The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories

1. Telling Stories

1 Telling Stories John Coetzee’s Question It seems to me now that The Story Is True has its genesis in a question John Coetzee asked one evening after dinner about twenty-five years ago. The three of us had spent much of the evening catching up and talking about politics (John and Diane had shared an office in the University at Buffalo English Department for a year in the early 1970s, when she first came to Buffalo and just before he returned to South Africa). It was well after midnight and we’d moved on to talking about writing. John’s third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, had been published a few years earlier, in 1980, about the same time as Death Row, a book and documentary film Diane and I had done based on conversations we’d had with condemned men in Texas in 1979. A production company had optioned my first novel, The Programmer , and one had optioned John’s second, In the Heart of the Country, both of which had been published in 1977. We talked about how many books are optioned and how few get made into films, and how it would be fairly easy to film The Programmer but extremely difficult to film In the Heart of the Country. (The 3 Programmer never did make it to film; In the Heart of the Country did, in 1985 as Marion Hänsel’s Dust, which was not well reviewed and quickly disappeared.) We talked about the difference in writing a novel, where the characters—however much they take on their own personality—are at least initially determined by the author, and writing a book based on taped interviews or conversations, where the structure— though not the primary words—is the author’s. In fiction, the characters can usually be counted upon to say what they ought to say at that point; real-life speakers are often less accommodating. It was, in other words, the kind of conversation that writers have all the time. Then John said: ‘‘Those men you and Diane interviewed and filmed on death row, how can you know when they were being selfserving and how can you know what truth is in what they say?’’ I don’t know if I’d ever consciously thought about that until that moment, but it must have been something I’d been thinking about at some level and dealing with for years. ‘‘I never know whether they’re telling the truth,’’ I said. ‘‘But I do know that at that moment , in that place, that is what they said. There is the truth of utterance .’’ As there is for all stories. All stories—whether a statement by one lover to another or a prisoner to a guard the other side of the bars or a politician talking to a crowd at a university commencement pretending he is there to celebrate education rather than court voters in the next election—have at the very minimum that perfect truth of utterance: that story was told at that time in that place by that person. The stories people tell about themselves and their lives always occur after the fact. Life itself has no narrative. It is serial and multiple : a million things happening at once, and then another million things happening at once, forever and ever. Narrative is one of the ways we apply order to that unimaginable overabundance of information . The process begins with exclusion of almost everything. In that regard, stories are like photographs. A decision about what a photo4 Personal Stories graph will be is simultaneously a decision about what a photograph will not be; stories, which tell about and describe a finite number of things, simultaneously do not tell or describe everything else. Every story implies a theory about what—in the infinitude of detail that comprises any moment in time or is available to an artist imagining one—matters and what does not, what was going on and what wasn’t going on. Keeping Time Did you ever wake in a strange room and find yourself briefly unable to know where you were? Do you remember that sense of not disorder, but no order at all, of chaos? Then you remembered: ‘‘It’s not home, it’s the hotel in St. Louis (or Paris or Beijing or Brooklyn or wherever you, in fact, were), and the reason I am here is...