“Fiction is the lie that tells the truth” goes a well-worn adage familiar to fiction writers, if not to memoirists and poets. A search of the internet associates, if not attributes, some version of the saying to any number of writers including Dorothy Allison, Neil Gaimon, Stephen King, and Abraham Verghese, all of whom are wonderful writers who lie and truth say in their own way. Albert Camus is often credited as originating the phrase in The Stranger—or perhaps it was Anton Chekov, who wrote in a letter, “The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth.” In its profundity, the adage is ageless, and seems it ought to have been first uttered in antiquity, perhaps even redacted from a draft of Aristotle’s Poetics. Whatever the origin, the idea that truth is the goal of fiction is a worthy, prevalent, and persistent one.
But it is also problematic.
Most disconcerting is the suggestion that the craft is a lie—a dishonesty, a deception. It is in fact less deceitful than most newspapers, for it is introduced as a novel or short story, and we all know that the essential characteristics of these forms is that they are invented narratives. Readers are not deceived, rather they are invited to indulge in stories that craftily blend realistic details, facts and imagined characters and circumstances—for the purpose of entertainment. If reading fiction is engaging with a lie, then it is a lie readers willingly involve themselves in. They become, through the imaginative process of reading, as much liars as the authors who made up the stories. Rather than thinking of fiction as lying, I prefer to think of it as artifice, the writer’s and the readers’ engagement in an artistic experience.
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