All Stories Are True
I can no more account for my own past than I can that of the people I lived it with. I think of the title from John Edgar Wideman, All Stories are True: whether or not they are our stories, our own stories, their veracity is determined not so much by verification as by the telling itself. All stories are true. Looking back for example, to the telling of a given joke, a dinner out, a sound check, or whatever makes sense. If I tell the story of the joke, I become the teller of the joke, regardless of who told it in the first place. An upstanding storyteller credits the original jokester, but even in so doing the joke becomes a story and the story is theirs to tell, and then the story is their story.
I’ve read two things this morning that bring this narrative axiom to mind. First, this story in the New York Times which shares, in some ways, a good deal with my own, or at least enough that I see myself in parts of it, nd I will no doubt write about this elsewhere.
The other is Hanif Adurraqib’s heartbreakingly beautiful There’s Always this Year whose version of events is entirely poetic, not short on details or chronology but very much in a contemporary mode of Pound’s “gists & piths,” concentrations of image and feeling that supersede the requirements of conventional biography or memoir.
The telling in these examples obviates any need to factcheck or amend any part of the stories. They don’t need it. And even if part of the author’s experience is to bear witness to their own past sufferings and loves and crises and aspirations, by the time it resolves into a story they tell, the salient aspect of it all is whether or not it rings true. To extend the metaphor, bells are tuned in their making, and if they are to ring true to their intended pitch, they might require some internal reshaping to achieve it. I’m sure if you’re still reading this you catch my drift.
I face this question all the time in my own writing: how much of what I want to say do I remember correctly? And how much can I get wrong before it’s a different story? I believe that to remember at all is to retune the bell, so to speak, to reshape some portion of the story to suit how I feel now about what happened then, but to do it in a way that the overall shape of the events remains intact, so the bell still looks like a bell.
