Truth in Fiction
Truth in Fiction
There is an Anglo-Saxon economics and a Mediterranean economics. Here in Salt Lake City I go into a drugstore to buy a tube of toothpaste. The price is set. I buy or I don’t buy, but I don’t argue. The toothpaste has a certain value, and the drugstore may or may not set it correctly, but we both believe in its independent existence, even if only as an ideal we can never precisely pin down. It’s just a matter of coming as close as we can, marking down our best guess on our little tube, and we can sell toothpaste from now until Judgement Day with a clear conscience.
In Juarez, which is culturally a Mediterranean city, I go into a drugstore and ask the price of the toothpaste. I’m told. I propose a lower price. We bargain until we reach a value that suits us both, at this moment, in this place. Both of us know that there is no absolute, predetermined, cosmically set value--there is only, within this system of bargaining, a temporary agreement, good for this one transaction.
And so with language. The Anglo-Saxon has a feeling. He mulls it over for a couple of weeks, or a couple of years, decides it’s correct, and puts it, more or less well, into words. His Mediterranean counterpart says something first, listens to what he’s just said, decides he meant it, more or less, but it needs a little adjustment. He works on it for a while until he arrives at a sentence that sounds OK. For now. For this paragraph.
For the Anglo-Saxon the truth of a thing exists prior to, and outside of, language. For the Mediterranean the truth is always subsequent to language.
It goes back a long way, this notion of truth we cling to so ferociously. Socrates and the sophists apparently spent a lot of time arguing about the nature of truth. For the sophists it was rhetorical in nature--a set of writing or speaking strategies that convinced the audience. For Socrates it was fixed, eternal, always outside of language, and speech, or worse yet, writing, was at best a muddy representation, a diminution, an always inadequate attempt to point to those unchanging verities. Unfortunately we know the debates between Socrates and the sophists mainly through the dialogues of Plato, who was firmly on the side of his teacher. Socrates had the better press agent. Consequently the Socratic notion of the relationship between truth and language seems self-evidently correct to us. What I want to briefly argue here, is that perhaps, just perhaps, the sophists had something of value to say, which for the most part got left out of history.
Fiction, despite its name, sets out to tell the truth. Hemingway said he was happy if he could write one true thing each day. Realism, which dominates our vision of the novel, and of the short story, claims that there is a world out there, and that the writer’s job is to depict at least a part of it clearly and faithfully. Everything else is style, which is an adornment, charming, but not essential. So in a panel like this one, our job is to talk about how writers can find, recognize, and tell the truth.
But what if Plato was, I won’t say wrong, because that would be to fall into his system of thought, but inadequate? Incomplete? What if there were other ways, not necessarily more valid, but more interesting, to talk about truth? What if, instead of asking ourselves how to best find, recognize, etc..., the truth, we asked ourselves if in fact there was any truth out there to be found before we began to talk or write about it? It seems a frivolous notion, this non-Platonic universe, this universe in which language exists prior to what we think it only describes. I wouldn’t even care to sit up here and defend it, except that it seems, somehow, interesting.
What the title of this panel implies is that we exist inside a system which opposes truth and non-truth. And we know, of course, which one we prefer. But what if it weren’t so? “What is truth?” said Pontius Pilate. And we have made of him a villain among villains. Not because he was responsible for the crucifixion, which clearly he wasn’t, but because he questioned that fundamental Platonic notion we live by. If we really hear his question, it throws everything into turmoil. Still, it’s a question worth asking.
What is truth, in fiction, which is after all what we’re talking about here? Not “What is the truth?” because that’s falling into Plato’s system. But “What is truth?” Truth is the moment when language seems to disappear. When description is uncorrupted by style. When each word seems to point directly to the thing it names. When pragmatic logic, the logic of life, and narrative logic, seem to be one and the same. When Odysseus, back from his twenty-year absence, disguises himself as a beggar not because he has to suffer ritual humiliation at the hands of the suitors before he can be allowed to re-enter the blessed condition of marriage, but because he must be devious or he won’t regain his lost kingdom. Truth in fiction is marked by the absence of the author, whose judgments after all can be questioned, or (and in the long run it’s the same thing) by the elevation of the author to a condition of preternatural wisdom when his pronouncements, like those of the Pope or the prophet, are not subject to error. Truth in fiction is the absence of metaphor and simile; the suppression of subordination; the disappearance of style. The disappearance, in fact, of writing. It’s that moment when we seem to hear ourselves speak, when all distance between signifier and signified is erased as if it had never existed. When the flesh is made word, so to speak, which is perhaps a lesser miracle than the one Saint John told us about, but is nevertheless a miracle after all.
Or so the sophists would tell us, I suspect, if they’d had a better chronicler of their arguments. I’m not arguing that Plato was wrong. In fact I have a sneaking admiration for him; he made up a system and he made it pay off, he imposed it on us for better than two thousand years--you have to respect that. But perhaps this other system we don’t hear much about so much is, I don’t know. . . more interesting. At least it’s more interesting to me as a fiction writer--at three in the morning when I wake up convinced I’ve got cancer or the sun is going to blow up, Plato looks pretty good. But it’s possible I’m not at my best at those moments.
Platonic truth means, it seems to me, that every act of writing is an attempt to put an end to any further writing. That if we once found the perfect way to say something, nothing more need be said. We could have a small perfect library--one poem, one short story, one novel, one essay on each subject. It’s rather tyrannical, this notion of absolute truth now and forever. It reminds me of the man I met on the Greyhound bus once, who when I told him I was a writer, said he didn’t see any point in reading anything but the Bible, which was after all God’s true word. Once you’ve got that on your bookshelf, what’s the use of other stories? We also ought to remember that Plato, the ideological father of this panel, would allow no poets or playwrights in his perfect state. Truth, in other words, is a dangerous concept for writers to embrace, and maybe instead of seeking it we ought to do the opposite, and run in another direction as fast as we can. Our world is that of language, and if we think of language as an always already inadequate representation of a perfect truth, what business have we got doing what we do? Better to meditate in the desert, to pray, to sing hymns, to read the Bible over and over. Better, like Socrates, to refuse to write lest we tell lies. And then of course we can hope for a Plato of our own to come along after us and immortalize our refusal in prose.
