Belles-Lettres, Ephemera & Notes

Truth

These are notes to be added to the larger essay in some shape or fashion.

Our relationship to truth is a complicated one. Saint Augustine points out in Confessions that, “...nothing is true just because it is beautifully phrased, nor anything false because haltingly sounded out. Conversely, nothing is true because awkwardly phrased, nothing false because voiced grandly.” His assessment exemplifies our difficult task, the task both writers and readers must face in coming to identify what is true and what is false: appearances can be deceiving.

You can find much discussion about truth in nonfiction writing and there are myriad cases where publicized squabbles revealed lies behind some contemporary memoirs. But in the memoirs themselves it is hard to assess the veracity of the narrator (I don't know if that's necessarily true); stranger than fiction comes to mind. From the most ludicrous to the mundane, it must be taken on faith that it is indeed true and not made up. These books cannot be fact-checked by readers and Ph.D. Candidates. Perhaps this is why there is much hue and cry over folly in contemporary nonfiction. Writers are lying and the readers only comes to know once the lie has been exposed. In fiction the lie is front and center, even though there are instances where narrative is badly-disguised truth. Still is it intent that is being wagered here and the best wagers are proffered and not by verification of fact, but rather through a belief in the narrator. Might this not then be a matter to be settled within the text rather than exterior to it? After all the narration does not exist outside the confines of a book's boards. The writer does. We hold both accountable, more so the writer who controls the what and how the narrator relates the fabula of the text.

Don't add. Don't deceive.

Readers know this by and large through the details a narrator provides of their self. Take Montaigne. Writing “Of Three Kinds of Association,” he examines our need for variety in mental activity such as conversation and study. Readers come to trust Montaigne in this assaying because he appears to speak less than highly of his own humors and dispositions. He boasts of his inadequacy over myriad essays – perhaps in all of his prose – but in this essay he offers that, “five or six stories can be truthfully told about me,” (italics mine) as a result of his own failings, in particular his inability to engage in small talk. He admits to growing sleepy to withdrawing in, “a dreamy way” and to have a “dull and childish ignorance of many common things.” Montaigne catalogs his faults first before making a pronouncement of his deficiency. In this manner – inductive perhaps – the reader arrives at the truth organically having first been introduced and known, to a degree, the person to which the attribute is to be attached. It allows Montaigne to write, “...this fastidious disposition makes me hard to please in dealings with men.” Self-deprecation rarely rings hollow and often is the medium of truth in nonfiction. Take Emerson. In “Circles,” he proclaims: “...I am only an experimenter,” giving readers a good indication as to the merits of his reportage. “Do not set the least value on what I do,” Emerson writes, “or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false.” Besides, he famously offers in “Self Reliance,” and in his essay “Spiritual Laws” people are not to be wholly trusted for people are not fully formed but are in a continual process of development. “A man is a method,” Emerson instead states, “a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle...” These are just statements, this is true, but it is my contention that there presence prepare and assist the reader in coming to trust the narrator. Honesty in self, one could assume, bears honesty in other matters. Take Augustine. As per the conventions of spiritual memoir, the bishop of Hippo, begins his autobiography by outlining his sins; his days of doubt and debauchery in Carthage; his engagement with Manichaeism, Skepticism, and Materialism before his conversion. “Give me chastity,” an early prayer went, “but not yet.” His frankness provides readers with a narrator they can trust for anyone willing to admit to sins and insincerity; to admit to licentiousness; is someone who is willing to be vulnerable and therefore with little to lose in terms of self-esteem. This allowance provides the writer with the ethos, the credibility, required for latter exposition. For by the time we come to Augustine's conversion – a steady progression to be sure – as he reads scripture the reader is on his side, metaphorically. Readers trust him, for why would Augustine now lie:

I grabbed, opened, and read: 'Give up indulgence and drunkenness, give up lust and obscenity, give up strife and rivalries and clothe yourself in Jesus Christ the Lord, leaving no further allowance for fleshly desires.' The very instant I finished that sentence, light was flooding my heart with assurance, and all my shadowy reluctance evanesced.

