Colin Burrow: Fiction and the Age of Lies

the age of lies is probably as old as time when I was young there was a comedian who did a Bristolian version of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden God says to Adam in the Bristol version Adam you've been eating them apples and Adam replies I never God then says where are all them bloody apple cores doing on the ground then Adams I never is the original lie is childlike and innocent in its palpable untruth a more sophisticated lie is delivered by Zeus in book 2 of Homer's Iliad Zeus sends a lying dream to Agamemnon the leader of the Achaeans in the form of ancient nestor the dream that's calling fake new Zeus tells Agamemnon that Troy is about to fall but now listen well I bring word to you from Zeus who though far-distant greatly cares for and pities you he bid you arm the long-haired achæans for battle with all speed for now you may take the Broad Street hit city of the Trojans now that is a lie because use actually wants to punish the achæans and doesn't want Troy to fall but since the dream comes from Zeus Agamemnon reports it to his fellow leaders the real Nestor is understandably skeptical about what his dreamlike doppelganger has said and murmurs had it been any other Achaean who informed us of this dream we'd call it a lie and have nothing to do with it then something extremely odd happens which reveals a lot about lying generally in fiction and in life Agamemnon having been lied to by Zeus the star decides to stand up in front of the Achaean soldiers and lie to them about Zeus ease lie he doesn't say Zeus says that if we attack today we're finally going to kick some pesky Trojan but instead he says we've lost it's time to go home great Zeus Kronos his son has snared me in a crushing delusion ask harsh God that he is once he promised and bowed his head in assent that I should sack strong wolde Lillian before returning home now he's turned a vile deception orders me back in dishonor to Argos after the loss of so many men so come then let's all agree to do as I say pull out with our ships return to our own native land since now we shall never capture Troy of the wide streets now why Agamemnon lies to his soldiers in this way is a mystery to me and to most commentators many see it as a piece of reverse psychology aimed at provoking the achæans to a final assault but this series of Lies is used to Agamemnon Agamemnon to the Greeks has a powerful effect lye generates lie and fake news generates chaos after Agamemnon's lying speech homer compares his audience to the sea towards which the troops bolt in order to set sail for home the ultimate consequence of Zeus's lie is swirling elemental rage the assembly was stirred into motion like the long sea rollers of the Aquarian deep which winds from the east or south roll royal up rushing on them from the clouds of zeus the father now the obvious place to begin a discussion of the relationship between lies and fictions would be with homers Odysseus that group that great storyteller and liar but the series of Lies in book 2 of the Iliad is a better place to begin because it displays two key features of lying which have tended to be neglected but which speak eloquently to our age the first is that lying depends on a predatory intimacy between the liar and the lied to Zeus knows Agamemnon wants to believe that Troy is about to fall so that's what he tells him Agamemnon knows his men want to go home so he tells them that Zeus has told them to do that the second key aspect of lying which is illustrated by the others idiot aside is that although Liars often think they know what effect their lies will have they're often wrong a lie can generate unpredictable emotions and indeed spawn more lies Zeus doesn't know that Agamemnon will respond to his lie by lying in turn and Agamemnon presumably doesn't want to provoke a world stampede to the Greek ships by his own attempt to tell his audience what they want to hear human beings are complex nonlinear systems and you mess with their sense of reality at your peril now the relationship between fiction and lies was particularly fraught for the Greeks because they didn't have a word for fiction hesiod theogony has a passage in which the muses declare we know how to tell many falsehoods that seem real but we also know how to speak truth when we want to but the muses don't explain how to distinguish between falsehoods that seem real and truths and the lack of a simple word analogous to fiction in Greek was probably one reason why plato was so uneasy about poets and the lies they supposedly tell about the gods that distinction between fiction and lies seems more or less self-evident now a lie is in the words of Bernard Williams an assertion the content of which the speaker believes to be false which is made with the intention to deceive the hearer with regard to that content and that definition makes it relatively easy to distinguish between fiction and lies because a fiction although it's not true is not intended to deceive but the suspicion that all forms of non true narrative were a kind of lie remained so deeply entrenched in Western culture that that very simple distinction took a surprisingly long time to establish itself it's sometimes traced back to room a remarkable passage in st. Augustine's soliloquy Eliquis from about 386 ad but the fictitious I call that which is produced by makers of fiction these differ from the misleading in this that every miss leader has a desire to deceive while not every fiction maker has four mimes and comedies and many poems are full of fictions for the purpose rather of pleasing than of deceiving and almost all who make just deal in fictions but he is rightly called a miss leader or misleading whose business it is that everybody should be deceived now translations of this passage generally presented as stating in a clear distinction between fiction and lying but actually since Augustine's latin tells a slightly different story because he calls the lie intended to deceive fell acts fallacious which is fine but the contrasting term which usually gets translated as the fictional augustine actually calls the mend acts which is of course the origin of our word mendacious and that creates an audible strain in the argument because Augustine's qualified defense of fiction depends on us distinction so linguistically fine that it's barely a distinction at all between the fallacious on the one hand the lie and the mendacious the fictional on the other but there is at least the outlines of a distinction there the liar aims to deceive the writer of fiction does not the category of fiction also depends on another kind of distinction between texts which describes the plausible or things that are likely to happen and those which record or purport to record what in fact happened only the latter could lie since the former doesn't claim to be true although this distinction seems easy enough to make the particular way in which it was developed in the Roman rhetorical tradition had major