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The truths that fiction can tell

By MARGO HAMMOND
Published February 12, 2006

A lot of ink has been spilled lately over lies. Politicians' lies. Journalists' lies. Memoirists' lies. Pundits have been deploring the falsehoods of reality shows and wrestling matches, the whoppers of presidential philanderers and presidential fabricators, and, most recently, the blurring of the truth in books of nonfiction and memoirs.

I certainly share the outrage of those who feel cheated when they discover that the facts in a politician's speech, a newspaper article or a book that has been labeled nonfiction turn out to have been distorted, twisted or made up from whole cloth.

But I worry: Is all this fretting over lies in nonfiction giving fiction a bad name?

I fear it is. And I'm afraid that our lack of regard for fiction actually may be hindering us from sorting out what is true and what is a lie. Fiction, after all, is the one lie that can tell us a truth.

Unlike nonfiction - memoirs included - fiction makes no claim to reality. Works of the imagination - better known as literature - are totally unfettered from what actually has happened. A work of imagination does need to have its own inner logic. For the sake of verisimilitude, the details chosen by the storyteller must make sense within the reality she has chosen to create. This is even more vital when a writer chooses to base her tale on a "real story." She cannot afford to get facts wrong that would cause readers to mistrust the story. (A story set in Florida, for example, that claims that Tampa is the state capital would have some explaining to do.)

But novelists and short story writers are free to create their own versions of the world.

And it is precisely this freedom that allows them to bring us the whole gamut of human emotions and experiences as an artful whole. By resorting to lies, fiction aims at an archetypical - more universal - truth.

Storytelling is how we make sense of our world. The artist shapes the random events and details of our lives into an artifice that transcends the everyday. The beautiful becomes most beautiful; the ugly, ugliest; man, everyman. And it is through these archetypes that we discover the essence of who we are.

Unfortunately, fiction has fallen out of favor. "There is so much going on in the world," people tell me. "I prefer to read about real events rather than made-up ones." "Fiction is fun," others say, "but I just don't have time for it." A National Endowment for the Arts 2004 survey supports this anecdotal evidence. Surveying 17,000 adults for the past 20 years, the NEA reported that literary reading - that is, the consumption of fiction, poetry or plays - has dropped 15 percent in the past two decades. Among young people 18 to 24, the decline is even more alarming, 28 percent.

When Oprah first began her book club, she concentrated on fiction titles by contemporary authors, helping to restore the importance of storytelling to our culture. Even cinema and television, where storytelling is still valued, albeit labeled "entertainment," benefited from Oprah's eye for a good story, as many of her picks were turned into films and made-for-TV movies.

Then Jonathan Franzen, one of Oprah's picks, disparaged the idea of being an "Oprah author" as lowbrow (a comment he later said he regretted). Oprah suddenly decided to turn to classics. (Dead authors don't give embarrassing sound bites.) After several fiction writers, including Amy Tan, sent her an open letter begging her to reconsider, Oprah relented and returned to selecting titles by contemporary authors. This time around, however, instead of picking a novelist, she chose a memoirist.

And we know how that turned out.

Oprah was not wrong when she said that, despite its falsehoods, the redemptive power of James Frey's story could still resonate with readers. What she failed to point out, however, was that by calling his embellished tale a memoir - and not fiction - he betrayed the trust between a writer and his reader that is not only fair but essential.

In picking up a work of fiction, the reader makes a pact with the writer: If you are persuasive, if you are artful enough to create characters I believe in and care about, if you can describe places - which may or may not exist - so breathtakingly real that I can see, smell and taste them, then I will enter into your artifice and allow you to transform how I see the universe.

Fiction has that power to change us precisely because it is a lie - an artifice - that we agree to embrace.

And that's the plain truth.

[Last modified February 12, 2006, 00:25:19]