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Article Excerpt
I'd like, over the next 50 minutes, first to explore some interconnected problems, and then to read you a story of my own. It's a kind of experiment that examines the way in which stories happen, and how they get told.
I'm using the phrase, "truth and storytelling," as my title here. When Maxine Ruvinsky first asked me to give a presentation today, I thought for a while I'd entitle it "Truth and Lying." It would have been the same talk, but I didn't want you to think I'm casual about this kind of replacement, this apparent ease of substituting one notion with another--that is, I don't want to suggest that "storytelling" and "lying" are the same thing. There are some complicated similarities, and along the way I'll touch on them indirectly. What I'm mainly interested in talking about today is the term that holds both "truth and storytelling," "truth and lying," together: the term "and." I am not considering the issue of truth or story-telling; only the issue of truth and storytelling.
This nondescript word, "and," is a messy but powerful space. A lot of people have trouble with it. As I'm using it today, this kind of little "and" controls two large subgroups, the truth and storytelling of the title. The first subgroup of my "and"--"truth"--seems basic enough; in daily chat we want the unadorned truth, we try to prove the truth, we want to arrive at the truth; in certain legal proceedings one swears to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The simple truth. The second subgroup, "storytelling," appears, from the start, more complicated. Storytelling can be oral, or written--as, I suppose, truth can be also. Storytelling can be fiction, or reportage; or visual images, sometimes first written down, then technologically transformed into pictures and narrative, pictures and dialogue.
Furthermore, the process of storytelling shifts back and forth along a kind of continuum, a continuum from "factuality," whatever that really is, to "imagination," whatever that really is. As if that's not enough, let me complicate your image of this continuum. Sometimes the continuum is complex as it plays with the motion of storytelling and truth--a continuum I like to think of as fat; and sometimes it focuses primarily on fact or primarily on imagination, a thin way of telling a story. And in every story the continuum keeps shifting between fatter and thinner. Furthermore, the factuality/imagination continuum is constantly on the move. It moves as the story moves, and it moves in our minds as we read or watch the story unfold.
Or maybe, to simplify, think of this association, truth/storytelling, in another way--as a kind of organism. The organism has a couple of arms: truth, storytelling, It also has a belly, our strange friend, "and." The belly is fat sometimes, sometimes thin. But there's always a lot going on in that belly.
For the moment I won't push this any further, or neither I nor any of you will get to the end of this talk. Time to try out what I've been saying on some actual stuff.
The New Yorker magazine of November 27, 2000, ran a story entitled "My Fake Job," by Rodney Rothman, a one-time chief writer for The Late Show with David Letterman. For his fake job, Rothman pretended to be working for an Internet company. He created a false identity, walked into the company's large office, sat down in a cubicle with a desk, an available monitor and telephone, and went to work. Asked what his role was, he called himself a "junior project manager." In his office he meets other employees over coffee breaks, spends a lot of time getting on e-mail, sits in on meetings, opens a spreadsheet document on his computer--he's never worked on a spreadsheet before but finds it easy filling the screen with arbitrary numbers. He gets a free back massage from Melissa, brought in by the company as part of its Team Wellness Program. He has become what he calls a "workaholic" in his non-job, constantly on, constantly aware. After seventeen days he can't take more of either the psychological high or the stress, feeling as if he is living in what he calls "death row." He tells co-workers, whom he's exchanged barely a dozen words with, that lie's "going back to the satellite office." One fellow worker says, "Lucky bastard!" Another, "Your own choice, or are you resigning?"
All well and good. A story about the complexity of post-industrial institutions, the impersonality of the workplace, and so on. But something else has happened in this story. Two weeks later, in the December 11th New Yorker, an editor's note appears:
We have learned that in his piece "My Fake Job" ... Rodney Rothman changed identifying details about the workplace and described an incident--a massage at the office, as it happens--that did not take place. Also, the author should have revealed that his mother worked at the company. The magazine does not disguise details or mix fact and fiction without informing the reader (not even in a comic piece like this one), and we sincerely regret the error.
So it's clear that the New Yorker has a pretty good sense of where to set its limits on the continuum between factuality and imagination. An imagined event, the massage, is not fact; and another fact should have been mentioned, that Rothman's mother worked in this organization and by implication could have given him insight into its structures, making it much easier for him to figure out in advance something of how the company functioned. Rothman tried to fatten up his storyline, and it failed as non-fiction.
Very well, a somewhat larger case. I was recently reading a book about Vancouver Island and its history, Islands of Truth, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000), subtitled The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island. The author, Daniel Clayton, takes as his subject matter the early encounters--the confrontations and friendships--between European explorers and native peoples. His large double question, controlling his inquiries, is always: how do we know that the information Western reports give us is true? And if less than true, in what way are the reports valuable? "I am concerned," he writes, "with the truth status of texts: the meanings they create, the sites they worked through, the realities and contexts they fashion, the understandings and stories they encourage and disguise, and the power relations they induce and bolster" (xiv).
To explore these concerns Clayton relies on some theories of Edward Said and Michel Foucault, modifying these according to his needs. So, early in the book, Clayton cites a passage from the official published account of Captain Cook's third voyage to the Vancouver Island area. "As Cook's ships got closer to shore, [the account goes,] `the canoes began to come off in greater numbers,' totalling thirty-two, and `though our...
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