The question, famously put to Jesus by Pontius Pilate, was prompted by Jesus’ self-report that he had come to bear witness to the truth.

Without capitalizing “Truth,” so that it acquires other-worldly sound-and-light effects – isn’t bearing witness to the truth just what we’re all called to do? Maybe not full time and exclusively, but at least when a question of truth or falsehood comes up?

Such a platitude might seem so obvious that putting it in writing or saying it out loud verges on bad style. But the objection from purveyors of intellectual influence today goes the other way. Nowadays, it’s considered good style to deny that truth (or “truth” in scare quotes) has anything to do with the life of the mind.

Since we came back from California last week, I’ve been somewhat under the weather, so Jerry got me a present, Theory of the Novel, a book on a topic in which earlier I’d expressed an interest. It’s by Guido Mazzoni, a professor of Philology and Literary Criticism at the University of Siena in Italy. One of the ecstatic blurbs on the back cover calls it “a magnificent theorization of the novel as a phenomenon of literary and cultural history … .”

Well, what could be better to relax and perk up the weary traveler? I like novels, particularly 19th-century novels with real story-lines concerning characters with whom you can identify. I even think real life is, or should be, more like a 19th-century novel than is generally admitted today. So any intelligent celebration of the novel will get my attention.

So what’s Mazzoni’s point? I’m only partway through, but I’ll share what I’m getting so far. For him, a novel is not like real life. Hmm. So let’s start the other way. What does he think real life is like? It’s furnished with oscillating, subjective feelings of unbalance, instability, restlessness, need, etc. All these are “passions,” each looking to satisfy itself (unbalance to get balance, restlessness to get calm, and so on) – however briefly. And what’s the Big Story? Is there one? Not really. The aforementioned feeling-ingredients occur and bump along against the “gray, static background of our existence [49].”

Hey girls. I’m already depressed. I don’t care how successful he is. Don’t marry this guy.

Here’s how Mazzoni tells it. The conventions of story-telling require story tellers to proceed along a timeline between “before” and “after.” That’s how we get the illusion of plot. But the so-called illusion rests on an underlying simplification. In reality, we are parts of “an immense surface of cross-references [46]” from which the “before and after” of the narrator plucks out a few bits from the larger causal system, which includes the “force fields in which individuals find themselves enmeshed” and “the power of circumstances [58].”

So Mazzoni thinks that there are stories and story-tellers and that is fine. The only trouble with stories is that they aren’t true. For him, none of them are true. Incidentally, there are no entries for “good” or “evil” in Theory of the Novel’s Index. So the landscape in which he situates his characters is morally flat.

But our actual landscapes are not flat. We are born with purposes and we enlarge, revise, renounce or reconceive our purposes as we test them in experience. Our self-education takes place in the company of formed adults with whose intentions we must contend adaptively, the adults being in their turn influenced by the surround of others – all within the matrix of purposes approved or thwarted in the shared culture or within a complex of overlapping cultures. Our stories take shape as we find out what feasible purposes best reflect who we are – a “who” question that we work out by the sequence of trials and errors that compose our stories.

Meanwhile, the human landscape includes shapes of another kind. Evildoers have a knack for discerning our purposes (our stories), sometimes before we’ve even figured out what stories we are living. Sometimes their bad intentions inadvertently jar us into figuring that out.

So, if I’m right about true stories and the nature of evil, what’s Mazzoni doing in his book?

Sorry to say it but, at least so far, 

nothing good.

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