Truth in Literature

How can there be truth in something that strictly speaking is not so? This question is a crucial one when it comes to whether or not we can speak of a fictional/mythic/symbolic/poetic work as being "true." If the Genesis creation stories are not literal scientific and historical fact, then in what sense can we find truth in them? The key to understanding this, I believe, lies in recognizing different understandings of truth and not falling victim to a pernicious reductionism that seeks to formulate all things as scientific statements of facts and affairs.

Jean Jacques Lecercle makes an important point in his 2007 article "How to Articulate Genuine Experience In, Of, and Through Language":

A literary utterance or discourse cannot have the same relation to truth, in the simple opposition of the true and the false, as a scientific statement has (if only because it introduces a third term in the opposition: fiction). And here the philosopher of language, having read Wittgenstein, will remember that different language-games need different concepts of truth (judicial truth, being what the trial produces at its outcome, is not exactly the same as scientific truth, obtained through the protocols of experimentation and the determinative judgements deriving from the laws of nature). And the philosopher of language will remember that ‘truth’ is a concept which, in the philosophical tradition, is associated with at least three different paradigms, the poetic and ontological paradigm of aletheia, famously revived by Heidegger (1971), the judicial paradigm of verum, and the rational and scientific paradigm of truth as adaequatio. So there is scope for a specifically aesthetic paradigm of truth to apply. (264)

Lecercle argues that the kind of knowledge that literature captures and expresses is knowledge of experience, something that propositional knowledge cannot capture (this could probably be phrased in Polanyian terms as "personal knowledge"). This is an interesting point because it shows that there are forms of truth that escape articulation in a strict scientific sense. Literary works capture moral truths, truths about human nature and above all the human experience. To borrow another example from Lecercle's article, a poem describing the trenches World War I can capture the authentic experience of such a situation. Statements of fact could never do such a thing.

We should avoid the mistake of making all things collapse into a naive scientific realism, especially taking into account the fact that we are fundamentally limited by the language that we use. And language itself is fundamentally metaphorical; it is not simply one to one representations of objects in the world (Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances is a useful illustration of this). We speak in metaphors, not in representations. Nietzsche was another who realized this, and he strove to make his readers cognizant of the way language itself smuggles in metaphysics:

Very belatedly (only now) is it dawning on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a monstrous error. Fortunately, it is too late to revoke the development of reason, which rests on that belief. Logic, too rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the same thing at different points of time; but this science arose from the opposite belief (that there were indeed such things in the real world). (From Human, All to Human in The Nietzsche Reader, eds. Pearson and Large, 164)

This should give us some pause about the weight and force we try to give to any of our conclusions, not simply ones about God and faith. (One might respond that since we are so limited we must withhold all judgments about God since it is clearly beyond our capacity. And I agree to a certain extent with this view, which is why the idea of revelation is essential to faith. Simply put, I cannot derive all of the features of my faith from my own rational reflection. However, if there is a God who exists as a person then this is exactly the way things must be since in person to person interactions and communications, we must rely upon the other person to reveal or withhold things - communication cannot be compelled.)

If nothing else, we should be mindful of the different senses of truth and should avoid making a category mistake by dismissing something as untrue simply because it is of a different kind than something else. This doesn't make literary truth any less "real" than scientific truth: the authenticity of the aesthetic experience captured can correspond to the actual feelings of humans even if the tools used to craft it were metaphors, simile, hyperbole, parallelism, and repetition instead of experimentation and observation. Thus, I don't need to read the book of Genesis as a scientific treatise in order to find truth in it. I can find truth in its description of human nature and experience and of our relation to God. There is truth to be found and had in literature, and it need not entail an impoverished reductive view of the world.