A Hundred Thousand Shapes and a Limitless Field
“What is truth? I don’t know and I’m sorry I brought it up.” – Edward Abbey
In this world of shadows, there are those who seek truth in many ways: through philosophy, religion, and, occasionally through art, a category in which writing is often included. The question of what truth is, as put forward at least as far back as the writings of Plato and the Sophists, of which Protagoras (490-420 BCE) was perhaps one of the first, has continued to spur much debate over its definition and even its existence for centuries, only to remain unanswered definitively. Truth is one of the many themes that surfaces repeatedly in the writings of Dacia Maraini, and is also touched upon by Morazzoni as related to invention.
The initial debate over truth, boiled down to its essence, was between Plato and his followers and the Sophists. Plato asserted that absolute truth exists as an independent entity, external to men’s minds, and not subject to the manipulations of language. The Sophists, on the other hand, believed that there is no single, final truth, but instead that a profusion of truths exist due to the fact that language makes its own reality and therefore truth can be invented. For Plato truth was objective, but for the Sophists the truth was subjective and subject to individual interpretation. When asked “Ma esistono delle verità assolute?” Maraini gave a Sophist answer: “Sì, le verità dei fatti. Che però vanno interpretati e a quel punto naturalmente le verità si complicano e si moltiplicano.” (Maraini, DQ, 93). This debate, tied in with the discussion of what normalcy is, is one of the main themes in the Famiglia played out between the father and his children Millo and Anna. Like the Sophists, the father sees the multiplicitous nature of the truth: “Io non ho paura della verità. Solo che per me è una cosa e per te un’altra” (Maraini, 26), whereas the children are on the same side as Plato. Millo responds “Non ci sono due verità. Ce n’è una sola” and also Anna says, “C’è una sola verità” (27).
To bring literature to the discussion of truth complicates matters. It would seem at first glance that fiction, by definition, could not be considered truth but its apparent opposite: falsehood, or invention. For the artist Picasso, falsehood and art are the same thing, used to manipulate people into seeing the truth. In this way, art is not unlike the act of seduction. Mariani admits, “Io cerco di sedurre con le parole” (Maraini, DQ, 81). Seduction is, by definition, a form of highly psychological deception used to have influence and gain power over others through persuasion. Or as Campbell said, “to seduce, of course, suggests an element of artifice and devious allure, of pleasures that have an undertone of the illicit, of Circe-like dissembling and the casting of spells over the rational mind” (Campbell, 56). In this light, if literature is deceptive by nature, with the power to seduce and influence others, it would also be inherently subtle and underhanded and therefore have the potential of being very dangerous.
However, as false as fiction may be on the surface, there is also “poetic” or “aesthetic” truth to be considered. The importance of the expression of truth through art was a crucial element of the artistic movement of modernism. “The emergence of modernism, a movement that lasted for more than half a century, coincided with a time of widespread disillusion with political action. Modernism tended to prize the arts as superior to the sciences; what is more, the arts aspired to be at least the equal of the Philistine world of politics and commerce in their power to remake society. Modernism was a lineal descendent of the art for art’s sake cult of the late Victorian era, one of those practitioners, Walter Pater, talked about ‘aesthetic truth,’ a new sort of veracity fit for a world of civilized artifice, a world where the given truths of nature recede and the inventions of culture require us to search for truth by an entirely different route.” (Campbell, 13). “When the modernists stake their claim as serious artists, as élites with a message that the audience may not heed, but that they ignore at their peril, they use ‘fiction’ to refer to what they create, but they emphasize that their task is to tell the truth” (lam, 271).
What kind of truth are we talking about? It is not the kind of empirical truth based on scientific fact, but some other. The sort of truth that the modernists sought after was a more vague and slippery thing, not necessarily based in fact but true in the sense that their work was meaningful. In general, “Literature is held to present some kind of truth, to yield some sort of insight, which makes it cognitively valuable. The ‘truth’ of literature is located on different levels and explained in different ways by different theoretical traditions” (lam, 289). Arnold “suggested that while the illusions of art are not true in the sense of being factually correct, they are genuine because their existence is a meaningful fact in our lives” (Campbell, 281). Nietzsche recognized the value of art, but did not consider the truths presented in them to be as profound as most modernists considered them to be. “He did say that art is only possible as a lie. But these lies are of a special kind: they are not really intended to deceive us. Art treats illusion as illusion, so that in a sense it is sincere. Yet its truth is a surface truth” (Campbell, 168).
However, one problem for the artist is whether it is even possible to attain the truth. Gardner says “All serious artists today… face the impossibility of saying anything, though one knows, or at certain times briefly imagines, that there is something profoundly true that, somehow, cannot be said” (Campbell, 79). Even during the modernist movement, this problem is clearly evident. “In the modernist novel, lies and liars proliferate, reflecting a deep suspicion of the value of truth in its literal, public form. Obscurity… renders suspect the notion that truth is single or simple, that it can be communicated at all through the suspect vehicle of language, or even that it is desirable to do so” (Campbell, 13). Wittgenstein devoted much time to the problem of language, claiming that seeking and speaking the truth is difficult due to how language tricks us, language being separated into a series of ‘language games’ which each possessed their own peculiar kind of truth, but only within context. Problems of speaking the truth arise when words are used in the wrong game, out of context. Maraini touched upon this when she said, “Non sono così pazza da pensare che la sincerità sia da praticare in assoluto, con inconscienza. Si diventa crudeli e arroganti. Nei pensieri bisogna essere sinceri, nelle parole spesso non è possibile.” (Maraini, DQ, 82).
