The Fiction of Post-Truth: Herman Melville to Cormac McCarthy

The term “post-truth” is currently applied to any situation or discourse “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In other words, post-truth is grounded on the assumption that feelings, sensations, and opinions matter more than hard facts. Nowadays, the term has acquired a multi-purpose lexical identity, but as was the case in the 1990s with the term “postmodernism,” it seems that our age has eventually found a word to define itself, though the very idea of a “post-truth age” may well prove to be an oversimplification, if not the umpteenth “fiction.” Lies, misinformation, and political propaganda have always been part of political discourse. I argue that to discuss post-truth, we need to move from sociology and media studies to literary criticism. Since fiction may be considered an “acceptable” kind of post-truth narrative, why should we consider some fiction “sincere” and others “fake” and dangerous?