Truth, fact and fiction

I love the expression ‘in my humble opinion’. That’s because it isn’t just wrong. It’s wrong in so many different ways.

After all, how can an opinion be humble or proud? Or pretty much anything other than right or wrong, well-founded or fanciful? The holder of the opinion may be humble, but if so, why advance the opinion anyway? Surely putting forward an opinion at all shows a certain confidence in it, if not downright arrogance?

Anyway, in my humble opinion, the two best pieces of TV I’ve watched in recent months are Unbelievable and Unorthodox. The fact that both titles are negative adjectives may be unnerving but is certainly unintentional.

Merritt Wever and Toni Collette as the detectives in Unbelievable
Fictionalised versions of real characters

Unbelievable is based on a compelling account of police work, led by two women detectives, on a serial rapist, with the linked story of a young woman whose rape complaint wasn’t believed by far less bright cops.

Unorthodox is drawn from the novel, built around her experiences, of a woman who broke free from an Orthodox Jewish community in New York, and the difficulties she faced both in her earlier existence and in coming to terms with the new one.

Shira Haas in Unothodox
The lake scene is one of the most poignant in the series

Both are works of fiction based on historical fact. This is not a spoiler, but there is a strand in Unorthodox to do with music which does not correspond to the real character’s history. But it’s powerful and engrossing, so it’s a welcome addition to the story. And it certainly doesn’t detract from its psychological truth.

Similarly, in Unbelievable, the names of the female protagonists have been changed. In the case of the young rape victim, this is principally to protect her identity. In the case of the two outstanding detectives, it is because though they are drawn from real figures, they differ from them in certain ways, and the invented names recognise the extent to which they are fictional creations.

Libby Hill recently ran an interview on Indiewire with Susannah Grant, co-creator of Unbelievable. The article’s worth reading in its entirety, but for now I’m going to focus on just a single sentence, because it struck me so forcefully. This is Hill’s opening, a quote from the novelist Madeleine L’Engle:

Truth is what is true, and it’s not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing.

Facts can be used to mislead. It is fact, for instance, that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently announced £5 billion of infrastructure expenditure as a key element in the government’s response to the economic crisis associated with the Coronavirus pandemic. It’s also a fact that when US President Franklyn Roosevelt had to respond to the economic crisis precipitated by the crash of 1929, he called it the ‘New Deal’.

Unsurprisingly, Johnson called his initiative a New Deal too.

The parallel with Roosevelt’s unprecedented and colossal programme in the 1930s is impressive. Or so it seems, until we add a further fact. Johnson’s New Deal represents 0.2% of British GDP, while FDR’s amounted to around 40% of the US economy.

A fact without context gave us a fiction that communicates a falsehood.

Unbelievable, on the other hand, took facts as a starting point, but then built a fiction around them which conveyed important truths. It used the fiction to illustrate the horror and distress of rape, the pain of the victim disbelieved, and the contrast between the slapdash work of an inept policeman and the tireless and exhaustive work of two excellent ones.

In other words, a good fiction can communicate an important truth, while simple facts, as in Johnson’s case, can be used to deliver a falsehood.

This all put me in mind of one of my favourites writers of all time, Denis Diderot, the French novelist and philosopher of the eighteenth century. He was a remarkable writer, and his novels sparkle and amuse even today (if you don’t know it, you should try Jacques the Fatalist, one of the greatest comic novels of all time). Strangely, he admired Samuel Richardson, an English writer whose novels are stodgy and cloyingly sentimental with a touch of sadism thrown in. Diderot was heavily influenced by him, which is odd, since his books are lighter, more compelling and above all funnier.

There was a sharp debate in Diderot’s day about the relative truth of history and the novel. This was a time when historians were not above inventing speeches to put in the mouths of the major figures they were dealing with, on the grounds that, though no one knew what Julius Caesar or Charlemagne had said on a particular occasion, this is the kind of thing they might have said. But even without such downright invention, much history is necessarily speculative – based on documentary evidence perhaps, but filling in gaps by interpretation.

Diderot directly addresses Richardson on this subject:

Oh Richardson! I will go so far as to say that the truest of histories is full of lies, and your novel is full of truths. History paints a few individuals; you paint the whole human race… The human heart, which has been, is and always will be the same, is the model you copy… I will go so far as to say that history is often a bad novel; and the novel, as you have made it, is a good history. O painter of nature! It is you who never lie.

I love that notion. Fiction can be more truthful than fact. “Truth and fact are not the same thing,” as Madeleine L’Engle so sharply put it.

To see how valid that is, watch Unbelievable and Unorthodox if you haven’t already seen them. And tease out the truths in these and other fictions, of screen or page.

Then listen to the allegedly factual statements of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin or even mini-Trump Boris Johnson, with a seriously large pinch of salt.