consequences for the long term relationship between lying and fiction the first century rhetorician quintillion included in his Institutes of oratory a description of that part of a Judas speech called the Naruto and this is the narrative about the alleged crime which the orator wishes the jurors to believe is true and quintillion says that in the narrative the orator doesn't need to say the truth but should rather describe things in a way that is plausible or like truth the ideal way to do this is to create what he calls an hour Gaea or the kind of vividness which will make your audience believe your version of events so quintillion says I'm complaining a man has been murdered shall I not bring before my eyes all the circumstances which it's reasonable to imagine must have occurred in such a connection shall I not see the assassin burst suddenly from his hiding place the victim tremble cry for help now the Latin word for this kind of vividness or na gaya intriguingly enough is evident here which is the root of our word evidence for quintillion however evident here isn't a set of facts that show X to be the case it is not the Apple calls that show that Adam has been eating the Apple it's a persuasive tool evidently is the dash of vividness juice that makes it more likely that the jury will swallow your story rather than that of the other guy and quintillion also associates n heir Gaia or evident here with the power of an orator to arouse passions in his audience when a narrative has evidently emotions will ensue just as if we were present at the event itself so the vivid probability of narrative evidence could just drive your jurors wild and you'd win and it would do so whether the narrative was true or to something they look like truth a Cicero had said that thing is plausible which generally happens or which is a matter of general belief whether it is true or untrue and there's the rub these rhetorical texts provided the foundations for thinking about the nature of fictional narrative and they potentially gave an enormous strength to the figure of the vivid liar the liar is potentially the double of the author who creates circumstantially plausible narratives which elicit overwhelming emotions in his audience and the figure of the liar of course acquires additional strength from the fact that Liars like Zeus like Agamemnon and like most authors to know or think they know what's likely to move their audience so good Liars a canny psychologists you can offer truths like statements directly targeted to what they know their audience wants to hear and that close relationship between liar and audience is worth pausing over because the Western philosophical tradition as we met it in burne Williams as generally considered lying from the perspective of the liar analytic philosophers have tried to determine what kind of statement a lie is and moral philosophers have argued about when if ever it might be defensible to lie and these discussions generally focus on the intentions of the liar rather than the role of the victim but the victims prejudices and assumptions about what's likely to be true do play a key role in determining the kinds of statement that a liar can get away with lying is a social act which is crucially dependent on the beliefs of the person lied to whom I will call the lie II the words generally used to describe the lie victim gal or in the Philosopher's Susilo Box favoured turn the dupe implicitly ascribe weakness to the deceived and deprive them of agency but the homeric lies with which I began Zeus to Agamemnon Agamemnon to the Greek army tell a slightly different story these lies are part of a wider social and political world and make use of ideas of authority to manufacture plausibility Nestor and Zeus and Agamemnon they aren't the types to lie so you believe them but these lies are also calculated to appeal to the beliefs and desires recipients and that feedback between the liar and the Laie has immense psychological significance it's why in fiction and in life lies can have such a powerful effect if they take us in it's because they work with our beliefs about what's likely to be true and that's why the discovery that one has been lied to can give rise to such emotional chaos when a lie is discovered it isn't just that Trust has been betrayed it's not simply that Myranda hello darling she's watching the video Miranda discovers that colin has been in the arms of a glamorous Russian spy rather than as he said in the library the lie is actually made to see herself and her desires as manipulable and herself as credulous and the fury of being lied to grows in part from a splatter of self-hatred at discovering one is the kind of person who can be deceived and realizing one is a lie e exposes one's perceptual vulnerability and it can make one's grounds for believing anything at all seem fragile and that makes lies in life dangerous but it gives Liars immense power in fiction since an effective lie is tailored to the belief systems of the lie e putting a fictional character within a fabric of lies as Henry James often does is a really powerful way to explore the nature and perceptual limitations of that person and although that fictional technique was to become common in the novel the most influential literary instance is of course Shakespeare's Othello a play which not coincidentally derives from an Italian novella Iago is a Fellowes echo chamber amplifying and replaying to him all of the things that make him feel uneasy he's black he's not Venetian he lacks the soft parts of conversation that chamber has have and the Argo is a master storyteller who creates around these fears a plausible narrative embellished by evident here in the sense of plausible detail he can invent a false but vivid story in which he hears Cassio talk in his sleep about sweet Desdemona he also provides evidence in the form of a fellow's handkerchief to prove that Desdemona is dallying with Cassio and the handkerchief is a piece of evidence which straddles the ancient and the modern senses of that word it is at once a work of fiction vividly embroidered with magic in its web to make it as lively as possible and at the same time a piece of material evidence literally material evidence which proves there is a sexual relationship between Cassio and Desdemona and these vivid fictions enabled the play to build up and then release the unpredictable violent emotional responses of the Laie othello is presented with evidence and plausible grounds for believing a reality which corresponds to his fears and like Homer's Achaean soldiers he is potentially as wild as the sea like to the Pontic sea whose icy current and compulsive course NER feels retiring air but keeps due on to the pro Pontic and the Hellespont even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace shall now look back TS Eliot famously declared that in his final speech before his suicide a fellow is cheering himself up but it's probably better to think of a fellow in that final speech as attempting to reconstruct