The very instance...light flooding his heart... we trust this narrator because we have seen and read of his transformation, chaste, but not yet. Take any number of classic and contemporary nonfiction writers and you will find similar methods in play – the details writers provide about their narrators, the statements these narrators provide to readers, paves the way for the franchise of trust, and therefore truth to reside within the prose of its narrative.

Truth in the Bible is of course more problematic for it requires an attending world view. But an argument can be made that read as literature the Bible does have an internal structure designed to lay a groundwork for revelatory truth in its books, The Gospel According to John, for example. By internal structure I mean in some books of the Bible, in particular John, the prose is composed in a clear pattern progressing from profane to sacred, or from the commonplace to the miraculous in direct mimesis of the transformation of word into flesh. In The Gospel According to John pattern of composition helps to establish veracity for latter exposition of incredulous deeds. The repeated structural argument begins with statements or words expressed and or written foretelling and witnessed ; the pattern then proceeds to highlight scenes and description of the foretold. It might be simplified this way: Word (exemplified, witnessed) before Deed. For example if I say or write that tomorrow the sky will be a brilliant blue and you see tomorrow that the sky is indeed a brilliant blue, the words begin to take on some heft. This is crucial to the gospel. “If I have told you earthy things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things,” asks Jesus. The cadence established here is that of primary importance is the establishment of a foundational truth, a truth found on the material ground before it can be expounded upon via the ethereal and ineffable. The book John wrote applies this very same principle time and time again, here's an example. The book famously begins with “in the beginning was the word,” and goes on to say this word was made flesh and that this flesh was made by God and that all things are made by God. This flesh contains life, in Jesus was life – “in him was life,” John writes. This comes several verses and pages before a miracle occurs and then this miracle only comes when proceeded by further qualification and exposition. John quotes Jesus as saying “Ye sent unto John, and he bare witness unto the truth.” So John has told us that God's word incarnated acknowledges the presence of a witness, the witness who is narrating the story, in order to provide the needed credentials as it were to speak of turning five barley loaves and two small fish into a largess for thousands. The pattern progresses through increasing incredulity, to be sure, but at least it progresses rather than halts. For the miracle of the loaves and fishes allows John then to quote Jesus saying: “My Father giveth you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.” Lazarus rises from the dead and his reappearance is witnessed by many as credibility for the latter resurrection of Jesus, witnessed by so few. But of course the so-called Good Book isn't entirely fool-proof.

The four gospels, the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are replete with contradictions. An essential moment in the life of Jesus is told four different ways in the gospels said to have been testaments to His veracity. In Matthew, Mary Magdalen and “the other Mary,” are at Jesus' grave site and witness an angel roll back the stove of the tomb. In Mark, Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, come to find the tomb with its rock already moved; they went inside and found a young man clothed in a white garment who said he was Jesus.. In Luke, the rock is rolled away and when the women enter there are not one, but two men inside in shining garments. Perhaps they're disciples, we're not sure. In John, Magdalene goes to the tomb alone in the morning to find the rock had been rolled away from the tomb's entrance; she finds the tomb empty. She runs back to tell Peter. Peter and perhaps, though it's unclear, John run back to the tomb. Inside they go and find a pile of clothes, but no body. Mary sitting outside weeping is said to have seen two angels in the tomb sitting where Jesus had laid and that they asked her why she was crying. Mary stands, moves back from the sepulchre to find “Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.” This leads up to the famous “touch me not,” scene; Mary later relates this to her friends, the disciples.

Why the contradictions over such an integral part of Christianity? Tomes and careers have been written and launched attempting to assay that very question. Might it come down to a matter of faith – faith in the narrator. At the very least John tells us he left stuff out and that you can believe him or not:

And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.