Maraini makes her point of the difficulty of language, but she also makes the point, like the modernists that truth may not be the prize we think it is. We are social creatures who, in order to get along, must submit to the conventions of our society or risk ostracization and alienation. It is one thing to be truthful when the consequences are rewarding, but quite another when cruelty is the result. “Under the contradictory conception of truth fostered by the authority of literature, truth is at once the grim truth of actuality – which everyone can see – and the deep truth of grim reality – which everyone avoids seeing” (Quinney, 60). According to Weil, only in literature can all that is denied by the world be brought to light. For this reason, in her writing she took “the side of the outcast, despairing and disenfranchised” (Quinney, 13), those who are intimate with suffering. For Weil, the only deep truth could come from “dispossession, loss, and solitude, the knowledge of the world’s emptiness and God’s absence…the experience of ‘the void,’ the ‘dark night of the soul’” (Quinney, 14). Weil’s version of the truth is inherently dark and cruel, which she connects to death: “To love the truth means to endure the void, and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death” (Quinney, 27). Weil sees the dark side of truth everywhere, even pointing out how in Shakespeare’s comedies, the truth is never spoken, except by the fool, whom everyone ignores. Maraini’s Millo is Weil’s fool: his family doesn’t take his aspirations as a writer seriously, and Anna refers to him as “impotente” and “non capace di fare niente” (25). But Millo wants to write about the family’s suffering in order not only to denounce them “come esempi di vite sbagliate, cretine, fallite e inutile” but also to liberate himself from them through the truth: “Solo dicendo tutto ci si libera. Dirò tutto e farò una cosa che cambierà il mondo” (28); un mondo che fa schifo. Along these lines, in her book on tragic literature, Quinney explains the appeal that tragedy has over us when it comes to truth. “the literature most likely to be seen as ‘deep’ or ‘real’ or ‘true’ is tragic literature – not only tragedies per se but works of all genres that seem bent on impressing us with a dark view… A more optimistic view, indeed any view that resists this one, is represented as willful illusion. These works [tragic ones] derive conviction from confirming our fears; to use a contemporary dialect, they are demystifying. Their pessimism, gravity, and glamour go hand in hand. For underlying this hierarchy of value is a concept of truth’s province, as assumption that it will turn out to be just what we would not wish, something sad and disheartening. Literature that corroborates this sense of truth is held in the highest esteem” (Quinney, xv-xvi). The family’s truth is not positive or amusing. For the father, his wife was “divertente e ipocrita” (29), her “quante bugie” being the cause of her being divertente. His truth-spewing children are instead “gente insopportabile” (29).
Part of the problem of tying truth to literature is the underlying belief that truth is a given and that art, created out of nothing and therefore an invention, is inherently false. However, it has been argued that a piece of fiction will “never be entirely fictitious in the sense of there being nothing anywhere that corresponds to it in any way: there will indeed always be things that correspond to its every detail, somewhere, in some way. In short, all its constituent parts will be drawn from reality. It is their non-occurrence together, in that combination, that constitutes the fiction” (lam, 292). Furthermore, “the classical defense of fiction has been, of course, that fiction is a mimesis or representation of actuality, or more generally an allegory of the truth” (Smyth, 35). It is interesting to note, however, that “The love of mimesis is a tautological phenomenon in which the truth held to be mimetically reproduced by literature actually begins in literature and will be apprehended everywhere as a kind of truth wandering at large” (Quinney, 58). This is the poetic truth that many artists have striven for: a truth which the author himself invents and which becomes endowed with its own brand of authority. But to say that art is merely a representation of reality has the implicit implication that representations are not truths but false inventions. Furthermore, “art… tends to throw the concept of truth into confusion. It sanctions possibilities, expands the store of meanings, uses untruth to deepen our understanding of what life is all about” (Campbell, 57). As Picasso said, “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the untruthfulness of his lies” (Cambell, 214).
Therefore, the grand designs of the artist to portray truth through the falsity of invention take precedence over scientific fact. But even in nature, “the impulse to transcend mere literal fact occurs throughout nature. Quite humble biological organisms evolve as a semblance, an alias; a pictorial rendering of some other, less vulnerable organism. Might we not say, for example, that species of Cycloptera, insects that resemble leaves, trompe d’oeil masterpieces which might have been painted by a seventeenth-century Dutch master, perfect in color shape and size, even complete with imitation veins and fungus spots, are works of art?” (Campbell, 15). In this way, for better or worse, deception is scientific fact, an integral part of nature and an indispensable feature of life, and, also, all art, not just modernist works.
Tied into modernism is a subgenre called metabiography, which has truth-seeking as one of its aims. “When art takes hold of history, it may rearrange it in order to liberate ideas more illuminating than those life grudgingly dispenses” (Campbell, 12). For example, metabiography “puts Freud in a room with Salvador Dali and has Orson Welles converse with Vivien Leigh. Though these encounters may have taken place under other circumstances, facts can always do with a little improving. In metabiography, we are told, ‘lives are transformed, abstracted and mythologised in pursuit of more essential truths” (Campbell, 12-3). “Veronica” falls under this category. “Veronica, meretrice e scrittora is not meant to be an investigation of the ‘historical’ Veronica Franco, yet Maraini’s presentation does justice to the complexities of Franco’s life and work as an ‘honest courtesan’ in sixteenth-century Venice” (Carù, 180). Mariani blends fact with fiction in her play. Franco really did receive a visit from the king, and really was involved with Marco Vernier, among other historical facts, and although Franco never suffered from the plague, Venice was devastated by it in 1575: one example of how “facts were improved” in order to arrive at “more essential truths.” In “Veronica,” the tale unfolds based on the untruth of Veronica’s disease, without which the relationship between Veronica and the nun could not have been developed. In “Invenzione”, Morazzoni uses the same method of altering history, using real people such as the Victorian art critic (among other things) John Ruskin, and Queen Mathilde, who, in Morazzoni’s book is credited with the design and creation of the Bayeux tapestry, which, although a possibility, is generally not the accepted belief of most historians, who usually attribute the commission of the tapestry to the Bishop Odo.
It would be too simplistic to interpret “Veronica” merely as a metabiographical work in pursuit of more essential truths. Another factor which must be taken into consideration is Maraini’s roots as a female writer and as a feminist. “[Maraini] demands for women the right to be protagonists in the historical process from which they have heretofore been excluded” (Amoia, 119). Mariani uses the oxymoron of the “honest courtesan,” a character who writes poetry in a world dominated by men. Historically, “Il pensiero femminile è stato svuotato di significato e le donne sono state spinte ad esprimersi sopratutto con il corpo” (Maraini, 15). Veronica will not idly sit by and be silenced, so she expresses herself through writing, which is, for both character and author, a transgressive act. Moreover, much emphasis is placed on the fact that Veronica always speaks the truth, and is even renowned for this. When Enrico, the king of France, pays her a visit, he remarks that he heard that “più che la bellezza è straordinaria in lei la sincerità intelligente” (Maraini, 23). Veronica’s friend Gaspara that “una cortegiana che dice la verità non sta né in cielo né in terra” (Maraini, 15). Not only is Veronica a woman who transgresses by writing, she transgresses further by telling the truth and, in her case, the term “honest courtesan” is no longer an oxymoron. Morazzoni also rewrites the past, for similar motives, giving her female characters a means of expression, not through the word, but through the visual arts: the act of embroidery. Both Morazzoni and Maraini are able to invent “truth” by writing, or rewriting an untold and thus forgotten history. By supplying women protagonists with unusual methods for expression brings the problem of women’s expression to light, while these writers manage to express themselves and reveal deeper truths of women’s existence.
One could read historical accounts about Veronica Franco, or even about the Bayeux tapestry if one so desired. However, the attraction of basic facts is nothing like the powerful sway that literature holds over us. Modernism: “suggests that literature, music, and painting may be as potent an influence in the shaping of history as economics and politics. Modernism showed that art on its own can be a world-changing, mind-altering force” (Campbell, 204). Millo wants to change the world via truth, which gives him a sense of power and freedom; he calls himself “diverso” because he is “un uomo che si esprime” (28). The modernists also “encouraged the provocative idea that the artificial is a source of truths that are more nourishing, more sustaining and interesting than the truths of the natural, and that the two are incommensurable” (Campbell, 220). In “Veronica,” this debate over which is more poetically nourishing takes place between two of Veronica’s guests, Maffio and Domenico Vernier. Maffio claims that his poetry talks about “creature di carne” while Domenico’s speaks only of “idee.” To which Domenico replies, “Il vostro mondo fatto di carne e di sangue è noiosissimo e prevedibile. Tutti siamo fatti di carne e sangue… per non parlare delle lagrime… a me interessa quell’altro mondo, fatto di invenzioni e stravaganze, di rivelazioni e delirii. Un mondo in cui le montagne sono di seta, il cielo è di carta, le nuvole di bambagia, i fiumi di vetro, i laghi di specchi spezzati… In quanto ai sentimenti… essi sono l’essenza più raffinata del più completo assoluto artificio…” (43). The modernists claimed that “The artificial is ‘truer’ than the natural, because the artificial is what we would prefer ourselves, our world, to be; what it is, in imagination” (Campbell, 303). As far as the modernists are concerned, fantasy has taken the place of fact, both scientific and historical. Invention, as Domenico says, is preferable, anzi better, than the reality of flesh and blood.
A question to pose at this point might be about the differences between historical fiction and other types of literature with regard to the truth. What effects does knowing that a book, movie, or television program is based on true events have on our perception of the work? Does our perception change when we know, such as in “Veronica”, that, although based a real person, the work is a pure invention of the author as she claims in her introduction? History has its own authority over us and only until recently, when writers such as sociologist James W. Loewen with his book Lies My Teacher Told Me have urged us to question the authority of history textbooks in which he points out numerous gross errors of misinformation and nationalistic propaganda, we have generally taken historical accounts at face value. However, historians are only human, and not completely infallible sources of authority. “the fictional quality of historical accounts manifests itself in several ways. First of all, any historical account involves suppression, subordination, and the highlighting or foregrounding of certain elements of the story. Some elements are given special attention, some are simply not mentioned at all” (lam, 304). “If historical accounts are true at all, they are true in the same way that literary works are true. They are then not true of the world, but have some kind of imaginative truth, a truth made by human imaginative construction” (lam, 306).
In Morazzoni we see this idea that truth can be created, from the title to the citation of Ruskin at the end of the novel: “We can imagine falsities, we can compose falsehoods, but only truth can be invented.” A central theme in postmodern thought, like for the Sophists, is the relativity of truth, the theory that truth is produced rather than discovered. Given the scope of the human imagination, an infinite number of truths may be invented and “…the version of reality we prefer can be substituted for the historically accurate one because it is more interesting. Once it is accepted that there are ‘different kinds’ of truth, some superior to others, then truth acquires the advantage of falsehood in being multiple, not single. It is hard to distinguish one from the other” (Campbell, 265). Morazzoni’s young queen seeks to create a new language, “una scrittura leggibile a tutti, e tutti vi si sarebbero accostati con emozione, commozione. Immaginava un indefinito libro universale, perfetto, da cui nessuna lingua fosse esclusa, a cui nessun orecchio rimanesse sordo” (8-9). For Morazzoni, perfection is equivalent to truth. This idea is reflected elsewhere in the novel with John Ruskin, who believes that “il segno dell’onestà dell’uomo, quando tende al compimento di quel che in vita non raggiugerà mai” (75), that is, perfection, aware of his own imperfections. In the tapestry, too, perfection is the goal unattained. One night the queen fill in a small piece of the tapestry, filling in the rudder of a boat which consequently lies over the line of the wave and not under it, and only in the light of the arriving morning does she become aware of the imperfection. In postmodernism, truth is no longer objective but subjective, which means that “man is the measure of all things. That was the Protagoran thesis. It does not mean that each individual is the final arbiter. To a sick person a certain food may taste unpleasant, but to a healthy palate it is most appetizing. The sick man is not false in his judgment of the food, any more than the well person is speaking the absolute truth. Put simply, it is ‘better’ to be healthy and nourished than sick and depleted. Life just works that way” (Campbell, 63-4). In the “Famiglia,” this thought is echoed by the father when speaking to his son Millo: “Per me, per esempio, la verità è che sono un uomo malato, malato e impedito. Tutto il resto prende il colore e il sapore di questa malattia. […] Tu invece vedi le cose attraverso la tua salute. Tutto ti appare diverso, ribaltato. […] Ma la mia verità è per me, è piú vera della tua e in assoluto, la mia equivale alla tua” (Maraini, 27).
In postmodernism, then, art (invention) and truth become the same thing, both subject to interpretation. This lack of distinction can be seen in Morazzoni’s choice of words in reference to truth and imagination: “lavorare di fantasia” (20) and “lo sforzo di verità” (91), putting them of the same level of fatica. “Even in the field of psychology, “there seems no doubt but that a well-constructed story possesses a kind of narrative truth that is real and immediate and carries an important significance for the process of therapeutic change” (Spense, 21). However, “Freud treated a patient’s narrative account of his or her life history somewhat as Nietzsche the philologist had scrutinized ancient manuscripts, taking nothing for granted, nothing on trust. Each reading was an interpretation, one of many possible interpretations, never final. Likewise, Freud believed that a dream is always open to a more complete interpretation, as are works of literature” (Campbell, 189). Speaking of the rapporto tra la narrazione e la realtà, Maraini expresses this subjectivity of interpretaion: “È un rapporto complesso, dialettico, non di imitazione come pensavano certi naturalisti, è un moto ondoso, fluttuante, tutto in divenire. La scrittura ci forza a scendere nel profondo della realtà per poi uscirne, attribuendole qualcosa di nostro, di assolutamente personale. Non esiste una conoscenza, una sensibilità, una sensualità che non siano legate al reale; anche il più astratto, il più metafisico degli scrittori agisce inseguendo una credibilità, che non è quella della realtà visibile, ma quella che nasce dall’interno di una narrativa riconoscibile” (Maraini, 7-8).
However, it has been argued that “‘poetic’ truth is a truth that does not rest on analysis: of course analysis is possible and certainly people try and sometimes are convincing, but the analysis comes after the event and the event is a perfectly valid experience independent of any analysis. ‘Poetic’ truth does not come upon the viewer as a result of reading what critics say, nor does it come step-by-step in the manner of reasoned calculation. It comes all at once, whole and entire, endowed, so to speak, with its own authority” (Bailey, 21). The authority of literature is not the same at the authority we tend to invest in historical accounts. According to Quinney, “truthfulness – the grim sound of truth – has its own power of persuasion, and though its floating authority is not that of empirical truth, it cannot but be felt as if it were” (Quinney, 59). Thus, each psychologist, each reader, each viewer of a piece of art brings his own experience, perspective and desires to the interpretation of a dream, a text, or even a tapestry, making it a subjective and entirely personal act, as Maraini has suggested. What strikes me as deep and profoundly true may not strike you in the same manner, even if, for example, we arrive at a text coming from the same background. The words that seduce me may leave you cold, and what has meaning for you may be something I cannot recognize and thus has no meaning for me. Still, the debate over whether truth exists, whether or not it can be expressed, whether art is true or false or both, remains, and there is, as of this moment, no absolute conclusion, except to say that everything I have written here is absolutely true. Or maybe not.
Bibliography
Amoia, Alba della Fazia. Women on the Italian Literary Scene: A Panorama. Troy, New York: The Whitson Publishing Company, 1992.
Bailey, F.G. The Prevalence of Deceit. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991
Campbell, Jeremy. The Liar’s Tale: A History of Falsehood. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Carù, Paola. “Vocal Maginality: Dacia Maraini’s Veronica Franco.” The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini. Ed. Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld and Ada Testaferri. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2000.
Gaglianone, Paola. Conversazione con Dacia Maraini: Il piacere di scrivere. Roma: Òmicron Casa Editrice, 1995.
