"What is the What" (2006)

What is the What represents, on its face, an opportunity for a remarkable number of potential literary pitfalls. Here we have the use of not just a Sudanese refugee's story by a popular white American writer, but the use of his voice as well.  The syntax and cadence of the story, as you'll hear in the above and below video, is modeled on Deng's. As early as You Shall Know Our Velocity!, Eggers was experimenting with this -- through Hand's humorously exasperating tic, once in Africa, of dropping all contractions -- but here it is rendered in absolute earnest.

And that -- its earnest intent -- is perhaps is what has kept the reception of WITW, even ten years later,  remarkably free of the angst that often surrounds the such use of stories and voice by writers: what, in the pejorative, would be termed appropriation.  The challenge in such conversations is that writers use materials -- appropriate them -- all the time. Such usage becomes more problematic when the intent is towards self-aggrandizement and self-actualization cliches -- How has this story made me, the newly enlightened writer, a better person? -- and, just as uncomfortably, when the question of financial motive is raised. WITW sidesteps both by removing Eggers's voice and presence from the narrative, and by directing the book's earnings to the VAD Foundation.

To the extent that Eggers has subsequently noted his learning process through Foundation work, it has been -- as he drolly puts it in this 2011 video -- "a journey to humility":



Amidst all this it's perhaps easy to forget that What is the What is itself a highly crafted work of art by Eggers.  The framing device of the Atlanta robbery -- the home invasion was indeed an actual event for Deng -- serves to shuttle back and forth between multiple timelines, which are themselves significantly filled out in a scene-by-scene, moment-by-moment fashion that the strict nonfiction of "It Was Just Boys Walking" was constrained from using. All of these are, ultimately, likely to be far afield in structure (though not voice or content) from the source material of his interviews and travels with Deng.

And while What is the What itself is at first glance is a formally unusual work -- a novel that began as nonfiction, with a prefatory statement by Valentino Deng that the major events of the book did indeed happen -- it is not an unusual work for Eggers, in retrospect.  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was nonfiction rounded out as fiction, but still retaining enough fact that (in the first printing, anyway) it included the actual home numbers of some of the characters, and a prefatory comment on its factuality.  The subject matter of What is the What and the use of eyewitness testimony are also logical extensions of the work in "It Was Just Boys Walking" and the Voice of Witness volumes.

It is also, in both its subject and in its execution, part of his ongoing meditation on what one does after surviving to find a palpable sort of success (literary or otherwise).  What is one's moral and artistic obligation to do with that? What is the What, I think to Eggers's great credit, is indeed what he did.