Are Artists Liars?
A
Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional
videos about acting, to he called “Lying for a Iiving”. On the surviving
footage, Brando can he seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of
enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di
Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles
street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a
memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). “If you can lie, you
can act.” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few
people to have viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan.
“Jesus.” said Brando, “I’m fabulous at it”.
B
Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a
liar is a line one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art,
albeit of a lower order-as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Indeed,
lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root-one that
is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular
kind of impairment. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of
reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief – a skill
requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical
self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such
parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on
lying.
C
A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the
story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes.
She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she
actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary
events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. In the language of
psychiatry, this woman was “confabulating”. Chronic confabulation is a rare
type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain damaged people.
In the literature it is defined as “the production of fabricated, distorted or
misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious
intention to deceive”. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission, there are
gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill – confabulators make
errors of commission: they make tilings up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing.
Confabulating patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and
will earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of why they’re in
hospital, or talking to a doctor. One patient, asked about his surgical sear,
explained that during the Second World War he surprised a teenage girl who shot
him three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to
life. The same patient, when asked about his family, described how at various
times they had died in his arms, or had been killed before his eyes. Others
tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside
Alexander in India or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators aren’t out to
deceive. They engage in what Morris Moseovitch, a neuropsychologist, calls
“honest lying”. Uncertain and obscurely distressed by their uncertainty, they
are seized by a “compulsion to narrate”: a deep-seated need to shape, order and
explain what they do not understand. Chronic confabulators are often highly
inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but
suggestive ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie
Antoinette of France, answered that she had been “suicided” by her family. In a
sense, these patients are like novelists, as described by Henry James: people
on whom “nothing is wasted”. Unlike writers, however, they have little or no
control over their own material.
D
The wider significance of this condition is what it tells us about ourselves.
Evidently, there is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal human
mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn. We are born
storytellers, spinning, narrative out of our experience and imagination,
straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. This is a
wonderful thing; it is what gives us out ability to conceive of alternative
futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our own lives
through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into trouble,
particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are real. Most
of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we exercise our
cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet people
lie for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that confabulating can be
dangerously fun.
E
During a now-famous libel case in 1996, Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet
minister, recounted a tale to illustrate the horrors he endured after a
national newspaper tainted his name. The case, which stretched on for more than
two years, involved a series of claims made by the Guardian about Aitken’s
relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he allegedly held
with them on a trip to Paris while he was a government minister. Whitt amazed
many in hindsight was the sheer superfluity of the lies Aitken told during his
testimony. Aitken’s case collapsed in June 1997, when the defence finally found
indisputable evidence about his Paris trip. Until then, Aitken’s charm, fluency
and flair for theatrical displays of sincerity looked as if they might bring
him victory, they revealed that not only was Aitken’s daughter not with him
that day (when he was indeed doorstepped), but also that the minister had
simply got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit.
F
Of course, unlike Aitken, actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally
attempting to deceive us, because the rules are laid out in advance: come to
the theatre, or open this book, and we’ll lie to you. Perhaps this is why we
fell it necessary to invent art in the first place: as a safe space into which
our lies can be corralled, and channeled into something socially useful. Given
the universal compulsion to tell stories, art is the best way to refine and
enjoy the particularly outlandish or insight till ones. But that is not the
whole story. The key way in which artistic “lies” differ from normal lies, and
from the “honest lying” of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning
and resonance beyond their creator. The liar lies on behalf of himself; the
artist tell lies on behalf of everyone. If writers have a compulsion to
narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about the human condition.
Mario Vargas Llosa has written that novels “express a curious truth that can
only he expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, masquerading as what it is
not.” Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.
Questions 14-19
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings
below.
Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i Unsuccessful deceit
ii Biological basis between liars and artists
iii How to lie in an artistic way
iv Confabulations and the exemplifiers
v The distinction between artists and common liars
vi The fine line between liars and artists
vii The definition of confabulation
viii Creativity when people lie
14 Paragraph A
15 Paragraph B
16 Paragraph C
17 Paragraph D
18 Paragraph E
19 Paragraph F
Questions 20-21
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Write the correct letters in boxes 20-21 on your answer sheet.
Which TWO of the following statements about
people suffering from confabulation are true?
A They have lost cognitive abilities.
B They do not deliberately tell a lie.
C They are normally aware of their condition
D They do not have the impetus to explain what they do not understand.
E They try to make up stories.
Questions 22-23
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Write the correct letters in boxes 22-23 on your answer sheet.
Which TWO of the following statements about
playwrights and novelists are true?
A They give more meaning to the stories.
B They tell lies for the benefit of themselves.
C They have nothing to do with the truth out there.
D We can be misled by them if not careful.
E We know there are lies in the content.
Questions 24-26
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS/strong> from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.
A 24__________ accused Jonathan Aitken, a
former cabinet minister, who was selling and buying with 25 __________
Aitken’s case collapsed in June 1997, when the defence finally found
indisputable evidence about his Paris trip. He was deemed to have his 26__________.
They revealed that not only was Aitken’s daughter not with him that day, but
also that the minister had simply got into his car and drove off, with no
vehicle in pursuit.
15. ii
16. iv
17. vii
18. i
19. v
20. B
21. E
22. A
23. E
24. national newspaper
25. arms dealers
26. victory PASSWORD: SUBSCRIBEIELTSONESTOP
