All Memory is Fiction, Again

Don’t worry about the facts, the truth is what is important.
Writers are told this all the time. There is this idea that there is a truth that transcends the facts and that we may find in what is not factual some profound truth. This is most obviously the justification for great fiction. The very name makes the point. Fiction is a cluster of lies, fabrications, inventions, that somehow have the capacity to communicate some of the most profound truths about human beings and about human experience. The characters are invented, the things that happened to them did not happen, but what they learn, why we discover about ourselves and about the world from what they do represent a clear example of truth despite fiction or because of fiction. And this feels quite comfortable. But not entirely. Even as we allow for the rich possibilities of fiction to go outside of “fact”, we seem to always demand, at the same time, a few things that are dangerously close to being substitutes for fact. We ask for probability. We also ask for plausibility. We imply that while we accept that it did not happen, we want to be able to think it did happen. In other words, while we are not sticklers for fact, we are for almost facts, that which might have seemed like fact if we were not told that it was not, in fact, fact. And if the near facts are presented, and once we have accepted the contract that these are not quite facts but near facts, then we can find truth comfortably. Truth, though is somewhat hard to pin down.

I have heard a few interesting phrases that have become quite vogue and have proven to be remarkable devices used by some to simply end a discussion. But this is not simply to end the discussion as a stalemate, but to, in fact, win the discussion through a trump card. When someone you are arguing with says, “I know how you feel, but this is my truth,” you are left with no other recourse but to shut up and stop arguing. The point is that even if you are “right’ and even if you have all the facts, the basic fact of the matter is that if I don’t see it or agree with it, then I am engaged in my truth and that is unassailably valid. To deny me my truth would be to deny me my humanity and to call question my capacity to hold to an opinion, right or wrong. In fact, the right or wrong bits don’t come into this. There is no right or wrong. It is my truth and that is enough. Here truth is sometimes an invention, something we create and own and embrace for ourselves. You see, my truth is not your truth. The facts we can argue about, but not the truth. And to deny me of my truth would be to deny me of my basic humanity and this would actually make you a bigoted, oppressive chauvinist.
The culture of “my” truth is one I encounter all the time when I am teaching. Over the years, many teachers, having survived the dogmatic era of “teacher knows best” on literary criticism, during which the teacher gave the proper interpretation and you repeated it whether you agreed with it or not, have started to embrace a new idea that any interpretation of a text is correct. In other words, there is no wrong reading of a text. All readings are valid in themselves because they are readings within their own right. Of course, these teachers will go only so far with this idea, because there is usually a standardized test somewhere that will fail a student who insists, brilliantly, that Hamlet was a woman. His truth.
But the effect has been that in class students will begin a clearly uninformed statement (you can tell my bias) with the statement, “This is my opinion”. They will then follow any question of their opinion with the defense, “I said this was my opinion.” In other words, you should not be arguing with my opinion. It is my truth.
The problem with these ultra subjective truths is that no-one really buys them. People will stop arguing, but will say in their hearts, “this person is a fool,” and leave it at that. Thus what we have these days is a bunch of people holding doggedly to their own truths but not accommodating the truths of others. I have heard George Bush use the phrase, “many people will have their own interpretations…” when speaking about the war. It is a clumsy trope that seems to satisfy him, one that he allows to go on while people are saying things like, “Does he really know what is going on over there?” Perhaps he does. But he is smart enough to offer much of this as his as against the truth of anyone else.
I keep thinking of this when I read Poetry. In the last issue, I was struck by the number of people who came rejoicing and praising a rather impassioned and quite negative review of a translation of the Polish poet Herbert. He was praised for his candor, his forceful opinion and of course, his beautiful prose. It occurred to me when I read the piece a few months ago, that he was embarked on a review that was heavily in “his” truth, but he had somehow avoided being dismissed by being assertive and forceful and opinionated. This was authority. It seemed refreshing to many. To others it seemed puzzling. Yet the truth is that he was offering his opinion, but hoped that we would recognize his as an informed opinion.
Truth I suspect is found somewhere in the middle of all this. For poets, truth is such a vaunted idea, and yet poets travel a strange path when it comes to the relationship between facts and truth. No matter how hard one works to avoid this, readers continue to imagine a lyrical bent in every poem written. The truth, they say is that all writers are really writing about themselves, anyway. If they seem not to be, they are merely disguising it. The problem with the lyric poem however, is that it seems to presume a factual relationship between the poet’s “I” (or “you” or “she”) and the poet herself. Thus readers find some comfort and some pleasure in reading these poems with the feeling that they are somehow entering the secret world of the poet—a word of deep longings, desires and taboo filled emotions and memories.
Recently, I advised a poet friend of mine to organize his manuscripts in a very specific way. I said, bring all the lyrical “me” poems to the front. Push the political pieces, the polemical ones, to the back. It is not that they are bad poems, but they are poems that we can only embrace and trust when we have come to trust and care for the poet. The presumption here being that the poems at the front would be somehow autobiographical and “true”. How disturbing, at some level. I give this advise, though, because it works. It really does. So what does that mean for poets and truth? Most poets know that any effort to try and stick to the facts will kill a poem that has somewhere to go. Which is why when we let the poem go where it wants to go, and someone asks us if we did slaughter stray goats and pour their blood in a pit latrine to see if flies liked blood, we can say, “Oh no, I just made it all up, but you can see that there is a truth here about my emotional connection to the idea of sacrifice.” Well, no one talks like that, but you see the point.
Here is the thing that throws much of this into strange array. For any of us, poets and fiction writers, after a while, we do not think we are dabbling in anything but facts. What happens, in other words, when the imagination because some tyrannical and compelling that it would be pointless to suggest that the poet is less concerned about the “facts” than, say, the non-fiction writer trying to offer a historical look at some event? But another rather obvious and rightly expressed thought is that we are never really dealing with facts, but with the organization of a memory in a way that will satisfy something I us. This idea is only slightly comforting.
Should a reader fee betrayed or lied when after reading a poem that ends with the death of someone who would seem to have been the poet’s father, the reader discovers later that the poets father is very much alive and kicking? After a performance of one of my poems in public a year or so ago, someone wrote a review of the event that was a generous appreciation of the work. The person, though, stated that the subject of my poem, my brother, was dead and that the poem was about my dead brother. Now, the person must be excused because I was reading the poem, and this was an oral experience and not an experience of reading the poem on the page. But nothing in the poem suggests that the brother is dead except for a certain pathos and a certain truth that were he dead the poem would have greater emotional poignancy. Well, other writers have picked up this idea, even having read the poems. They are offering this idea as if it is fact. It has gone viral. Is this their truth? Should it bother me? Should it bother my family?
I can’t have it both ways, though I want to. I can’t, in other words, use the freedom of fact and truth to obfuscate “facts” so that I can still reach for truth and then not expect that readers will do what they want with fact if it is available to them to do so. Personally, I find myself returning to my old mantra: “all memory is fiction”, and that seems to hold me steady. It does cover a multitude of sins.