A few months ago an uproar over James Frey's bestseller A Million Little Pieces — a book which was promoted as a memoir but which turned out to be mostly fiction — sent a chilly tremor through American publishing circles. This scandal was soon followed by the confusion created by the revelation of the true sexual identity of J.T. Leroy who had made a name for himself/herself with stories of transsexual sex in the wild and boorish world of truck drivers.
In the wake of these two scandals, the question of truth in literature was once more raised starting a no-win controversy, but which, in turn, had the merit of shedding some light on certain means (such as the aggrandizement of the self and embellishment of reality towards the making of a bestseller). But this would be a whole other field of investigation.
What I am more interested in, is the very idea of "lying" in literature.
At the same time as these scandals broke out, I was browsing in a French bookshop and to my surprise, on a table was a book entitled: Le Menteur Magnifique: Chateaubriand en Grêce, by Michel de Jaeghere (tr. The Magnificent Liar).
I bought the book and was astonished to discover that one of the great monuments of French literature is the inveterate "liar" who exaggerates almost everything from his travels to Greece and the Orient to his Les Memoires d'Outre Tombe, a delicate embroidery on his life. These are considered to be the centrepiece of his oeuvre Romanesque — in other words, a masterpiece of fiction. And yet, had Chateaubriand not written that he had "un amour maudit de la verite" (tr. "a sickly obsessive passion for the truth")?
In his work, Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem et de Jerusalem a Paris he writes that the traveller is a sort of historian. He wants to record faithfully what he sees and what he hears; and yet, the man who writes those lines is a traveller who rushed through Greece, through the country's historical places, sites, monuments, so hurried he was to meet his lover in Portugal. Still, his writings about Greece give the reader the illusion that he (Chateaubriand) was not just a tourist, but rather someone who had lived, on site, among the people. What I learned from the book is that he drew on his readings and various sources to flesh out his meagre notes and observations.
Readers continue to be enchanted by Chateaubriand's travel accounts are still fascinated by his descriptions of the classical and oriental worlds and certainly the reader never feels cheated. We then have to ask ourselves, Why?
What is the reader after? Truth or beauty? Does he want to read a literal description of a place or a life or rather be enchanted and inspired? Literature is art and art in Literature lies (no pun intended) in the author's writing style. Art is artifice, that is artificial, and all of the great classics of world literature are an artistic refashioning, re-making of reality.
I will leave the concluding word to E. A. Markham, a contemporary Caribbean writer who introduces a collection of short stories, Meet Me in Mozambique with a quote of and an homage to one of his schoolteachers:
Once, Teacher Morgan refused all urging to punish a boy in his charge for a minor misdemeanour, because the boy's account of the incident was inventive — and growing more so. "But the boy's lying!" urged an exasperated onlooker. "I know he's lying," said Teacher Morgan," but he's lying intelligently."
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