The Difference Between Fiction and Lies Is Actually Very Straightforward
Give or take a few edge cases, sure, but the basics are pretty simple
For many years now I have seen, in multiple discussions in various contexts, remarks and asides to the effect that "it is really hard to draw a line between fiction and fact". And for many years now I have thought in response, "No it isn't! It's really clear in nearly every case!" Which is to say that while there are, as there are with in any conceptual distinction in any field outside mathematics and its ilk, some tricky borderline cases, a few definitional wrinkles that want ironing, the main issue is not particularly complex or tricky at all. It is not, we might say, notably tricky, which meant that people's continuing to note it was somewhere between puzzling and frustrating.
So when I recently came across an essay by the philosopher Emar Maier called “Making Up Stuff” on the difference between fiction and lies,1 I was excited: a philosopher! That will clear things up!—Now, “philosopher” is also (often said to be) a complex conceptual category, but in the sense in which it is used in contemporary American philosophy departments it includes people who seem to specialize in unpacking seemingly tricky linguistic tangles—indeed, that is arguably the central skill taught and practiced in those departments. So I launched into his essay, optimistic that Maier might make the clear point that I had long thought so desperately needed making, perhaps an even better version of it than I had imagined.
So did he?
Well, yes and no. Early on my heart sank as Maier referred to "the surprisingly elusive distinction between fiction and lying". Fortunately he didn't leave it there: he goes through a number of examples (some of which I will discuss below), and comes, I think, to something like the distinction I would suggest. But to my mind he made the entire matter seem much more mysterious than it was. The thrust of his essay was “it’s very tricky—look at all the complexity”, ending with a possible answer, as the hard-won prize at the end of a tough competition, rather than (as I would have wished) beginning with “it’s very simple, see?”, outlining a simple answer, and then addressing edge cases, thus letting the answer be an easy illumination like the turning on of a much-needed lamp, followed by some business about remaining but minor shadows.2 And the real problem with his approach, besides his making mysterious what he promised to clarify, is that in the process of juggling compelexitiese the actual answer—which, again, I think he basically got right, which is to say it’s the answer I would give—was obscured if not downright buried.
My reader might think that I would take Maier's caution and insistence on complexity as a sign that the issue is trickier than I am crediting, seeing as how Maier is a professional philosopher and all, and knows how to handle such dangerous substances as complex distinctions. But I intend instead to rush in where angels fear to tread and lay out my understanding of this distinction, tyring why it isn’t complex, by which I mean that it is no more complex than most distinctions: tricky, but not notably tricky, such that singling it out as such is either an isolated demand for rigor or Griceanly misleading.
But prodded by what I found to be Maier’s essentially correct but overly mystifing answer, I am going to provide my own, and explain what this distinction mostly consists of, and only then try to sweep up around the edges, confident that, even if a tiny dusting of confusion will remain in the odd corner, a tiny bit of dirt under the sofa won't stop the room from looking clean. And then you, reader, can either bask in the knowledge of the distinction with a clarity beyond Maier’s telling (if not beyond his ken), or explain to me what I am missing and why I really should leave such things to the professionals.
Here is the basic claim I shall be defending and discussing:
The difference between fiction and lies is metadata. Fiction is labeled as (that is, openly avowed to be) fiction; lies are disguised.
This is a straightforward consequence of the extremely different intention behind lies and fiction. Lies are meant to fool: to get someone to believe something that isn't true. (This is, of course, not a new insight: to take but one prominent example, it’s a clear premise of philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s famous discussion of the issue.3) Fiction, in contrast, doesn’t fool anyone and isn’t supposed to. It’s meant to be enjoyed in the full knowledge that it’s made up. It’s true, of course, that in some sense that may seem impressive if you ignore the entire historical, social and linguistic context of the matter, that the lie that “Donald Trump won the 2020 election”, and the fiction that “in the hole in a ground lived a hobbit” are both false claims. But it is the broader context that differs; that makes one a lie and one a fiction.
The place this plays out is in the metadata—or, if you prefer, you can say the social context in which the fiction or lie is presented, but I find that thinking of it as metadata is clarifying.—So what does this mean?
Well, fiction is, above all, labeled as such: books of fiction are often labeled “fiction” somewhere on the cover; they will usually have a ritualistic disclaimer somewhere inside along the the lines of "All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental". Furthermore it is sold in stores from the “fiction” section, is reviewed and discussed as fiction, etc. Similar labels, disclaimers, and discussions surround fictions in other media as well. In nearly every case, there is no question whatsoever whether a book is fiction or not: anyone sufficiently fluent in the book’s language to read it will also know the cultural signals that clearly mark it off as fiction. Or, to take a different case (of an oral story) it will be made clear at some point (“Daddy, did this really happen?” “No, sweetheart, I told you this was a made-up story, remember?”)
Lies, of course, have no explicit metadata, and the social context is entirely manipulated in a way to suggest that they are, in fact, true. We might say that lies are passed off as true: a liar s them as they would a true claim, and the lie works to the extent that it is taken to be true. Thus the lack of metadata—the lack of labeling them as lies—is entirely necessary: if it was said that they were false, then no one would believe them, and the whole point is to get someone to believe them.4 (If you are not meant to take them as true, then they are something other than lies (an exaggeration, or possibly just bullshit). If deception is not the goal, then their status as lies is questionable—perhaps it’s an innocent mistake.5
So the difference between fiction and lies is, I maintain, simple: it’s in the way it’s presented. If you mark it out (even implicitly) as untrue in advance, and clearly signal that no this is not real, then it's fiction. If you are trying to pass off what you are saying as true, then it's a lie. Indeed, this leads to a simple test of any individual false statement, at least in cases where the claim’s maker is alive and willing to answer: ask them. If they admit to it being fiction, then it’s definitely fiction; if they insist that they are, in fact, telling the truth, then (if indeed the claim is false) they are not engaged in fiction,6 and are quite probably lying.
