The Dorris Fiasco

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, October 22, 1997

The news of Michael Dorris' death and the attendant allegations of sexual abuse and alcoholism seemed to provoke two primary emotions. The first was pity. Here was a man whose life and work would come to be overshadowed by the circumstances of his demise, which make for far juicier a story. The second was a sort of shocked, snickering condescension towards his intellectual achievements. Only in as false an academic field as Native American Studies could a man whose personal life betrayed such fundamental confusion and naiveté (the man seems to have spent much of the past two decades choosing a sexual orientation; he also believed that his powers of influence were so great that he could single-handedly defeat the effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in his children) achieve such distinction. I must admit that when I first read of Dorris' death, a combination of those two emotions, pity and condescension, dominated my reaction to the story. To some extent they still do.

Reading John McWilliams thoughtful and provocative essay on Dorris' death, however, forced me to reconsider my shallow analysis of the event. The real story lies not in the debate over the legitimacy of the allegations that hounded Michael Dorris. Nor does it lie in an abstract assessment of the worth of Dorris' work.

All questions of intellectual legitimacy and sexual abuse become secondary with David Steinhart's introduction of the argument that the zeal of Eric Konigsberg's New York magazine article attacking Dorris may have forced the suicide. The central question becomes Konigsberg's zeal.

David Streinhart's thesis is not terribly believable. If we accept that Dorris would kill himself in a fit of despairing innocence, then we are already inherently accepting that Dorris was less than fully rational; that he was, in short, the sort of person who would commit those crimes he was accused of. Any suggestion of Dorris' innocence, therefore, in part implies his guilt. It is even more implausible to suggest that a figure of Dorris' nearly mental acuity would fail to realize that the circumstances surrounding his death would come to overshadow his life, or to think that a man who aspired to proud intellectual credentials would not care about the submersion of his life to his death. Dorris' life was his work. If he was innocent, he would not have killed himself. The risk involved was too much.

Even if he was guilty, however, the questions of the moral worth of Konigsberg's piece do not go away. Konigsberg certainly overstepped his bounds as a journalist. He mentioned only in passing that the allegations against Dorris were of an extremely dubious nature, and he used challenges to Dorris' intellectual purity (mainly from Indian intellectuals) to reinforce arguments about Dorris' moral transgressions, an approach which is clearly and confusingly disjunctive. Rather than present a convincingly coherent thesis, he decided to bash Dorris from every angle possible.

The argument that the press has a moral obligation to reveal the private transgressions of public figures has some merit when it concerns politicians. Bill Clinton, Dan Rostenkowski, Gary Hart — we select these men as representatives of ourselves, and the media therefore has a duty to question their character to the fullest, most zealous extent of its abilities. Dorris, however, dealt in ideas. His personal life has no reflection on the validity of his work. Even if we challenge the merit of his work's subject (I certainly do), Konigsberg's piece and others like it only subtract from such an analysis by forcing us into pitying condescension. This is not a valid man, we sneer, his ideas are those of a twisted crackpot. And we dismiss without questioning.

My argument is not that we need automatically consider Dorris' life's work right, or his topic legitimate. That would be silly. My argument, is, instead, that any focus on his personal life prohibits a worthwhile critique of his ideas.

America may, in many respects, be a moral nation, and its people may have a right to question the moral character of her leaders. It is much more, however, a nation of ideas, and if we start to judge thoughts singularly by the actions of the thinkers, as does Konigsberg, then we are indeed in serious trouble.

The Dorris Fiasco

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