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as if she were a work of art. The husband, though overjoyed, cannot resist an aesthetic objection: the statue does not accurately represent the woman he remembers. “Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing / So aged as this seems.” The reply to his critique is swift: “So much the more our carver’s excellence, / Which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her / As she liv’d now” (WT 5.3.28–32). The word now once again makes the moment a shifter, always contemporaneous with the audience, the reader, the spectator. And the play ends, as virtually all Shakespeare’s plays do, with a gesture toward inclusion and dialogue, as the characters exit to talk over what they have experienced. Offstage, out of our hearing, they will “leisurely / Each one demand, and answer to his part / Perform’d in this wide gap in time.” This gap, whether it is sixteen years or the two hours’ traffic of the stage or the intervention of four centuries between 1611 and the present, opens a space for the use of literature: its openness for commentary, debate, wonder, and pleasure is what makes literature always contemporary.

SEVEN

On Truth and Lie in a Literary Sense

“Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality,” T. S. Eliot wrote in the first of his Four Quartets.1 Variously misremembered and misquoted as “Mankind cannot bear very much reality” and—with a deplorable indifference to the rhythms of blank verse—“Mankind cannot bear too much reality,” this phrase, lifted from its context, has achieved the status of an aphorism, and—what seems always to follow—a truth. Since this chapter will offer a resistant account of reality as it has come to be valued in the world of literature and writing, we might begin by asking how much is “too much”—or, alternatively, what is it that makes “reality” real or reality “real”? The problem is already apparent.

What is the use of reality in literature? Sometimes contemporary writing is itself referential—pointing toward or running parallel with actual events and persons, as, for example, in novels by E. L. Doctorow or Don DeLillo, or in the genre of the “occasional poem,” written to commemorate an event. But what happens when reality becomes a trait, or a criterion, for the success, excellence, or sincerity of a piece of writing?

The brief celebrity of the nonfiction novel in the 1960s, following the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, presented real events narrated in the style and using the techniques of fiction. My interest here, however, is in the converse situation: works that present themselves as true and that disclose themselves, or are forcibly disclosed, to be invented.

The normative distinction on best-seller lists is between fiction and nonfiction. But like all binaries, this one is difficult to sustain. What is interesting about the fiction/nonfiction divide is precisely the formal pretense that these things are opposites, or alternatives, to each other, rather than versions of each other, or aspects of a larger category of writing and reading. There is a certain irony in the fact that we praise works of fiction for being true-to-life, and condemn works of nonfiction when they turn out to be fabrications. I have sometimes found myself sharing the ethical outrage of those who feel duped by false memoirs. But from a critical rather than a moral or ethical standpoint, should these deceptions be telling us something about the nature of writing?

We might also want to consider the curious status of a term like nonfiction, which implies that the standard kind of writing—what linguists and anthropologists would call the unmarked term—is fiction. Why is the true-story narrative for modern readers defined in terms of a double negative? Is nonfiction the equivalent of “not untrue,” and how is that different from “true”?

The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris offered some thoughtful commentary on the vexed question of reenactment in film and television:

Critics argue that the use of re-enactment in documentaries suggests a callous disregard on the part of a filmmaker for what is true. I don