Is there any place for the truth in writing?

Dave Eggers plays with, and exploits the desire for truth in his memoir A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius. Being postmodern to its core, the work has characters rejecting their position as metaphors within the novel, announcing the falsity of the text, and generally disturbing the reader’s assumptions of ‘truth’s’ place within memoir writing. The illusion of truth it seems then is a very useful important literary technique; some texts such as Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl rely almost exclusively on our belief that they report perceived events as honestly and integrally as possible. The respect given to ‘authentic writing’ can in turn be used to sell an idea that’s purely fictional and outlandish, gaining a certain suspension of disbelief when presented as true, such as the Coen brothers did with their crime film Fargo.

If the author is dead anyway, then what can their ‘truth’ possibly offer? The intentions of the writer, now having been thrown aside by Barthes, are in many respects irrelevant. Any other truth that can be found within a text is purely a product of the reader’s ideologies, their political bent etc, and is therefore only relevant as a truth, not the truth. So despite ‘the truth’ not actually existing, the suggestion of it certainly has a place within writing; whether you subvert it or use it to give credence to a situation. In the case of using writing to explore a truth about its author, such as John Cheever and his sexuality, then the search is valid, but it’s still a reading that’s being imposed upon the writing, and must never take precedence over any another interpretation.

Is the writer as an artist special, and if so how?

During Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, she discusses how writers appear to have been labelled with a ‘socially acknowledged role’, one that ‘carries some sort of weight or impressive significance’. This I think can be agreed upon if we consider the term writer to only be associated with the more traditional act of writing novels or poetry. That person certainly appears to carry a level of respect within society, but what about those who write video games for example, or perhaps adverts that go up on the side of buses? Games are still criminally treated as a lesser art form, and it seems to me that those writing adverts are judged as a less important writer compared to the exalted novelists, poets and playwrights - those who are perhaps described as artists, as opposed to just purely being a writer.

I don’t think that any one individual and their attempts at recording the world around them is intrinsically more worthy than any other. Sure, some documents are more highly valued within a certain episteme than others. Right now I doubt that many would argue that the film Inception is greater than the novel The Great Gatsby for example. But such a judgment is rooted entirely in the ideologies of the moment rather than anything universal. Certainly I argue that Fitzgerald the novelist is no more special than Nolan the scriptwriter, and he is no more worthy than the graffiti artist who writes on a street wall. There is nothing that separates any writer out as an artist, as special, except the bias of the time period.