It was taboo to point right at a liar and refer to them as such. A child learning the world, learning to recognize and name my world, learning, especially through the curriculum of the Baptist private school I attended, to be truthful on all counts, by all accounts, I remained puzzled by this familial phenomenon, this explicit rule. That I was, for explicable but unexplained reasons, expected to indulge a lie—a liar—confounded me. “Story” was the term handed to me instead. Rather than lying, the person was said to be storying: not “you’re telling a lie,” but “you’re telling a story.”
For the most part, we were dealing with “white” lies, lite lies, lies of little consequence. An infamous one from my father’s repertoire was that he could lift our three-bedroom house, balance the entire structure on a single pinky. Another relative would invent an anecdote of being good friends with a celebrity. About being in one place in the face of empirical evidence that said they were in another.
The usurping of “lie” with “story” seems to issue a sort of mercy to the tall tale teller. It permits the instance of dishonesty. (Dishonesty, which we’d normally associate with disinformation.) “Story” says, “We’ll allow this un-truth.”
“Story” rather than “lie” seems to suggest that there is, in fact, information present, even if that information is not presented as “fact.”
In his posthumously published work Lectures on Art (1850), Washington Allston wrote:
“Not even a child can love a lie purely for its own sake; he would else love it in another, which is against fact . . . Look at any child’s face when he tells his companion he lies. We ask no more than that most logical expression; and, if it speak not of a natural abhorrence only to be overcome by self-interest, there is no trust in any thing. No. We cannot believe that man or child, however depraved, could tell an unproductive, gratuitous lie” (original emphasis).
The fibber, upon confessing their fib, after a moment, displays a smirk or wink or chuckle—a sign of self-interest, a logical expression because every lie does have its logic; no lie is gratuitous, unproductive. From this, we conclude the following:
1) there is some pleasure, at least for the falsifier, in the invention of a falsehood and
2) every lie is a means for achieving an intended end. Lies perform—they’re assigned tasks.
The prohibition of “lie”—which did not forbid lying but forbade the act of calling a lie “a lie”—suggests that there are “permissible deceptions,” deceptions that are “true enough” (Matthews & Kennet). The permission granted tells us that lies are social. The other adults, and by their mandate all of us, get “in” on the lie as collaborators. Conspirators. In this sense, every lie is a story, actually—a purposeful construction—that, when regarded as performance—a process of carrying out a function—reveals particular sincerities: desires, fears, vulnerabilities of the teller and the told—the performer and their audience.
With my father, for instance, an easy read of his house-carrying single pinky would be that he simply wanted to be seen as strong so he concocted a lie to do it. But what about the perceived needs of his audience? A more complex reading pushes in, inquiries further, poses the journalistic questions of Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How?
I think of my child self, a member of his audience. I was shy and hesitant, quiet and meek. I kept to myself. It was my tendency to decline opportunities to “stand up” for myself, especially when dealing with peers—at school, for example. I think of his other audience members—my sisters, my mother. Then I think back to the performer: a Black father of only daughters in the late 1990s; a Black woman's husband. What were the unspoken tasks or functions assigned to that particular storytelling? What were our individual and collective desires, our fears? Surely it would have been of benefit to any and all of us to believe that there was a "strong man” in our corner, yes? How would it have been of benefit to my father to position himself as someone capable of holding up the family home in Pine Hills, Florida, the locus of our shared existence? Himself an only son and eldest child, himself the only male of his own nuclear unit, what reality, realities, did he unleash his lie to address? His story, which knew there was more than one “truth,” that such matters are relative, that truth is not limited by fact.
References:
Allston, Washington (1850). Lectures on Art (R. H. Dana, Jr., Ed.). Project Gutenberg,
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11391
Matthews, S., & Kennett, J. (2012). Truth, Lies, and the Narrative Self. American Philosophical Quarterly, 49(4), 301–315. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23460807