Having dealt in my previous two posts with my objection (translate: pet peeve) to a particular approach to the question of truth in literature, I now turn to exploring the broader question of how literature contains truth or how literature can be true. Taking my cue from a critic of my previous posts who shall remain nameless (does a link constitute a name?), I intend in the next few posts to look specifically at the question “What is truth in literature?” In this post I will consider truth in literature as the correspondence between the statements in a work of literature and reality.
Truth has traditionally been defined as the correspondence between language (e.g., words, concepts, ideas) and reality. My idea of a thing is true if it conforms to the thing as it is in itself. The understanding of truth as correspondence seems to describe what we mean by truth in literature. When I say that Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit, my statement is true, because Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit. Macbeth’s proclamation that life is a tale told by an idiot seems to be false because life, while it may be a tale, is not one told by an idiot. Dante’s image of Satan encased in ice strikes me as true, for it embodies what I take to be the truth that sin stifles freedom. However, understanding truth in literature as the correspondence between its language and reality presents some difficulties.
First, many if not most of the statements in a literary work, especially in the case of a fictional work, do not correspond to reality. Yet the falsity here, if it is falsity, doesn’t seem to bother us. We might be willing to call a story true in which 99% of the statements do not conform to reality. Besides, we don’t generally verify most sentences in literature by testing them against reality. When I read in a bedtime story, “It was a dark and stormy night,” I don’t look out the window to see if the sentence is true. The author establishes the truth of the statement. Tolkien established the truth that Bilbo is a hobbit by creating Bilbo as a hobbit. Of course, that the fictional artist establishes truth doesn’t rule out truth in literature being truth-as-correspondence. While I don’t scan the horizons of Texas looking for Ents, I may reflect upon the truth of Treebeard’s words when I can apply the meaning of his words beyond the literary world Tolkien created. Treebeard seems to make a number of statements about morality and the nature of language that I can consider both within the context of the novel and the larger context of the world I inhabit.
Here emerges our second difficulty with thinking of truth in literature as a correspondence between language and reality. When a fictional narrator or a fiction character makes a statement that we would consider true to life, the statement made, while written by a real author, does not directly reference the real world. Sentences in literature have their meaning and reference in the context of the fictional world.[i] Captain Ahab’s words of hatred for the White Whale refer to an entity created by Melville. Portia’s exposition on the nature of mercy refers not to mercy in our world, but to mercy in her world, a world created by Shakespeare. What she says may be true to real mercy, but her statements are not directly about real mercy, for the real word in which real mercy exists is not the world of which she speaks. Why do these prepositions to and about matter?[ii] Because if Portia’s statements do not directly refer to mercy in the real world, then it seems that no declaration about mercy in the real world is being made. As a reader, I might speak those beautiful lines about mercy and mean them to refer to real mercy, and in doing so make a declaration, but here it is I who declare, not Portia. Moreover, while we are probably safe to say that Shakespeare believed the words he gave to Portia (and didn’t believe, say, Richard III’s take on conscience), it does not follow logically from his giving the lines to Portia that he himself agreed with those lines. Therefore we cannot logically conclude that Shakespeare was making a declaration about mercy when writing Portia’s words on the matter. If literary works do not make declarations about the real world, is it then accurate on our part to judge the truth of literature on whether its words correspond to reality?
A third difficulty is with the correspondence theory itself. When I consider, for example, whether Treebeard’s philosophy of language is true, I cannot test its correspondence to the reality of language, but at best to an interpretation of the reality of language. In other words, I compare Treebeard’s fictional philosophy of language to philosophy of language in the real world. The question, then, is which understanding of reality should be the standard by which I judge the truth in literature?
These difficulties shouldn’t lead us to abandon the idea that there is truth in literature, but they may prompt us to consider ways other than correspondence that truth functions in the literary work of art.
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[i] Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art. Translated by George G. Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
[ii] Hospers, John. Meaning and Truth in the Arts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948.
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