Today I called in to a radio program about truth in memoirs, and a large chunk of the program was devoted to how reliable our memories are.
So I'm going to do an experiment. I will try to reconstruct from my memory what I said, and then whoever wants to can go listen (advance the player to about two-thirds of the way through) to the program at WUNC-FM and see how much detail I lost, or where my memory failed. (Update: transcript is below!)
I am writing 45 minutes after I got off the phone.
Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I'm a classicist and a mythologist and I wanted to give some historical perspective to this question. Often when we talk about truth today we say, 'all right, that's true, that's fine," but we don't think about why we consider truth important.
In the ancient world there was a huge debate about this question, and it started in Athens in the fifth century BC with a group called the Sophists. They said that it didn't matter what was true as long as you could make people believe what you said. Plato reacted to that and said, no, the truth does matter, and that was picked up by Christianity later on. One of the greatest questions of truth in the world is whether Jesus Christ was resurrected, and St. Paul wrote that if he wasn't "we are among men most to be pitied."
So the truth can matter a lot, as your guest said earlier, about James' Frey's "failure of empathy." If you're on James Frey's side, you're on the side of the Sophists, and if you're on the side of Absolute Truth, you're on the side of Plato and St. Paul.
Haven Kimmel, the best-selling memoirist, was a guest on this show, and argued that when Frey lied about things that matter to people, he had a "failure of empathy." Frey failed to recognize how he would hurt people by getting them to believe his success story. Every person who triumphs over an addiction, as Frey claimed to do, gives hope to those who are addicted themselves, or to those who have addicted friends and loved ones. One fewer success story off the roll means less hope for everyone.
And being lied to is always demoralizing.
I agree with Kimmel, but I think I've isolated a different reason this scandal rubs me the wrong way.
Frey may be defended by arguing he wrote a "good story." The ancient Greeks did the same thing with their myth, so what's the problem?
The ancient Greeks had loose but recognizable criteria for their myths. The "forests of myth" (a phrase of Prof. C.J. Herington-- check out his book Poetry into Drama from the library) embraced a complex of traditional story patterns and characters established over the course of centuries. Variation was fine within boundaries, but as the tragedian Euripides found out with such unorthodox plays as the Medea (which in the yearly dramatic contest placed third out of three at its premiere), not every new interpretation was guaranteed success.
More importantly, in the late 5th century BC, a playwright named Agathon wrote at least one drama using characters that he had made up from his own imagination, much the way fiction writers do today. Aristotle reports this innovation disapprovingly, along with charges that he tried to out-Euripides Euripides.
So, as far as we know, the Athenians of the 5th century BC, at least, did not accept every story, even a good one like the Medea, which ended up a classic.
Therefore, the James Frey "mythology" defense does not hold water even for the culture that gave us the word.
The Greeks had criteria for true stories-- not truth as we think of it, but a truth characterized by consistency with, and thorough understanding of, tradition. They did not give blanket acceptance of a powerful story. Neither are Americans obligated to do so, if our tradition has been violated. It just so happens that, unlike in the ancient world, our tradition stipulates that authors who put "true" on the covers of their books write about events as they happened.
And to me that's a fine tradition to have.
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Update-- The transcript is here:
Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I'm a classicist and a mythologist and I just would like to give a historical perspective on this. In America today, we-- sometimes we think things are true and that's okay and-- or they're not-- but we don't think about what the underlying history of it is.
And in the ancient world we had this debate, and it was between Sophists in the 5th century BC in Athens, who believed that you could say anything any time if you wanted to make a good argument. And then there was Plato, who reacted against them, who said that truth did matter, truth really did matter.
And that was picked up by-- that concept was picked up by Christianity and, for example, one of the most important quote facts that we have is whether Jesus Christ was resurrected or not, so, which St. Paul said was a very important thing. He said it was-- if it didn't happen, then men are all most to be pitied.So if you are on James Frey's side, then you're really on the Sophists' side in Athens, and if you're on the absolute truth side, or the truth side, you're on your guest's, talking about the failure of empathy and thinking that truth really does matter.
It looks like what I did when I wrote my initial post was to clean up all my bumbling sentence construction, and to add a little bit of explanation that wasn't in the original phone call.
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