Of course they might not be lying: they might, for instance, be mistaken, or be joking, or bullshitting. This is an important point: I am not claiming that every untrue statement is either a lie or fiction!7 On the contrary, there are clearly a number of others, as Maier also notes. Maier lists as other forms of untruth exaggerations, metaphors, irony and jokes; I might add mistakes, delusions, and bullshitting, and there are most likely other categories as well. This doesn’t mean that fiction and lies aren’t worth distinguishing, nor that we necessarily need to bring in every possible type of untruth; just bear in mind that in making this distinction I am focusing on one area and not pretending to be exhaustive.
So the difference between fiction and lies is in the metadata. If I’m right then this is a simple distinction indeed. And I think you will find that in nearly every case where one or the other is presented, you can tell whether something is a lie or a fiction without any difficulty. But as I said above, there are always edge cases for any distinction; my claim here is not that this distinction is crystal clear in every case, but that it is not unusually or remarkably mysterious.
So let’s look at some edge cases.
Fictional Metadata
One common thing in fiction is something which purports to be metadata but which is actually part of the fiction itself. Maier mentions several examples of this, in particular Robinson Crusoe, which was originally published with a preface declaring it to be real, and Tolkien's fictional conceit that his work is but a translation of the Red Book written by Bilbo and Frodo. And we could multiply such examples easily: Gene Wolfe, in The Book of the New Sun, has a similar conceit to Tolkien’s, only involving a manuscript from the future rather than the past; Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose begins with a marvelous preface describing how he found the manuscript, came to translate it, and then lost it; and so forth. There is a continuum here, of course, between this sort of device and purer fictive texts, but I don’t want to limit this category (amorphous as it necessarily is) to fictional metadata which is signed by the novel’s real author. So for one more example, consider Nabokov’s Lolita, which famously begins with a forward by John Ray, Jr., in which he describes the origins of the manuscript that makes up the rest of the novel. In all of these cases, we might say, the metadata is not truthful: each of them claim to be the truth—or, at least, to tell a story of how the manuscript arrived to cast doubt upon the matter. Do these cases create a whole category of works that muddle our seemingly tidy distinction?
I claim they do not. The case of works like those of Tolkien, Wolfe, Eco and Nabokov8 are actually simple. No one is meant to be fooled. The fictional metadata in those books are surrounded but yet more metadata—ought we to call it metametadata?—that makes it perfectly clear that those claims of truth are themselves fiction. As with any other novel, the works of Tolkien et. al. will be labeled fiction; will probably have standard disclaimers about how they are fiction printed on their copyright pages; will be sold from the fiction section of book stores and clearly marked as fiction in the reviews, in interviews with the author, and so forth. Tolkien never claimed in his letters or to his friends to have merely translated his book!
The case becomes clear when we look at actual examples of book-length lies, when a book is published as a true story but then turns out to be false. There are lots of such cases:9 there is, for instance, the case of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, where a purported memoir in fact turned out to be made up. Then there is the memoir by Nobel peace price winner Rigoberta Menchú (called I, Rigoberta Menchú) which sparked a controversy due to some falsehoods within it. This doesn’t mean that her book was fiction; a lot of it, apparently, was factual. Rather than fiction, it was a memoir that included a lot of truth and some lies. But those lies can’t be excused as fiction, since they weren’t called that. Again, examples could easily be multiplied.10 Occasionally the books in question are reissued as fiction; in other cases, they simply stand as memoirs with lies in them.
It’s important to realize that while some cases are complex—the facts are in dispute, say, or the authors are inconsistent in their claims—that doesn’t mean that the distinction is unclear; it means that specific cases are complex or disputed. Nor will a deceptive book necessarily be invented from stem to stern: some are, but in many cases (such as as in the case of the Menchú) they end up being mixes of truth and lies.
One might ask what the point of putting in fictional metadata if not to fool people? The answer, I think, is reasonably clear: it enhances the fiction in various ways. The prefaces and afterwards in which a manuscript’s history is discussed by the author are part of the fiction, taking the form of a story about the main story. They are, we might say, one particular form of frame tale, which is what we call those stories which begin with someone sitting down to tell a story which then consist of the story that that person tell (or a set of stories which a whole group of different people) tell. Frame stories, of course, are an extremely common fictional device, dating at least as far back as the middle ages in such works as The Thousand and One Nights, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales.11 To the extent that we can understand these instances of fictional metadata to serve as a frame story—which I think is a very large extent—they need no particular explanation or analysis.
But perhaps it is worth pausing for a moment to think about the way in which this sort of frame story, in which the author, more or less in their own voice, talks about hearing the tale or finding the manuscript, differs from the more common frame stories in which a clearly fictional character tells the story. It has been said12 that what frame stories do is highlight the narrated nature of the inner tale, its status as a story. I think this is true; but what stories with fictional metadata do is slightly different: they highlight the story’s connection to the fiction’s present, its place in history. Tolkien’s fiction of translating a manuscript makes clear (or should, although in point of fact many readers miss it) that it is not a secondary world, but actually a story set within the deep past of our history. Eco’s introduction adds a layer of mystery to his mystery, causing the inner story to shimmer in and out of reality and focus in a way that not only highlights its narrated nature (as does any frame story) but ties it in to the practice and mysteries of history. Wolfe’s claim of translation puts us directly in the path of his future, and also allows him to leave certain words deliberately ambiguous, and to add yet another layer of estrangement to an already marvelously strange narrative.13 And John Ray, Jr.’s forward to Lolita not only effectively sets up some basic plot points (like the fact that the narrator is dead and was “in legal custody”), as well as placing subtle clues about deeper plot points that are almost certain to elude the first-time reader.