Lamarque, Peter & Stein Haugom Olsen. Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Maraini, Dacia, “Veronica, meretrice e scrittora.” Veronica, meretrice e scrittora, La terza moglie di Mayer, Camille. Milano: BUR La Scala, 2001.
---. “La famiglia normale.” Fare teatro, 1966-2000. Milano: Rizzoli, 2000.
---. Dizionarietto Quotidiano: da “amare” a “zonzo” 229 voci raccolte da Gioconda Marinelli. Milano: Saggi Tascabili Bompiani, 1997.
Morazzoni, Marta. L’Invenzione della verità. Milano: TEADUE, 1995.
Quinney, Laura. Literary Power and the Criteria of Truth. Gainsville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1995.
Smyth, John Vignaux. The Habit of Lying: Sacrificial Studies in Literature, Philosophy, and Fashion Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
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Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.
In this world of shadows, there are those who seek truth in many ways: through philosophy, religion, and, occasionally through art, a category in which writing is often included. The question of what truth is, as put forward at least as far back as the writings of Plato and the Sophists, of which Protagoras (490-420 BCE) was perhaps one of the first, has continued to spur much debate over its definition and even its existence for centuries, only to remain unanswered definitively. Truth is one of the many themes that surfaces repeatedly in the writings of Dacia Maraini, and is also touched upon by Morazzoni as related to invention.
The initial debate over truth, boiled down to its essence, was between Plato and his followers and the Sophists. Plato asserted that absolute truth exists as an independent entity, external to men’s minds, and not subject to the manipulations of language. The Sophists, on the other hand, believed that there is no single, final truth, but instead that a profusion of truths exist due to the fact that language makes its own reality and therefore truth can be invented. For Plato truth was objective, but for the Sophists the truth was subjective and subject to individual interpretation. When asked “Ma esistono delle verità assolute?” Maraini gave a Sophist answer: “Sì, le verità dei fatti. Che però vanno interpretati e a quel punto naturalmente le verità si complicano e si moltiplicano.” (Maraini, DQ, 93). This debate, tied in with the discussion of what normalcy is, is one of the main themes in the Famiglia played out between the father and his children Millo and Anna. Like the Sophists, the father sees the multiplicitous nature of the truth: “Io non ho paura della verità. Solo che per me è una cosa e per te un’altra” (Maraini, 26), whereas the children are on the same side as Plato. Millo responds “Non ci sono due verità. Ce n’è una sola” and also Anna says, “C’è una sola verità” (27).
To bring literature to the discussion of truth complicates matters. It would seem at first glance that fiction, by definition, could not be considered truth but its apparent opposite: falsehood, or invention. For the artist Picasso, falsehood and art are the same thing, used to manipulate people into seeing the truth. In this way, art is not unlike the act of seduction. Mariani admits, “Io cerco di sedurre con le parole” (Maraini, DQ, 81). Seduction is, by definition, a form of highly psychological deception used to have influence and gain power over others through persuasion. Or as Campbell said, “to seduce, of course, suggests an element of artifice and devious allure, of pleasures that have an undertone of the illicit, of Circe-like dissembling and the casting of spells over the rational mind” (Campbell, 56). In this light, if literature is deceptive by nature, with the power to seduce and influence others, it would also be inherently subtle and underhanded and therefore have the potential of being very dangerous.
However, as false as fiction may be on the surface, there is also “poetic” or “aesthetic” truth to be considered. The importance of the expression of truth through art was a crucial element of the artistic movement of modernism. “The emergence of modernism, a movement that lasted for more than half a century, coincided with a time of widespread disillusion with political action. Modernism tended to prize the arts as superior to the sciences; what is more, the arts aspired to be at least the equal of the Philistine world of politics and commerce in their power to remake society. Modernism was a lineal descendent of the art for art’s sake cult of the late Victorian era, one of those practitioners, Walter Pater, talked about ‘aesthetic truth,’ a new sort of veracity fit for a world of civilized artifice, a world where the given truths of nature recede and the inventions of culture require us to search for truth by an entirely different route.” (Campbell, 13). “When the modernists stake their claim as serious artists, as élites with a message that the audience may not heed, but that they ignore at their peril, they use ‘fiction’ to refer to what they create, but they emphasize that their task is to tell the truth” (lam, 271).
What kind of truth are we talking about? It is not the kind of empirical truth based on scientific fact, but some other. The sort of truth that the modernists sought after was a more vague and slippery thing, not necessarily based in fact but true in the sense that their work was meaningful. In general, “Literature is held to present some kind of truth, to yield some sort of insight, which makes it cognitively valuable. The ‘truth’ of literature is located on different levels and explained in different ways by different theoretical traditions” (lam, 289). Arnold “suggested that while the illusions of art are not true in the sense of being factually correct, they are genuine because their existence is a meaningful fact in our lives” (Campbell, 281). Nietzsche recognized the value of art, but did not consider the truths presented in them to be as profound as most modernists considered them to be. “He did say that art is only possible as a lie. But these lies are of a special kind: they are not really intended to deceive us. Art treats illusion as illusion, so that in a sense it is sincere. Yet its truth is a surface truth” (Campbell, 168).
