How much of a story can you invent before you become a liar?

This piece was in yesterday’s Guardian and follows this piece by David Mitchell from a few months ago.

A good story omits or changes anything that might break the spell before it hits its absolutely-not-natural climax. It’s not a crime to write about a medieval peasant eating a breakfast no medieval peasant would have had. I’m not worried about what you’ve had on your Corne Flaykes, so long as you tell me something I didn’t already know and cram in a few poop jokes and a pun or two.

And then there was this piece in the Boston Globe, about Eben Horsford, inventor of double-acting baking powder and Viking Boston. I didn’t have a clue that I came from a makey-uppy Norumbega until I saw this on the Cartogrammar blog a few months ago. The Globe article makes a point that I like to make about Celtic Ireland. Maybe it didn’t ever properly exist in the Iron Age, but by the 19th century, the construction of that collective historical memory shaped modern Irish identity. It’s not so much a lie as a truthy story.

Where’s the line, then, between fictitious history and historical fiction? And what makes a story true?

At Chaos Thaoghaire, we ask storytellers to be ‘truthy’. If we wanted a list of facts, we’d file that police report, and anyway, Officer, we really were just holding it for a friend, and also, my speedometer is broken and I didn’t see the sign, and MOREOVER, it’s not even loaded! We invite you to change names, dates, identifying details, anything that allows you to get to the greater truth that forms the foundation of any good story.

I’ll be telling a story at the next Chaos Thaoghaire (and I already know which one, thanks to your votes and my lack of faith or interest in the democratic process), and again at the Electric Picnic, but my memory is fuzzy at best, and mostly rubbish. I remember most of the facts, some of them vividly, traumatically, embarrassingly. I remember roughly how long I spent in those woods. I remember how long it took me to deduce that when a man in a car asks you if you’re “working”, he does not mean “Are you in employment generally?” The greater truth at the root of these stories is that what goes in one of my ears comes out of the other in about six shades of prismatic stupid, plus indigo. I used to feel bad filling in the gaps in my memory with what seemed like believable details, but that’s how we shape narratives. It’s not the details that give it meaning. The stories are true, but I can’t tell them as they happened. The only danger is when you confuse the greenhouse with a warm place to live.

Once you get down to the writer’s granular level, it might surprise you how much of non-fiction is invented, and how much of what gets called fiction is a lot truer than anything that relies on verifiable fact. The closer you look, the fuzzier the line between historiography and historical fiction, which is why the Chaosettes are quite happy if what you tell us is a kind of historical fiction. Which is why we love a Hills marathon. Which is why I don’t care if the Vikings didn’t land in Boston a thousand years ago. I like Horsford’s story better than the real one.

I quit a PhD (in archaeology, in case I’m so self-involved that I assumed you already knew) because I’d become the pigskin in a game of politics, but the other truth — the one I am happier to talk about because it doesn’t make me squeeze pint glasses until they shatter — is that I was beginning to have a crisis of faith in our ability to piece together a believable narrative about the past, no matter how many material memes we can get our mitts on. I never thought I’d discover anything major, nor that I was doing anything that would feed the hungry, solve the energy crisis, or heal the bloody rift between Heidi and Lauren, but I never found a comfortable vantage point.

It’s not that the facts aren’t true, it’s that I was arranging facts that weren’t mine, and I was more interested in the stories of the present and the recent past. Archaeology is like herpes or malaria: you’re infected forever, and you just learn to manage the flare-ups. But I stumbled into journalism and Chaos Thaoghaire as different ways of getting to the truth, demanding different forms of honesty and integrity. I’m much more comfortable crossing the rope bridge that is the shaping of non-linear memory and experience into narrative that serves our own ends, especially since Chaos Thaoghaire stories are free of the need for fact-checking (although I wish people didn’t also apply this to journalism).

I like this recent exploration of what historical fiction does, and the way these invented histories are being taken more seriously, partly because I relate it to the way we tell stories at Chaos Thaoghaire. We’re distinctly American oversharers, and influenced by the very Irish way of telling stories, with embellishment and fabrication. With a combination of historical fiction and fictional history, a series of carefully selected half-truths, lies, and unverifiable details, someday we’ll arrive at an honest story.

But it leaves us with another question: how much truth can you tell before you’re intruding on someone else’s experience? I guess I’ll find out when you punch me in the face or when Heidi and Lauren finally rear up and rip out each other’s vertebrae.

Please don’t punch me in the face.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts