At 5:34 PM -0700 10/20/02, Karen Watters Cole wrote:
It would be nice to hear from the
many
other FWers who read but do not speak up at all or infrequently,
but
even if everyone else maintains this same simple
two-dimensional
perspective, it doesn't change the fact that history
teaches that there is
always more than one side to the
truth.
Hi Karen,
I read more fiction than NEWS which allows me to share this
little gem. (I won't attempt a
synopsis of the novel. Check this website out if you want more
context:)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0553289640/reviews/ref=pm_dp_ln_b_6/102-7645177-8065762
An excerpt from the novel:
Body of Truth
David Lindsey
1992
Doubleday
p. 247- 248
"This is a mad
society. We do things like this . . ." Grajeda let the words
fade away, his eyes settling on the scattered newspapers. Then he
looked up. "Do you read very much, Mr. Haydon? Fiction, I
mean?"
"Some."
Do you know the novels of Heinrich Boll?"
"I've
read Group Portrait with Lady and The
Clown."
"Really?" Grajeda smiled hugely, surprised. He
almost laughed.
"How interesting. I am surprised. I mean . .
."
"I have a degree in literature,"Haydon said, himself amused at
Grajeda's reaction. "I didn't come out of the womb a
policeman."
This time Grajeda did laugh. "This is a wonderful
thing," he said.
"What . . . Ah . . ."
"My father was a well-read
man," Haydon said. "He had an excellent library, which I still have, and
certain ideas about what an educated man should be. I got a degree in
literature, which was fine with him, but it wasn't what he had wanted for
me. He was a lawyer, and he wanted me to be a lawyer too. I
entered law school and stayed two years. But I walked away from
it. Then I joined the police force."
Grajeda listened to this brief
biography with an expression of delight. "What a wonderful story," he
said. "I am happy to hear it." He looked at Haydon, smiling, the
surprise still in his eyes. Then he caught himself. "So,
good, you know the man, then, Heinrich Boll. I once read an interview
with Boll in which the interviewer asked him if he thought of written
history as lies. He said, no, not lies perhaps, but it is more like a
narrative of inaccuracies in as much as one can never precisely reconstruct
it, and it therefore contains untruths. Boll said that, at bottom,
truth was an 'assembled' thing. That it could not be found in one
place, not in one book, one man's perspective, not in one man's testimony,
or one government's history. These he implied, were only particles of
truth. They had to be assembled, collated to get at the greater thing
itself. I thought about that a lot after I read it. It is such
an obvious thing, yet until someone says it right out like that one seems
not to be cognizant of it. It seems to me that all too often we go
through life holding only the particles in our hands, thinking all along
that we possess the whole thing itself.
"Boll said that truth was so
difficult to get at because the documents that we gather together in order
to assemble the truth may not in themselves by truthful to begin with.
He says that we know that governments and statesmen lie to each other and
that these lies sometimes are recorded (as truth, of course) in documents
which we then assemble (unaware of their deceit) like so many particles, and
with the best intentions, into a body of 'truth' that really is not the
truth at all."
Grajeda looked at Haydon a moment. "And there
you have it," he said. "The death and resurrection of Lena Muller, so
intertwined with the death of XX that we may never know Boll's 'assembled
truth.' It may not be possible to discover even in a thousand
years. We, you and I, are principals in this story, a story that
hasn't yet finished being told, and even we don't know the pieces of truth
that fall within our own purview. As a matter of fact, you are here
now, trying to decipher the lies that you have been told, in search of the
truth. We have even contributed to the lies . . . or, forgive me, at
least I have. It's a shameful thing, really, what habitual deceit can
do to people, even a whole people, like Guatemalans . . . or
Americans."
