Truth is Beauty: When Is It Lying and When Is It Art? [View All]

[McCamy Taylor]

The answer is easy on DU. When the story teller is Barack Obama in his best selling autobiographies it is art. When it is Hillary Clinton telling an animated story about her adventures in a war torn country, it is a big fat lie.

If only the real world were so simple. The truth is there is no such thing as nonfiction story telling. Everything is a fiction. Some fiction pretends that it is truer than others. However, a story is always told through filters---the author who has some conscious concept of the "truth" which is colored by emotion and a host of other factors too numerous to list but including the multiple motives for telling the story (in Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner or Heart of Darkness or this motive for telling the tale becomes the centerpiece of the story). There is also a listener included within the story above and beyond the actual reader or listener. In some stories, the fictional listener is the centerpiece as in Absalom, Absalom . Add on top of that the intended audience and then any unintended audience---for in the modern age, Roland Barthe has decreed that all stories are now created as much by the listener as by the teller ( therefore Ulysses is at once a revolutionary novel appreciated by the intelligentsia on the first half of the 20th century and a novel deemed pornographic by the Philistines and the basis for a trial and a textbook on many college syllabuses in the later half of the 20th century and a book that will win you admiration if you carry it around with a book mark stuck halfway inside and an excellent paperweight)---- and you have an infinite number of stories from one telling.

If a child sees a bear shaped shadow while lost in the woods at night and hears a growl, adrenaline will surge and the child will remember images of bears. The image of a bear will appear very clearly in the child's mind at that moment. Later, when the child is safe at home, she will be asked what frightened her and she will say "A bear!" If there really are bears in that part of the country, her family will panic. A search will be conducted. The ensuing alarm will convince her that she saw a bear. Years later, she will tell her grandchildren about the time she ran away from a bear. It will become one of their favorite stories. Every time she recalls it, she will feel a surge of adrenaline, a reliving of her panic but also a sense of warmth, for by then the bear story will have become precious to her. It will be a part of her identity, reaffirmed by each telling.

This is how family myths become fixed and precious. No one sets out to lie. The stories are told over and over. Someone mishears or mistakes a word. That word is included and it becomes part of the ritual, and its mere presence in something so familiar as a family story makes it comforting in its predictability.

It surprises a lot of people when they find that Robert Heinlein was able to deconstruct all stories to three basic story elements. The Brave Little Tailor. The Man Who Learned Better. Boy Meets Girl. Except for humor which turns this on their heads, these are all we have. Aggression. Sorrow. Love. That is the essence of all stories. When we tell a story, we take one or more of these basic forms and fill in details. A story is satisfying to the listener if it meets the criteria of one of these basic story units. Why? Because when we tell a story, we wrestle with an emotion, or two or three. Therefore, when one tells a story of going into a dangerous area, there will always be trials that must be overcome. The story requires it. If we write about a missing parent, there will always be a reconciliation, spiritual if physical is impossible. Otherwise, the story teller will be unable to complete the tale, because the story is not told merely for the audience. The story is told for the storyteller himself, to complete some internal quest. If a woman needs to bolster her courage, she survives a battle. If a man needs to reconcile himself with a part of himself that has been denied, he will do this through the metaphor of reconciliation with the father.

Obama has written autobiographies for a reason. Hillary tells stories about herself for the same reason. Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote his Confessions for the same reason. All are prisoners of reason ---this age of reason---who seek for truth but keep coming back to the same answer, one that William Blake spelled out very clearly in his writings.

"God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night
But does a Human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day."

Truth is beauty is human. To err is human. To err is beautiful. It is the flaws that make a work of art exquisite. A machine can mass produce perfection. If the story rings true---if after 12 years Hillary remembers an adrenaline surge when told that she and her daughter would be landing in a dangerous area and if that lingering emotion---for emotions last much longer than factual memories--- worked its way into her story in the only way that her rationale mind could make sense of it, that does not make her story a lie. Her story is the true story for her. It is the only one that she could tell as the woman she was at the moment she told it.

If you want to blame anyone for the "deception" blame the Brother's Grimm and Homer and Shakespeare and all the story tellers who have helped us define what a story will be. However, before they told their epics, there were anonymous tale spinners. As long as we have had language, we have used words to try to make order out of our jumbled emotions and record fleeting bits of time so that they will not be lost when we die.