Tompkins Essay

2 Pages 391 Words

In “The Tradition: Fact and Fiction,” Robert Coles says that “in shaping an article

or book, the writer can add factors and variables in two directions: social and cultural and

historical on one hand, individual, individual or idiosyncratic on the other” ( Coles 177 ).

In other words, historians, filmmakers, or documentarians are endowed to blend this so-

called tradition of “fact and fiction” to create something real in “an attempt to engage,

represent, and understand the lives of others.

In his essay, Coles provides examples of work that is social, cultural, and

historical. After all, his goal as a documentarian was to grasp an understanding of white

culture facing adversity at its highest. The photographs of the “migrant mother” is a

perfect example of ways in which artists can manipulate reality by adding special factors

and variables. The contrast in backdrop moves the viewer from a narrow and broad scope

of grief to a solid sense of sadness of an individual faces. Let alone, her eyes and

expression speak for themselves in a state of deprivation. The children hide in a shy

manner, as if they don’t exist, in order to emphasize the migrant mother’s puzzled and

miserable outlook.

An example Coles uses of a work that is individual or idiosyncratic is the

novelist’s approach of writing. “A novelist uses his or her lived experience and the

observations he or she has made and is making in the course of living a life as elements

of a writing life. Fictional devices, that is, inform the construction of nonfiction, and of

course, fiction, conversely, draws upon the actual, the “real-life.” With his idea of

“human actuality”, Coles suggests that fiction is a blend of facts.

Through documentaries, the public is guided see things in a certain way. Coles

considers this as something positive because it enhances an au...