Like any fictive device, fictional metadata can be used in many very different ways, and I am hesitant to make any generalizations about them. I think it’s safe to say that one common use is to ease the path to the suspension of disbelief—or perhaps we might better say that it strengthens the suspension of disbelief: in Eco’s case, in particular, it makes the story seem more embedded in history that in might otherwise. And another common use is to establish plot points that would not be easily worked into the main narrative voice of the text (as in Lolita). But obviously there will be a lot more uses, with still others have never as yet been carved from the hard marble of possibility space by any fictive sculptor. I have dwelt on these instances not just for the pleasure of doing so, but also to guard against the possibility that a suspicious lingual analysts might suspect that deception is the only plausible reason to insert fictive metadata. I trust this brief sketch at lest suggests a few of the many reasons besides dishonesty that writers might chose to use them.
I am not saying, however, that all uses of fictional metadata fall into this category. There are some that are straightforwardly deceptive.14 One case is from the movie Fargo, which famously (or infamously) begins with a card (of text) which reads:
This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.
The Coen brothers have been cagey about this, finally admitting its falsehood only two decades after the film was released.15 More to the point, unlike the fictions of Tolkien et. al. that enhance the story by telling a story about the story, this is a bald assertion: this happened. If you know for a fact that Tolkien or Nabokov is making up their fictional metadata, it affects your enjoyment of their books not at all, and you can and do still delight in their frame tales just as you do in the tales of Scheherezade’s nupitals or of the pilgrims met on the road to Canterbury. But if someone tells you, right before you see the movie, that the opening card of Fargo is false, then it just seems pointless, risible, like any other lie once fully uncovered. Unlike the various cases of fictional metadata I have examined above, the introductory card to Fargo adds nothing at all if you know it isn’t true—it only works as a lie, not as a fiction. (Unlike all of the other fictive metadata, there is no frame story, such as Tolkien and Wolfe’s acts of translations, or Eco’s discovery of a manuscript; it is just a bald statement of fact. Nor is there any plot included, as there is in the forward to Lolita.) For this reason it is, I think, immoral in the way that (most) deceptive lies are immoral.16
But while I think the prefatory title card of Fargo is clearly just a lie, a more complex question is whether its presence makes Fargo as a while into a lie. Here the answer is, to my mind, no, but it’s a genuinely tricky question. One might say that it’s still a fiction since obviously even if one falsely believes the title card to be accurate, there are a still a lot of things which are unmistakably fictional: the appearnce of the characters, say, and almost certainly the specific dialogue, and quite possibly some of the actions (would “told exactly as it occurred” require the marvelous moment where Jerry Lundegaard (played by William H. Macy) has a burst of frustration while scraping his car window to be anything but ficiton? I wouldn’t think so), to be clearly invented. Part of this arises from the technicality of its medium: it is in the nature of specifically cinematic storytelling to make even the truest stories be “based on a true story” rather than simply accuracy per se: people played by actors alwayss don’t look precisely like their real-life counterparts, and dialogue almost always has to be invented or recreated, etc. But even with true narratives told using the mechanics and style of fiction we naturally assume at least a small amount of license we don’t in a history book. Then there arises the question of how much the mechanics and style of fiction themselves are supposed to belie the claim in the title card. Are we supposed to “know” that it’s really made up? Not entirely—the title card is, as I have argued, clearly deceptive and intended to be so. But maybe to some degree. The proper response to this situation, of course, is to be extra upfront about what is invented, not to blatantly lie about it as the Coen brothers did. Nevertheless I think one might argue that Fargo was fiction, just that the title card was a lie; but I think even if you buy that argument (and I’m not sure I do) the latter lie did a real disservice to a fiction that needed no lies told on its behalf.
Ambiguous Metadata
More frequent hard cases multiply when the metadata is not fictional but ambiguous (a case far more frequent than fictional metadata, familiar though the latter is). The most common case here is the one introduced by the familiar formula already mentioned in passing, "based on true events".
"Based on true events" is a way to try and gain some of the benefits of lying without actually lying. After all, all things being equal true stories are more powerful than fictional ones: they can include coincidences and ironies no self-respecting author of fiction could plausibly indulge in and that no half-competent editor would allow to stand. In true stories, people behave in ways or suffer fates that are simply unsatisfying, and which you can’t get away with in fiction. Other times, events in true stories would strain credulity if they didn’t happen. As I have already cited Joel Coen saying,17 “if an audience believes that something's based on a real event, it gives you permission to do things they might otherwise not accept.” "Based on a true story" doesn't give writers all the extra power that "is a true story" does, but it gives a good measure of it. And there is a sense that this is unearned. (Which is why Fargo, or at least its title card, is such a clear-cut case: the Coen brothers were not trying to fudge something, and imply something not claimed, they were actively claiming what they had no right to claim.)
And yet… I don’t think I want to call “based on a true story” a lie, at least not in most cases. True, there may be some element of deception here—a way to get narrative power or get away with plot clunkiness or achieve suspension of disbelief that is essentially unearned. But like anyone who picks up a fiction, you are openly deceiving a willing audience. So it’s not really a lie. Presumably, if questioned, the authors or creators of a “based on a true story” fiction would be open about what they invented and what they didn’t; we don’t ask because we enjoy the fiction and don’t want to know (or, more commonly, simply don’t care).
