Difficulties in Writing Truth 1964 — Heissenbuttel

Difficulties in Writing Truth 1964 — Helmut Heissenbuttel, translated 2023.

When Bertolt Brecht recorded the Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth in 1934, he spoke of a truth that had to assert itself against the untruth that was opposed to the truth. With regard to the difficulties in writing truth, he could rely on the certainty of untruth. Truth was that which negated untruth and tried to outwit and defeat it. His suggestions for writing truth recommended the means of indirect speech, satire, ambiguity. He took evidence for the writing of truth from the world literature of doublespeak, an ancient Egyptian papyrus, a Chinese sage, Lucretius, Thomas Moore’s utopia, Swift’s satires, Shakespeare’s Coriolan, Voltaire’s Maid of Orleans, Lenin and the detective novel. I cite this list of quotations to show that Brecht was convinced that this tradition of writing the truth existed from the very beginning of human literature. A tradition in which the writer who writes the truth means a truth that is suppressed, suppressed by the untruth against which the writer tries to assert the truth. A tradition that sees the criterion of literature in the extent to which it was and is capable of speaking in this sense with a double bottom, of having a speech behind the speech, of speaking in what has recently been pompously called the language of the palimpsest.

But one of the difficulties that the writer of 1964 has in writing the truth, I think, is that he sees clearly how much this conviction of Brecht’s was bound to the certainty of untruth, the untruth of unlawful violence, of oppression, of fascism, of dictatorship. Today, when everything seems mixed, it is no longer possible to simply say that I am writing the truth when I am fighting untruth. It is true that even today people try to follow Brecht’s rule, but the untruth that is written against turns out to be a literary invention that is merely half and half empty; and this mere invention makes the truly untrue half of the untruth win rather than lose. Federal government, economic miracle, East-West conflict, East zone regime or whatever the slogans, politically speaking, may be called, they all show neither truth nor untruth, but temporary signs that have various functions, but in any case prevent the recognizable opposition of truth and untruth from forming.

Now, the truth that Brecht was talking about referred to the human being as a social and political being, the human being in coexistence with other human beings (and the fact that Brecht referred to this already signifies a completely different kind of preliminary decision for the writing of truth). But there was and is also a group of writers who recognise the difficulty in writing the truth in telling the truth about themselves, about their most secret, reprehensible impulses. Céline, Leiris, Miller, Genet, Burroughs, Sartre and others, it can be assumed, want to tell the truth just as much as Brecht does when they speak of the all-too-human, so to speak, which has not been allowed in public speech until now; they want to break through the lie of concealment of moral, sexual and other underpinnings. Their truth, too, is bound to such untruth, but it does not confront it, but rather acts in a probing, accusatory, self-incriminating, denuding way. Her/His/Its speech is not one of cunning, but of self-exploration and self-accusation. For this, too, a tradition could be cited in which such illustrious names as Augustine, Dante and Rousseau could stand. But is it still a truth with which we have difficulties in 1964? Has not in the meantime such a widespread network of faci- tures developed that, without doing anything for or against the truth, we can place in it everything that we find in ourselves that is alienating, suppressed or wholly unfamiliar? Self-accusation no longer seems to be a matter of truth, but rather of fashion, of inverted taste.

Now, however, there is (in order to continue to simplify everything to a few main types) a third difficulty in writing the truth, and this is not one of knowledge, of insight. of what is to be said, but this is one of the right crying in general, of how one finds the words and sentences to say what imposes itself on one. This difficulty has always existed, as far as can be seen, and overcoming it has always been the first criterion for what has been written. And here, it seems to me, something new has occurred, which also includes Brecht and the self-exposers: this is the doubt as to whether what can be said can still be said at all. A doubt that threatens to lose confidence in the ultimately correct linguistic expression of truth. A doubt that sees the basic structure of language in contradiction to the experience that is supposed to be said in it. A doubt that sees experience outgrowing the possibilities of language, that is now critically directed against the conventional prejudices of language. But also a doubt that suddenly sees language, abandoned by the living flexibility of its instruments, as a mere stock of quotable formulas.

These are all insinuations. I am afraid, I must say frankly, to give more than hints as far as the difficulties of writing the truth are concerned. Questions of detail can easily be discussed in detail. But the whole? For truth, if one can still speak of it seriously at all, should be truth, that which is true, really and truly true (and from the affirmations I feel urged to make, I can see how difficult it is for me already to keep the scope of this question in view, if it is at all the blink of an eye and not a much blinder, more helpless wanting to hold on, which is active there). I suspect that one can try to say it, and that what is said is what does not yet exist, a linguistic utopia of what is factually already more tangible than any conceivable utopia could devise.