However, one problem for the artist is whether it is even possible to attain the truth. Gardner says “All serious artists today… face the impossibility of saying anything, though one knows, or at certain times briefly imagines, that there is something profoundly true that, somehow, cannot be said” (Campbell, 79). Even during the modernist movement, this problem is clearly evident. “In the modernist novel, lies and liars proliferate, reflecting a deep suspicion of the value of truth in its literal, public form. Obscurity… renders suspect the notion that truth is single or simple, that it can be communicated at all through the suspect vehicle of language, or even that it is desirable to do so” (Campbell, 13). Wittgenstein devoted much time to the problem of language, claiming that seeking and speaking the truth is difficult due to how language tricks us, language being separated into a series of ‘language games’ which each possessed their own peculiar kind of truth, but only within context. Problems of speaking the truth arise when words are used in the wrong game, out of context. Maraini touched upon this when she said, “Non sono così pazza da pensare che la sincerità sia da praticare in assoluto, con inconscienza. Si diventa crudeli e arroganti. Nei pensieri bisogna essere sinceri, nelle parole spesso non è possibile.” (Maraini, DQ, 82).
Maraini makes her point of the difficulty of language, but she also makes the point, like the modernists that truth may not be the prize we think it is. We are social creatures who, in order to get along, must submit to the conventions of our society or risk ostracization and alienation. It is one thing to be truthful when the consequences are rewarding, but quite another when cruelty is the result. “Under the contradictory conception of truth fostered by the authority of literature, truth is at once the grim truth of actuality – which everyone can see – and the deep truth of grim reality – which everyone avoids seeing” (Quinney, 60). According to Weil, only in literature can all that is denied by the world be brought to light. For this reason, in her writing she took “the side of the outcast, despairing and disenfranchised” (Quinney, 13), those who are intimate with suffering. For Weil, the only deep truth could come from “dispossession, loss, and solitude, the knowledge of the world’s emptiness and God’s absence…the experience of ‘the void,’ the ‘dark night of the soul’” (Quinney, 14). Weil’s version of the truth is inherently dark and cruel, which she connects to death: “To love the truth means to endure the void, and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death” (Quinney, 27). Weil sees the dark side of truth everywhere, even pointing out how in Shakespeare’s comedies, the truth is never spoken, except by the fool, whom everyone ignores. Maraini’s Millo is Weil’s fool: his family doesn’t take his aspirations as a writer seriously, and Anna refers to him as “impotente” and “non capace di fare niente” (25). But Millo wants to write about the family’s suffering in order not only to denounce them “come esempi di vite sbagliate, cretine, fallite e inutile” but also to liberate himself from them through the truth: “Solo dicendo tutto ci si libera. Dirò tutto e farò una cosa che cambierà il mondo” (28); un mondo che fa schifo. Along these lines, in her book on tragic literature, Quinney explains the appeal that tragedy has over us when it comes to truth. “the literature most likely to be seen as ‘deep’ or ‘real’ or ‘true’ is tragic literature – not only tragedies per se but works of all genres that seem bent on impressing us with a dark view… A more optimistic view, indeed any view that resists this one, is represented as willful illusion. These works [tragic ones] derive conviction from confirming our fears; to use a contemporary dialect, they are demystifying. Their pessimism, gravity, and glamour go hand in hand. For underlying this hierarchy of value is a concept of truth’s province, as assumption that it will turn out to be just what we would not wish, something sad and disheartening. Literature that corroborates this sense of truth is held in the highest esteem” (Quinney, xv-xvi). The family’s truth is not positive or amusing. For the father, his wife was “divertente e ipocrita” (29), her “quante bugie” being the cause of her being divertente. His truth-spewing children are instead “gente insopportabile” (29).
Part of the problem of tying truth to literature is the underlying belief that truth is a given and that art, created out of nothing and therefore an invention, is inherently false. However, it has been argued that a piece of fiction will “never be entirely fictitious in the sense of there being nothing anywhere that corresponds to it in any way: there will indeed always be things that correspond to its every detail, somewhere, in some way. In short, all its constituent parts will be drawn from reality. It is their non-occurrence together, in that combination, that constitutes the fiction” (lam, 292). Furthermore, “the classical defense of fiction has been, of course, that fiction is a mimesis or representation of actuality, or more generally an allegory of the truth” (Smyth, 35). It is interesting to note, however, that “The love of mimesis is a tautological phenomenon in which the truth held to be mimetically reproduced by literature actually begins in literature and will be apprehended everywhere as a kind of truth wandering at large” (Quinney, 58). This is the poetic truth that many artists have striven for: a truth which the author himself invents and which becomes endowed with its own brand of authority. But to say that art is merely a representation of reality has the implicit implication that representations are not truths but false inventions. Furthermore, “art… tends to throw the concept of truth into confusion. It sanctions possibilities, expands the store of meanings, uses untruth to deepen our understanding of what life is all about” (Campbell, 57). As Picasso said, “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the untruthfulness of his lies” (Cambell, 214).
Therefore, the grand designs of the artist to portray truth through the falsity of invention take precedence over scientific fact. But even in nature, “the impulse to transcend mere literal fact occurs throughout nature. Quite humble biological organisms evolve as a semblance, an alias; a pictorial rendering of some other, less vulnerable organism. Might we not say, for example, that species of Cycloptera, insects that resemble leaves, trompe d’oeil masterpieces which might have been painted by a seventeenth-century Dutch master, perfect in color shape and size, even complete with imitation veins and fungus spots, are works of art?” (Campbell, 15). In this way, for better or worse, deception is scientific fact, an integral part of nature and an indispensable feature of life, and, also, all art, not just modernist works.
