Non-fiction?

Gypsy Scholar, a blogger I like to read has a post up about a fascinating place called The Saddle Store. Contrary to what you might guess, it didn't get its name because it sold saddles. I don't know for certain, but it may be the case that the store never sold a saddle in its entire existence. In any case, Gypsy Scholar has some fun with the store and notions of fact and fiction. Just look at the picture with his post and you are inclined to think of stories. The Saddle Store is the sort of place that people probably say "the legendary Saddle Store" even though I have no doubt the place actually exists.

There was a historian whose name I can't remember now who had a great line about "the King and his constitutional rival," meaning the actual guy versus the figurehead he increasingly became as the British constitution evolved. With places like the Saddle Store, you get the impression that there will always be a tension between the actual place and the place it comes to occupy in the imagination.

Gypsy Scholar also tosses up this great sentence: "This description isn't quite accurate, so I suppose it's also partly fictional." Wittgenstein would have had a field day with that sentence. I would hazard a guess that much if not most of what sells under the heading of "non-fiction" is not true. Shirley MacLaine's autobiography is classified as non-fiction. OTOH, there are novels which are nothing but thinly veiled autobiography and yet we unhesitatingly call them fiction. There was a movie a few years ago called Laurel Canyon* that featured the standard disclaimer none of the characters were intended to be real life portraits even though one character's personality seems have been modeled on Joni Mitchell (and it wasn't an attractive portrait). My guess is that Wittgenstein, if he were still alive, would say, absolutely correctly in both cases. To write non-fiction is not synonymous with telling the truth and writing fiction is not synonymous with lying.

* A pretty good movie by the way. It's well worth renting. I recent years I have met two people who have had dealings Joni Mitchell and both said that if the portrait in the movie errs it doesn't do so by being too kind.