Handling the Truth By John Scherber

girl writing
Photo By Pascal Maramis

Jack Nicholson famously said to Tom Cruise in the 1992 movie A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth!” This line has a resonance that survives today––a remarkable feat for a statement that is fundamentally untrue. Because at a personal level, there is no single ongoing truth to be handled.

The reality is that we all handle the truth every day––but it is the truth of that day, not yesterday or tomorrow.

But surely, you say, some things are dependably true, and we can have access to them. For example, we can look up the meaning of words in the dictionary. But wait, the meaning of words changes over time. Well, there is science, where information is generated from measurable facts. That must be true. Maybe the truth can be found in those books included in the term nonfiction––a term whose meaning s perfectly clear.

Maybe, but as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, I regard nonfiction as a subcategory of fiction, the only one that overtly proclaims itself to be “true.” Yet the truth of nonfiction is often the victim of time. If I want to learn chemistry it would not pay to pick up a textbook from1950, yet it was among the hardest of hard sciences when the book came out, and still is. But the “truth” of chemistry is fluid, and it’s different today than it was then, and it will continue to evolve. Similarly, the biography of George Washington on your bookshelf was written by someone who never met him, never heard him speak, and is based on information that is second, third or fourth hand. The gaps between the recorded facts of his life that the author has filled in are merely plausible. Testimony of this kind would never be admissible in court. The conversations attributed to Washington were rarely written down.

The autobiography you are now working on in an attempt to tell the “true” story of your life is full of omissions. Some are the casualties of faulty memory, others are the conscious deletions from embarrassment or fear of provoking an unfavorable reaction from your family and friends. The sheer limitations of space require the elimination of myriads of things you know about yourself but have no room to put down. You discard them as unimportant. Yet, how can we trust your objectivity in these choices? How can so fragmentary a picture of your life be “true?”

Of course, there are the vitally important things, the events you remember so clearly. Surely these things are true, since you have never for a moment forgotten them. They are the trustworthy landmarks of your life, and because they are the part of your memory that is carved in stone, they must be dependably true.

writing subway
Photo by Susan Sermoneta

For example––and this will figure prominently in your life story––there was the time you had that terribly traumatic experience when you were eleven years old. You can see it still. Your reaction was immediate and devastating. If was fully an hour before you could speak coherently. Naturally, that night you did not sleep, blaming yourself. In the morning, you felt marginally better, but you were exhausted. It was a week before you started to settle down, even though you couldn’t get it out of your mind. You already knew that it would affect you for the rest of your life.

Two years later you are beginning to think it wasn’t as big a deal as you first believed. You are able to talk about it to your closest friend, but never to your parents.

You are twenty-six years old before you realize quite suddenly that it wasn’t really your fault. It was caused by the bullying adult who immediately blamed you. It is only when you have a child of the same age as when this event occurred, that you begin to take on a different and more mature perspective, one that has always eluded you in the past.

Now you are fifty-one years old. Your index finger is poised over the keyboard of your computer as you work on this autobiography, this rationalization of your life. From the base of your current maturity, you are about to sum up this episode, but what is the truth? Is it the way you felt at the moment of the event forty years ago? Is it the way you regard that moment now? Or is it somewhere between? And if your viewpoint now is the truth, why is now any better than the entire chain of perspectives you have evolved through during the years since it happened? Won’t the now of today be invalidated by the now of tomorrow, just as yesterday’s now is longer true?

This is sounding like the question asked of President Nixon during the Watergate crisis: “What did you know and when did you know it?” And this inevitably brings up your ethical awareness, since you have pledged to yourself to tell the “truth.” My, this is much harder than you thought.

books
Photo By Hike Kurzke

I believe the answer is that truth is a process composed of two elements. One is the fact or event that you experienced. It was over when it was over, and it does not change. The second component is your reaction to it, which began instantly and evolves continuously as you gain in years and experience, maturity and wisdom. It is truly a moving target, and because it consists of two elements, one of which is always in motion, and has no stable content. So where do you turn for truth of a more dependable kind?

The answer, I’m afraid, is that you turn to fiction, a term often used as a synonym for lie.

I have heard it said that the fiction writer is the possessor of the truth, because he cannot be contradicted. You cannot say to me, as you read my book that has parts you disagree with, that I have not told the truth. You cannot read my mind, and since it is my obligation as a writer to tell the truth as I know it, your wiser course is to concede that I have. If I have succeeded well enough, which is to say I have been persuasive, you can also recognize that.

The truth in fiction will have the following characteristics: it will feel profound even if it’s a conclusion you’ve never thought of before. It will apply almost universally and will lack the kind of specificity that is invalidated by the flux of changing events. It will transcend gender, age, politics, and nationality. Reading it will uplift you and may even lead to other insights in unrelated areas. It will have a symmetry and a simplicity that can only be described as beautiful.

The rest is only news and reminiscence.

 

 

Shopping cart0
There are no products in the cart!
0