Tied into modernism is a subgenre called metabiography, which has truth-seeking as one of its aims. “When art takes hold of history, it may rearrange it in order to liberate ideas more illuminating than those life grudgingly dispenses” (Campbell, 12). For example, metabiography “puts Freud in a room with Salvador Dali and has Orson Welles converse with Vivien Leigh. Though these encounters may have taken place under other circumstances, facts can always do with a little improving. In metabiography, we are told, ‘lives are transformed, abstracted and mythologised in pursuit of more essential truths” (Campbell, 12-3). “Veronica” falls under this category. “Veronica, meretrice e scrittora is not meant to be an investigation of the ‘historical’ Veronica Franco, yet Maraini’s presentation does justice to the complexities of Franco’s life and work as an ‘honest courtesan’ in sixteenth-century Venice” (Carù, 180). Mariani blends fact with fiction in her play. Franco really did receive a visit from the king, and really was involved with Marco Vernier, among other historical facts, and although Franco never suffered from the plague, Venice was devastated by it in 1575: one example of how “facts were improved” in order to arrive at “more essential truths.” In “Veronica,” the tale unfolds based on the untruth of Veronica’s disease, without which the relationship between Veronica and the nun could not have been developed. In “Invenzione”, Morazzoni uses the same method of altering history, using real people such as the Victorian art critic (among other things) John Ruskin, and Queen Mathilde, who, in Morazzoni’s book is credited with the design and creation of the Bayeux tapestry, which, although a possibility, is generally not the accepted belief of most historians, who usually attribute the commission of the tapestry to the Bishop Odo.
It would be too simplistic to interpret “Veronica” merely as a metabiographical work in pursuit of more essential truths. Another factor which must be taken into consideration is Maraini’s roots as a female writer and as a feminist. “[Maraini] demands for women the right to be protagonists in the historical process from which they have heretofore been excluded” (Amoia, 119). Mariani uses the oxymoron of the “honest courtesan,” a character who writes poetry in a world dominated by men. Historically, “Il pensiero femminile è stato svuotato di significato e le donne sono state spinte ad esprimersi sopratutto con il corpo” (Maraini, 15). Veronica will not idly sit by and be silenced, so she expresses herself through writing, which is, for both character and author, a transgressive act. Moreover, much emphasis is placed on the fact that Veronica always speaks the truth, and is even renowned for this. When Enrico, the king of France, pays her a visit, he remarks that he heard that “più che la bellezza è straordinaria in lei la sincerità intelligente” (Maraini, 23). Veronica’s friend Gaspara that “una cortegiana che dice la verità non sta né in cielo né in terra” (Maraini, 15). Not only is Veronica a woman who transgresses by writing, she transgresses further by telling the truth and, in her case, the term “honest courtesan” is no longer an oxymoron. Morazzoni also rewrites the past, for similar motives, giving her female characters a means of expression, not through the word, but through the visual arts: the act of embroidery. Both Morazzoni and Maraini are able to invent “truth” by writing, or rewriting an untold and thus forgotten history. By supplying women protagonists with unusual methods for expression brings the problem of women’s expression to light, while these writers manage to express themselves and reveal deeper truths of women’s existence.
One could read historical accounts about Veronica Franco, or even about the Bayeux tapestry if one so desired. However, the attraction of basic facts is nothing like the powerful sway that literature holds over us. Modernism: “suggests that literature, music, and painting may be as potent an influence in the shaping of history as economics and politics. Modernism showed that art on its own can be a world-changing, mind-altering force” (Campbell, 204). Millo wants to change the world via truth, which gives him a sense of power and freedom; he calls himself “diverso” because he is “un uomo che si esprime” (28). The modernists also “encouraged the provocative idea that the artificial is a source of truths that are more nourishing, more sustaining and interesting than the truths of the natural, and that the two are incommensurable” (Campbell, 220). In “Veronica,” this debate over which is more poetically nourishing takes place between two of Veronica’s guests, Maffio and Domenico Vernier. Maffio claims that his poetry talks about “creature di carne” while Domenico’s speaks only of “idee.” To which Domenico replies, “Il vostro mondo fatto di carne e di sangue è noiosissimo e prevedibile. Tutti siamo fatti di carne e sangue… per non parlare delle lagrime… a me interessa quell’altro mondo, fatto di invenzioni e stravaganze, di rivelazioni e delirii. Un mondo in cui le montagne sono di seta, il cielo è di carta, le nuvole di bambagia, i fiumi di vetro, i laghi di specchi spezzati… In quanto ai sentimenti… essi sono l’essenza più raffinata del più completo assoluto artificio…” (43). The modernists claimed that “The artificial is ‘truer’ than the natural, because the artificial is what we would prefer ourselves, our world, to be; what it is, in imagination” (Campbell, 303). As far as the modernists are concerned, fantasy has taken the place of fact, both scientific and historical. Invention, as Domenico says, is preferable, anzi better, than the reality of flesh and blood.
A question to pose at this point might be about the differences between historical fiction and other types of literature with regard to the truth. What effects does knowing that a book, movie, or television program is based on true events have on our perception of the work? Does our perception change when we know, such as in “Veronica”, that, although based a real person, the work is a pure invention of the author as she claims in her introduction? History has its own authority over us and only until recently, when writers such as sociologist James W. Loewen with his book Lies My Teacher Told Me have urged us to question the authority of history textbooks in which he points out numerous gross errors of misinformation and nationalistic propaganda, we have generally taken historical accounts at face value. However, historians are only human, and not completely infallible sources of authority. “the fictional quality of historical accounts manifests itself in several ways. First of all, any historical account involves suppression, subordination, and the highlighting or foregrounding of certain elements of the story. Some elements are given special attention, some are simply not mentioned at all” (lam, 304). “If historical accounts are true at all, they are true in the same way that literary works are true. They are then not true of the world, but have some kind of imaginative truth, a truth made by human imaginative construction” (lam, 306).