the narrative of the life he thought he had before a liar stole it from him he's trying to create a narrative of his former exploits which is both vivid and true and say besides that in Aleppo once where a malignant and a turban to beat a Venetian and traduced the state I took by the throat the circumcised dog and smote him thus and with that concluding thus the dagger sinks into his own flesh aligning vivid narration with physical reality Othello's dying speech is an attempt to create an alternative to the world of probability plausibility and misleadingly credible evident ear into which Iago has plunged him an Iago says when he's accused by Amelia of lying to a fellow that I told him what I thought and told no more than what he found himself was apt and true the first Clause of that statement is a lie but the second is not because the lie e is a person who is fed to destruction with what part of him wants to believe a fellow also suggests something else about the role of Liars within fiction the liar is the intimate double of the author who creates plausible narratives within a fiction by showing the liars narratives to be false fiction can establish its own kind of emotional realism the real story the one that matters is the tragic narrative which ends and smote him thus rather than hiago's lies and the exposure of a liar is one way in which fiction can distinguish itself from lies and claim to be offering its readers something more than the simple wish fulfillment which the liar offers to the credulous and that is the role very often played by liars in realist fiction and the best example the most beautiful here I think is Wickham in Pride and Prejudice who is a sort of downmarket rewrite really of Iago isn't he when Wickham denounces Darcy to Elizabeth Bennet he does exactly what the best Liars do he tells her what she found herself was apt and true or in the terminology the novel invites us to use he talks directly to her prejudices Wickham knows that Elizabeth thinks Darcy is proud and unpleasant so he says that Darcy's father meant to provide for me amply by leaving him a living but when the living fairly was given elsewhere and the passive it was given elsewhere omits the crucial fact that Wickham had in fact renounced the legacy Lizzy who is taken with Wickham but no fool is inclined to regard truth as depending ultimately on documentary records or what we would now call evidence so she asks how could his will be disregarded and wicked Wickham claims there was just such an informality in the terms of the request as to give me no hope from law Saab a liar builds belief on the presumptions of his audience and presents as evidence things which he believes will be self-evident to the listener hence the more the lie reveals her desires and beliefs the more the liar can operate upon them Elizabeth exclaims how abominable I wonder that the very pride of this mr. Darcy has not made him just to you Wickham the inheritor of Iago's ability to echo back the language of the lie in order to amplify their emotions confirms the truth of her observation it is wonderful replied Wickham for almost all these actions may be traced to pride and pride had often been his best friend it is connected him nearer with virtue than any other feeling and hearing her own judgments endorsed in this way Lizzy is overwhelmed Elizabeth went away with her head full of him she could think of nothing but of mr. Wickham and of what he had told her all the way home a persuasive narrative backed by apparently vivid evidence be it true or false can generate uncontrollable emotions provided it is rooted in what the Laie wants to believe now the exposure of Wickham's lies comes in a letter from mr. Darcy and that letter stiffly displays a very different kind of truthiness from Wickham's it's presented within the novel not as a seductively intimate conversation but as a document which can be read and reassessed and reread and that simple fact reminds us that in the age of Jane Austen the concept of evidence was evolving towards the modern sense of quasi-legal tech testimony so Darcy's letter relates that Wickham wrote to inform me that he did not wish to take holy orders he also says that after Wickham had squandered the money he was given in lieu of a living he later applied to me again by letter for the presentation now Darcy isn't vulgar and he isn't so vulgar as to say I can prove all this because I've still got those letters in my desk at Pemberley but that's surely what he wants to imply here and a key distinction between the truth teller and the liar in the age of Jane Austen is that the truth teller is rich enough to to store and retrieve material evidence he has a library he has a desk he can keep the stuff now Elizabeth Bennet's response to Darcy's letter is jános I think it's the best chapter in Jane Austen it's a it identifies truths with a frustration of what we want to believe and it identifies lies as the fictions towards which we're drawn astonishment apprehension even horror repressed her she wished to de crédit discredit the letter entirely repeatedly exclaiming this must be false this cannot be this must be the grossest falsehood and when she'd gone through the whole letter though scarcely knowing anything of the last page or to put it hastily away protesting that she would not regard it that she would never look in it again but poked or she does the lie is caught between the truths she wants and she fears and as Jane Austen puts it for a few moments she flattered herself that her wishes did endure and that Darcy is lying rather than Wickham well our wishes do a but a seductive liar makes it look as though they don't and for Jane Austen one of the main ways fiction establishes its moral seriousness is by representing someone learning to resist the allure of a plausible liar lies are akin to romantic fiction in that they are a species of wish fulfillment learning to resist the allure of liars goes along was resisting not just Wickham and his fine jacket but the passionate affairs and erotic elopements described in popular sentimental narratives and that might make it sound as though serious fiction it's ultimately concerned with just resisting the pleasure principle with slapping the wrists of the fantasy and telling it to simmer down and get real but fiction generally wants to have it both ways it wants to deliver plausible inventions which have their own kind of allure while at the same time differentiating those inventions from the seductive untruth of the liar and Jane Austen can pull off that magical fusion of wish fulfillment and the reality principle largely because of the social foundations of truth-telling in her world the truth teller is a man like Darcy who has a desk and a library and that means you'll also have a big house and a fortune and if you're lucky you'll also have a chest like Colin Firth and you know all Colin's are eternally grateful aren't they - Colin Firth they're bringing a bit of sex appeal - what is the least sexy name in the world