On Truth In Art

Does conveying the truth in non-fiction require strict adherence to fact or reality? In the visual arts it certainly doesn’t, e.g., Monet and French Impressionism, but what about history and biography?

More to the point, does writing non-fiction require sticking to the exact truth?  When I was writing Dead Wrong I was stymied by the naive notion that in writing dialogue I had to be able to recall conversations in exact sentences or else impair the narrative with qualifications like “I don’t recall the exact words she used.”  A friend who is a professor of creative writing told me this. “That’s nonsense,” she said. “Nobody can recall conversations word for word.  Your task is to tell the story in a way that conveys the larger truth in words that the original speaker would not reject. You have a literary license to cobble words together in a way that feels right to the reader.” Well, that’s not exactly what she said, but it’s close enough to make the point.

Paraphrasing a quote often attributed to Mark Twain, a friend observed: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and poetic license.”  Amen, brother.

My ideas about truth find shelter in Pragmatism, a philosophical tradition initially articulated by American polymath Charles Sanders Pierce in the middle of the 19th century and later refined by Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dewey, and William James.  Truth to a Pragmatist is “That which is useful to believe.” That is to say, “If it works it is true.” I find it useful not to put too fine an edge on truth. To do so highlights differences at the expense of shared belief and often transmutes broad, flexible beliefs (principles) into narrow, rigid ones (rules). It’s a sure way to find trouble. For example, allowing students to possess guns, knives, or other weapons at school is a bad principle. Disallowing them is a good principle. But we are tempted by righteousness to adopt a “zero tolerance” policy, which at a stroke transforms principle into the rule. It’s a certainty that in due time the rule will result in an absurdity, e.g., Johnny takes a cake to his grandmother but leaves the cake knife in the bed of his pickup, campus security finds it, and Johnny is banished to a school for troubled youth.