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

Intending to do so is another matter. Whether an intent to deceive is a necessary or contingent condition for Iying has been open to some philosophical question (Aquinas and Augustine, for example, differing on this issue),(8) and I would raise it here only with respect to the rhetoric of fiction. The intention of poetry is to engage and maintain a reader's informed attention and, in the case of the best writing, to draw deeply on it without exhausting it. But this is not really like a means--if not an end--of Iying (deceiving listeners about the truth of a statement) or of classical rhetoric (persuading them to praise, blame, convict, exonerate, vote for or against). A common instance of oral (or even "folk") literature whose form is the broadest of lies is the "tall tale," whose blatant falsification is part of the 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.

Poets, Prophets, Liars

Poetry has been traditionally linked in various ways to prophecy. We might consider this for a moment: What about prophecies possible frauds or lies? Predictions turn out to have been true or false, but making a false prediction is not Iying (whereas pretending to predict might establish that possibility: if you knew an outcome in advance, and predicted--for whatever advantage might accrue to you--the opposite, something like a lie might be lurking here). Like poetry itself, prophecy has both an expressive and an interpretive component: prophetic insight reads signs and wonders, on the one hand, and receives inspiration from within, on the other. This reflects the relation between the more expository and the more concealed and oblique material in poems, which themselves are like the kinds of dream material that come from "above" as well as from "below"--alluding to recent daily experience and deriving more mysteriously from older, repressed matters.

"X will occur when A is seen. Well, that indeed might happen--substituting will for could or even for might well occur: this looks rhetorically like bending, rather than breaking, the truth, and yet its consequences can be dire. Or--both X and A can be systematically ambiguous, so that when Y does indeed take place, having previously been "signalled" by B, the former can be claimed as a case of X, the latter of A. This is why oracles and prophecies are so often riddles. The implicit and devious claim about their riddling nature is that the solution has to be locked up to protect its truth. More significant is that as many keys as possible will open the lock. And this has some deep relation to the rhetorical forms of prophecy (for example, why the Delphic oracle delivered its utterances in hexameters) and, hence, to the matter of form, of linguistic device, in poetry. But prophetic enigmas seem to be designed in order to appear to have been predictive under the widest variety of outcomes. Poetic enigmas are an entirely different matter. Their use hovers between the fragile power of the engima itself--to fascinate, puzzle, charm--and the force of the "solution" or "answer" which annihilates it. Perhaps there can be--for the audience to "the shadow of a lie"--an analogous hovering of the charm of the particular falsehood and some concern for what the truth might be.