Word Play: Telling it crooked

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. 

WORLD commentator George Grant explores one of the great paradoxes of storytelling: how lies—told by rogues and heroes alike—have shaped some of the most enduring stories ever written.

Here is Word Play.

GEORGE GRANT: The novelist Lawrence Block has quipped that writing fiction is the art of “telling lies for fun and profit.” 

Indeed, the best-told tales are often full of lies and liars. 

Deception is often used as a key plot element. Dissembling is a useful device for creating layers of mystery, intrigue, or suspense. Sometimes the author lets readers know things that characters don’t know; sometimes characters know things that other characters don’t know; and sometimes characters know things that the reader doesn’t know. 

Red herrings, false flags, ruses, bluffs, artifices, ploys, duplicity, and contrivance abound.

Think of all the ways lies and liars, shape classic fiction:

Huckleberry Finn begins with a discourse on the nature of lying and authorship. Huck then has to navigate truth and deception as he navigates the Mississippi, an adventure he inaugurated by faking his own death. 

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Mayella’s false testimony leads to tragic injustice. And lies send the innocent Edmond to prison in The Count of Monte Cristo.

The story of The Great Gatsby hinges on lies about Gatsby’s romantic life, his past adventures, the origins of his ostentatious wealth, and even the pretense of all the unopened, unread books in his library—perhaps the worst lie of all!

Shakespeare cast the chronic deceiver Iago as a central character in his play, Othello. Holden Caulfield called everyone “phonies” while constantly lying about himself in The Catcher in the Rye. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus used lies and disguises to resolve his formidable challenges.

The plots of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Eliot’s Silas Marner, and Steinbeck’s East of Eden all turn on deceptions. And it was the lying of Edmund that complicated the drama in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

In the Bible, the duplicity of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Joseph’s brothers, and of Ananias and Sapphira, provide provocative backdrops to the great redemption story. Even the Apostle Peter lied three times, declaring that he was not one of Christ’s disciples. And of course, Satan is described as “a liar and the father of lies.” 

Indeed, Jesus declared that when the devil lies, “he speaks his native language.”

The adage, “A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is still putting on its boots,” has long been attributed to Mark Twain. But that’s a lie; a generation earlier, Charles Haddon Spurgeon identified it as an old English proverb. 

Regardless of its provenance, it declares the reality that in truth and in fiction lies are easier to tell than they are to undo, because they inevitably take on a life of their own.

W.C. Fields once jested, “Bending the truth is merely a quibble over words.” But the resolution of all of us who name the name of Christ ought to be that “the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in the sight of the Lord, our rock and our redeemer.”

I’m George Grant.

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