Truth, accuracy, Piggy's glasses and Madame Bovary's eyes
I've always been interested in the subjects of truth and accuracy in literature, largely because I'm convinced that they're not at all the same thing. It seems to me that some writers beat themselves up far too much in the search for accuracy in their work and neglect to make sure that it is true. Others, of course, do a fine job on truth but sabotage their own work by spending so little effort on accuracy that it becomes painful to read.Anyway, I was reading a fascinating little book by Julian Barnes called Flaubert's Parrot, and ran across a whole chapter that is more or less on this topic. The chapter is called "Emma Bovary's Eyes." In the passage that I reproduce below, the error of Golding's is that in Lord of the Flies, Piggy is very nearsighted, yet his glasses are used as a burning lens. This isn't possible. The glasses of a farsighted person could be used that way, but not those of a nearsighted one.
Here's Barnes:
"The shakiness of Golding's optics, on the other hand, must definitely be classed as an error. The next question is, Does it matter? As far as I can remember Professor Ricks's lecture, his argument was that if the factual side of literature becomes unreliable, then ploys such as irony and fantasy become much harder to use. If you don't know what's true, or what's meant to be true, then the value of what isn't true, or isn't meant to be true, becomes diminished. This seems to me a very sound argument; though I do wonder to how many cases of literary mistake it actually applies. With Piggy's glasses, I should think that (a) very few people, apart from oculists, opticians and bespectacled professors of English would notice; and (b) when they do notice, they merely detonate the error--like blowing up a small bomb with a controlled explosion. What's more, this detonation (which takes place on a remote beach, with only a dog as witness) doesn't set fire to the other parts of the novel.
"Mistakes like Golding's are 'external mistakes'--disparities between what the book claims to be the case, and what we know the reality to be; often they merely indicate a lack of specific technical knowledge on the writer's part. The sin is pardonable. What, though, about 'internal mistakes', when the writer claims two incompatible things within his own creation? Emmas's eyes are brown, Emma's eyes are blue. Alas, this can be put down only to incompetence, to sloppy literary habits."
You can see that Barnes makes a different (but still useful) distinction from mine. I would say that the detail about Piggy's glasses is inaccurate: they wouldn't work that way. But the truth of the story lies in the fact that Piggy's glasses are essential to Piggy for his personal happiness but essential to the group for an entirely different reason, and thus the differences in the impact on Piggy and the group when they're broken. I think this is why the error "doesn't set fire to the other parts of the novel."
The color of Emma's eyes, on the other hand, is of no particular importance to the truth of Madame Bovary. So inaccuracy on Flaubert's part about their color is just an annoyance and detracts from the enjoyment of a reader who notices the error.
Isn't that contrary to what we're taught about writing, though? Golding gets a detail wrong that is central to a developmental plot point, but it's okay. Flaubert gets a niggling detail of no real importance wrong, and it detracts from the enjoyment of his book. Scary stuff to contemplate, if you ask me.