and that fact about truth-telling in this period the social foundation of it makes it possible for Elizabeth to renounce the romantic fictions of a place that's liar like Wickham and still end up with every wish fulfilled in love and moreover as mistress of Pemberley how much of this has changed in our present well it's now said with perhaps tedious regularity that we live in a post truth age which radically differs from anything which has come before sages and hacks alike grumble that the rot of post-modernism has formed a toxic alliance with online disinformation to dissolve the secure foundations on which truth supposedly once rested secure these claims I think radically lack historical perspective of course we live in the age of lies because the age of lies is is without beginning and probably will be without end some things have changed but a lot of things are the same and there are grounds for thinking our world has more in common than we might want to think with what has gone before and the best evidence to use that very slippery word to support that claim is of course some statistics and we all know there are lies damned lies and the Google books Ngram viewer which is an online statistical tool which allows you to search for the frequency of phrases within a data set of extremely poorly transcribed and often misstated texts from about 1500 to about 2012 now the Ngram Bureau isn't always right when it suggests that the phrase liar emerged between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP I think that cites a pretty plausible note doesn't it and if you believe the Ngram viewer then damned lies have slightly passed their peak you can see it's a grouping off there and the phrase lying politician was far more common in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods than it is today though of course it is possible that today the phrase lying politician has simply been eaten up by its near synonym lying bastards which used to consist on the ride but the most thought-provoking index of change in the language of lying is the Engram graph for the phrase living a lie and that graph is still on the up but the phrase appears to have originated around the 1840s which was perhaps the greatest period of greatest decade of the earlier English novel and living a lie has become a euphemism for a marriage which carries on in appearance but is not sexually fulfilled or for self-deception about one's own sexual identity and it makes sense I think that this phrase should have emerged during the period in which those phenomena were not so shocking as not to be thinkable but still so shocking that they could only be described through a euphemism you live a life rather than being gay and married and in the 1840s as in Jane Eyre of 1847 you might have a madwoman in your attic to whom you were married but you would keep it secret so you live a lie and the concept of living a lie of grounding your entire being on something you know to be false is surely one of the deep psychological foundations of the novel as we know it it goes along with the idea of a plot as a process of discovery in which a lie creates overwhelming emotions is discovered and its discovery creates overwhelming emotions of a slightly different kind and one of the deepest structural components of the bourgeois novel is that plot of uncovering a lie or a self-deception and thereby creating the illusion that reality is established and that is part I think of what realism means in our literary tradition and this takes me to my main thesis which is we aren't actually post anything very much let alone post truth indeed my most fundamental belief about cultural history is that we still have much more in common with the emotional structures of the Greeks and Shakespeare and Jane Austen that we might want to believe and that's why reading literature is important it helps us understand where our least comprehensible emotions come from the Nexus of lies deception and unpredictable emotions which I've teased out of the Homeric poems and traced through the realistic novel is still a fundamental component opponent of our super sophisticated postmodern psychologies however the material world changes much faster than the human mind or the languages which shape it we no longer believe that rich people like Darcy who have libraries in which they can store documents are more likely to tell the truth than the sons of estate managers like Wickham in each period credibility is associated with a slightly different range of qualities and through time different kinds of people and different ways of speaking have come to be regarded as markers of truthfulness in that very limited respect we might be regarded as belonging to a post truth age if truth is given the highly restricted sense of a set of cultural configurations that established the plausibility of one particular kind of witness on the basis of his social and economic status but it's quite likely that the concept of truthfulness has changed more through time than the concept of the lie so although the ways in which people experience and think about truth and evidence have changed a great deal the way human beings think about and respond to lies hasn't changed nearly so much even if we're not quite sure what the truth is we know what it is to be lied to and we all know don't we that sense of wild and self savaging anger that comes from being a lie II now I'm old enough to remember when buses would usually speak the truth if they said National Express on the side you take the Express bit with a pinch of salt wouldn't you but a bus that said Leicester on its front would usually go to Leicester provided I am really old provided it wasn't attacked by highwayman but now buses have learnt how to lie and we have a prime minister who when trying to fabricate a personality for himself claim to spend his time fabricating buses and it's oh so tempting to embody the age of lies in the phallus illa quant Boris father silicon such a good word for the Prime Minister because within the sound of that word there is the word phallus isn't there I mean it's just such a good rhythm but but the faster the converis imagine if this new Agamemnon had been uncovered ly enough to testify to the Supreme Court about his reasons for prog in Parliament one could imagine him saying well blimey there's old doctors Lucy geezer and a beard sent a dream that Toby chap you really must promote Parliament or I'll toast your testicles with the Thunderbolt so I did okay don't mean take the beard off now mate I think they've bought it you can imagine that very easily the history of lying makes us believe that where there are lies there must be a liar but fiction can and perhaps should educate its readers to question their grounds for wanting to believe things it is so tempting to embody the Age of lies in individuals because the larger cultural history of lying has taught us to see it principally as a matter of one person misleading another but that might be less true than it once was as