Liar, Betrayer — You, a Writer?
Lost on Me, written by Italian writer, translator and screenwriter, Veronica Raimo, longlisted in The International Booker Prize 2024 announced on March 11, has a curious narrative line: Vero has grown up in Rome with her eccentric family consisting of an omnipresent, anxiety-filled mother, a father ruled by hygienic and architectural obsessions, and a precocious genius brother at the center of their attention. Vero wishes to break-free, but her mother’s relentless tracking methods and guilt-tripping mastery thwart her at every turn. Vero eventually becomes a writer — and a liar — inventing stories in a bid for her own sanity. The book was originally published in Italy as Niente di Vero, or “Nothing True”, and is categorized as an auto-fictional novel. This is where I am intrigued — Are writers liars? Megan Kiger counts herself as one. In an opinion piece for Glassworks Magazine, Megan says: Used-to-be outstanding liar, but maybe just above average now. My intentions are never anything more than comedic (or dramatic) relief. We all love drama, and we all lie about that too. Megan may be correct in the assessment. We all have lives full of stories, mostly mundane regular stuff, but for the purposes of a story we want to tell the world, are they funny or dramatic or interesting enough? That is where the idea of lying to make up for the deficit comes from.
Take me for an example. I have an uninteresting life. What are the events that make it partially thrilling? It is a very short list: birthdays, holidays, surprise dinners, or an unexpected writerly news. To make up for the shortfall, I could fall back into lies if I were to write autofiction like Veronica Raimo. Since I mostly write fiction, apart from the odd poem or essay, I can totally rely on imagination, even when it is the first person narrator who is telling the story.
But question is: Is fiction, then, about lying, and since lying is betrayal, maybe writing is betraying? According to a 2020 neuro science research: “Fiction has the capacity to transport you into another character’s mind, allowing you to see and feel what they do. This can expose us to life circumstances that are very different from our own. Through fiction, we can experience the world as another gender, ethnicity, culture, sexuality, profession or age. Words on a page can introduce us to what it’s like to lose a child, be swept up in a war, be born into poverty, or leave home and immigrate to a new country. And taken together, this can influence how we relate to others in the real world.” Therefore, by lying, one can create a fictional narrative using the tools at the writer’s disposal and leave the reader to peel off layers in order to discover the essential, and universal, truth. I find this exceedingly interesting.
We are wired to tell stories and it is perhaps through these extrapolations that our stories transcend boundaries, not just geographical and cultural, but the barriers of body and mind that otherwise trap our experiences.
Any discussion on ‘lying’ in the context of literary pursuits would be incomplete without an reference to plagiarism. trampset editor L Mari-Harris advises literary magazines to do a check before accepting a piece, because, let’s accept it, plagiarism is rampant across the board. On March 21, Split Lip Magazine released a statement: “… it was brought to our attention that the author of our March poem has a history of lifting content from other writers’ work without acknowledgement.” The poem was removed. I am not bothered about the poem or the contributor found guilty. I am concerned about the hundreds of poems declined in the process, any one of them written honestly could easily have found publication. You, unnamed plagiarist, robbed them of that spot.
The unnamed plagiarist is in august company. Melania Trump was accused of plagiarism after her speech at the Republican National Convention, 2016. Portions had similarities with Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech. In March this year itself, the multi-crore rupee pre-wedding function of the son of India’s richest man ran into controversy when the would-be daughter-in-law lifted Susan Sarandon’s lines from the movie “Shall We Dance?” for her speech. I am not a big movie buff, but even from the bunch of movies I do happen to have watched, a smalltime viewer like me could easily catch her lame, lazy approach.
Plagiarism is not lying; it is cheating, an absolute betrayal of the art. I am sure it has existed forever and will continue to do so, though tools are now available to detect them more swiftly and accurately.
Meanwhile, the mind boggles to count how much assistance — AI and paid humans alike — happen to be available nowadays, including for class works, assignments, to manuscript blurbs, book reviews and writing entire novels.
I am sad how the rest of us are made to look like fools — slogging to create something rare and original. In any case, we may take heart from the fact that those at the helm are taking swift and severe action against cheaters so the rest of us can limit ourselves to dramatic lying and imagining the what-could-be!