Of course in many ways the equivocation “based on a true story” is a good one: it highlights that what follows does not strictly follow fact in the way that “this is a true story” does not—which makes, for some level of distortion, a claim that “this is a true story” a lie: again, judgment in any given case may be muddy, but this is not because there is a conceptual difficulty in telling fact from fiction or fiction from lies, but simply because any given case may involve judgment calls.
Still, while not lying, its purpose is often deceptive in a way that strikes me as somewhat suspicious. It’s underhanded, one might say. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the phrase is associated with low-rent knock-off films, and not more serious movies: it is a bit of a skeevy thing to do. For a non-skeevy version, we need only make a minor change: “inspired by a true story” does not, I think, go nearly as far as “based on a true story” does in suggesting that a story is true enough, and that it’s basically true. In other words, it is somewhat less deceptive than “based on” so often is. Which is presumably why it is used less often: it doesn’t work as well.
Fiction relies on a suspension of disbelief—a willingness on the part of the audience to deceive themselves about what they know is not, in fact, the case. There are a lot of techniques to achieve this, mostly various forms of versillimitude in narration, but fictional metadata is (as I’ve argued) another. “Based on a true story” is yet another, but it is a slightly underhanded one because it is deliberately ambiguous about where the fiction ends and the story begins.18 It is, so to speak, achieving a suspension of disbelief with an extra kick, like a block that is not quite a foul but isn’t quite fair play either. Not a lie, but questionable sportsmanship.
Stories That Seem to Contradict Their Metadata
Another common phenomenon is stories which include their authors, not just in a (fictional) forward or afterward, but in the text itself (Paul Auster is a character in Paul Auster’s own novel City of Glass; Grant Morrison is a guest star in Grant Morrison’s own comic book Animal Man #26). For the most part these instances are no more confusing than Tolkien's purported translations. But at times it is. I shall examine one such case in detail, since only in the details does the complexity I am discussing emerge.
One of my favorite books is Tim O'Brien's mosaic story The Things They Carried. Many of the stories in the book don't include O'Brien, being entirely third person; but many do, being told in the first person and showing him either in the troop with the others, or talking with the others as, decades later, he is writing up their stories (as he might have done if they had been his real former comrades in arms). The book is dedicated to the "members of alpha company", and lists most of its main characters in what is (usually) not part of the story—another example of fictitious metadata.19 But then other parts of the novel contradict the stories which include O'Brien, in particular the brief, powerful chapter "Good Form" in which O'Brien says "It’s time to be blunt. I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented."—and then tells a brief (one-paragraph) story, before admitting immediately "even that is made up". The novel, in short, tells you something, and then says that it was made up—but still in the novel, that is, still in the space where the narrative has the mantle of fiction drawn over it, leading us to question which is true and which isn’t.
Ironically, this has led (in my experience teaching the novel) not to greater distrust of the text but to greater trust of it. In other words, while nothing he says is a lie—the book is labeled fiction; he is honest about it in interviews—people are still fooled, because they believe the text over the metadata. This is, I suppose, a form of the contract we make when we read fiction (or go to a magic show): we walk in, knowing we will be fooled. But it’s a particular and powerful one. Let me walk through how this works, using the most powerful example from the book.
The three stories immediately prior to "Good Form" form a unit: the first one, "Speaking of Courage", tells about one of the soldiers from the fictional platoon that forms the locus of the mosaic soon after the war, living at home and feeling alienated from his neighbors by the experience of war, which references (briefly) the experience of camping in what turned out to be “a shit field”. The second story, “Notes”, talks about the writing of that story (including purported correspondence from one of the surviving members of the platoon with O'Brien). And then the third, "In the Field", actually tells the story of camping in the shit field that was previously alluded to. It's a brutal and brilliant series of linked fictions. Immediately following is “Good Form”, the brief tale in which O'Brien confesses "almost everything else [apart from the fact that O’Brien was a soldier in Vietnam] is invented"—taking, as it were, the implied truth of the previous three stories back. And then comes another story, "Field Trip", about taking his daughter to Vietnam decades after the war, and touring that field where the soldier died (the one referenced in “Speaking of Courage” and “Notes”, and portrayed in “In the Field”)—a vivid portrayal of his relationship with his daughter, and how that story (the one he just told us in several ways, the one he claimed was “invented”) affects him, and is hard to tell to his child.
In this sequence, it is easy to take the admission that "almost everything else is invented" less seriously than one should. O’Brien spends so much space selling you the story, at various levels of narration—direction narration in “In the Field”, and three different types of meta-narration in “Notes” (correspondence with a character), “Speaking of Courage” (portrayal of a character remembering it) and “Field Trip” (going to the location and seeing it)—that the sheer weight of narration, its sheer power, makes us downplay that “almost everything else”: we read it not as “this is fiction” but as the sort of disclaimer we get in the phrase “based on a true story”. The fact that all of these levels, these affirmations and contradictions, come (openly and explicitly) within the text of the fiction further undermines their authority—and thus increases the authority of the tale.
So on the various occasions when I've taught the novel my students are invariably floored when I inform them—as I usually do after we have talked about those stories, and the interplay of fiction and nonfiction in them—that O'Brien not only never took his daughter to Vietnam, he doesn't have a daughter at all. It's invented.
So, did O’Brien lie?
I have already said no, and I stand by that: the book is fiction. We are forewarned not to take its claims straight! And in interviews O’Brien talks openly about what he’s doing, and does not (say) pretend to have a daughter. But he relies upon our willing suspension of disbelief to set up a situation in which we are even more powerfully fooled.
This is a brilliant use of form by a superb writer—but I insist again that it does not conceptually muddy the waters between fiction and lies: it simply finds a new way to include fictional metadata (and, as is familiar to us by now, using that to heighten suspension of disbelief). But just as a magician might do things in their act—say, pretend surprise at what occurs, as if the result might be real magic not what they had planned—this is an extension of the show. As long as the magician, afterwards at the bar is willing to say “yeah I made that up”, it’s not a lie.