In Morazzoni we see this idea that truth can be created, from the title to the citation of Ruskin at the end of the novel: “We can imagine falsities, we can compose falsehoods, but only truth can be invented.” A central theme in postmodern thought, like for the Sophists, is the relativity of truth, the theory that truth is produced rather than discovered. Given the scope of the human imagination, an infinite number of truths may be invented and “…the version of reality we prefer can be substituted for the historically accurate one because it is more interesting. Once it is accepted that there are ‘different kinds’ of truth, some superior to others, then truth acquires the advantage of falsehood in being multiple, not single. It is hard to distinguish one from the other” (Campbell, 265). Morazzoni’s young queen seeks to create a new language, “una scrittura leggibile a tutti, e tutti vi si sarebbero accostati con emozione, commozione. Immaginava un indefinito libro universale, perfetto, da cui nessuna lingua fosse esclusa, a cui nessun orecchio rimanesse sordo” (8-9). For Morazzoni, perfection is equivalent to truth. This idea is reflected elsewhere in the novel with John Ruskin, who believes that “il segno dell’onestà dell’uomo, quando tende al compimento di quel che in vita non raggiugerà mai” (75), that is, perfection, aware of his own imperfections. In the tapestry, too, perfection is the goal unattained. One night the queen fill in a small piece of the tapestry, filling in the rudder of a boat which consequently lies over the line of the wave and not under it, and only in the light of the arriving morning does she become aware of the imperfection. In postmodernism, truth is no longer objective but subjective, which means that “man is the measure of all things. That was the Protagoran thesis. It does not mean that each individual is the final arbiter. To a sick person a certain food may taste unpleasant, but to a healthy palate it is most appetizing. The sick man is not false in his judgment of the food, any more than the well person is speaking the absolute truth. Put simply, it is ‘better’ to be healthy and nourished than sick and depleted. Life just works that way” (Campbell, 63-4). In the “Famiglia,” this thought is echoed by the father when speaking to his son Millo: “Per me, per esempio, la verità è che sono un uomo malato, malato e impedito. Tutto il resto prende il colore e il sapore di questa malattia. […] Tu invece vedi le cose attraverso la tua salute. Tutto ti appare diverso, ribaltato. […] Ma la mia verità è per me, è piú vera della tua e in assoluto, la mia equivale alla tua” (Maraini, 27).
In postmodernism, then, art (invention) and truth become the same thing, both subject to interpretation. This lack of distinction can be seen in Morazzoni’s choice of words in reference to truth and imagination: “lavorare di fantasia” (20) and “lo sforzo di verità” (91), putting them of the same level of fatica. “Even in the field of psychology, “there seems no doubt but that a well-constructed story possesses a kind of narrative truth that is real and immediate and carries an important significance for the process of therapeutic change” (Spense, 21). However, “Freud treated a patient’s narrative account of his or her life history somewhat as Nietzsche the philologist had scrutinized ancient manuscripts, taking nothing for granted, nothing on trust. Each reading was an interpretation, one of many possible interpretations, never final. Likewise, Freud believed that a dream is always open to a more complete interpretation, as are works of literature” (Campbell, 189). Speaking of the rapporto tra la narrazione e la realtà, Maraini expresses this subjectivity of interpretaion: “È un rapporto complesso, dialettico, non di imitazione come pensavano certi naturalisti, è un moto ondoso, fluttuante, tutto in divenire. La scrittura ci forza a scendere nel profondo della realtà per poi uscirne, attribuendole qualcosa di nostro, di assolutamente personale. Non esiste una conoscenza, una sensibilità, una sensualità che non siano legate al reale; anche il più astratto, il più metafisico degli scrittori agisce inseguendo una credibilità, che non è quella della realtà visibile, ma quella che nasce dall’interno di una narrativa riconoscibile” (Maraini, 7-8).
However, it has been argued that “‘poetic’ truth is a truth that does not rest on analysis: of course analysis is possible and certainly people try and sometimes are convincing, but the analysis comes after the event and the event is a perfectly valid experience independent of any analysis. ‘Poetic’ truth does not come upon the viewer as a result of reading what critics say, nor does it come step-by-step in the manner of reasoned calculation. It comes all at once, whole and entire, endowed, so to speak, with its own authority” (Bailey, 21). The authority of literature is not the same at the authority we tend to invest in historical accounts. According to Quinney, “truthfulness – the grim sound of truth – has its own power of persuasion, and though its floating authority is not that of empirical truth, it cannot but be felt as if it were” (Quinney, 59). Thus, each psychologist, each reader, each viewer of a piece of art brings his own experience, perspective and desires to the interpretation of a dream, a text, or even a tapestry, making it a subjective and entirely personal act, as Maraini has suggested. What strikes me as deep and profoundly true may not strike you in the same manner, even if, for example, we arrive at a text coming from the same background. The words that seduce me may leave you cold, and what has meaning for you may be something I cannot recognize and thus has no meaning for me. Still, the debate over whether truth exists, whether or not it can be expressed, whether art is true or false or both, remains, and there is, as of this moment, no absolute conclusion, except to say that everything I have written here is absolutely true. Or maybe not.
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