I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth."
-Ursula K. Le Guin, in her introduction to "The Left Hand of Darkness"
So, writers of fiction out there who think that they're portrayers of truth and humanity, you're already in the business of lying. Lying to yourself, that is. But let's put the modernist lens down for a minute and let me level with you. The idea of lying being a respectable profession really just intrigues me. I very briefly touched on this subject in my blog back in November and called upon the thoughts of Oscar Wilde found in his "The Decay of Lying." Oscar (we're on a first name basis) basically puts forward the idea that lying is the highest form of art when writing. He claims it's easy to mimic reality because, well, we're surrounded by it. Any attempt to recreate reality would just be mundane. A Lie, however, is delightful to read.
But Oscar always fancied paradoxes more than lies and Le Guin offers us with one in her introduction. She claims that science fiction writers are not in the business of predicting the future, but rather they are in the business of commenting on the here and now. Hm... So the lies need some context of truth? It makes enough sense, all jokes contain a bit of truth in them or else a sense of humor wouldn't be evoked. Readers need something to grasp onto in the sea of lies. Many people feel that Shakespeare's work remains relevant to a modern audience despite the massive cultural shifts that have happened over the last 400 years because he managed to encapsulate the unchanging human condition within his verse.
But the fact was that Shakespeare was a liar. Even his history plays contained a multitude of lies. Writers of fiction create characters, situations, worlds, and standards that are non existent in the world; however, they aren't without reason. The questions Le Guin has prompted me to ask is "where do writers draw the line?" Well, I don't know. But the real question is, can the elements of mankind only be portrayed through this systematic lying? I don't know that either, but one of the great determiners of outstanding fiction is its ability to hold a mirror to humanity.
So do we learn more through lies than the truth?
Still don't know, but I expect a visit from our resident Sci-fi authority.
I'll leave you with more words from Le Guin's introduction.
"In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find-- if it's a good novel-- that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it...
All fiction is a metaphor."
Until next time,
-Rainamoinen
Ryan,
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting blog, and I like that you're going back to Oscar for this one. I think the word "lie" is taken a bit too seriously - in that lies are not always a bad thing, yet we often like to look at the "bad" side of lying - and is demonized a bit too much. Lying is around us all the time, and the implications of a well placed lie often reveal much about the liar. In literature, though, I think it becomes a very important rhetorical device.
You raised a very good question in your article. The issue of lies revealing truth in fiction has fascinated me for a long time, and I think that lying does reveal something about ourselves. If "something" in literature is represented differently than how we perceive said "something", then we will inevitably have an unconscious, or conscious for some people, response to the dissonance created between the story and our persona. That dissonance is very telling about one's disposition.
I do think, however, the demarcation of good lie/bad lie is a bit fuzzy. Obviously, we know that crazy outlandish lies, as seen in surrealist literature and theater of the absurd, are taken just as seriously as little white lies. So what constitutes good and bad? I think the answer is pretty much impossible to pin down, so I'll be thinking about that one for a while.
Good blog.
JF
Le Guin tends to be a bit Ayn Rand-ish with her theories, in that they have a seed of interest which is doused with suffocating self-righteousness, leaving the point relatively masked or even undiscovered. But who really cares, because this is all nonsense anyway, right?
ReplyDeleteEric I promise that if you ever compare Rand to Le Guin again you will regret it.
DeleteAnd Ryan, it's 700 pages or nothing - Rand wouldn't bother using a 400 page manuscript as a flyswatter.
I know Rand is a terrible writer, but at least she had some bloody principles beyond a fixation on genitalia.
And Le Guin's introductory thesis on believing the lies might hold more water if she had ever written a good novel.
I'll leave you with some thoughts on John Irving (whose writing I adore but whom I usually disagree with at some profound level) - "Imagining is better than remembering," which is the fundamental problem of his character, T.S. Garp, in The World According to Garp.
I do agree with Irving (or Garp) on this point - the creation of something new, whole, fantastic and vaguely unreal is preferable to the reexamination of some part of an author's life; fiction should be autobiographical as infrequently as possible, fantastic and strange as often as is plausible, and completely removed from the world in which the author lives. Why? Because fiction is a shitty place to keep a mirror - mirrors go in entryways and bathrooms. Fiction should be a lens, but not something stupid and rose-tinted and pretty much the same as what you see every day; have you ever held a macro lens at arm's length? The world is shrunken and puckered and upside-down and wrong, but you still see some portion of your world, and you see it more clearly than if you were looking at it through either a simple lens or a mirror.
Fiction (at least literary fiction) is not just a telescope that zooms you into reality, or a microscope that peers at one tiny section of the universe - its lens should be a distortion, but the distortion should be either better or much worse than the world you see through unshielded eyes.
When you're learning anatomy as an art student, one of the tricks you learn is to flip your sketches upside down. A drawing that looked perfect from a normal perspective will suddenly show flaws and distorted proportions when it is turned on its head - this is what fiction should do: by lying fiction should turn things about, flip things over, and show the flaws that go unnoticed in simple observation.
And Le Guin fucking sucks. And you know it, Ryan, but you also know how to goad me so well. Cheers, guys.
Indeed, Le Guin's agenda is quite obvious in her introduction. Her novel however, seems a bit different than Rand insofar as I didn't pin down the core philosophy on the first page and get systematically beaten over the head with it for the remaining 400.
ReplyDelete"fiction should be autobiographical as infrequently as possible, fantastic and strange as often as is plausible, and completely removed from the world in which the author lives. Why? Because fiction is a shitty place to keep a mirror - mirrors go in entryways and bathrooms"
ReplyDeleteBravo