O'Brien's book is about stories at least as much as it is about Vietnam, and nothing he does in there is in the slightest bit illegitimate. He does not lie. But what he does do is let readers fool themselves (nowhere in or on the book itself does he say his daughter is fictional). He even says, straight out, why he's doing it:
But it’s not a game. It’s a form. Right here, now, as I invent myself, I’m thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is… I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief. Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him. What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
This is walking the line just as much as "based on a true story" is, but in a far richer and more sophisticated way. And if you told someone there was no daughter before they read the book, it would diminish their pleasure—but only a little bit; it would not make it pointless, as the card of Fargo became. If “based on a true story” is a somewhat skeevy way of gaining the benefits of fact without deserving them (and thus achieving the suspension of disbelief required for all fiction), then O’Brien’s method is a superbly elegant way, a way done not only with sportsmanship but with extraordinary finesse.
O'Brien's case, while unusual, is not unique. To take an example from another one of my favorite books, A Princess Bride, the volume begins with a lengthy tale of how the book-within-a-book by S. Morgenstern was Goldman's favorite book as a child, and he got his wife to buy it for his son as a birthday present, and his son didn't like it. Unlike O'Brien, Goldman does have daughters, but he does not have a son. This is not the gut-punch that the O'Brien is (it's a different sort of story in a different place in a different novel), but it's effective, and I have seen readers be fooled, assuming that it must, to some extent, be true.
Sticking to the Bit Outside of the Fiction
But what if O’Brien had insisted in interviews that he’d had a daughter, or Goldman that he had had a son? Obviously this would have been an all-but-impossible masquerade to keep up, so it’s hard to imagine. But the equivalent is not hard to imagine: there are people (less often writers than comedians and other entertainers, but probably writers too) who refuse to break character—whose commitment to the bit extends to interviews. But if they were put in a situation in which they dared not break character—charged with a crime, say—they might claim that all that was part of the act. That their interviews and public life were the equivalent of the fictional forwards and afterwards we saw to begin with: all part of the skit. Is this a lie?
I don’t want to say that it’s always not. I do think that commitment to a bit can go too far; that it (like everything) is but one value in the parliament of values that make up any truly ethical life, and that its tyranny over the others is no more justified than any single value riding roughshod over the collective. So call me a spoilsport or pendant if you like, but no, I do not think that “staying in character” is always justifiable. At the same time, I don’t think it’s always wrong, either. In the above discussion, I drew the lines at interviews and other extra-textual discussions of fiction, simply because that is a place where, if the line is drawn there, the result seems to me to be perfectly clear. That doesn’t mean that that is the only place the line can be drawn: it’s just an easy place.
What’s complicated about being over that line, of course, is that there is no solid basis of truth. Tolkien and O’Brien and Wolfe and Goldman and Eco and Nabokov can all say, with completely reasonableness, “look, I wasn’t trying to fool anyone, I said the book was fiction!”. But in the cases where the fiction bleeds off the page into what is usually not fictional metadata, it’s not so simple. No one who studies the matter (as many readers, of course, will not, as my students never did) would be fooled by any of TOWGEN’s books: you have to avoid paying a certain level of attention to be fooled. But for those who never break character, you have to see something that they are never (overtly) showing you. And all-too-often, “everybody knew I was joking” can become (increasingly has become) an ex-post-facto excuse when a claim, suspended in a Schrodinger’s box half serious, have joking, turns out to have been too much. Which is to say that relying on “I told you elsewhere that it was fiction” is an entirely reasonable line to draw, but “you ought to have known” is not. Because in any of those cases there will always be people who disagree, who maintain ever after that the person was/was not simply being themselves or staying in a character. Because people now use that to pretend, afterwards.
So where else might we draw this line? I am claiming that any untruths called such in external metadata (even if that metadata is wrapped around a layer of fictional metadata that maintains the fiction) is fine, but that if you never break character you might simply be a liar—and that “everyone knew”, or “everyone should have known”, is not a defense, first, because it’s never strictly correct, and secondly, because it has now become a weaponized way to push out horrific ideas only later calling them jokes. But if I am saying that this is also not always wrong, where then ought we draw the line?
I would suggest we take a clue from the illegitimacy of Fargo, and ask what would the effect be if everyone really knew (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) that the person was just staying in character. If it would simply extend the fun of the performance out into new arenas, drawing real live talk-shows into the fiction of a film or comedy sketch—if the power of that is not in people actually being fooled—then we can say that it is simply pushing the fiction on (admittedly possibly non-consenting) people. I don’t think this is then lying. That doesn’t mean it’s always ok—I think the closest parallel is something which is neither a fiction nor a lie, namely, playing a joke on someone: this is sometimes ok, and sometimes not, and it’s tricky and involves lots of judgment calls, but not because the categories are inherently complex but simply because specific applications of them are inevitably mixed with the complexity of the world (which is just to say that just because it is not lying does not mean it is okay: it might be wrong in other ways). On the other hand, if the staying in character would have no power if it were not for the deception—if the fun or the humor or the pathos or the arousal or the whatever-it-is that is being pulled out would misfire if you knew, for a fact, that it was false—then it is lying, and no claiming that you were simply committing to the bit (or extending a joke) will change that.
There is an important variation on this question which I feel the need to discuss. The “clearly joking” category is simple enough, but the “actually deceiving” category actually contains, within or adjacent to it, another that can best be spelled out by example. But this example is, alas, political. If you are here for philosophy and literary discussion and have no wish to talk about the contemporary political scene of the U.S., then you may wish to stop reading here; you will be missing a wrinkle, but only one, and you might not care enough to catch it. But I feel like I can’t talk about commitment to a bit without talking about its recent weaponization.
