Ryszard Kapuściński: Defending his literary license

Author: Meghan O’Rourke
Source: Slate Magazine, January 30, 2007
Link: https://slate.com/culture/2007/01/ryszard-kapuscinski-defending-his-literary-license.html

Editorial summary by kapuscinski.info. The text below is a summary based on the original article. The full article is available free of charge at Slate.

A reply to Jack Shafer’s The Lies of Ryszard Kapuscinski, published five days later by the same magazine. O’Rourke — a literary critic and poet — does not defend Kapuscinski at any cost, but she questions whether the standards of hard news reportage are the right ones to apply to his work.

Her central argument: Kapuscinski always wrote in a genre with its own tradition and its own rules — literary journalism, narrative non-fiction. The conventions of that genre permit compression, composite characters and reconstructed dialogue, provided the intention is signalled or plainly understood. She sets Kapuscinski beside George Orwell (The Road to Wigan Pier) and John Hersey (Hiroshima) — writers nobody calls liars for doing much the same thing.

O’Rourke observes that the problem lies less with Kapuscinski himself than with the way his publishers and the press promoted him: as a witness to history rather than as a writer. That marketing opened a gap between what readers expected and what the texts actually were.

The piece closes on a judgement: the death of a writer is not the moment to reduce his work to a question of factual reliability — too narrow a measure for literature of this order.