Novelists are Liars

I bought two books tonight:  Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.  I went to the bookstore specifically to get Vonnegut's book and caught out of the corner of my eye on another shelf, Le Guin's which had been recommended to me several years ago by Nacho of WoodMoor Village Zendo.  I've just read both introductions and found something interesting...

Vonnegut writes of Campbell in the Editor's note to Mother Night:

To say that he was a writer is to say that the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it.  To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto something as grotesquely artificial as a stage.

And, now that I've said that about lying, I will risk the opinion that lies told for the sake of artistic effect - in the theater, for instance, and in Campbell's confessions, perhaps - can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth.

LeGuin writes in the intro. to The Left Hand of Darkness:

...Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists.  It is not the business of novelists.  A novelist's business is lying....Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, to speak it, to serve it.  But they go about it in a devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There!  That's the truth!

They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies.  They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology and so on.  This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalizable region, the author's mind.  In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers.  We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon.  Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. 

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society as ever trusted its artists?....

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist.  But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar.  Distrust everything I say.  I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie.  Psychologically defined, a symbol.  Aesthetically defined, a metaphor....

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these word, this novel; and Genly Ali would never have sat down at my desk and used my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination."