In a world so firmly grounded in the empirical, governed by the numbers of the bank, the predictable ticking of the clock, and the letter of the law, it surely follows that this simple binary can translate to everything, even something as fickle as literature. Yet literature is all fictional, deemed "imaginary", "invented" and "untrue" by its very definition. Even so many great writers weave reality, personal or historical, implicit or overt, into their work. So many of our beloved novels are fundamentally realist and operate within recognisably authentic environments. How do the facts of literal occurrences make their way into literature? Can objective truth exist in this form?
Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel – or "biography" as she mockingly presents it, much to the confusion of English booksellers who first shelved it with real biographies – is one such example of a text that deals with forms of "truth" in what is ultimately a fictional and partly fantastical, work. Although Woolf’s novel follows sex-changing young nobleman Orlando in a myriad of adventures across three centuries, it is largely derived from her close friend Vita Sackville-West’s family history.
Woolf uses Vita Sackville-West as inspiration for the character of Orlando, embeds some of her poetry in the narrative and even had her pose as the character for some of the photographs in the book. Stories from the history of Knole, the Sackville-West family home, are woven throughout and the novel recalls vivid episodes of history such as the court of Elizabeth I and the Great Frost, as well as including names of real people associated with the family. In this sense we see truths in the book, but these are set alongside a character who lives for 300 years without aging and who changes their gender and travels across geographies as well as in time.
Woolf is toying with the boundary between reality and fiction, between experience and experiment. There is no hard line of truth really in Orlando, just the imprint of what did happen modulated and embellished in the imagination. Crucially, this is still a form of truth, without which the story would have taken a remarkably different, less impactful direction. The incredibly rich writing plays with a stream-of-consciousness perspective, drifting in and out of the speaker, and perhaps this backbone of "truth" puts more emphasis on the style of Woolf’s writing.
One of the ways in which she uses this compound of people and histories is to explore identity, and the concept of each of us being the product of many selves, which manifest themselves at various times, all in the hope of coming together in what Woolf calls "true self". The fact that these selves were (mostly) real people further illustrates her point and enhances this reading of Orlando. The reality behind the book also serves to imagine a world in which Sackville-West’s sex was more fluid, to explore how Sackville-West could have easily inherited the house she and Woolf loved so dearly, Knole, had she been born a man, and thus makes wider feminist points about the unfair biases the contemporary patriarchy perpetrated.
Looking to recent times, Jeanette Winterson’s 1985 novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (Oranges) leans heavily on her experiences growing up in the '60s and '70s in the small town of Accrington near Manchester with an extremely strict Pentecostal Evangelical mother, not least when she falls in love with another girl. Yet interwoven are fables, Arthurian myths, and even the story of a wizard and a girl named Winnet Stonejar, an anagram for Jeanette Winterson.
The details of the novel's reality are mostly true to life. Published as her debut novel when she was just 24, Oranges is a raw reaction to an emotionally turbulent childhood. The protagonist shares the author's name and she records details of real events, like her birth mother visiting, embroidering a school project with "The summer is ended and we are not yet saved" and her mother’s discovery of her first girlfriend. But many of these particulars are distorted – for example, the beatings she was subjected are omitted or ameliorated. Much later, after both of her parents had passed away, Winterson wrote an autobiography entitled Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? which highlights some of these differences between her personal fiction and non-fiction.
Many critics seem to focus on the autobiographical side of Oranges, reducing it to an outpour of emotion and simply ticking off the "real" moments, only asking did this or that actually happen? But the novel is much more than this. It too, like Orlando, engages in a new, non-linear style of writing and conforms rather to Winterson’s perception of how we live our emotional lives as human beings. Time becomes multi-dimensional and involves imaginative trips, as we all take in daily life.
Truth is omnipresent in the novel, but it is not its central pillar. It is not objective either – how can it be? It is Winterson’s own perception of her childhood and adolescence when she was a young adult, told not as units of information but as dictated through her own emotional lens. It is the truth seen through her glass, darkly.
Although these are just two case studies in the vast field of literature, their examples can be used to take a view of truth in literature. Arguably, it is not a question of whether or not truth exists. That is too harsh of a binary. Truth is both ubiquitous and impossible to capture. It is yet another layer in our methodical examination of texts which can be considered or discarded if unnecessary for our personal interpretation. "Truth" can be used to gain valuable insights into the author’s intended interpretations. Ultimately, it can be everything or nothing or both in literature and the beauty is that it is up to us, the reader, to decide.
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