Sic of Fiction

Sic of Fiction

Recently I met a sic in a book of fiction. In Donan Tartt's The Goldfinch. That has set me thinking. What is a sic doing in a text of fiction? Especially the said fiction which doesn't open with the jaded apology that this is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person dead or alive is only incidental.

A sic is a certifier of an error. It is an apology for committing an error. One makes oneself clear that the person who is committing the error is aware of the fact that it is thus but is committing the same as it was already committed by another. Hence a sic is not an acknowledgement of ones error but an acknowledgement of re-presenting an error made by another person or even a source.

"Sic is short for Sicut, a Latin word which, for those familiar with Latin choral works, crops up in Sicut erat in principio... or 'As it was in the beginning'. So it basically means Like that. It's used when quoting something with a spelling mistake or other glaring error, to mean Don't blame me, I'm only quoting", states one David Kimmins on The Guardian discussion forum. Thus be it!

A sic says that this is how it was. This acknowledgement cum apology is made by a person when it is essential to illustrate the same, to indicate that the one who is sicing is aware of what is being done. In the state of things, it becomes mandatory that the said sic is displayed so that it can either be pointed out or be set straight. It points bad to the one who originally used it. The Latin term from which it came means 'thus'. Thus was it when it was found, or read.

On page 668 of the paper back edition, Donna Tartt was speaking of a particular Indian Restaurant,  a place where Indian delicacies could be had. A Mahal or something. This perked my mind's ear. For one who has been fictioning free, with hardly any thoughts whatsoever to the hard facts of the terra firma, I was sic of this distasteful push of the door. Why should fact put its foot in the door when fiction was sailing smooth. Suddenly didn't the whole tome of text I have put behind me begin to raise its tail in suspicion?

The sic in question speaks of an Indian Restaurant Jal Mahal Restaruant (sic). This could not be a sic-ness we can attribute to the writer. How can it be that the novelist put a typos in the manuscript and the proof readers forgot to take care of it? No way. It has to be part of the Restaurant where nothing has changed for a long time. The seediness the writer seems to speak of in detail, through Theo, the speaker, is reflected in the misspelt signboard. As everything else has remained the same, the misspelt name of the form too. In the writer's need to be honest in the fiction, she has retained the fictionally correct ( really incorrect) spelling of Jal Mahal.

This is a case of the publisher retaining the sic of the writer who was retaining the sic of the actual board she has imagined. In the long novel this is the only sic we encounter but since it happens to be part of the author's need to be honest, we should, pass it over. But in the same novel, if we can forget the Sikh man's taxi which Theo and his mom drives on the day he loses his mother, this is fine. That is a stinking rickety vehicle which reeked of shit, as per the novelist. They had to kind of jump out of the car as Theo's mom feels weird and nauseated in side. Another seedy Indian story.



The typos could be very true. As the are a number of hoardings and signboards which shamelessly flaunt its shaky grammar and silly spellings. That the said novel, The Goldfinch, carries only one is because that is the only one the writer felt like putting into her text, as that justifies her fictional scheme of things. fiction could have its roots drawing sustenance from some kind of deeply buried reality. The serpentine route which the fact has taken, traveling through caverns measureless to man, before taking its birth as a fiction need not be retraced as it will amount to attributing motives to the random encountered sics in a text. Neither is it possible to do thus. As the trace of the act will often be camouflaged to lean on the accidental and the serendipitous.

Is not a fiction a sic? A thus? A sic which doesn't have to state itself that it is thus? Every turn and twist that a writer brings to bear on a thought, image, idea, isn't it damaging things as they are supposed to be? When a writer does that, do we usually place a sic there, to point out that this fracturing of the supposedly real was performed by this writer? We don't. But an error which is factual, a broken sentence, a misplaced preposition or a misspelt word, is a different entity and its presence has to be reported and marked clearly.

When the sic of that shabby Indian Restaruant, though having beatific faced bearers appear in the text, is presented, reality is reflected through fiction. Without that misplaced 'r', the shabbiness perhaps would have been out of place. Like the empty frame from which the painting Bullfinch is gone, the text called Indian Restaurant, the work called Jal Mahal would be empty without an 'r' misplaced and the word misspelt.