Peter Pomerance F and Martin Moore in particular have shown with great skill political lies now tend to be rather more than statements by individuals which are designed to mislead they're partially generated by the desires and beliefs of the Laie they can be algorithmically created to elicit a particular response from an audience that's been micro-targeted in which is fed little drips of misinformation which its predisposed to believe the guiding presumption of algo lying is that human beings are as manipulable as white mice and so the object is to develop a stimulus that provokes the desired behavior send out the stimulus irrespective of its truth or falsehood keep sending and provided the white mice are in the majority and they all head for the cheese then it's a victory it doesn't matter if the stimulus is a lie that generates unpredictable side-effects like a loss of trust in institutions or if the lies fashion to appeal to the white mice so enraged the piebald mice that they start a civil war it's short term outcomes that count now the Algol I might look like a counter example to my paradoxical claim that the truth has changed more than lies the Algol AI is new but it has two genealogical features in common with earlier or earlier forms of lying the first is that it's generated by feedback between the liar and the lie although there's nothing sexy about algorithms and nothing sexy I think about focus groups the process of lie making to which they can contribute is actually analogous to the way that Wickham fashions his lies from Lizzy's prejudices the algorithmically generated lie is also akin to Wickham's or indeed to Zeus his lie in that it elicits emotions in those lied to of a kind that those who fashioned the lie haven't entirely predicted and that's why the Algol I is proving so hard for democracies to cope with it may produce the electoral results which the algo Liars want but it also generates wild emotional byproducts evidence or vividness as quintillion knew very well creates a direct pathway to the emotions of an audience even if the evidence is not true that's why the spread of the algo lie makes us want to transform our politicians into Pinocchio's and ourselves into wannabe or Fellows of towering rage and confusion we want someone in whom to embody the lie but the absence of a liar from the algo lie means that the rage of the lie II loses its home and proper object it spreads and hemorrhages within turning into rage against our own collective gullibility or a more selective proxy rage against the nameless others who was sufficiently credulous not to see that they had been played being lied to can make us hate ourselves for B manipulable but it can also make us hate other people who as we might see them are being jerked around by irrational appetites and ill grounded opinions like Agamemnon's audience we are roiled into motion like the long sea rollers of the Aquarian deep whipped up by the wind fiction has not yet responded well to this new kind of liar lying it's one of the stranger facts I think about literary history that the rise of the Algol AI has coincided almost exactly with the rise of what's usually called also fiction all narratives which appear painstakingly to relate the lived experiences of their authors Carlo Venus guards my struggle the overweight apogee of this form is grounded in the kind of realism so detailed that it might be dubbed punitive realism mouthguard punishes himself by relating his father's death in remorseless detail and by describing his own repeated premature ejaculations and episodes of self-harm he also though punishes his readers by telling them exactly how many sausages he cooked for his kids on a particular evening and the precise meat content of those sausages as nurse Garda said my commitment was to reality what I wrote about had really happened and it had happened as described now it's potentially comforting for fiction to make that claim since a key feature of truth from a narrowly psychological perspective is that unlike a lie it doesn't have overt designs upon you that's why we can talk about being lied to but we don't talk about being truths to a liar knows exactly what he wants to get from you and believes he knows how to get it but a truth teller doesn't claim to be telling you what you want to hear indeed a truth teller might tell you at length things which you really don't want to hear about at all like the meat content of the sausages served to his children on a particular night but also fiction does still display buried deep within that unsteady dialectical relationship with lies which has been such a key element in Western fiction in volume 6 spoiler alert but very few people apart from me have got there I suspect volume 6 of my struggle now's guards uncle claims the description of the father's death with which volume 1 began was all lies and NASCAR claimed that his father had been living with his grandmother for two years and at the time of her his father's death her house was covered in sheet and full of empty bottles the uncle claims this is all untrue and that now scars father had lived with his grandmother for only two months and that the house wasn't a mess at all and the uncle's accusation prompts a voice within the author which says I was untrustworthy mendacious and had written the novel because I hated the now scarred family and now Scott's way of silencing this voice is perhaps not surprising actually he becomes a sort of new Darcy an embodiment of the documentary truth principle he finds evidence which supports his own plausible narrative of events I called Christian sand and I asked him to send me a printout of dad's medical records which they did from the records it was clear that he had lived with might his mother for a year and five months before he died he wasn't quite two years but it was a long long way from the two months gonna the uncle who claimed dad had stayed there how could he say dad stayed there for only two months and that I was lying evidence in that modern sense taken from the records lays to rest now scars anxiety that he's not a serial truth teller but a spectacularly egoistic liar auto fiction distinguishes itself from lies by sticking to the evidence and it's evidence not in quintillion sense of vividly realized tales but in Darcy's sense of documentary records and the escapism of fiction has become in Auto fiction and scape into what looks like a carefully documented world of endless formless truth and in that respect my struggle might be regarded as comfort food for the age of lies it resembles one of the most common but these plausible arguments about how we should cope with our supposedly sposta truth age we're urged by Matthew d'Ancona born in 1968 to go back to the Enlightenment to get our facts straight to line up the documents to fact-check the liars then we'll lose and those arguments are typically put forward by people who like me born 1963 and now scarred born 1968 are too old to be digital natives who can see but can't quite process