Rethinking the Whole “Truth” Thing (Or, Assaying “Answerability” and the Reader/Writer Contract)
George H. Jensen | University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 4
Excerpt | “To tell nothing but the truth—must, in all cases, be an unconditional moral law: to tell the whole truth is not equally so.” —Thomas De Quincey, Letter to the Editor, London Magazine, November 27, 1821
Dear reader. Yes, I am going to adopt the outmoded form of direct address to the reader—which was probably already quaint and artificial even to readers of eighteenth-century novels—to discuss terminology related to issues of identity. Some of you have, no doubt, already started to position yourselves for or against certain terms and phrases: authenticity, the true self, self-knowledge, free will, the search for identity, the social construction of identity, inner vs. outer, introversion vs. extraversion, private selves vs. social selves, modernism vs. postmodernism, the individual vs. culture, and so on. Such terms as these recur time and again in discussions of narrative. In narrative generally (and life-writing in particular), you might argue for the phrase “the social construction of identity” over the term “authenticity,” or vice versa. “It has to be one over the other,” you might say. Or, “I need definitions.” Readers have critiqued and problematized. You have used terms imprecisely, as if pointing to an object on the horizon. You have found them inadequate. All of them. The terms should have disappeared long ago, but you continue to use them, or at least some of them. This is probably because, as David Graeber and David Wengrow, who have studied cultures across the globe and through history, say, identity historically “came to be seen as a value in itself” (504). So, the terms linger.
Key words | Truth, Non-Fiction, Fiction, Self, Authenticity, Identity, Ethics, Writing, Answerability, Reader/Writer Contract
George H. Jensen (ghjensen@ualr.edu) is retired from the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA, where he served as Professor and Department Chair. A pioneer in the development of personality theories of writing, he has written extensively on the application of Jungian personality types to the teaching of composition. A published memoirist, his most recent publications explore the genres and ethics of nonfiction.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Jensen, George H. “Rethinking the Whole “Truth” Thing (Or, Assaying “Answerability” and the Reader/Writer Contract).” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 5, no. 4, 18 Sep. 2023, pp. 1.5-1.11, http://ellids.com/archives/2023/09/5.4-Forum-Jensen.pdf