Department of Clarification

For about the millionth time…

Last night we chezzed it up in Sailorville, and the subject of Nostrum arose. The usual belief that Jules and the Nostrumite are not the authors of this series was yet again refuted by yours truly. I mean, Jules has a blog, and a life, and whatever, that has nothing to do with me. I am the speaker of the words; that does not automatically make me their creator. Think about it. Let’s say that last night you watched “24” on TV. Do you really think that Kiefer Sutherland made up all his own lines? Jeesh.

By the same token, do you really believe that there’s a Jack Bauer? For some reason, people believe that in Nostrum there’s some sort of one-to-one ratio of fictional people to real people, as in, Seth B. Obomash is really [fill in the blank] or Amnea Nutmilk is really [fitb] or Hamlet P. Buglaroni or whoever is [ditto]. It’s not so much that people believe everything they read, but that they read everything so literally. What are we teaching our children in the schools these days? What part of “It’s fiction” don’t people understand? If it were just a chronicling of real life, Jules and the Mite would have labeled it nonfiction and, although maybe they would have changed the names to protect the innocent (i.e, themselves, from libel suits), they would have indicated that what was at hand was unabashed truth. Nostrum, on the other hand, like all fiction, is abashed truth. Its roman a clef leanings are minimal. In other words, there is really no mafia don nicknamed “The Whale,” and the character of Hans Castorp is a direct name steal from The Magic Mountain (by Thomas Mann, not by Six Flags) and is not directing a movie starring young Buglaroni. My favorite leap is when people claim that categorically such-and-such was based on so-and-so doing you-know-what, when in fact the Nostrum story was written five years before the real life event. Not only do people not understand the concept of fiction, they’re also a little fuzzy on the concept of timelines. Mes etoiles! at Hautboy LeMonde (who does not exist and is not based on something that hasn’t happened yet) might say.

In other words, Nostrum, while “based on a true story,” as it is sometimes noted, is a work of fiction. And it is written by Jules O’Shaughnessy (a bookstore clerk and pretender to the throne of Moravia) and the Nostrumite (a teacher and debate coach at Tennessee Williams HS).

(By the way, please do not infer from this that The View from Tab is also fiction, written by Jules and the Mite, and that O’C, Bietz and I are just reading our parts. There are no such people as O’C and Bietz, and even if there were, Jules and the Mite wouldn’t have bothered to invent them.)