My mental circus, inside and out.

digression

I had a conversation a while back with some published memoirists, which is one of those genres that has an uneasy relationship with the truth.  They freely admitted that they embellish the truth for effect; some of them flat out lie.  I think there's a lot of ground between a truth and a lie, and all shades of stretching, adding, embellishing, selecting,  and narratizing in between.  The Jesuists believe that the only lie is one you actually speak, so that lies of omission are not included.  Sissela Bok agrees, though she adds that any spoken lie, even lying that you think someone's hair looks great when it's really awful, is unethical.  Mark Twain, on the other hand, thought that lying was the foundation of all civilized society, and it has been argued that the foundation for consciousness is lying: junior male gorillas and females sneak out of the range of the silverback to mate, and the very act of sneaking is predictive, abstract consciousness.

There are hidden emotions in any telling, even the most seemingly objective ones,  that further shade the landscape. The memoirists agreed that while they felt they could write subjectively, even dishonestly, about their own lives, they had to keep fidelity to the broader scope of history.  For example, they couldn't write that the Days of Rage were in 1972 rather than 1969.  They had to be faithful to public history, the accepted factoids of collective history. 

Putting the outright lie aside, is any telling of history free of imagination? Is the objective voice rather a pose? For example, it is ok to psychoanalyze historical figures, like Hitler or Stalin, but not ok to represent their thoughts in a creative voice, even though psychoanalysis is pretty much doing the same thing.

My attitude towards the practices of history and historians is awash in cynicism these days, but then all cynics are just disappointed romantics and utopianists.  An acquaintance of mine, who has known me for many years, asked me the other day, "What happened to you? Why are you suddenly so practical and hard-headed? We always thought you lived somewhere up in the clouds."  He was very approving of this, but I do miss those clouds sometimes.

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 07, 2005 18:43 | link | comments (4)

Comments:

#1  07 June 2005 - 19:06

 

Howard Zinn ruined us all : )

InMyLife

#2  08 June 2005 - 06:13

 

Emma:

I was browsing your blog just before you posted me. Fascinating.

I've linked you in my sidebar on my blog. Perhaps you'll do the same for me?

Chantal.

"I Was Hitler's Wet Nurse"

http://iwashitlerswetnurse.blogspot.com

Anonymous

#3  08 June 2005 - 06:16

 

Silly me! I see you already have linked me. I missed it first time round.

Thank you!

Chantal.

"I Was Hitler's Wet Nurse"

http://iwashitlerswetnurse.blogspot.com

Anonymous

#4  16 June 2009 - 07:42

 

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