Shifting Truths

This week I thought about some of the fiction stories we read in light of a topic that we’ve been discussing in one of my other classes: the concept of truth. In that seminar we’ve been reconsidering the role our idea of truth plays as we interact with others and form relationships. The truths we know are always particular to our won experience and must therefore be considered in context. We are able to have relationships with others because our versions of the truth overlap in such a way that allows us to interact and share common perspectives with regard to experiences. Conflict within relationships takes place when the two people have opposing versions of the truth. It can be resolved if each person presents their perspective and the two eventually come to a consensual new version of the truth. But to engage in conflict there must be enough mutual understanding to allow the two parties to communicate. If there is no overlap in versions of truth, conflict will carry no meaning and the relationship will be empty.
As it relates to our readings, memory is elemental in the way we shape our perspective and develop the truths with which we structure our knowledge and understanding of the world around us. It is our memory of past experiences that allows us to agree upon certain realities, and therefore communicate with others. When a person’s memory starts to break down, these realities deteriorate leading that person to become increasingly detached from the relationships that were once of great importance in their lives. In the Alice Munro story, Fiona and Grant lived together and shared a rich and rewarding marriage for many years, but once her memory starts to go all the life and meaning of their previous relationship is deflated. When he visits her in the home for the first time he is baffled to find that her version of the truth with regard to their relationship has completely shifted. She greets him not as her husband but instead with a vague and formal courtesy. Munro says, “He could not throw his arms around her. Something about her voice and smile, familiar as they were, something about the way she seemed to be guarding the players from him – as well as him from their displeasure – made that impossible” (5). Without her memory of their connection and all their shared experiences, Grant’s implicit understanding of how they should relate to each other in rendered valueless. Their shared version of truth is lost, and thus he senses a new distance between them that he cannot bridge with affection. Since she is living with new truths she is in a new world, and he knows that in this new world she would not recognize the affectionate gestures of her own husband.
The story demonstrates how shifting versions of truth brought on by memory loss can be particularly painful for the people close to the amnesic person when some consensual truths remain in tact. Munro shows this in the scene when Grant is driving to Fiona to the home, and they share the enjoyment of a memory of skiing in the moonlight. Grant thinks, “If she could remember that, so vividly and correctly, could there really be so much the matter with her? It was all he could do not to turn around and drive home” (3). The overlap in understanding that still exists makes the discrepancies all the more hard to bear for the people close to the victim of memory loss.
The issue of truth comes into play in the Walker Percy story, “The Second Coming.” Written from the perspective of someone with an unreliable memory, the narration give the reader the sense of a shifting sea of truths were nothing is solid or certain. In the opening scene we are brought into this bewildering world, where each new circumstance brings old realities into question. Percy says, “As her mind cast about for who or what he might be – a new kind of runner? masquerader from country club party? Halloween trick-or-treater? – she realized she did not yet know the world well enough to know what to be scared of” (Lethem 102). Although she has the capacity to list different possible explanations for her strange visitor, she also recognizes that knowledge of reality and what defines a useful version of the truth is too limited to allow her to understand the situation. She cannot attribute her trouble to amnesia, but instead to a general confusion as to what exactly she has learned from her past experiences. The issue reveals itself in another form when the main character contemplates love and happiness. She thinks, “Is one supposed to do such-and-so with another person in order to be happy? Must one have a plan for the pursuit of happiness? If so, is there a place where one looks up what one is supposed to do or is there perhaps an agency where one consults?” (110). In this part of the story the reader senses the failure of the main character’s mind to do what comes naturally to most people with working memories – that is, construct versions of truth based on experience. While most of us are able to develop ideas about love and happiness simply by remembering our feelings with regard to certain events in our lives, this story lets us consider the perspective of a person who cannot rely on her memory of the past to help her define truths to live by.