As I said above, these categories—fiction, lies, jokes, truths—are social categories that we create: they are not trans-cultural ideas, but cultural ideas we use (and as such no more arbitrary than the distinction between mountains and hills is, but one that has to be made and for reasons). But this means that they change over time, evolve, as people use them and twist them in different ways. And one major use of “commitment to the bit” has been to give cover to bad political actors trying out horrific ideas without being blamed for them. This is by now very familiar and I won’t belabor it. But many right wing media figures,20 including quite centrally the current right-wing media figure in chief, use the ambiguity about whether they are joking or not as a way to say things that are shocking, to get people used to shocking ideas without committing to them.
I thought it was important to discuss these cases because they are subtly different from ones in which people’s being fooled is necessary to their effectiveness: in these cases, it is neither the case that they would be unaffected if everyone knew they were false nor the case that they must deceive to be effective, but rather the ambiguity is crucial.
Let us take a case of Trump’s recent and repeated claim that he wants to make Canada the 51st state. First, there was no meta-data here: if he had said, around the time that he was making this remark regularly, “It’s just a joke I like to tell, of course I don’t mean it in the slightest”, then it would turn from an act of aggression to simply an act of very bad taste, but it would also not achieve any of the ends he was seeking. It would vitiate the point of saying it in the first place. But that doesn’t mean he needs everyone to believe him, either. Rather, the point is that people don’t know if he’s serious, and that that ambiguity allows people to get used to the idea. This is, by the way, by no means aimed only or even chiefly at Trump’s enemies (nor whatever neutral people have somehow managed to live through the last decade with no fixed opinion on this human calamity); in fact, it seems to me to be aimed at his supporters more than anyone else. If they knew he was joking they would laugh at it or ignore it; if they knew without question that he was entirely serious, however, it might be shocking, and might cause a few to weaken or drop their support of him—not a big deal in this one case, perhaps, but given how often Trump does this sort of thing over time it would add up. By keeping it entirely ambiguous whether he is joking, he allows people to live with it, and then to contradict him without ceasing to support him (“of course he’s only joking, he’d never do anything like that”). It’s a way for him to test the ground for new ideas, and for him to move his supporters more subtly than simply making a new, flat-out claim would. And it entices his supporters to changing themselves in a way they would not if simply asked.
I said above that I am not claiming (nor, for that matter, is Maier) that fiction vs lies is a dichotomy, that all untruths are either one or the other. I have already mentioned many other possibilities for other categories, including jokes (one Maier mentions too). But what Trump offers, what so much of the right wing mediasphere offers, is neither fiction, nor lies, nor jokes, nor exagerations, nor (in this case) even bullshit, but rather yet another thing, a thing whose name sounds odd to our ears because it is a new coinage. It’s a new coinage, of course, because it is a new, or at least newly common, phenomenon: as I said, these categories evolve. But what Trump is doing is trolling.
Trolling is neither fiction, nor lies, nor jokes, nor bullshit nor any of the other types of untruths we have mentioned: it has its own aims and its own form. If fiction proclaims its untruth, lies depend on and seek to engender deception, and bullshit doesn’t care whether you are deceived or not as long as it works, then trolling requires the uncertainty be maintained. It relies upon a sustained ambiguity between joking and lying and being serious. In the same way that lies cease to work if labeled as such, trolling ceases to work if it trips towards being either an outright joke or outright claim. Trolling is usually a temporary tactic: you troll until you can say something outright (or until you decide you can’t, and then claim you were joking all along). What trolling has in common with lying and bullshit (but not with fiction) is that it relies upon deception. If you are openly trolling, then you’re just being an asshole (which, of course, is common enough, and may even qualify, in some circumstances, as another type of untruth in addition to all the others). But true trolling is when you claim later to be doing something else. It employs a time-limited ambiguity for (usually) malicious ends.
So what do you think, reader? I have claimed that something which is often called complicated (even by Maier, even if he does land more or less where I do) is, in fact, mostly simple, and that the edge cases are, well, just edge cases, no different than the edge cases that most concepts in our analog world accrue. So am I right that it is simple? Even more importantly: do you think that I am correct? Is this the line between fiction and lies, or do you see a flaw in my arguments here? If so, make sure to leave a comment so and “may my example profit others!”
The essay was first published in Aeon in January, 2020—not, perhaps, the most auspicious time to launch an intellectual endeavor into the world. I have called it by what is its current title, but the evidence of its url suggests that it might have had as a previous title “How to Tell Fact From Fiction: in Fiction and Other Forms of Lies”, which is more to the point albeit less pithy.
To be fair, part of what Maier finds tricky is a related but (I think) distinct issue, namely, what it means to say that something within a fictional world is true or not, such that it is true to say that Sam Gamgee was Frodo Baggins’s gardener but false to say that he was his coachman even though neither Sam nor Frodo are not real and thus in some sense neither claim is true. This, too, I think is not as complex as Maier makes it sound—but that’s another topic and (as with this one) I think the answer is in his essay, just made out to be more complex than it is, so if you’re really curious go read Maier.
Frankfurt famously, and usefully, distinguished it from bullshit, in his classic 1986 essay “On Bullshit” (which was reprinted as a short book in 2005 during a then-unprecedented and at the time seemingly unsurpassable deluge of sheer bullshit from the executive branch of the United States government, a well-timed publication which resulted in the unusual phenomenon of a technical philosophy essay ending up a NY Times bestseller). Frankfurt distinguishes lies, where you are trying to fool someone into thinking something other than the truth, from bullshit, where the bullshitter doesn't care what you end up believing so long as you go away. To say I was in my room studying when you were out at the movies is a lie: you want someone to believe something false. To bullshit on an exam is different: you don't care whether it's right or wrong as long as the grader passes it.
