Charles Durning Carroll

Idea Review

Michiko Kakutani’s: “Bending the Truth in A Million Little Ways”

The New York Times has a very interesting article on the Million Little Pieces brouhaha by the inimitable Michiko Kakutani. Her article, called “Bending The Truth in a Million Little Ways” talks about a lot of issues that interest me–truth, lies, objectivity, the status of literature, etc. Ms. Kakutani is no fool and is certainly widely read, but her training as a journalist (despite a degree in English from Yale) leads her to leave us with the impression that the end of objectivity is a recent phenomenon stemming from something rotten in the kingdom, e.g. reality t.v., navel gazing, the “me” generation, psychoanalysis, academia, etc. In point of fact, memoirs were never about objectivity and the blurring of fact and fiction is probably as old as storytelling itself. I’ve been reading and thinking about Rousseau’s Confessions as some of you know, and am at the moment also reading Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or The Growth of a Poet’s Mind.

What strikes me about these autobiographical works (essentially memoirs–or maybe indeed an autobiography is somehow not a “memoir”) is that they are both attempts at self-justification. I would argue that there is a straight line to be traced between Augustine’s Confessions and A Million Little Pieces. I haven’t read the latter and read the former so many years ago it’s now all blurred in my memory, but if these fit the pattern of Rousseau’s Confessions and The Prelude then they are extended excuses for various forms of illicit behavior. What they all do (I say this of course without having them fresh in my mind) is create a subjective ground for morality and then invent various means for redemption–the church, nature, confession itself, etc. Wordsworth even reminds us of how little he has fallen! The purpose of the memoir, I would argue against Ms. Kakutani, is not about the recounting of facts but rather a tool for forgiveness and social re-integration. Ms. Kakutani’s article suggests in a misleading way that if only we all stopped lying something called “objective truth” would suddenly shine out from under the grime of rhetoric.

Truth—and nobody really wants to say this—is hard work. Whether in science—supposedly the preserve of objective truth, but once again shown to be quite subjective by the Korean experimenter who suceeded in passing a fabrication to the normally sedulous Science—or in literature, a serious dose of humility and an iterative process that works and works again to call into question what is passed for “truth” is vitally important. Political liberals, poets, and many academics get skewered for supposedly making truth subjective and relative, but I think this is to misunderstand what they/we are saying. I recall Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon and its seven different versions of reality. Somewhere behind all those scenes there’s something vital called truth, but you’d be a fool to claim that one version or the other is in fact the truth.