Alternative history
Which is to say, fiction
Why do people write stories?
If you put this question to a cross-section of the population, many would assume you were talking about fictional stories. One definition of “story” is “lie, falsehood.” A story is something you made up.
I don’t use the word this way. At least not exactly. I inform my history students at the beginning of the semester that I’m going to tell them stories. But I immediately add that these will be true stories, about real people doing real things. I prefer these kinds of stories to the made-up kind.
I recognize that other people have different preferences. To many people the attraction of a story is precisely that it is made up. A made-up story affords relief—escape—from the real world. Everyone likes to escape occasionally; some people like to escape often. The escape is to an alternative realm. The extreme alternative is fantasy, far removed from everyday life. Less dramatic escapes are into worlds that look much like our own but with characters and events drawn to the authors’ specifications rather than from reality.
When was the first jailbreak? When did the first story teller recognize that he or she might improve on reality? A Ricky Gervais movie from 2009, The Invention of Lying, imagines a world where everyone tells only the truth. One person discovers lying and takes advantage of others’ innocence. Hilarity ensues.
The details are wrong; it wasn’t hilarity that ensued when lying began. But the premise might be true. Lying—deliberate deception—can confer power. And deception predates humans. Birds fake injury to lure predators away from nests. Opossums play dead.
Stories, as commonly understood, awaited language. But the capacity for deception—for improving on reality—was already there. Some forms of fabrication were less about deception than about conjuring meaning from ignorance. Origin myths and tales of gods were probably taken literally by some, metaphorically by others, and not at all by still others. They were stories that might not have been factually correct but sought a higher truth.
Which is precisely how modern story tellers—novelists and screenwriters, for instance—often describe their work. To put it another way, ancient story tellers and modern story tellers alike describe the world not as it is but as it might be. Often this imagined world has coherence and meaning the real world lacks. That's what gives the imagined world its appeal. Historians—history tellers—debate whether the real world has coherence and meaning; story tellers dodge the debate by creating worlds that have not simply coherence and meaning but the coherence and meaning the story tellers want them to have.
The two genres—story telling and history telling—need not conflict. I can read the real world on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and imagined worlds on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. As long as I remember which day is which, I’ll set my expectations accordingly.
Moreover, the border between the two realms isn’t a line but a zone of transition. Fiction includes lots of facts. You can learn more about industrializing Britain from Charles Dickens than from many historians. And historians have been known to editorialize. Their judgments can appear in something as mundane as the ordering of clauses. “Winston Churchill was a stirring orator but a raving imperialist” leaves a different tone in readers’ ears than “Churchill was a raving imperialist but a stirring orator.”
In George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, the Serpent tells Eve, "You see things, and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were, and I say, 'Why not?’” One hesitates to ascribe sincerity to a Serpent, but the line was unironically adopted by both John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy to convey a romantic vision of politics.
This is the spirit of the story teller. The history teller would answer the Serpent and explain why not, citing evidence of folly and futility. The story teller dreams on.
I have spent the last 50 years of my life believing that J. Frank Dobie first said “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Until this morning, that is.
I read Prof. Brands essay “Alternative History.” Coming to an understanding of how the human memory is now thought to work, saving the expenditure of calories by filling in holes with perceived recall of things and events that may or may not have actually been or happened to make sense of it all before sending it back into areas of the brain for later retrieval, I decided to spent a little time this morning on my computer and its linkage to the modern version of the Library at Alexandria, the internet, to find out exactly what Prof. Dobie said in this regard before putting it down in my Comment.
Lo and behold. I find that this may have been said by Mark Twain, who of course was really Samuel Clemens, if for no other reason than it sounded like something he might have said. Or it may not have.
So if not from Twain’s lips, or at least from Clemens’ brain, or vice versa. While I can’t prove that Twain ever said it, you can’t disprove that Twain didn’t speak it or that Clemens didn’t think it. Just as “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” [Perhaps Irish physicist William Wright may have written something like this in 1888, but more recently Carl Sagan and Martin Rees have spoken and written cosmologically about this, do I dare say, principle. I actually first heard an old Austin police detective speak it.]
So what if I just write that my saying “never let the truth get in the way of a good story” must have surely been based upon an old Irish proverb, because such proverbs are often the source of great wisdom? Not because it did, but just because the Emerald Isle is a good place to park it this morning because I have no present inclination to expend more time and energy on the quest for its origin.
Which brings to mind “laziness.” I suspect that sometimes what gets passed off as historical storytelling or even alternative history and surely a lot of fiction, depending on the credentials and reputation of the teller, comes from the laziness that I have just exhibited. I am not here attributing laziness to the late Larry McMurtry, one of my favorite writers of fiction, but McMurty wrote in his non-fictional “In a Narrow Grave” that he preferred writing fiction to non-fiction, because it was easier.
But is laziness in speech and writing lying? It, as most things, depends on context. Just as lying most often is thought of as springing from the malicious intent of trying to get someone else to act to one’s advantage or the other’s disadvantage. But what about the so-called “white lie” often uttered with the benevolent or benign intent to spare another’s feelings?
Too many questions this morning. Not enough answers.