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 Polonius' conclusion raises another question perhaps of interest here. To shine own self be true" does not caution Laertes against Iying to himself (whatever we decide that could mean) but instead enjoins him to consistency, to faithfulness, to whatever we decide "self" might mean here. "What is truth? said jesting Pilate and would not stay for answer" opens Bacon's famous essay; but whatever truth may be, the English word "true" can seem even more problematic than the condition it has been designating in these observations. The root sense of the word is "faithful," "constant": it reflects the Indo-European base *deru (firm, solid, steadfast) from which derive which derive tree, trust, truce, endure. Likewise, of course, the German treu = faithful, constant, but not wahr = true: the English cognate Truth confusingly comprises both die Treue and das Wahrheit. The Latin verus (*weros [OK & ON] faith, pledge, agreement; Russian vjera="faith"; Latin verus>verray(>very), then French verite', and soon gives English, through French, "very," which in Middle English kept its relation to truth, "verray" meaning "truly." We still have residues of this in "the very thing"; "I am the very model of a modern major-general," and so forth, although "very" has withered into being a mere intensifier.(3)

Some past contention about the "truth" of poetry considers whether it involves a direct or implicit lie about what veridical truth truly is. But that contention can be shown often to be about what the English word "true" truly means: die Treue or la verite or, even more generally, "authentically." Certainly all these meanings come into play in the celebrated exchange, in As You Like It, between the fast-talking clown, Touchstone, and the country-girl Audrey.

Aud. I do not know what 'poetical' is. Is it honest indeed and

word? Is it a true thing?

Touch. No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most feigning, and

lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry may be

said as lovers they do feign.

"True," "feigning," "honest"--a number of different meanings of these words are being juggled here with great skill, but the stakes for poetry are quite high. At work simultaneously here are: faining=joyful or affectionate feign=simulate or even dissimulate feign = artfully contrived, imaginative and honest = open, true, honorable honest = chaste.

And so at first reading, a paradox built on simple reductive meanings ("The most genuine poetry is the most phony") resolves itself into something much more complex, embracing in its way the received form of the Platonic anti-poetic agenda and poetry's own most vigorous rejection of such an attack. The most (authentic, faithful, constant, and "true") poetry is that which is most (joyful, glad, contrived, artful, highly wrought, deeply imagined). When the additional common play among meanings of "honest" is factored in, the wit about poetry and life, truth and dissimulation, faithfulness in word and deed, art and life, becomes all the more serious as it becomes less solemn.(4)

There is a trivial case in which a lie can "be true": I profoundly believe that X is the case in a certain suggestion, and for whatever reason, when asked is X or Y the case, I answer "Y." Clearly a lie. And if I have been in fact mistaken about X, and it is indeed true that Y holds, I have unwittingly told the truth while intending to lie. One might say that Nature (or Reality, or "Was der Fall ist" [Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicals, 1.1], or whatever) had itself undone my lie and forced me against my will to speak the truth. As I say, a trivial case in the logic of lying but not perhaps so for the realm of poetic fictions. Perhaps one of the greatest of modern theorists of fictions, Oscar Wilde, used unwitting truth-telling with great brilliance in The Importance of Being Earnest. He had previously set forth in "The Decay of Lying" an outrageous elevation of the authenticity of trope, of fiction, of representation, over fact. It insists, among other things, that art invents life. Wilde's great play is to some degree a commentary on his essay. In it, a central character employs for social purposes a major lie about his identity, purporting of the time to be a fictional "Ernest." By an intricacy of plot, this is revealed to have been a telling of the truth (Jack Worthin's name, "Ernest," turns out to have been--unbeknownst to him--his true one after all), and his lie about his name had been unwittingly in earnest.(5)