the extreme power of the Algol I which has delivered minute by minute to exactly the right smartphone and to exactly the right prejudices and fiction I think needs to find a way of dealing with this new kind of lie British writers of fiction from my generation have on the whole failed when they've tried to do so and this is because understandably they tended to become angry rather than trying to do the main thing which liberal fiction can do for a society which is to be at once surgically anatomical in analyzing a systemic social problem and willing to articulate that systemic problem through a plausible but fictional version of individual experience and a large part of the problem actually is the rage out there which many novelists haven't been able to control sufficiently to explore its origins in a way that would explain it to any but the like-minded algorithmic lies provoked a kind of anger that can easily become complicit with its target the object of fury is the reduction of human beings to groups that can be influenced by evident falsehoods the temptation is to represent that process by creating reductive falsehoods of one's own fictions about the lying prime minister the gullible cab driver who believes the Daily Mail the FoxNews addict and these fictions might appeal to like-minded readers and dually inflame them with righteous outrage but if the problem is that the population is being split algorithmically into target groups who are believed to occupy distinct and several views of reality then the solution surely is not furiously to serve your own target group with fictions that it wants to hear that would be to make fictions which participate in the simplifications that they're condemning and middle England 2019 by Jonathan Coe born 1961 strikes me as a classic instance of this problem it's a brexit novel which offers all-you-can-eat comforting stereotypes the xenophobic former Birmingham car worker the wonderful East European immigrant cleaner while not having anything at all to say about the technologies which now influence and distort the opinions of those types a little texting and emailing is the deepest COEs characters get into the world of social media and fiction which recirculates perspectives on the present which correspond closely to a particular strand of print or electronic media is just not doing the job fiction should do it isn't harmless comfort food but comfort food akin to the lie it knows what its audience wants to hear and it says it and the problem is that it will therefore sound like lies to those who don't want to believe it and if the main literary consequence of this latest age of lies is to identify the audience for serious fiction with a small group which has a meet as mutually sustaining and more or less identical political attitudes then we should all be very afraid for the future of fiction my Ian McEwan born 1948 be the unhung key mr. Darcy who cuts through these problems well McEwan has always been willing to get scientifically down-and-dirty and he has a career fascination with the warping effects of violent emotion atonement of 2001 extraordinary book I think although it appeared a couple of years before the Iraq war and at a point when the dissemination of untruths through social media was not yet a significant public concern he is perhaps the closest that mainstream highbrow British fiction has yet come to evoking the age of lies which followed atonement of course aligns the imaginary work of the author with the fictional rewriter of history who is also an outright teller of untruths and it rests on a great volcanic base of love and betrayal and national and personal tragedy but McEwan like most people born before about 1990 I suspect is probably just the wrong side of the digital generational divide to be able to assemble lies digital media and violent emotions into a novel which conveys the human consequences of the impersonal Algol I so machines like me of 2019 is really a version of the traditional novelistic plot about erotic betrayal and interpersonal lies it doesn't finally matter all that much that one of the agents in this story of betrayal is a mechanical replicant of a human rather than a human whose behavior is produced by continual feedback between experience and the algorithm that runs him it doesn't matter all that much because machines like me is really an erotic novella for the virtual age but it's not really a fiction for the age of the Algol I and that's because it hangs nostalgically on to the consoling fiction that lies are personal transactions with intense but small-scale emotional consequences they can be impersonal and have national consequences MacEwan of course attempted to widen his scope in the cockroach his brexit novella which was produced at breakneck speed and published in September 2019 just after the Preem court had decided that the Prime Minister had acted unlawfully when he probed Parliament and only five months after machines like me and the cockroach also fails because it is once too angry and too prone to personalise the lies the story in which a Kafka through the looking-glass cockroach wakes up and finds himself Prime Minister is I think funnier than the more post reviews allowed the conventional denial at the start that a work of fiction is based on fact becomes any resemblance to actual cockroaches living or dead is entirely consonant which i think is a good one and it's also quite funny about lies the cockroach playing Prime Minister plants a fake news story about sexual harassment by arrival in the newspapers and after this he walked up and down within the confined attic space in a state of exultation there was nothing more liberating than a closely knit sequence of lies so this was why people became writers it's a joke which is a perilous one because of course only a cockroach Prime Minister could identify writing fiction with the dissemination of lies and implicitly we the target readers and the currents fiction know better perhaps even smugly know better novels offer higher truths don't they which are distinct from lies we might think as we laugh now I'm a critic rather than a creator of fiction and that means I find it easier to see what's wrong with things than to do anything better myself and that makes being a critic sound like easy work it's actually folks a dirty psychic burden there are none of us like to talk about it all that much the critic like the satirist sees voids in the world that is and has to face the risk that those voids will swallow him that will swallow him up because he can offer nothing to fill them but the larger story I've just put forward here might help someone unlike me and certainly younger than me imagine what a novel for the new age of lies might look like I can that many features of the high Victorian novel the strands of different people pull different ways by versions of the same social forces their interaction and their separation could be used to create fiction for the age of lies and that's what Ali Smith has tried to