Thursday, February 28, 2008
Week 7 Open Topic
Thus far, my favorite "story" has been "How to Tell a True War Story". Focusing on the abstract definitions of truth in the story. O'Brien lists the things he thinks define truth. They differ from our textbook, straight laced teachings of truth. We were taught that truth was always honest, accurate, moral, and final. Most importantly we were taught that truth is absolute. O'Brien says, "If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for truth..." (69). Thereby saying, truth is obscene. He notes, that you cannot separate what happened from what you think happened. So truth is open to interpretation and dictated by the individual telling their truth as they think it was. Truth is a memory flaw...or strength, however you see it. Truth is also never believable because it is so unbelievable. So in a war story to tell the truth is to lie about the believable and tell the truth about the unbelievable...which of course could not be the truth to you or me or even the one telling the story. Here lies the imperfect, incomplete non-absolute. "The truths are contradictory" (80). The death of Lemon in the sun is beautiful yet gory, the story is about war but not really, it's about love. The yin and yang, opposites that contradict the absolute lines and boundaries we build around stories and our lives in general so that the abstract conscious can be silenced and our absolute sedentary minds can rest in peace at night. O'Brien also says the truth is ugly but then again it's also a contradiction, therefore making it beautiful. Finally he says, "...nothing is ever absolutely true" (82). So we are left with questions and no answers or answers we can make up based on our proposed truths and ideals. My question is though, if all these truths are truths, how do we ever know what really happened? How does that play into religion and "God's truth" (71)? -Hey, he said it, not me.
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3 comments:
I think that it is very important to focus on the meaning of truth when evaluating a war story. As war stories are commonly full of lies and deception or bending of the truth. I really liked the part where you brought up how the truth can be contradictory. Sometimes things that are truly horrible can be seen as beautiful or how what really happened can differ from the feeling that a war story can create. Most importantly I believe that we should always be skeptical of what we read and hear. I’m not saying that we should automatically disregard everything that we read in a war story because some of them do reveal certain truths about human nature and war, but we should not take every thing as gospel.
Channing makes a good point about it being important to focus on the meaning of truth when evaluating a war story. To the men in the Red Convertible and Circus in the Attic the "truth" they told they actually believed to be true while some knew it to be false and the same applies to The Things They Carried. Some of the stories are unbelievable and they have been told so many times that the storyteller actually begins to believe his own lies. This is why we read fiction though, because we want to hear truly unbelievable accounts and O'Brien says that this is what constitutes a true war story.
Great discussion all! in answer to Leah's question, if all these truths are true, how can we ever know what happened...
To answer this, we'd have to arrive at a definition of Truth that is more philosophical or maybe even spiritual than empirical, and in this way, the truth of war is again like the truth of love.
In love (whether we're talking about a person or a place or a principle, etc.) we can name off a number of "true" things we love about the beloved, a catalog of things that are true and yet, even when we enumerate these things, they don't add up to the great truth of what that love is. Moreover, some of the things we love might contradict other things about the beloved; within us all, there lay many a contradiction, yes? human beings are wildly inconsistent, after all.
Perhaps for O'Brien, war is like this. You can list all the things you know about it, everything you remember or think about it, and this whole catalog won't add up to the truth of it. Maybe truth is ultimately not-knowable except through the higher faculties of love and understanding? In other words, through lifting the veil of false simplicity and confronting the complexity of things, not looking to label them as true and false, but aiming rather to knit them all into some larger pattern that aids us in understanding ourselves and our world; maybe it's that larger understanding, which doesn't always fit into words, that constitute Truth?
I think O'Brien is going for a philosophical truth like this...
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