| Wednesday, April 25, 2007 5:14PM | | | | A Kernel of Truth | Posted By: Luke Epplin
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Colum McCann kicked off the event, A Kernel of Truth: History and the Truth of Fiction, with two fantastic quotes, which I’ll attempt to paraphrase. The first is from the great novelist and New Yorker editor (and fellow Illinoisan) William Maxwell: “What we refer confidently to as a memory is really just a form of storytelling that goes on continually in our mind. In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.” The second quotation comes from the esteemed anthropologist Clifford Geertz: “The real is as imagined as the imaginary.”
These quotes cut to the heart of this event: that all history is, in some way, fictional, and that time has a way of distorting and coloring our memories. The panel of writers grappled with this issue for the next ninety minutes, discussing how they balance fiction and nonfiction in their historical novels. The Dutch writer Arthur Japin had an interesting response: he had spent years researching his novel about the 18th century, and realized that, at some point, it’s very possible to invent the truth. That is, one can go through archives and files and historical reports, primary and secondary sources, and document where a certain person was at a certain point in history, constructing a timeline of the person’s life, essentially. But this timeline won’t necessarily indicate how a person changes emotionally, or show why a person made the decisions that he or she made. In such an instance, one can deduce motive or intent and make a case for why certain decisions were made (which is one way of inventing truth), or simply imagine the character living his/her life, re-creating what he or she must have felt or thought, which, it turns out, most of the panelists did to some extent in their works.
One of the panelists, the Spanish novelist Imma Monso, whose works have unfortunately not been translated into English, wrote an autobiographical novel, and remarked that, “I wrote a true story, but it was nevertheless a fiction.” A great deal of time was dedicated to drawing the line between fiction and nonfiction: does such a line exist? Are all memoirs fictional to a large extent? What is the difference between an autobiographical novel and a memoir? Arthur Japin said that such distinctions are unimportant, since all novels deal at least partially with real lives. But the Moroccan writer Laila Lalami disagreed, noting that there is a marked difference between fact and truth: fact deals with concrete events, while truth includes intention and motive, and inevitably carries a political element. These issues never were resolved, of course, but it made for a lively discussion.
One of the most intriguing anecdotes came from the German novelist Michael Wallner. (Full disclosure: I did the final line-edit on Wallner’s novel April in Paris.) His novel is about a German translator in occupied France during World War II who grows disillusioned with his job and dresses up as a Frenchman at night. At a reading that Wallner gave in Cologne, an elderly woman came up to him afterwards and asked: Do you know about my husband? Apparently, her husband was a translator in occupied France who also disguised himself as a Frenchman at night. Of course, Wallner had never met these people, but for him, it was a validation that a degree of truth had seeped into his fiction.
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