The shadow of a lie: poetry, lying, and the truth of fictions - Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception

Social Research, Fall, 1996 by John Hollander

PLATO has it that poets are liars. Conscious of this, a great Renaissance defense of poetry propounded a canonical formulation of the relation of fiction to literal falsehood from which any discussion of the question might well start. The poet, says Sir Philip Sidney, "nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth" and continues:

For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false; so

as the other artists, and especially the historian, affirming many

things can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape

from many lies. But the poet (as I said before) never affirmeth.

The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to

conjure you to believe for true what I writes. . . though he

recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true,

he lieth not (emphasis added).

We might paraphrase the claim here as maintaining that the propositions embodied in ordinarily indicative sentences, and thereby assessable for truth-value, are not to be extracted from indicative sentences in the language of fictions, or, in any event, certainly not in the same way. Or not telling things "for true," in Sidney's phrase (modern idiom might change this to "as true"). What Sidney might mean by "for true," and what we might consider veridical truth (whether we find the dualism analytic/synthetic to be untenable or not), however, are somewhat different. While there was a common apprehension of what in fact was factual and what was not, the principal repository of truths was historiography, rather than the record of an empirical inductive process we now generally call "science" that was only beginning, locally, to develop. And, thus it was History to which Poetry would be, in Sidney's view, misleadingly compared for verity. Admittedly, Francis Bacon would within two decades speak of "theological and philosophical truth" (by which latter he meant "scientific") and "the truth of civil business" about which he propounds a brilliant simile, at once metaphoric and metonymic in operation: "the mixture of falsehood [in honest dealing] is like allay [alloy] in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but embaseth it." Falsehood, as "working the metal" and by extension effecting a favorable deal, is a matter of rhetoric; keeping the coin pure is both prudential and moral.

In the matter of "working the metal": a liar would seem always to perceive--rightly or wrongly, as might turn out--some advantage in telling the lie; but the false state of things that the lie itself would propose could be in fact one both wished--for or not, as in the difference between a boast and a disclaimer that, say, one did not have any money (when one indeed had) offered as an excuse for not lending some of it. Insofar as wish fulfillment, in various guises, touches the matter of fantasy or dream, it might be analogously invoked in the realm of instrumental imagination in which romantic and later theory would locate poetry. But this becomes a complex matter when, for example it is asked exactly what sort of wish is being fulfilled by the kind of lie the fiction, in any particular instance, will sound like. In an ordinarily white or pernicious lie, there is usually no room for aesthetic criteria.

Perhaps the case of pretending to lie--as whatever part of particular conversational play--may not be totally trivial. To tell a palpable (a "broad"?) lie, it might be assumed that the other party would recognize that the alternative truth was so obvious that the "lie" had to be some kind of joke. It would then bring the particular form of the lie, and its particular way of not being true, into prominence. Of such a patent lie might, like a poem for Sidney, be said that it "nothing affirms." To treat it as if it did would be as uncomprehending of the language of conversation as assuming that a hyperbole characteristic of American speech--for example, "It's hot as hell in there!" (when the temperature was 100 degree F.)--or a litotes equally characteristic of British talk-for example, "It's a bit warm in there!" (when the temperature was 150 degrees)--was literal and taking exception to its obvious falsehood. A patent lie--perhaps greeted by the amused response, "That's a good one!"--would be like an allusion to be caught and acknowledged. It could be receiving mock praise for its very patency; but under some circumstance might be admired for its ingenuity, elegance, complexity, and so on (many professional liars, such as spies, know that the best lie is the simplest one; non-professional liars do not know this; poets something else). A common instance, close to being a pretended lie, in oral (or even "folk") literature is that of the "tall tale." Its form is the broadest of lies whose blatant falsification is part of its literary framework, and whose capacity to entertain depends upon the audience's knowledge of its falsity, and perhaps even of the indirect or devious quality of the boasting that the exaggeration might imply.