Shifting truth

For the intelligentsia, it seems, there is but one truth. The problem is, that truth keeps changing.

Eric Metaxas

Eric Metaxas addresses this phenomenon as it applies to literature in his book Fish Out of Water. He recalls writing a paper on George Eliot's Middlemarch while a student at Yale in the early 1980s and getting a disappointing B. His professor found his paper flawed because he had "insufficiently appreciated the book's feminist message." At that point in history, every work of literature had to be judged according to its feminist message, whether or not the author even had a feminist message.

Later, he says, he studied Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and was shocked by the subject matter — a man preying on an underage girl. By this time Metaxas was wise enough not to dare reveal his true feelings about the novel because professors then considered it improper to make moral judgments. A few years later, it was considered wrong to read the novel without making such moral judgments. Today the intelligentsia appears to becoming more accepting of sexualizing children — consider the drag shows for children in schools and libraries — and so expect a different proper reading of the novel any day now.

Truth does, in fact, shift in literature, but there is never just one truth. Truth shifts from one reader to another. Sometimes a novel may mean something different to a reader at 50 than it did when that same reader was 18. Older novels usually do seem dated, yet they were written to reflect their own times and the views of their author, not future times and the views of future readers.

Metaxas read Middlemarch differently than his professor, and that should have been good enough as long as he wrote a sound paper. Similarly his view of Lolita should have been as valid as his professor's. Literature, like any other form of art, does not have a truth that can be nailed down, even temporarily, by anyone.