In Irish folklore there’s a character who steadfastly refuses to tell the truth as a matter of principle. “Why bother,” he asks, “when you can tell a story instead?”. Not only does his remark embrace the origins of the storytelling impulse (to make real life more entertaining), it also opens an enormous can of worms for any student of meaning, namely: How true is it? And this is Big Theme #1 in our list.

This question begs dozens more, and here’s a few of them: if literature is founded on lies, or at best embroidered truth, what relation does it bear to life as we live it ? Is it of any value beyond simple entertainment? Can we learn anything from literature if it has such a dodgy provenance? And here’s the killer - Surely meaning has no meaning if its roots aren’t firmly anchored in actuality? And if you agree with that last statement, what you’re saying is that the whole right-hand half of our Meaning Line shouldn’t actually be there, because all those terms we lined up in the right-hand column in the list incline towards the unverifiable.

This is the basic gripe of all the philosophers who say literature isn’t worth studying because it isn’t ‘real’. What gets their goat is that this form of lying can actually be a lot of fun.  And because it’s fun, literature keeps getting away with it, and no-one listens to them - who aren’t, in general, a whole heap of fun. This is why St Augustine refers to “poetic fictions” as “the devil’s wine”. Definitely a case of sour grapes.

There’s loads of  disquisitions on this subject, most of them dull, most of them saying the same thing, with a little-read exception from Oscar Wilde, entitled ‘The Decay of Lying’ published in 1905, in which he laments that contemporary novel writers (from whom he singles out arch-naturalist Emile Zola) seem to be losing their capacity for deception. Here’s a representative sample:

One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. The BlueBook is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner. He has his tedious ' document humain,' his miserable little 'coin de la creation,' into which he peers with his microscope. He is to be found at the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up his subject. He has not even the courage of other people's ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything . . .  The loss that results to literature in general from this false ideal of our time can hardly be overestimated . . . Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He falls into careless habits of accuracy . . .

Wonderful stuff. And not without a serious point to make - if you rob literature of its prerogative to play fast and loose with the truth, it will grow dull. And while Zola is far from dull, some of his Realist successors are fantastically prosaic. But they saw it as their duty to record, and not create reality. And some, as we’ll find out later, actually did some good by reporting the day-to-day grimness of people’s lives which might otherwise have been ignored.

In some quarters though, literature remains a rather trivial or even mildly disreputable field to be involved with, or even to study, simply because it’s all ‘made up’. In Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited’, the narrator’s cousin Jasper gives his seal of approval to Charles Ryder’s chosen course of study at Oxford;

“You’re reading History? A perfectly respectable school. The very worst is English Literature.”

Back in the 1920’s when ‘Brideshead’ is set, Jasper’s opinion would not have been thought remarkable. The eminent critic Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, speaking in Cambridge in 1917, noted that “ the teaching of our language and literature is, after all, a new thing and still experimental”, and had yet to emerge from beneath the lengthy shadows of the Classics.

At most, a college freshman would have been told to read “two or three plays of Shakespeare; a few of Bacon’s Essays, Milton’s early poems, Stopford Brooke’s little primer, a book of extracts for committal to memory, with perhaps Chaucer’s Prologue and a Speech of Burke”.

In what Quiller Couch calls the “great” public schools, the study of English wasn’t recognized at all. Which makes its current ubiquity seem all the more remarkable.

It’s certainly true that until comparatively recently, the study of English at Oxbridge placed far greater emphasis on the History of the English Language than in analysing texts because, no doubt, the mental discipline was thought to be more rigorous and the results more tangible. Having opinions about drama, fiction and poetry was somehow a soft option. And there was no point having them anyway, because they have no empirical basis and thus do not constitute KNOWLEDGE.

And it’s an attitude that certainly survived into my lifetime.

Although he never said as much, I’m sure my late grandfather was disappointed when I proudly told him I’d won a place at college to study English Literature, as he himself would have absolutely no truck with anything that wasn’t, in his opinion, 100 per cent verifiably true, hence his love of history and biography (which, of course, pose no such empirical problems, do they?) I remember he took me to one side, addressing me in a hushed voice that had the air of someone imparting bad news: “Those stories you read,” (he always referred to  literature as ‘stories’), “they’re not true, you know.” After huffily reassuring him I did know the difference between fact and fiction, and coming out with some pretentious guff about art being more real than reality (not knowing what the hell I was talking about), I think I left him wondering whether his grandson had taken leave of his senses. “Well as long as you’re happy,” he said calmly, and the subject was dropped - but not before he’d adopted an expression half way between pity and condescension.

I miss my Grandad. Despite this temporary confusion, he was one of the few Northern men of his generation and class who didn’t automatically think that a love of literature was incontrovertible proof that you were gay.

Of course, all that’s changed now, and in some quarters (as we’ll see by the end of this section), some think that literary meaning isn’t less but more real than reality.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If we’re going to address such fundamental issues as the status of meaning, we should travel right back to the origins of storytelling to see how ‘honest’ literature really is. Only that way can we be sure that writers don’t simply get their kicks by feeding us an unadulterated diet of lies.

Cue travelogue. . . . . .

. . . . the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They . . . are familiar as the house you live in.”