do in her seasons series by charting the accidental collisions of different groups of British people though these novels are to my eyes also marred by the anger of the Laie by proxy that's to say the person who's enraged not because she's deceived herself but because other people are deceived and that seems to me the wrong kind of anger to fuel the novel and it would but it would take a really powerful imagination to transform the energies reserved in the traditional novel for treating erotic deceit into forces which could be released by algorithmically directed political lies a novel which did that would have to avoid getting so angry that it simply emitted the thin whale of a Ramona it would have to present its world as a multi-dimensional human problem rather than simply as a place in which people are reduced to types pulled hither and yon by the voice of the new Zeus's the foxy lady liars on cable news the gods of Google the likes of Facebook channeling the anger of the lie into fiction is what the so far non-existent thing the great British techno novel of the 21st century needs to do perhaps the outlines of that book have already been sketched by Shakespeare in a fellow the liar is the monstrous agent of emotional feedback who enables that feedback to grow in intensity until it becomes a scream and then finally destroys the Laie and in the process the liar finally ceases to resemble a person at all the novel I'm imagining would need to be at once inside the speed of the new media and inside the ancient emotional turbulence that results from being told falsehoods that one predisposed to believe it would need to get sympathetically into the heads of people who believed lies without suggesting that they were dupes or gulls and it would have to run the dangerous risk of making those lies all must possess the compelling authority of truths it's not a book I could write perhaps it isn't a book anyone could write or certainly not until the wounds of this to me dismal brexit day have healed a little but if our present age of lies had one good consequence it would be that book thank you very much what happens if the person being lied to knows he's being lied to but doesn't doesn't mind doesn't care I'm thinking that actually there are a huge number of people who saw the brexit bus for the 350 million figure on the side and knew it was a lie and didn't care yeah good question I think well I think that phenomenon is one explanation for the rage of the Laie by proxy because the you know the person who sees other people being lied to and goes how can you possibly believe that is feeling angry partly because they know that the person doesn't believe it and he's going along with it but it's not it's not the the the I can't think of a good literary example off the top of my head of a person who is lied to and willingly deceived it is quite of I mean it's quite a phenomenon in commercial transactions generally where everybody knows that nobody's telling the truth but everybody's you know in on the game but I think that kind of transaction tends not to be a transaction that fictions very interested in because there aren't many emotions at stake there's only money but I yeah that that is a very important phenomenon and it is part very much part of the world that we are now in thank you you've talked about anger as if it's a disabling thing I'm interested in what you think about works of literature that have engaged with anger like Dante's Commedia evylyn war just satire and the place of satire in general thank you yeah thank you good question Dante's a particularly good case to raise really because there his anger at Florence is a real anger that repeatedly spills through into this distant alternative world and it's what gives often a kind of violent realism to the scenes that he's imagining and the the figure of the angry satirist is is there I suppose you know juveniles the archetypical instance and it does enable people people to write about their present through strongly realized types I think where and so yes there is a very strong positive role for anger in literature but I think the anger in the contemporary fictions that I'm talking about is anger that's too close to its subject that there is a need to back off from intense emotion and I think in some of the contemporary fictions that I've been talking about that the the anger at present events leads to a kind of description of reality which is serial so you go through day by day as Jonathan Coda's or year by year through a story leading up to the the United Kingdom leaving the European Union and it he is wanting to see each moment as a separate a separate thing rather than stepping back from the whole and looking from a distance and you know Dante just had a bit more stepping back when he had a theological framework that enabled him to position his own anger within it and I think McEwan's cockroach is the most striking instance I think a book written in three months about the events that are just taking place just quite it just doesn't quite have that space but it's a very good point and and you know there is definitely a positive role for Rage in the world and in fiction in your talk you focus quite a lot on the two parties in a lie and the possibility that the lie can have consequences which the liar doesn't intend and I was wondering if you think that there's a continuity in terms of how we look at lies which actually do achieve that purpose so for example at the end of the Homeric cycle the Greeks use a lie the Trojan horse to achieve what war hasn't mailed to achieve in ten years and then you look at the modern age where for example Russia America different countries are accused of using algo lies to achieve in other countries what may be armed force wouldn't achieve I was wondering if you think that that's a sort of parallel in the way lies have been used by humans and recorded in fiction yeah I think that's a that is a that is a good parallel I don't know what more to say you have like these characters in fiction that you recognize us like the archetypal truth teller and there's a kind of recognition that we've maybe lost that in modern fiction but I would still say that we have that in society like you still might believe a kind of middle class white bloke so why did you think that we've still got it in society but not in fiction you believe me I mean yeah I I wasn't really saying that we've that we don't have that yeah you know I mean I I think I mean historians of science had talked a lot about the sort of moral the role of the moral character of the experimenter and the social status of the experimenter in establishing the truth of what the experimenter discovers and it's really that kind of social construction of truth that I was talking about and I wasn't really suggesting that we no longer trust Darcy types you know probably there still is a bias toward Darcy types you know readers predisposition to believe people what I was simply saying was that it changes and that and that credibility