I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 2 1This, in fact, is one thing we mean by the word ‘fiction’. Fiction
does not primarily mean a piece of writing which is not true.
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s
Song and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes are all offered to us as
true, yet they translate the truths they convey into a kind of imagi-
native fiction. Works of fiction can be full of factual information.
You could even run a farm on the basis of what Virgil’s Georgics has
to say about agriculture, though it is doubtful that it would survive
for very long. Yet texts we call literary are not written primarily to
give us facts. Instead, the reader is invited to ‘imagine’ those facts,
in the sense of constructing an imaginary world out of them. A
work can thus be true and imagined, factual and fictional, at the
same time. It belongs to the fictional world of Dickens’s A Tale of
Two Cities that you have to cross a stretch of sea to get from
London to Paris, but this is also a fact. It is as though this fact is
‘fictionalised’ by the novel. It is put to work in a context in which
its truth or falsehood is not the main point. What matters is how it
behaves within the imaginative logic of the work. There is a differ-
ence between being true to the facts and being true to life. To say
that there is a lot of truth in Hamlet does not mean that there really
was a Danish prince who was either mad, pretending to be mad or
both, and who treated his girlfriend abominably.
Works of fiction may tell us that Dallas is not in the same
country as St Petersburg, or that an oculus is the central boss of a
volute. They may make reference to facts with which almost every-
body is wearily familiar, telling us for the umpteenth time that a
seton is a skein of absorbent material passed below the skin and left
with the ends protruding in order to promote the drainage of fluid
or to act as a counter- irritant. What makes such works fictional is
that these facts are not provided for their own sake, as they might