A Dash of Colour

I am interested in the relationship between recording stories and telling truth.  More specifically, the conversation between woman Susan Barton and Captain Smith after Barton and Friday were “rescued” from the island.  Susan Barton says, “what little I know of book-writing tells me its charm will quite vanish when it is set down baldly in print.  A liveliness is lost in the writing down which must be supplied by art, and I have no art” (Coetzee 40).  She regrets the loss of “liveliness,” of “charm” when stories are written in words rather than spoken.  Therefore, she says, the “bald” words must be “supplied by art.”  However, she also expresses the desire and need for events to be documented—stories somehow preserved.  For example, she asks Cruso if it was “possible to manufacture paper and ink and set down what traces remain of these memories, so that they [would] outlive [him]” (Coetzee 17).  Barton thinks preserving stories is crucial—so that people can learn from them and so that those they are about never really die.  This idea ties back to what we talked about in discussion on The Things They Carried and the power of stories to “make things present” (O’Brien 172).

            There seems to be a contradiction in what Barton is saying she wants out of a story.  She wants to be entertained, demonstrated by the need for “art,” but she also expresses a desire for truth.  For example, when the captain suggests hiring an author to “put in a dash of colour” (Coetzee 40) to her history, Barton immediately responds, exclaiming she “will not have any lies told” (Coetzee 40).  Barton declares the value of a story is its factuality (“If I cannot…swear to the truth of my tale, what will be the worth of it?” (Coetzee 40)).  I do no agree with this.  I think that we can find “truth” in stories filled with events that never happened and people who never existed.  It can come in the form of a circumstance we identify with, or an idea with which we agree.

It is, of course, possible to tell an entertaining story that is also factual, and therefore “true.”  But is there a way to tell a factually reliable story that is dull in a way that is captivating without, to some degree, making it a lie?