The difference between fiction and lies

In an average high school literature class, there is an increasing inability to understand fiction. Stories, those timeless entertainments and balm to the weary soul, are becoming foreign to people in a world of facts. High school students can become irate when they learn that Tim O’Brien did not write The Things They Carried following the exact path of personal experience in Vietnam. Other students are inordinately gratified to learn that Ernest Hemingway did not successfully woo the nurse as his protagonist does in A Farewell to Arms. Jammed between sloppy units on poetry and that behemoth “creative non-fiction,” students gleefully pronounce “Gotcha!” when they find some fact in a work of fiction that diverges from things exactly as they happened in real life.

These puerile reactions miss the point. Authors of fiction have no obligation to conform to the facts, nor should they. They are not telling the truth of their own personal experience lived out in war-torn Vietnam or in fledgling towns on the Great Plains. What fiction is presenting is artifice, a constructed world in which things can be different from how they occurred in reality for some particular person in some particular place.

However, fiction is not an exercise in some kind of Platonic noble lie in which untruths are spoken for a desired persuasive result. It’s true, there was a reason that Plato deals so ambiguously with songs and poetry. These deceitful arts can be dangerous, but they are not lying.

The confusion between lies and fiction arises because there is, by necessity, always going to be some intersection between the real world and the constructed realms of imagined stories. Sometimes this overlap is incidental, serving as a place of entry. Other times, as in the novels mentioned above, the similarities between real life and fiction are clearly deliberate. The reason for this is sometimes that the fiction can more accurately convey the experience.

There is nothing compelling about a detailed list of facts and figures. Such a rendering of an event cannot convey the experience of human connection or the passage of years. To achieve this art, there is a process of subtracting and erasing individual details and adding in gestures that evoke the real world even better.

An example of this comes from Agathe Von Trapp’s Memories Before and After the Sound of Music. This interesting little memoir offers quite a different perspective of the famous Von Trapp Family Singers and the step-mother who made them internationally famous. Toward the end of the book, after discussing her mother and father in great detail and the many changes that led their life to a new mother and many world tours as a singing family, Agathe address the musical loosely based on her life.

Agathe is quick to dismiss any romantic fantasies that she, the oldest Von Trapp daughter, had experiences anything like the fictional Liesel who goes romping in the rain and falls in love with a young Nazi. This storyline does not seem to bother Agathe. What does bother her, and even moved her to outraged tears upon first seeing The Sound of Music, was the portrayal of her father.

In the musical, Georg Von Trapp is cold and aloof, appearing so trapped in his grief that he is unable to notice his children. Agathe’s experience of the man was anything but that. She describes a warm and loving father who tirelessly worked to know and love his children. On his deathbed, he even had the chivalry to inquire about Agathe’s new hobby of beekeeping so aware was he of the comings and goings of his children’s lives. He did, Agathe writes, have a boatswain whistle with a tune to summon each child, but it was not the cold, military procedure portrayed in the fictionalized version.

As Agathe continued to travel around the world and be recognized as a member of the Von Trapp family, she was continually met with warmth and admiration by people who saw and loved the film or the musical. She writes:

After meeting so many people over the years who told me how they had derived such great enjoyment and inspiration from the musical and the movie, I finally came to terms with The Sound of Music. I thought, Who am I, then, to criticize this movie? After a long inner struggle, I finally learned to separate the memories of my life from the screenplay. I began to see that while all the details may not be correct, the creators of The Sound of Music were true to the spirit of our family’s story. That freed me from my resentment and made it possible for me to enjoy the play, the movie, and the music as others have. I have even learned to sing and play “Edelweiss”!

Good storytelling is not meant to conceal but to reveal. Where the particulars detract from Truth, the storyteller has the liberty to remove them. Poorly written fiction will often do this clumsily, but that does not mean that storytelling is a pack of lies.