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Was There Always a Clear Dividing Line Between Fact and Fiction?

by Andrea Young
Ms. Young is an HNN intern.

Knowing that biographers have, on occasion, exaggerated or embellished certain facts to provide color and captivate their audiences, why are James Frey's readers scandalized to discover that details about his life were manipulated and fabricated?

Because he told A Million Little Lies in the process. His text about drug addiction and alcohol abuse is categorically misrepresented.

But the dividing line between fact and fiction has not always been as clear as it seems to us today. “During all of the Middle Ages and perhaps even later,” says Jamie Fumo, an English professor at McGill University, “fact and fiction were pretty much blurred." Not until the later Middle Ages, She says, did the difference become evident. This was mainly because of a change in the "legalistic notion of ‘trouthe.’ "

In A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England, Richard Firth Green illustrates how, in the late fourteenth century, England experienced a shift from an oral to a literate tradition and a consequent upheaval in the way social relationships were understood. A professor of English at Ohio State University, Green notes that the complex Middle English word trouthe “denotes something much more like ‘loyalty’ and ‘good faith’ than the ‘facts of the case.’” He contends that these alterations in meaning were closely related to a rising emphasis on the written over the spoken word.

While there are signs that the distinction between fact and fiction arose in the fourteenth century, some scholars argue that it did not emerge in a form we would recognize until later. McGill Professor Yael Halevi-Wise contends that it was not until the Enlightenment that the change took place. “During the Renaissance, there were intellectual debates regarding the nature of fiction,” Halevi-Wise says, “and of course Descartes' Scientific Method introduced a way of testing facts rather than relying on fiction." But all of these "major cultural distinctions" took centuries to coalesce.

By the seventeenth century, the distinction was firmly in place, as is suggested in the observation by English philosopher Francis Bacon that “Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.”