the criteria for believing people change through time and that those criteria I think changed probably more than the concept of a lie but yes we certainly do still have performances of authoritative Ness you have the stumbling middle-aged white guy standing up spouting what is purportedly truth on the lectern you know and that happens yeah so the Spanish writer Javier Maria said about fiction that unlike reality it's something that can't be denied say in the sense that Anna Karenina died by throwing herself under a train that's a fact which can't be denied whereas something in reality you can bring up counter evidence counter arguments and dispute a position so many of his books are obsessed with spies with Liars and many of them as well they are about to kind of concealed historical lies from Spanish history so from the Franco regime I was wondering whether how could this kind of quality of non deniability in fiction be used to approach more overt lies so then not not the cover-ups of a dictatorship but the kind of blatant lying of a trump or brexit campaign fantastic question you know it's like a lot of fantastic questions I wish I had the answer but yeah well I suppose at the end of the nature what I was trying to suggest was that was that fiction has a power in dealing with lies and truth claims and that it can describe to a society what's going on in that society better than any other medium can do and in that respect the the sort of undeniable 'ti of the world of a work of fiction is a really powerful weapon and it's a day it's a tricky weapon to use because if you use it as a weapon it can look crude and violent and as I've said I'm sort of over angry but it is you know being able to create something that has its own autonomous truth criteria built-in and which therefore seems undeniable is a really really powerful antidote potentially to the kinds of things that we are seeing in the world at the moment and I think writers are fiction in this generation really need to get a handle on that and I don't think they quite have yet I mean there may be other people who you know I haven't read you have done so but but the ones I've read haven't it's a great question thank you do you think that all lies are fundamentally the same kind of action in other words that you could take say an interpersonal lie that's there might be typically the kind of fiction that you've described over a long period of time where for example that you tell your wife that you're the library but actually you're with the Russian spy and then on the other hand a algo lie something that's put out there to achieve some kind of power are they fundamentally the same kind of action or are we actually just dealing with different things I think they're much more different than I was suggesting I mean the the philosophers who've written well about lying tend to make very careful discriminations of a kind that I just didn't have time to make between different forms of lying I think the the sort of the Bernard Williams definition of an assertion that the arturro believes to be false which she wishes the audience to believe to be true is is at the core of what a lie is but I think the social performances of lies or that all the political implications of lives can be wire wildly different and so the small-scale interpersonal lies are dependent on you know other patterns of behavior and deceit I you know I always wipe Tatyana's lipstick off my face before I go home so then I've been in the library and that sort of thing whereas the the political lies are much more driven by a straightforward end which is power and I think that does make a give on grant grounds for thinking I'm not saying it's not power in an interpersonal way either but but but that does allow one to make distinctions between those different kinds of lies which I think it actually you know important to make and if I were talking at greater length about lying I would certainly make the cessation so thank you very much for encouraging me to do so hello there do you think that some forms of lying a more self conscious than others I see that you have made quite a droit use of cartoons and in particular Pinocchio do you think the cartoons for example draw water or more self-conscious and draw attention to themselves as lies than other forms of fiction so interesting question yeah I think that's right because the cartoon is saying here's something that's not reality in an absolutely overt way but he's also saying yeah maybe is for his reality and I think different types of fiction in a similar way are transforming the world in different matter to different degrees and in different ways so yeah I would say definitely the different genres can can lie in different ways have I not got the nub of your question I can see by your gesturing I'm just interested in in that particular story because obviously as Ben ochio lies it's obvious to everybody around him that he's that he's lying it's a very sort of you know it's a kind of it's what we would like to happen I suppose when when we are lied to yeah yeah no that's right the physical Matt and I mean there is a sort of esthetic version of the liars and their TV just wants to do it you know he loves it and takes pleasure in it so yeah there are many different types and just building I suppose on the questions are answered with different types of liars what about the position of a lie he who becomes a liar by transmitting something that was alive but they believed to be the truth and they pass it on someone else I split yes because because a lie can be contagious once it's believed I think I think you know if I were being sent Augustin which you know I really am NOT attached to ask Tatyana she knows but if I was being central Gustin I'd say that the person who repeats a lie not knowing it to be a lie is he's going to get to happen they'll be fine but of course outside the world of theology the the thing that that person is doing is potentially quite bad because part of what is damaging about Asus teaming lie is that is is the spread and I think there's there's a wonderful remember toe echo which I'm not gonna be able to quote sorry but it goes roughly like in the Information Age the responsibility rests with the receiver that's to say it does seem to me that there is a kind of moral imperative in repeating things to be confident in your grounds for believing them and those grounds for believing them might go beyond your confidence in your source so in that respect I am with with sort of Matthew Don Kona and people in saying you know fact-check fracture because otherwise the the lie he who becomes the liar unwittingly can be doing moral political harm thank you it was wealth he was worth waiting for thank you [Applause] you you

Channel: London Review of Books (LRB)

Views: 8,191

Keywords: fiction, politics, Pride & Prejudice, Homer, Iliad, Boris Johnson, Knausgaard, Ian McEwan, Jane Austen

Id: J_E_xx7V8KI

Length: 69min 14sec (4154 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020