restored. Can this give rise to the demand that fiction dealing with the Holocaust has to be not only true but also acknowledging, respectful and restorative? I don’t think so. I think that truth is the only acknowledgment, the only respect, the only restoration that fiction can provide. Yes, fiction can have mythical, legendary and fairytale qualities that can be useful for many purposes, but I don’t think that myths, legends and fairytales can be demanded and constructed to serve the wants of those who have been traumatised and persecuted during the Holocaust.
What does it mean to find truth within a work of fiction? Fiction is true if it presents what happened or could have happened, and if it is a comedy or a satire, a legend, a myth or a fairytale that opens our eyes to something that happened or could have happened. What it presents doesn’t have to be the full truth; it can be just a tiny element of the truth as long as it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. And of course, the presentation of what happened or could have happened is far from being all that fiction does. We don’t want fiction just for the facts being presented to us. We want reality to be presented to us and explained to us and turned into something that, even though it is not our reality, we can imagine ourselves into. We read because we want to share the lives of those we read about, we want to empathise with them, fall in love with them, train our hatred on them, and ultimately learn about ourselves from them.
Even though the composition of these fictitious realities with their fictitious plots and situations and characters is something other than a presentation of facts, I experience it as something that has to be true. I don’t mean true by virtue of laying out what happened or could have happened any more – right now I mean a different truth. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what I mean and how to define this truth. What I am talking about is the feeling I have when a story that I have thought about, played with, thought about some more, and played with some more is finally ready to be written. It is a feeling as strong as when, after having researched a fact extensively and carefully, I have finally found the truth. The feeling doesn’t have to do with me putting something autobiographical or something else of which I am particularly certain into the story that I am going to tell. It doesn’t concern having a message I want to convey that I am finally about to convey successfully or with any other agenda. It is a feeling devoid of any agenda except: now I have it, now I can tell it. And it feels like I have found the truth.
In fact, an agenda other than telling the story would, at least for me, make the feeling of truth that I try to describe impossible. Once in my life, many years ago, I had a purpose other than telling a story when I tried to write a novel. I had been left by a woman I loved. I hoped to get her back, and to have God on my side, I promised to write something in His praise if He would help me – like Franz Werfel fleeing from Vichy France to the USA promised to write and later wrote The Song of Bernadette about the girl that had the revelation of Maria at Lourdes. I then started to think about what to write, and came up with all kinds of ideas about stories touching on religion but none praising God and none any good. The purpose killed all creative fantasy. I don’t want to go so far as to say that I was happy that the woman didn’t come back to me, but there was some relief in not having a promise I had to keep.
The pursuit of truth needs no other purpose than the truth. This is evident in the well-defined truth that I first talked about: truth in fiction that represents or opens our eyes to what happened or could have happened. It also holds for the truth that I find difficult to define, for which I can give no criteria other than my feeling and the absence of an agenda. To be true in both senses
What does it mean to find truth within a work of fiction? Fiction is true if it presents what happened or could have happened, and if it is a comedy or a satire, a legend, a myth or a fairytale that opens our eyes to something that happened or could have happened. What it presents doesn’t have to be the full truth; it can be just a tiny element of the truth as long as it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. And of course, the presentation of what happened or could have happened is far from being all that fiction does. We don’t want fiction just for the facts being presented to us. We want reality to be presented to us and explained to us and turned into something that, even though it is not our reality, we can imagine ourselves into. We read because we want to share the lives of those we read about, we want to empathise with them, fall in love with them, train our hatred on them, and ultimately learn about ourselves from them.
Even though the composition of these fictitious realities with their fictitious plots and situations and characters is something other than a presentation of facts, I experience it as something that has to be true. I don’t mean true by virtue of laying out what happened or could have happened any more – right now I mean a different truth. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what I mean and how to define this truth. What I am talking about is the feeling I have when a story that I have thought about, played with, thought about some more, and played with some more is finally ready to be written. It is a feeling as strong as when, after having researched a fact extensively and carefully, I have finally found the truth. The feeling doesn’t have to do with me putting something autobiographical or something else of which I am particularly certain into the story that I am going to tell. It doesn’t concern having a message I want to convey that I am finally about to convey successfully or with any other agenda. It is a feeling devoid of any agenda except: now I have it, now I can tell it. And it feels like I have found the truth.
In fact, an agenda other than telling the story would, at least for me, make the feeling of truth that I try to describe impossible. Once in my life, many years ago, I had a purpose other than telling a story when I tried to write a novel. I had been left by a woman I loved. I hoped to get her back, and to have God on my side, I promised to write something in His praise if He would help me – like Franz Werfel fleeing from Vichy France to the USA promised to write and later wrote The Song of Bernadette about the girl that had the revelation of Maria at Lourdes. I then started to think about what to write, and came up with all kinds of ideas about stories touching on religion but none praising God and none any good. The purpose killed all creative fantasy. I don’t want to go so far as to say that I was happy that the woman didn’t come back to me, but there was some relief in not having a promise I had to keep.
The pursuit of truth needs no other purpose than the truth. This is evident in the well-defined truth that I first talked about: truth in fiction that represents or opens our eyes to what happened or could have happened. It also holds for the truth that I find difficult to define, for which I can give no criteria other than my feeling and the absence of an agenda. To be true in both senses
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