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

2. A is really B, despite all obvious appearances to the contrary. There is as much of a game or trick being played with the word really here as there is with the confusion of the is of identity with the is of predication. Fictionally really encodes "not in the ordinary sense really at all, but potently, rewardingly, to consider as . . . ." This is the sort of lie which could be considered as against epistemology. In modern theory, it is popularly called a dissonance from "scientific" truth (rather than from, in Sidney's notion, the truth of history). And yet it clearly engages what are most usually considered as matters of trope--the figurative as opposed to the literal meanings of words (pace Donald Davidson's argument that it is never the meaning of a particular word itself that is figurative) or of phrases or sentences. It is amusing here to recall that in twentieth century casual idiom, "It was literally an inferno in there" [said, for example, of a New York City subway train in August? means, "It was figuratively an inferno . . .", literally means not literally "literally," but figuratively "figuratively." Any yet it would be frivolous to suggest that the speaker in this instance was implicitly lying about the meaning of the word "literal."

3. This particular representation has some privileged authority. Something like this has been the underlying point of persuasion in rhetorical theory since the Renaissance, when rhetoric became a theory of writing as well as of legal and political effectiveness. It involved the developing tradition of the authority of authorship (as opposed to that of systematic traditions, like those of scholasticism or, afterward, scientific method). This may be considered an unsubstantiated claim or boast, rather than a formal lie. But literature is continually making and renewing and formulating such pronouncements.

4. Some relation--elicited or made more prominent by clever verbal manipulation--between words reveals some analogous relation between the entities designated by them. This is more perhaps like a conjuring trick, an illusion, than a lie designed to deceive or delude. Those verbal relations and their sleights-of-discourse are the subject of a good deal of modern theoretical poetics. A Renaissance rhetorician, George Puttenham, implies that there is something of lying in metaphor; when discussing the trope he calls allegoria he observes that "every speech wrested from his own natural signification to another not altogether so natural is a kind of dissimulation, because the words bear contrary countenance to th'intent." I have myself discussed these questions in considerable detail (Hollander, 1988, particularly chs. 1-7) and shall not, despite their central importance for poetry, explore them further here.

But one additional point might be made. Similes are often treated as figures of speech-metaphors with some "like" or "as" qualifying what would otherwise be an unjustifiable literal "is" of identity or predication. But similes seem to be of two sorts. One I should call expository and does not seem to touch at all on the non-literal. Consider, "A is like B, in that both exhibit property P." This is clearly either true or false, according to whether or not P is there in both cases. How much the common presence of P can liken A and B, how much it's worth pointing out the likeness, depends on each instance: I could say that cabbages and kings (from the Walrus' list) were alike in that the words designating both of them in English commence with the phoneme /k/ You might be entitled to observe that this analogy was trivial and did not make them very like, but it could not be called a false statement. But if I said the same thing precisely about sealing-wax and cabbages, it would be untrue; and if I new it to be untrue, uttering it would be a lie. So-called epic similes--from Homer and Virgil through Milton and Pope--are of this expository kind. But the other kind of simile that we usually think of in connection with poetry is of a different nature.