un-truths, not-quite-truths are the everyday studd of speech acts, and this deserves greater attention in research texts. ZNH got her hands ‘dirty’ - she told tales, participated in rituals, narrowly escaped death (twice), was intitiated into hoodoo/voodoo, included her own thoughts, opinions and political views in her work - and this did not accord with what many of the boys - both white and black - felt she ‘ought’ to be doing as a researcher, anthropologist, recorder of black folklore and so on...but then ZNH rarely did what she was told, and she always had a good ‘tale’ to get her out of sticky situations:

SHOW ‘TRAFFIC LIGHT’ PICTURE

"She once claimed she was arrested for crossing against a red light, but escaped punishment by exclaiming that ‘I had seen white folks pass on green and therefore assumed the red light was for me.’ In this way she personalized traditional stories."

References

Abercrombie, Nicholas, Hill, Stephen & Turner, Bryan S. (1994) Dictionary of Sociology (London: Penguin; third edition).

Banks, Anna & Banks, Stephen P. (eds.) (1998a) Fiction and Social Research: By Ice or Fire (Walnut Creek,CA: AltaMira Press).

Banks, Anna & Banks, Stephen P. (1998b) ‘The Struggle Over Facts and Fictions’ in Banks & Banks (eds.), 11-29.

Bordelon, Pamela (1999) ‘Zora Neale Hurston: A Biographical Essay’ in Bordelon (ed.) Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston

from the Federal Writers’ Project (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.), 1-49.

Clifford, James & Marcus, George E. (eds.) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Denzin, Norman K. (1997) Interpretive Ethnography:Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century (Thousand Oaks: Sage).

Haraway, Donna J. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge).

Harding, Sandra (1998) Is Science Multicultural? Post-colonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

Hemenway, Robert E. (1977) Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).

Hurston, Zora Neale (1927) ‘Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver’, Journal of Negro History, 12, 648-663.

Hurston, Zora Neale (1935) Mules & Men (Philadelphia:J.B. Lippincott).

Hurston, Zora Neale (1938) Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott).

Kiesinger, Christine Elizabeth (1998a) ‘From Interview toStory: Writing Abbie’s Life’, Qualitative Inquiry, 4:1,71-95.

Kiesinger, Christine Elizabeth (1998b) ‘Portrait of anAnorexic Life’ in Banks & Banks (eds.), 115-136.

Krieger, Susan (1983) The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women’s Community (Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press).

Locke, Alain (1925) ‘The New Negro’ in Locke (ed.) The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert & Charles Boni), 3-16.

Lugones, Maria C. & Spelman, Elizabeth V. (1983) ‘Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for "the Woman's Voice"’, Women's Studies International Forum, 6:6, 573-581.

Moreno, Ricardo R., Eduardo Sanchez, Daniel Myrick &Neal Fredericks (dirs.) (1999) The Blair Witch Project.

Rinehart, Robert (1998) ‘Fictional Methods in Ethnography: Believability, Specks of Glass, and Chekhov’, Qualitative Inquiry, 4:2, 200-224.

Smith, Dorothy E. (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Milton Keynes:Open University Press).

Stanley, Liz & Wise, Sue (1983) Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

Walker, Alice (1983) ‘Looking for Zora’ in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 93-116.

Wolf, Margery (1992) A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

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