In his book, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes about the Vietnam War (because he almost never writes about anything else). He discusses the difference between factual truth (the things that really happened in Vietnam) and emotional truth (the story of what happened that readers can actually take in). I think of this because I have been thinking about Emily Dickinson’s poem:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
I also think of this because of all the writers I love who have used fantasy or science fiction or even comedy/horror to tell truths that are difficult to communicate directly in a straight documentarian kind of way. Fantasy frequently helps us talk about religion and moral values: good vs. evil. Science fiction interrogates our fears about the uses and abuses of technology. Horror can illustrate a more manageable or more laughable version of social fears: vampires demonstrate class warfare, werewolves our discomfort with the wild vs. the domestic, zombies our feelings of incipient chaos. Perhaps all of literature is in part telling the truth at a slant so that it catches the light in a more meaningful way.
Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Ed Ralph W. Franklin. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998,
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I was lucky enough to attend an interview with Margaret Atwood and she said the same thing–sci-fi (later to become speculative fi) was a way of talking about things that didn’t make sense or were too difficult to make sense of in a safe way. I’m a bit obsessed with the O’brien’s The Things They Carried, not only the text itself, but what lies between the lines for us all. Those things we carry with us each and every day. The important and useless, and the judgement call we have to make about each.
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what kind of speculative questions would help you address the themes you want to address?
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I recently completed a class in short fiction writing. When the professor asked what we would have liked to have received but didn’t, I mentioned genre fiction — that it would have been useful to be assigned readings in each of the genres so that we can appreciate the “slant” that helps us tell the truth.
Thanks for this article.
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What kind of truths are you trying to tell? That can help you figure out what kinds of “fictional” or “nonfictional” or “poetic” etc. things you wANT TO address.
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