HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
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person? Husserl (or Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty) would be happy with
Mr. Aciman's magnificent reflection on the phenomenology of time.
And Ms. Govrin reveals the beautiful fissures in stories. But. And here I
confess I may have spent too many hours with Christopher Ricks.
Christopher is fond of asking how one can distinguish between making
a point and making a mistake without a consistent respect for what is
the case. Now, with respect to imagination, how does one know when
you are making a point or making a mistake?
Jeffrey Meyers:
I think the imagination is responsible to truth.
Victor Kestenbaum:
Yes, many do say that truth is at stake. That
response identifies you, in certain philosophical respects. You would
find yourself in agreement with Roger Shattuck, who talks about imag–
ination as a loop, a loop road, which is only a temporary delay from
getting back to the real, to the truth. And the real, one might argue, is
carefully dealt with in your treatment of it. That is, how things acquire
meaning. The point is: philosophically, must meaning aspire to truth?
Andre Aciman:
To quote another philosopher, "Must we mean what we
say?" There are two answers. The beginning of one is very simple: it
doesn't matter. That's the answer to your question.
Of course, this is totally flippant, and I don't want to be that. The
other answer is that in the genre itself, it's not quite the events that mat–
ter, but how we try to string them together or lace them together so that
they give us back the meaning we thought was hidden and which we
couldn't quite articulate. We already know what we will find, and we're
just going to fish for fish that we know we've already thrown into the
pond, if not baited and hooked.
I'm speaking in metaphors. But it's the most honest answer I can give
because we're not really looking for a story, we're looking for a mean–
ing, and that is the catch-term here. Sometimes the exercise is to pretend
to go after a story. It's not the story but the exercise that makes the story
mea n ingful.
Michal Govrin:
I will echo what Andre just said, quoting not philoso–
phers, but the master director Konstantin Stanislavsky, who said that to
be true to the character is simply the work of the imagination. It's a total
act of imagination and creation on the part of the actor to portray a
true-to-life character. The profound aspiration of Stanislavsky, which he
puts in almost theological rerms, was the reincarnation of a character by
