Revelation, Transgression, Disclosure and the Tyranny of Truth

Randall Albers and Steve May

This chapter is written in the form of a dialectic, with some fortunate moments of agreement.

Randall Albers: One of the oldest saws in the teaching of creative writing is 'Write what you know'. This canard ranks right up there with 'Show; don't tell' in popularity and half-truth. (Do Flaubert, Faulkner, Woolf and others limit themselves to showing? No, they do both.) The dictum seems to imply: Writing must draw on the writer's own experience, what the person has lived and seen, in order to have any claim to the attention of an audience. If writing what you know were limited to writing only what you had experienced or seen first-hand, fiction would be a pretty paltry thing indeed.

Steve May: Only if one's experience were paltry – isn't the key issue the implication that only those blessed with magnificent experience can be magnificent writers? So the question is, how do those of us with paltry lives (like Baudelaire, 1861: 250) turn 'miserable sludge' (boue) into gold?

RA: Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, tells of times when he would not be able to get a story going. Standing in front of his fire, squeezing the peel of an orange into the flames to watch it sputter, he would look out over the Paris rooftops and tell himself, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence.' And invariably, he would write that one true sentence and then go on: 'It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. ... Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about' (Hemingway, 1964: 13).

SM: But what is this 'truth' that Hemingway – and, we might venture, writing teachers and students – hope to claim?

RA: Writing what he 'knew' seems coincident with what he felt was 'true' and was necessary to story. Hemingway's notion of felt truth departs from what some philosophers have tried to prove about objective truth, but it recalls Keats's linking of the two in asserting that 'axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses' (Keats, 1818). The key point here is that truth is discovered in the mind – and heart – of the beholder.

SM: So, while the external world, sludge or no, may be the source of our writing, ultimately truth is found in what we make of our experience, not simply in scientific examination and fidelity to external fact.

RA: It doesn't take Hemingway to remind us that truth is an internal, felt response more than an external, objective reality. And it doesn't take Coleridge to remind us that what we know is as much a product of imagination and dreams as of experience – Hobbes, Locke and the empiricists notwithstanding (Coleridge, 1817: 167). In fact, conflating knowing and truth can be a trap. While Hemingway may use his feeling of the truth of something he has known or seen or heard as a means of engendering his sense of possibility and of pushing past the paralysis of writer's block, for others hyperawareness of the need for maintaining fidelity to the way things 'really' happened may actually prompt that paralysis. Writers may not be aware of the cause. They may simply find themselves sitting at their computer, trying to write a scene and not able to get it out. They can't see it clearly enough, can't find the right language, can't hear their voice on the page. And suddenly, they feel the weighty presence of the monkey censor on their shoulder, whispering 'You can't write that! What will the critics think? What will your friends think? What will your mother think? My lord, you'll never hear the end of it!' And that's followed by 'You know, you'll just never be good enough. If you wanted to tell fictions, why didn't you just listen to your mother and become a lawyer? It would've paid better.' SM: Blake (1793) put the same point rather differently:

How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

So, we want the bird, we want the truth about the bird, that is the goal. And in order to locate that truth, some grasp of the airy way through which it travels would be useful, if it is air or ether and whether it permits a vacuum. Trouble is, there is no 'available objective reality'. To expand: 'available' means available to us as creatures, 'objective' means untinged or untainted by perception and 'reality' means 'in quotes reality' because we can't have it without the modifying inverts. So, there might be a reality, an objective reality, an unambiguous and fully consistent reality, but it is not available to us, either as poets, novelists, playwrights or physicists. The flat fish with two eyes on the same side of its head will see a moon other than the moon of the toad. Indeed, the toad may be a two- or three-moon creature, depending on its state of amphibiousness at any particular time:

In short, it seems as if language...