For the man born in Xaos, it was no absolute truth. Mussolini payed him a worldwide tour to promote Italian theater and in 1935 he was given a Nobel prize. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Luigi_Pirandello

"The little cat is dead" that's what Agnes answer his tutor after secretly seeing her boyfriend, in the theater play "L'école des femmes" (Women's school) from Molière. The tutor believe her, even if all the spectators know the truth. The same happens with "As you like it" (William Shakespeare): all spectators know the beautiful prince is a girl, even if sent by the King to tell his love to a girl, that instantly fall in love with that handsome prince.

Thank you, Fred Romano for sharing this.

Literary works are usually built on cultural, social and intellectual structures which are intrinsic to the writer's milieu, right?

So can literary works help us understand "reality", I mean actual life events and "real" people?

I recommend you, dear Muthana, "Too loud a solitude", from Borumil Hrabal, greatest Czech writer, the story of a writer that accepted to betray its ideals for saving his life, working in a factory destroying forbidden books in Communist Czechoslovakia. He manages to save some but any hope on Humanity is lost. A terrible great book that doesn't depicts any dramatic sequence but makes you feel the quotidian of horror.

Thank you, dear. I'll search for it. This relationship between fiction and reality is so intriguing. It gives an uneasiness that keeps eating at the soul like a bad itch!

Best

Lying, lies, pretense, and bullshit are referred to in a number of Cecilia Copeland's poems, although perhaps not enough to call them themes. You decide: https://www.ceciliacopeland.com/poetry-collected-works-from-2012-2016.html

Thanks, Karl Pfeifer . Interesting and daring!

Another terrible book: La familia de Pascual Duarte. Or how to survive a civil war: the lowest level of humanity and it doesn't even matters who won. From (deserved) Nobel prize José Camillo Cela.

If you want to be a distinctive person, gain confidence and love others, and have a prestigious manner in your community, so you'll get away from lying.

Tristan Corbière, the Bad Luck Britton poet, king of irony

" Double femme, va !… Qu’un âne te braie ! Si tu n’étais fausse, eh serais-tu vraie ?… "

Unfairly nicknamed "Damned Poet" by a jealous Paul Verlaine

https://books.google.es/books?id=y3MTDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA142&lpg=PA142&dq=tristan+Corbi%C3%A8res+mensonge&source=bl&ots=u4MDY6vukU&sig=ACfU3U28wbYOThV2VX5ilpBTrbA4UIuXSA&hl=es&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjUg8y0w-ThAhXN66QKHVRiDlMQ6AEwAXoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=tristan%20Corbi%C3%A8res%20mensonge&f=false

Post-Modernism's extreme ambivalence toward lying is partly predicted by Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense," which demonstrates how far relativism might go to formulate a philosophy and practice of lying as a matter of principle: since truth is groundless, those who think they can know that truth come to think of lying as something true to the way things are. Nietzschean liars are supposedly superior to ordinary, half-hearted or merely mean liars because they have stronger wills to lie and think they know the profound relativity of any truth. Next step: The Big Lie, which becomes believable to vulnerable audiences because of its targeted outlandishness. Gossip becomes weaponized. Literature by contrast, at least good literature, deals with a universe of possibilities that is escapes such skewed analyses. And after all, Nietzsche's essay might perhaps be read more accurately as a work of darkly humorous literary daring that ultimately denies its own premises and conclusions.

Literature, at least literature of mythic potentialities, is not confined by modern scientific reasoning about objectivity and error. It draws from deeper roots. It is "made up," but not simply made up. It is hardly characterizable as a lie. If poets are liars, as they are labelled in Plato's Republic, it is important to remember that they invited back into the conversation to defend what they do. Hence we have the Ion, the Phaedrus, the Symposium, and so on, and of course Plato's own literary recreation of Socrates.

Oscar Wilde‘s THE DECAY OF LYING comes to mind, but it is not a poem.

John C Briggs , thank you, sir! That's very well thought of.

For a theoretical discussion of the theme I would suggest the work of Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris

So far as I know the first great work of literature devoted to the preeminent value of integrity and honesty is the Book of Job. See my article in the Princeton Seminary Bulletin, 2006, accessible free on the internet. I believe the first (and almost only other savant) to understand the Book of Job this way was Immanuel Kant. Look for my forthcoming annotated translation of Job to be published by Yale in the early fall.

Edward Greenstein , thank you, doctor. I'll have a look at it.

I think there is a strong tradition, within hexametric poetry in ancient Greek, to present the content of a poem with a pretension of truth over other discourses. In particular, the implication that the poet is a spokesman of the divinity can already be traced back to Homer. It is interesting the spin that this motive takes in later developments of poetry, especially among the presocratics: the "αλεθης λογος" of Parmenides, the "truthful speech", is certainly something worth looking at: in his poem, he established a clear opposition between the "path of truth" and "the path of appearance". Other sources you may want to chec are Xenophanes of Colophon and Empedocles, all of whom wrote in hexametric poetry.

Javier Maldonado , thanks! This is interesting. I'll have a look at it.

Interesting discussion! I learn something new.

I'm curious, do you guys think that academics tend not to be cunning, or does education actually sharpen their maneuvering capabilities?!

The short answer is that academia is a home for the full range of naïfs, simpletons, hacks, plodders, as well as insightful, innovative, productive, shrewd, manipulative, or cunning people — some of them moral and some downright evil. I've known some who've manifested extraordinary cunning as administrators, although whether their education sharpened inchoate abilities or merely provided them with challenging opportunities to exercise already full-fledged abilities is moot.

Yes, I guess you're right! And there is a place that fits everyone of these! And a need for everyone of them, may be?!

This works as a great extension to Nietzsche's article!

Works for children often put it less ambiguously than for adults. 'The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales' (Scieszka and Smith) plays with various varieties of reality throughout. My 'Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two children tell' discusses the whole reality aspect as understood by young children from birth to eight. It might be useful.

Thanks, Virginia Lowe ! I'm having a look at your very interesting work right now!

I wonder how did the idea of documenting your kids' encounters with literature ever come to?!

Thanks to all participants for an on-topic discussion. I should mention that my annotated Job translation, with an introduction, is now published by Yale. You can find an ad with nice blurbs from leading scholars and from Publishers Weekly there and at the Amazon website.

I've recently read a Rand Corporation report (300 + pages) on "Truth Decay" in our society. However, it is not about truth telling and honesty per se but rather about the prevalent blurring of the distinction between fact and opinion.

I'm glad you're enjoying my work Muthana - i presume you've got hold of Stories, Pictures and Reality. I was studying children's literature as part of library qualifications (before it became a university subject) and read Butler's Books Before Five. it struck me how much more advanced actual children were in contrast with what was expected of them from the work of developmental psychologists. Butler's work was the only one recording actual children, and i determined to keep a record of my own when i had them. Fortunately John is also a librarian, and fully agreed it was a worth while thing to do - he helped a lot. The record is 5000 handwritten pages long, covers over 2000 book titles. It shows what children are capable of, and never to underestimate them. i gave up lecturing in English and children's literature to actually attend university at 38 - then got BA hons, MA and ultimately PhD when i was 52. The daughter sees the point of keeping the record, but the son rather resents it. Ho hum...

Interesting. Tell the boy it's like keeping a family album! After all, we humans are made of our own memories. Thanks for sharing your experience, Virginia.

Hmmm - i could try that! Thanks Muthana.... Warm regards, Virginia

Pirandello's theater plays are about inner multiple personnalities.