For much of my time in universities, I taught standard literary-history courses—mostly American literature from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. But a funny thing happened when I started teaching narrative journalism: I learned that students in my classes would often investigate, online, what had eventually happened to the people who had appeared in the works we had finished reading. For example, if I was teaching a journalistic narrative about children caught up in poverty and street crime, a student wanted to know what happened to them after the book’s timeframe ended—for instance, whether they finished school, survived into adulthood, and so on. I was completely blindsided: after all, none of my students in American literature classes had ever asked, much less looked up, what happened to Mark Twain’s characters after Huckleberry Finn. (BTW, Twain published 2 sequels and planned a third.) But now, my students were researching facts that were, in effect, “after-facts”—beyond the time frame of the text–and in some cases, seeming “outcomes” from a much later point in time.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised: after all, part of the power of narrative journalism is that it deals with actual people, and usually those who don’t disappear when a reporter stops writing about them. Still, it’s sometimes the case that someone who discovers an “after-fact” starts to wonder if (a) the writer had overlooked it or intentionally left it out, (b) whether it was “predictable” or not, and/or (c) whether the after-fact should change how they feel about the text as a whole. Some, in fact, will use an after-fact to discount a reporter’s work altogether. (The aftermath of the marriage presented in Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun [2009] is (in)famous in this regard.)
I’d love to hear from other teachers and/or readers whether they’ve encountered this issue, and what they’ve done about it. Of course, when I was teaching, I tried try to point out that reporters can’t be responsible for predicting the future. But along with doing that, I also tried to steer the discovery of these “after-facts” to other discussion topics. For example:
- Sourcing. Does the after-fact suggest something about which sources a reporter relied upon, at the expense of others?
- Privacy and Anonymization. Did the reporter try to disguise certain characters’ identities? How did they, and why might they have done that? And is it a good thing that the “disguise” has stopped working? (Consider, again, my example of reporting about children or other vulnerable populations.)
- Our own hindsight as readers. Did we know something about the topic before we started reading, and if so, how did it affect how we read the book? (We usually can’t read a book about an election, for instance, without knowing who won or lost. In fact, we know things like that from the very moment we start reading.)
And finally, “after-facts” can be used to generate discussion about the shaping of narrative in the first place. Sometimes, for instance, I tried to ask my classes if they had any intuitions about where the narrator of a given work was “standing” in time—yes, always after the story has ended, but how long after? With that in mind, did it ever seem that the journalist was using hindsight as well?—that is, making an outcome seem “inevitable” when it couldn’t have been known or predicted, in real time? (I discuss these topics a bit in the “Reality Effect: Point of view” section of Chapter Three.) Were there occasions when a writer seemed not to be disclosing information, holding things back? Was the after-fact one of those undisclosed items, or not? Any good reason why it might have been withheld?
Imperfect strategies, admittedly. But I’d love to hear if you ever came across an “after-fact,” and what you did about it—Thanks.
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