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

But as I have observed elsewhere (Hollander, 1988, pp. 2-5), it remains intriguing to associate fictions and lies. Robert Browning, in the introductory section of The Ring and the Book, in which he mulls at great length over the relation of truth to historical fact, has one of the persons of his prologue speak of "Poetry--make-believe / And the white lies it sounds like." In Catholic tradition mendaicum iocosum--the lie of fiction and amusement--is distinguished from mendacium officiosum--the lie intended to gain some good or protect someone from harm (both of these being contrasted with pernicious lying.) Another version of this is by Bacon from Of Truth again: "One of the Fathers [1], in great severity, called poesy vinum daemonum, because it filleth the imagination; and yet it is but the shadow of a lie." Since "shadow" means any kind of representation in seventeenth-century English (picture, metaphor, and soon), Bacon is suggesting that to propound fictions tropes--but does not literally perform--an act of lying. What this may mean is that poetry is not literally, but figuratively, lying; that a fiction is a trope of a lie. "One of the later school of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what should be in it, that men love lies, where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor for advantage, as with the merchants, but for the lie's sake."

We might today associate this last instance with the life of the pure romancier, whose lies gain him or her no advantage at all, save for gratifying some need to lie for its own sake. Someone I know of was celebrated for these, for example he informed a group of acquaintances in Paris many years ago that he was going to have tea at the Ritz with the then Queen of Greece; on being surreptitiously followed there, he was revealed to be having tea with the then Duchess of Windsor. Nobody who knew could explain what he might have gained from this deception, which seemed to have a certain purity of its own. But it was hardly interesting or elegant or complex.

On the other hand, we might consider the difference between Bacon's lies "made for pleasure" and those told "for the lie's sake"; then the question arises as to whether the white lies that fictions sound like are of either or yet another kind. If a fiction is literally (and falsely, I believe) considered as a lie, then the production of literature (whether for favor, for fame, for money) is clearly for advantage and thus engages Bacon's first type. But propounding a fiction, although clearly for some advantage, does not gain that advantage through the success of a particular lie or set of lies. Rather, it has to do with the pure form of the untrue account, lifted out of the context of mendacity. However poetic fiction is differentiated from lying, it might still be admitted that poetry depends upon one very simple matter: To any question of act, there will usually be one true answer and one only. But there will be an inexhaustible number of false ones.