Arundhati Roy, ‘The God of Small Things’

If it were possible to identify the first story ever told, it was probably motivated by the desire to make sense of some natural phenomenon that defied obvious explanation, like, say the sun, the stars or a range of mountains. The trouble is, we’ll never know, since oral cultures have always, of course, preceded the ability to write throughout man’s long evolution. But if this was the case, (and what does survive suggests it is), our first ventures into literature would have been motivated by the desire to explain something. So meaning at the dawn of man’s literary history could be viewed as honourably educational.

It certainly was for the Australian Aboriginals (thought, at around 40,000 years, to be among the oldest extant cultures in the world). Storytelling was a social event conducted by revered elders of the tribe who were respected for their abilities to explain the surrounding environment, since this was not a gift granted to everyone.

Their stories tell of a "seed power" that exists in the earth. Every meaningful activity or event that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibration, like plants often deposit seeds before they die to keep their species alive. And each of these vibrations constitutes a story.

And it’s not just big things like mountain ranges that have their own stories - water holes, animal burrows, even individual trees can too. And, when joined together, these stories form a fabulous (in the literal sense of that word) road map of  the local area. The Aboriginals called this potency the "Dreaming" of a place, and this Dreaming constitutes the sacredness and meaning of the Earth.

For example,  the Macdonnell Ridge in the Northern Territory of Australia was formed when a line of giant processional caterpillars ran into the back of one another when the leader suddenly decided to stop. And if you gaze on the profile of the Macdonnells, particularly at sunset when they are silhouetted against the luminescent blue of the desert sky, that’s exactly what they resemble. The view is absolutely breathtaking, by the way.

And here’s another: drive for about two hours east out of Sydney, and you’ll come across a set of three massive rocks nearly 1000 metres high which were once three beautiful sisters, "Meehni", "Wimlah" and "Gunnedoo" from the Katoomba tribe. The three sisters fell in love with three brothers from the neighbouring Nepean tribe but their tribal laws forbade their marriage. The three brothers weren’t having any of this and tried to carry off the three sisters by force. This caused a major tribal battle and the lives of the three sisters were put in danger. A witchdoctor decided to turn the sisters into rocks to protect them, intending to reverse the spell after the battle. The only trouble was, he was killed in the fighting and the three sisters remained in petrified form.

Tales like this are still passed down the generations in the form of children’s stories (tourists like Chris and I aren’t allowed to hear the adult versions, as this would violate Aboriginal law). And what better way is there to placate a child’s insistent curiosity than to invent a story for them, when they point at something and ask “what’s that?”, and you haven’t a clue? In the absence of a detailed knowledge of local geological history, how else do you explain how a mountain ridge was formed?

OK, there were no giant caterpillars, but that particular epistemological issue didn’t bother the Aboriginals. And it would almost be churlish to insist that it should.

To the uninitiated outsider, each story not only makes sense of the landscape, it lends it a coherence and vibrancy you can’t find in guidebooks. As you become accustomed to this way of looking at things, the truth or otherwise of the stories is no longer an issue. You delight in other aspects: its inventiveness, energy and fun.  You marvel at a culture that actively cherishes an alternative reality, one that resolutely resists received notions of accuracy, definition and classification. It’s peculiarly liberating, and so seductive that you can end up creating your own stories. Meaning, as in the most successful works of formal art, becomes your meaning, meaning that is personal to you. And that, let’s mince no words here, is the most powerful kind of meaning there can possibly be, because it exists within you, and because you’ve had a hand in creating it. So Meaning = Home. Your special place. Furnished by your imagination.

Footnotes:

1. Henry James once famously remarked that there wasn’t much beauty in Zola, but “a great deal of filth.”

2. To actually understand the full implications of aboriginal storytelling is more than a lifetime’s work - a struggle mirrored in Bruce Chatwin’s controversial novel ‘The Songlines’, which was criticized by some aboriginals as over-simplifying their storytelling heritage. In it, the narrator (“Bruce”) meets a Russian scholar, Arkady Volstok, whose job it is to advise anyone proposing to develop areas of the outback whether or not they’re destroying sacred Aboriginal sites while they’re roadbuilding or drilling for oil. In order to gain this knowledge, Volstok has to completely turn his back on his Western cultural and intellectual inheritance and ‘go native’. It’s a flawed but fascinating read.

3. Incidentally, if you’d like to hear some beautifully read Dreamtime stories, visit http://www.dreamtime.net.au/dreaming/storylist.htm, which is part of the Australian Museum website

4. If you visit the Three Sisters, make sure rain isn’t forecast, as they tend to get shrouded in mist. Also, if you walk down to the base of the formation (and you’re not easily frightened) take the funicular railway up. It’s the world’s steepest, and looks like someone built it from Meccano.

5. Thought for the Day: just as Oscar Wilde lamented the fact that realism was gradually intruding on the liar’s art, so some Aboriginals feel that life is getting more ‘real’ as time goes on and that one day, the intellectual climate won’t be conducive to storytelling. Let’s pray they’re wrong - but it doesn’t take a genius to see why, with their numbers diminishing, they might think that. But then Thomas Carlyle was worried by the same thing; as the Industrial Revolution took hold of England in the 1820’s, he was concerned that “the Age of Machinery” would kill off the human imagination.