Seen from the outside, some stories have more truth than others, but the truth value of the story does not depend on its actual truth content. – W. G. Sebald
What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth. Throughout my life I have always wanted to tell the truth, even though I now know that it was all a lie. In the end all that matters is the truth-content of the lie. – Thomas Bernhard
Type "John von Neumann" in YouTube and one of video clips that pop out is his guesting in a 1950s American TV show (link).
In The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut, the video clip was described by Klára Dan, Neumann's second wife.
He [Neumann] had just come home after doing something that was completely unheard of for him: he had appeared on television. It was one of those saccharine programs intended for “young adults,” which I’m sure that nobody ever enjoyed, Youth Wants to Know—it ran on NBC for almost a decade. Government officials, renowned sportsmen, and noted scientists were questioned on subjects of current interest by an eager panel of boys and girls. Johnny was forced to participate as part of a PR campaign set up by the Atomic Energy Commission, and I almost cried with laughter when it aired: in his episode, he is surrounded by a huddle of children dressed in their Sunday best and is interviewed by a chubby blond boy with a buzz cut and a bolo string tie. No more than sixteen years old and already a head taller than my husband, that teenager asks him a series of inane questions—Does the United States have enough educated technicians to operate all the new technologies that are popping up? Are there are [sic] sufficient scholarships for young people?—queries that my Johnny answers with such gentle saintlike patience that you would think he was America’s favorite uncle, all smiles and nods, ambling about with his head weighed down by a massive microphone hung around his neck, as they tour an exhibit inside a nuclear power plant, with the program’s presenter leading him by the arm and pointing out several thick cables on the floor, so that my spouse, who is moving in his usual distracted manner, won’t trip over them as he expounds on the inner workings of Geiger counters, scintillators, and other instruments used to measure radiation, still completely unaware that his own exposure to that very same energy during the atomic tests had already cost him his life. That ridiculous little TV program is the only extant record, the only film of him that exists. How can that be? A genius lowered to the status of a bumbling tour guide.
In the age of deepfake and hyperdata, everything was verifiable. Truth was a commodity subject to evaluation and fact-checking.
Was Klára Dan's opinion of the "saccharine" TV program Youth Wants to Know her own or was it invented by Labatut? This question could not be verified unless there existed a written account about Klára's views about the TV incident. There was an unpublished autobiography of Klára.
"No more than sixteen years old and already a head taller than my husband", said Klára in the novel, but in the video one could see Neumann was just the same height as, if not a bit taller than, the boy who asked the question. The taller one was the one behind Neumann.
True or false, invented or not, the passage above was telling us more about the state of mind of Klára than that of his husband: her bitterness at the cause of her husband's cancer due to radiation exposure.
The method of narrative appropriation, imputing words on historical characters, was central to the artifice of fiction and almost always invited questions on authenticity and ethics. Fiction was aesthetic appropriation and approximation, as Max Sebald explained. Thomas Bernard was more succinct and direct: All that matters is the truth-content of the lie.
A novel is not fact-checked but truth-checked. There is a difference. For Lisbon-based Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper and author of "A Factless Autobiography", entire passages might contain a few or many lies but still be entirely true. Soares believed in the necessity of lies. According to him, we lie because we are social animals.
We make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth – personal and incommunicable – could never accomplish.
Art lies because it is social. And there are two great forms of art: one that speaks to our deepest soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first is poetry, the second is the novel. The first begins to lie in its very structure; the second in its very intention. One purports to give us the truth through lines that keep strict metres, thus lying against the nature of speech; the other purports to give us the truth by means of a reality that we all know never existed.
If they are any effective, the truth-content of images in a writing are but a smokescreen of the characters' inner feelings. They could be evocative because they are accessible by other's feelings when faced by the same situation, the same dramatic tension.
The last section of The MANIAC—the five-match duel between Lee Sedol the South Korean grandmaster and world champion of Go and AlphaGo the AI program developed by eventual Nobel Prize laureate Demis Hassabis's team at Google Deepmind—was a further invitation to truth-checking in fiction. This was a standalone section that rivals the suspense in Kawabata's The Master of Go, the Japanese novelist's reportage of a 1938 Go match.
Labatut seemed to follow Kawabata's principle: "Since I was reporting on a match sponsored by a newspaper, I had to arouse interest. A certain amount of embroidering was necessary." Cross-checking Labatut's "facts" with the available online materials showed more than "a certain amount" of embroidery. It was almost a reshoot and re-editing of the documentary film on which the whole section was anchored. Labatut's fictionalized version of Lee vs AlphaGo was a textual documentary spliced from various tweaks of facts and truth-contents of lies.
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