LITERAL TRUTH AND LITERARY TRUTH

“Now what I want is Facts!”

         Hard Times

 

In one of his essays, David Daiches – Professor of English in the University of Sussex at the time he was writing – tells of an experiment he undertook while visiting an American university: Buffalo, I think.  As students came out of an English seminar, he put to each of them this question:

            Literature is about people who never existed, and events that never happened.  Why read it?

            This is not a new question, and the definitive answer to it was given centuries ago by Sir Philip Sidney in his Apology for Poesie.  Any defences of literature that I give can lay no claim to originality, but are merely variations of Sidney’s arguments, updated. 

 

In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare gives Bohemia a sea coast.  Bohemia is in the middle of Europe.  Maybe Pandosto, on which Tale is based, was geographically accurate. I don’t know, I’ve never read it, and its chief claim to fame today is as a source for Shakespeare. 

            But Shakespeare was never a slave to his sources: he would take what he needed, throw the rest away, and then see where his imagination led him.  In Tale, Shakespeare wants to explore two kings moving in different directions in parallel kingdoms: hence the adapted Bohemia to match Sicilia: which indisputably does have a coastline.  It matters only if we want Shakespeare as a guide to the layout of Europe.  But we can get that from an atlas; whereas what we can’t get from an atlas is Shakespeare’s exploration of guilt and reconciliation. 

The Wind in the Willows is likewise disappointing if we demand that it shall give us lessons in natural history.  Water rats, after all, don’t row boats or compose poems about ducks; badgers don’t wear carpet slippers; toads don’t get leaves in their hair.

But the book is magnificently ‘true’ in its depiction of a particular place - the Thames riverside; of a particular time - the Edwardian glow before the First World War; and of a particular emotion- friendship.  And in a bizarre way, the essence of each animal has also been captured.  A mole would not be gruff in the way that Badger is. Although they are both water creatures, Toad’s movements are not those of Otter. 

Peter Porter entitled one of his collections of poems Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces.  In doing so, he is quoting Isaiah’s curse on the Babylonians, as rendered by The Authorised Version.

Modern translations substitute ‘jackals’ for ‘dragons’, but in this context either word is equally indicative of ruin where there once was splendour, and is ‘true’ both for Porter’s theme of the decline of western civilization and for Isaiah’s prophecy of doom.   But the distinction between the two creatures would be relevant if you were reading a guide as to what you might expect to find in an African safari park. 

In one of his parables, Christ compares the Kingdom of Heaven to the mustard seed: the smallest of all seeds that can grow into a tree, and have birds nestle in its branches.

Sober botanists have pointed out that there are smaller seeds than mustard seeds, and larger garden plants than mustard trees – I’ll take their word for it, I’ve never seen a mustard tree – and the Bible is therefore not to be trusted. 

But Christ may simply have been using a figure of speech.  When Conan Doyle's Watson says, “I am the most long-suffering of men.” he does not mean that he has undertaken a comparative analysis of everyone else on the Victorian planet, or even in London.  He simply means “I am very tolerant”, and Christ’s image of something large and useful from small and unpromising beginnings is a comparable example that does not need exact precision to make its point. 

Christ might have said – with equal truth – that great oaks from little acorns grow; only this might have been puzzling to his audience of Galilean yokels.    It is not even certain that Christ himself would have known about oak tress. On the one hand as God – and therefore as inventor of the oak tree – he must have done; but as a man who had grown up in Galilee, he might not.  It is a riddle – the blend within one person between the human and the divine –  to which we cannot know the answer this side of the grave; although it might be an interesting question to put to Christ in the hereafter.  

 

In Bleak House, Krooks – the gin-sodden old miser – ignites and explodes, dripping yellow bile onto the lodger in the room beneath.  Dickens apparently believed that spontaneous combustion of humans was possible.  Science itself might have believed this at the time Dickens was writing, but Science has since shown the belief to be erroneous.  Whatever nonsense the scene may be in a literal sense, symbolically it has hardly been affected:  reinforcing the theme of yellow disease – jaundice – that runs through the book. 

            Homer may, or may not, have believed in his gods.  His audience certainly did: Plato condemned Homer for making the gods laugh, which was an unseemly example for the impressionable young. 

            We today tend not to believe in Homer’s gods, and yet they are absolutely key to the text: bickering and interfering at every stage of the struggle between Greeks and Trojans.  Does that mean we can no longer read The Iliad?

            Not a bit of it.  Treat them as natural, or irrational, forces, and consider the rapid reversals of fortune that may occur to any of us in the course of a week, and they are alarmingly true to life. 