This is one point on which Maier interestingly complicates things, saying there are examples when a lie is not intended to deceive at all. His specific example is from the film Godfather Part II, in which a witness (Pentangeli) perjures himself (“I never knew no Godfather”), but in circumstances which, Maier claims, “ Everybody in the courtroom understands that Pentangeli is lying. Pentangeli himself knows he’s not going to convince anyone, but he doesn’t really care”. I admit that this is a tricky case, and I can imagine a number of different strategies for dealing with it: it’s not clear to me yet how to best consider the matter.
I think the right response to Maier’s proposed counterexample would be to say that there is some sort of deception there—that the answer that is read into the record is false, and thus deceptive in regards to the official record, even if he doesn’t expect to actually fool someone—that Pentangeli is, so to speak, fooling the official record. This approach is bolstered by the same thing that distinguishes fiction from lies: the lack of acknowledgement of the falsehood. Just as no lie would work if it were prefaced by “I am about to tell you something that isn’t true” (whereas all fictions do this, implicitly or explicitly), Pentangeli’s statement would not do anything if he said “What I am about to tell you isn’t true” and then said he “never knew no Godfather”: no one would be fooled, but he wouldn’t be allowed to say that, either (I imagine he would be reminded “you have to tell the truth here, Mr. Pentangeli”, or perhaps simply told to cut the crap). So he is deceiving, even if no one is deceived: he is officially deceiving, one might say.
As I said, I think that is actually the right answer to this counterexample. But there are other ways to think about it too. One might say, for instance, that Pentangeli is bullshitting rather than lying, and that bullshitting can be perjury just as much as lying can. Another approach would be to question whether he is in fact fooling nobody—perhaps some of the Senators (who didn’t hear his earlier testimony) are fooled, or at least uncertain what is going on, thinking perhaps their colleagues summoned the wrong guy. There are other approaches too. But unlike Maier, I don’t think that this edge case (or any other parallel ones) means that in general lies don’t have anything to do with deception. (Mammals don’t lay eggs, even though platypuses lay eggs and are mammals.§) Which is to say, we can clarify the distinction on this basis (no one, within the universe of the Godfather movies, would have claimed that Pentangeli is engaged in fiction), without having a hard-and-fast mathematical definition of lie which covers all cases.
§ I mean this last remark slightly less flippantly than it may appear. I think our categories (truth, fiction, lies, jokes, etc) are evolved: which means that, as with evolutionary anomalies, convergent evolution will create things which appear to be one category while arising in different ways. I think that lies are deceptive, but that certain situations have arisen which cause lies to be repurposed, like a panda’s thumb, into statements which aren’t, precisely, meant to fool anyone. Our categories are flexible, and can bend without snapping.
In some cases, especially political ones, it is fair to say that it counts as a lie if the speaker ought to have known it was true: deliberately kept themselves from knowing, did not look at basic facts about the case, and so forth.
There are a few possible exceptions to this which I shall discuss shortly.
It’s important to avoid what the sadly-underrated philosopher J. L. Austin called “the deeply ingrained worship of tidy-looking dichotomies” (Sense and Sensibilia, Oxford, 1962, p. 3.)
I am setting Robinson Crusoe aside because its historical point of origin—right at the beginning of the English-language novel—make it far more complex. The very existence of fiction, let alone its differentiation from the lie, is, after all, inextricable from social norms and expectations —as all language is. (They are, I think, good norms and we should want to keep them; but they are norms nonetheless.) Crusoe is from a foreign country, and they do things differently there. If some Pierre Menard were to publish a word-for-word copy of it today, it would be clearly fiction, but I don’t know if the norms that would make this true were sufficiently established in 1719 to make it true then. To what extent did Defoe intend to fool anyone, or imagine that he might succeed? To what extent were people fooled? Where there signs of the works ficticity, either that we would today recognize or (more intriguingly) that we might now miss? If, as I shall argue, it is the norms and social habits around fictional metadata which make them not lies but clearly fiction, then one would have to push into the historical context of Defoe’s work to find out whether and how they applied. But however great the historical interest of this question, I think it simply muddies the waters when looking at the philosophical issue, so I feel safe in omitting it. (This does, of course, leave open the possibility that Defoe was in some sense lying as well as writing fiction: but as I have said several times, there are always edge cases.)
The linked Wikipedia essay includes some that I would argue are novels with fictional metadata, that is, that were not really presented as fact, like Vonnegut’s superb Mother Night and Edgar Allen Poe’s Narrative of the Life of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket. I should also mention that I am indebted to this essay by Lyn Garity for jogging my memory about some and introducing me to a few others.
Purported fact is not always of the memoir form, of course. The trick of Tolkien, Wolfe and Eco of claiming to have translated a work can be used deceptively, too. Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet of the Latter Day Saints, claimed to have merely translated The Book of Mormon (from golden plates which were conveniently ascended into heaven once he was done), not written it. But to everyone in the world save for believing Mormons, this is a pretty obvious bald-faced lie. Again, the contrast with Tolkien et. al. is pretty obvious: Smith never described his work as fiction, published it as if it were fact, and so forth.\
I can’t think of any pre-medieval examples, but I may simply not be recollecting them, or not aware of them. And while I don’t know of any full-on frame stories from the ancient world, there are certainly lots of stories told in ancient stories. For instance, The Odyssey does not have a framing device per se, but it embeds most of Odysseus's journey (including a majority of the most famous parts, such as his deception of Polyphemus, his encounter with the Sirens, and so forth) as a tale he tells, so that that section of the book has a frame—to stretch a point, we might say that most of the book is a lengthy and plot-heavy framing device for its core tale of the journey.
