An intriguingly grumpy piece appeared in the Independent a few days ago by Hanif Kureishi's sister, Yasmin Kureishi, to coincide with the publication of his new book, Something to Tell You. It ranges widely across Kureishi's career to date, and is in essence a litany of the plagiarisms from life Hanif's works have committed—from putting his parents into The Buddha of Suburbia to "a particularly spiteful portrait" of Yasmin herself in the 2003 film The Mother. She concludes:
I would have liked not to have written this [article], to be able to get on in my own way with my own life, but I know the insults, the remarks, will keep coming. I don't want to be seen as "good" in the preachy sense. I do believe that writers should be able to take from their experiences. But I don't think they should use their "art" to be malicious, or to settle scores, or to rewrite history without any regard for others. That is simply an abuse of privilege.How fair is this? A writer being unpleasant towards another, real person—in print or in person—is just as objectionable as anyone else being similarly unpleasant (and from what Yasmin writes there have been some frankly expressed sibling tensions in her family). But a writer being unpleasant towards someone through fiction, and through characters not explicitly identified with anyone real, is a rather more slippery matter.
All writing is based upon experience. Good writing may be experience transformed and reconfigured, but it is ultimately more a matter of selection than fabrication. As Thomas Mann argued, a writer never actually makes anything up—they simply choose from the store of their glimpses of the world, and arrange these into an object which succeeds or fails as art on its structural, intellectual and aesthetic merits. All of which offers rather cold comfort to those who feel offended by works that have strayed rather close to the facts of their own lives.
One cautionary tale is the case of Pierre Jourde, a French novelist whose critically acclaimed Pays Perdu (Lost Land) consisted of a deeply unflattering account of his home town in rural France within which, apart from their names being changed, family and friends were recognisably rendered. The Independent's coverage of the upset came under the headline "Novelist beaten up by the neighbours he wrote about," which tells you about all you need to know of the results of its publication.
In Jourde's case, the law was on his side, and a court subsequently ruled against his attackers. "I regret some people might be hurt. But it's a novelist's work to write about the complexities of human nature," was his final word on the matter. But a serious point remains at stake. Anything, when labelled by its maker as "art," claims the right to be considered outside of the personal context—to be weighed against a canon, individual taste, the work of peers, and that mysterious totality, "human nature." Yet such claims remain open to dispute, along with a creator's "right" to have their work considered in purely artistic terms. Is anti-Semitic propaganda rendered inoffensive (or legal) if I post it in a gallery? Is libellous prose still libellous if I'm allowed to frame it inside White Cube?
While everything can be considered art in some context, all art is also a form of moral, political and personal action. When do frankness and verisimilitude become insult, injury or even illegality? As ever, artists themselves are out of the frame. It is we, the audience, who must decide.