 

For the insatiable fact seeker, determined to salvage at least something from the wreck of knowledge that is literature, the ‘I’ of narrative sounds promising.  Thus ‘I’ equals autobiography: even if the character’s name is Pip, and the author’s name is Charles. 

            I recall a discussion with a girl about Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems, in which  she asked me if I knew who the real-life ‘Lucy’ was.  When I said that ‘Lucy’ might have been imaginary, she looked at me first in bafflement and then in disappointment. 

            But the power and truth of the Lucy poems are not that they explore a real person – they may do, they may not – but that they explore a real situation: a shy young man who sees the beauty and value of a shy and unassuming young girl.  There are thousands upon thousands of shy anonymous lovers of shy Lucys; and thousands of people who are taken for granted, and whose true value is seen only after they have died and it is too late to make amends.  And the Lucy poems are a celebration of all such people – past, present and future – and their ‘truth’  lies not with whether Wordsworth knew a real-life Lucy or  not, which could happen to anybody, but with his skill in depicting the emotion inherent in such a situation, which is a rare gift. 

            Years ago, when Deidre Barlow was on the verge of leaving Ken Barlow in the television soap Coronation Street, newspapers ran pictures of her with the headline, ‘Will She, Won’t She?’  If you had asked readers and viewers about whether Deidre really existed, nearly all of them would have known perfectly well that she didn’t.  Neither did Ken.  What they were responding to was the truth of the situation, and its echo of a decision many of them would have made, or still have to make, in the course of their own lives. 

            Why else did I cry at the death of Lee Scoresby’s daemon, Hester the hare, in The Subtle Knife?  Daemons don’t exist, and I’ve never seen Hester. But the power of Pullman’s writing had reminded me painfully of the death of a beloved animal of my own. 

 

In the same vein as the ‘I’ voice in narrative, there are those who prefer realism in fiction to fantasy, on the grounds that realism is more like real life.  This seems to me illusion: both genres are artificial – even stream-of-consciousness narrative is artificial – and both represent the selection of one experience rather than another, and the patterning of such choices, that is the writer’s craft. 

“In the early years of this century, such a linen-weaver, named Silas Marner, worked at his vocation in a stone cottage...”   No he didn’t.  Silas Marner never existed; although weavers like him did.   Michael Henchard was never mayor of Casterbridge, although the truth of his situation – an individual unable to adapt to change – is as valid as ever it was.  But both of them are as much fictional creations as Gandalf the Wizard, jerking Bilbo Baggins out of the settled routines of his sheltered hobbit life. 

We may, of course, argue that the events in Silas Marner could really have happened, unlike the events in The Hobbit;  that Raveloe is a recognisable village, in a way that the village of Bree in The Lord of the Rings is not.  And yet, in reading Tolkien’s descriptions, many readers feel they have experienced English pubs, the Oxfordshire countryside, and the landscapes of The First World War. 

            If the events of The Lord of the Rings could not have happened, the situations could.  A threat hanging over the human race is a reality with which everyone can identify.  Both Marner and Rings are concerned with the regeneration of an individual: in Marner, it is the driving force of the narrative, in Rings it is the sub-plot involving Gollum.

           

            ...and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo’s

            knee  - but almost the touch was a caress.  For a fleeting moment, could one of

            the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old

            weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time,

            beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved

            pitiable thing. 

 

            Sam, misreading the situation, duly intervenes; the green light returns to Gollum’s eyes, and the moment of potential redemption is gone forever.  If anything, Rings is more realistic in this respect than Marner, for Silas is successfully reintegrated into society, whereas in real life such attempts are often doomed to failure. 

            Diggory Venn in The Return of the Native is another such selfless character as Sam, whose well-meaning interference simply exacerbates misfortune.  And the situation is as true of the one work as of the other; although the one is set in mythical Middle-earth and the other in realistic rural Dorset. 

            The last of the Elven ships leaves the Grey Havens, taking with it Elrond and Galadriel, Gandalf and Frodo.  Sam, left behind, “saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West.  There still he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth.”  

            Many readers will feel from this ending quite as much regret for the passing of an Age as they will feel from the ending of the much more realistic Brideshead Revisited.  Perhaps more for the loss of the Elves, than for the loss of effete and decadent aristocrats. 

Sidney said – I am paraphrasing – that history is about what happened, whereas literature is about what happens. Literature is ‘true’ if it is a valid exploration of an imagined experience.  We can share the situation of Hamlet – a situation that never existed in reality – and feel his confusion to be true, even if it is not the same sort of truth as the truth known to historians.   For literature is the truth about the human condition.  It enables us to view the world through the eyes of others – whether we like what we see, or not – and, in doing so, to extend our understanding of our own complex mortality.