My memory is that this is an observation of John Clute’s, but I can’t find it at the moment, so I am paraphrasing from memory, and may have the point and/or its author wrong.
Thus in the appendix to The Shadow of the Torturer, Wolfe writes:
I might easily have saved myself a great deal of labor by having recourse to invented terms; in no case have I done so. Thus in many instances I have been forced to replace yet undiscovered concepts by their closest twentieth-century equivalents. Such words as peltast, androgyn, and exultant are substitutions of this kind, and are intended to be suggestive rather than definitive. Metal is usually, but not always, employed to designate a substance of the sort the word suggests to contemporary minds.
This inserts the idea that new substances, unlike our metals, exist, and are sometimes used, without having to invent tedious fictional terms or add a dull layer of complexity to the already plentiful layers of deliberate and ingenuous complexity Wolfe’s novel contains.
As with anything, this will be a disputed category: much of what I am calling metadata is actually carried in Gricean implicatures. For any given case, there will probably be someone who says that they were fooled, and another person who says that of course it was clearly all part of the fiction. There will never (or almost never?) be an entirely unitary response; nor should we expect one. But just as we have all learned that we need in at least some cases to dismiss the excusing of suggested horrors by ex post facto claims that they were “just jokes”, I don’t think we are required to take every interpretation at face value here. There is room for debate; but there are also cases which are baring further evidence, clear.
See here, and specifically here. Note Joel Coen’s claim that “if an audience believes that something's based on a real event, it gives you permission to do things they might otherwise not accept.” That is true in some ways, which is why I have defended fictional metadata; but to the extent that it is true only if they are deceived, then it’s lying. To put it another way: according to above-cited article, William H. Macy (one of Fargo’s stars), “upon discovering that the film he was making wasn't fact-based, told the Coens, "You can't do that!" To which the visionary writer-director team responded, "Why not?"“ But while Coen presents this as an unanswerable objection, it seems to me that the obvious answer is “because lying is wrong”.
A trickier case is the TV show that was adapted from the film (by other creators than the Coen brothers, who wrote, directed and produced the original). Each season of the television show Fargo begins with a title card identical to that used in the film. But the two cases are different. In the case of the movie the purpose was, in my view, clearly dishonest—an attempt to claim some of the extra power of a true story where none was due—as is shown by the fact that the title card did nothing else. But in the case of the TV show, there is a plausible purpose—to link the show with the film it is based upon, and as an homage. Further, it might well be argued that in the two decades between the film and the show the false nature of the film’s announcement became known, and thus the TV show can’t have been expected to fool anyone. I am not sure I agree with this latter point—while the movie’s card’s deception had been unmasked by then, it was hardly common knowledge—but the claim of homage is a real one, and I can see the argument both ways. Certainly I think the makers of the show should be crystal clear in all their communication about the work that the title card was untrue and was intended just as a link to the original film; arguably a card to that effect (at, say, the end of the first episode) would have been in order too.
What? Yes I did, in a footnote (two above this one). You’re reading the footnotes, right? I mean, you read this…
This is often interestingly puzzling in the other direction, that is, when can we take information in overtly fictional narratives as true. This is a whole different question to the issue of fiction vs lies, namely, ficiton vs truth. No one thinks that London must be fitional because it is mentioned in Harry Potter, nor Baker Street because it is mentioned in Sherlock Holmes… although if we’ve never been to London or read about the issue, we probably wouldn’t feel sure about the latter. But we are often surprised by some fact in a novel that turns out to be true, not invented. And at other times we take things from fiction—a claim or simply the impression of an atmosphere or culture—to be true when they are not. This, however, is a different complex issue, and so I will not pursue it further into the forest of Arden.
Here we can see another use, though: it might have been a signal to O’Brien’s real life comrades, who might see themselves in his characters, that they were not wrong to do so.
Only the right wing? No, almost certainly not: human nature is human nature, and the horseshoe theory is, if not absolutely true, then at least a useful model that sometimes produces accurate and useful results. But I do think it is far more common on the right. What would be an example of left-wing trolling? Here are some examples: “globalize the intifada”, “defund the police”, “kill all men”, “trans women are biologically female”, “end capitalism”. I want to hedge a bit here, because I think that (in a way that I do not see as true on the right) there is a real divide here, and some of the people saying this really are not trolling. We see this whenever a statement like one of the above is pressed: you will inevitably find some people respond “of course we don’t want to literally X” at the same time (often juxtaposed in the same media thread) as others are reply “no really we do literally mean X”.¶ (Perhaps this is true on the right, too.) In any case, I think all of these statements rely, in a trollish way, on their ambiguity: not in the same way as right-wing trolling, but they are presented half-literally, haf-metaphorically in a way which achieves an end which neither being clearly and simply literal nor clearly and simply metaphorical would. And I think the same thing about the left-wing version as I do about the right-wing version (albeit to a lesser degree since I think it’s less widespread): that trolling, like lying, is nearly always wrong, and is nearly always destructive to discourse, and that (save for exceptions arising almost entirely in jury-rigged thought experiments that never actually occur) people shouldn’t do it.
¶ With the exception of “kill all men”, maybe: there I think the ambiguity is not between “I am just venting” and “I actually want to commit gendercide”, but rather between “I am just venting” and “I really do think that men as a class are fundamentally evil”, which is to say, it is a variant on trolling where it is not the statement itself which is ambiguous but rather a statement that is clearly meant non-literally is strategically ambiguous about precisely how far the emotion is to be taken—what the non-literal statement stands in for.