I just can’t stay away from the truth/facts/reality thread these days despite swearing repeatedly to disregard it (analyse that!), and so I must point out that even William Gibson, a novelist, has people assuming that because he writes something, it must be fact. His blog post of yesterday details some of the many things he has not actually experienced.

5 thoughts on “truth revisited

  1. Norman

    Isn’t it all part of the intellectual disintegration so rife in our post modern world? It’s there in our “anything goes” approach to language and logic. We find what’s really a form of literature being presented as History. Boundaries are so blurred in so many ‘disciplines’, that it’s unsurprising to find his readers making the sorts of assumptions to which he refers.

  2. Jill

    Yes, our confusion is very postmodern, isn’t it. Or post-postmodern, perhaps, we must be up to that by now.

    On the other hand, there were apparently violent discussions in the 18th century about whether or not epistolary novels were TRUE or not. For instance, a Duke published all the love letters he received from a nun – but were they truely from a Venezualan nun or just his own fabrication?

    Btw, I can’t remember the exact example, or where I read it, but I’m sure I read of an epistolary novel more or less like that, anyway 😉

  3. Norman

    I’d like to think there was a time we were beginning [however briefly] to make clear distinctions between imagination being presented in a realistic form, and claiming imagination as reality.
    But isn’t there an enormous difference between attempts by the Duke you mention, to pass off bogus material, and an approach which can be seen as meaning all written material is “really” only one form or another of literature, so those 18th Century type arguments are no longer even relevant?

  4. Planned Obsolescence

    Synthesis
    In a bizarre merger of the background materials of my last two posts, Jill Walker today directs our attention to William Gibson’s thoughts on writing, “truth,” and accountability. When did we all become such literalists that we would suggest that someo…

  5. the chutry experiment

    Truth and Blogging
    I’m still in the process of collecting links about the ethics of blogging. I think it is an important topic in terms of defining blogs. In my original post, I commented that “My own tendency is to avoid revising.” Oddly…

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