Telling What Is True: Truthiness and Fictional Truths in Hybrid (Non)Fiction

Abstract

In this essay, I propose that there is a logic behind the concept of truthiness that has permeated our categorizations of fiction and nonfiction, one that can shed light on the reception of truth claims within each category. In order to understand this logic, we can look to hybrid forms of discourse, which play with the expectations we associate with fiction and nonfiction and engage with the difficulties we face when reading representations of experience. I contend that such hybrid forms use truthiness as a qualifier of fictional truth in a nonfiction context (or vice versa) in order to force us to reflect simultaneously on both fact and fiction because, they suggest, this is the only way to say something true. The essay will first explore the theoretical context implied by truthiness before going on to analyze two exemplary hybrid works by psychologist and writer Lauren Slater: Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir and Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century.