When Truth Is at Stake: The Case of Contemporary Legends

Carlos Renato Lopes

Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), Brazil

Introduction

Unsuspicious moviegoers and pay phone users are being stung by HIV-tainted needles

strategically planted as a means of revenge or out of sheer cruelty. Club scene habitués

are getting doped at parties and waking up the next morning immersed in a bathtub

surrounded by ice just to find that their kidneys have been snatched by the international

traffic of body parts. Innocent fast food diners are being exposed to the risk of

contamination from all sorts of unthinkable ingredients deliberately added to their

happy meals. School kids are terrified of going to the school bathroom alone in case

they bump into the ghost of the bloody bathroom blonde (in Brazil, the loira do

banheiro): an ex-student whose unrequited love for a teacher led her to suicide on the

school premises. All-too-frequent cell phone users are suddenly fearing for their brains,

which might be exposed to the risk of long-term damage, or even cancer. Are any of

these stories commonly passed on mouth-mouth or via the internet true? Are we

justified in dreading them?

A bunch of myths, some might say. Another series of contemporary legends, or more

popularly named, ‘urban legends’1: these unverified reports of unknown origin, told in

multiple versions as having actually occurred in a social context whose fears and

aspirations they express symbolically (Renard 2006). A not so modern form of

mythology which does little but recycle, in the form of narrative, the same old fears and

1 The terms “urban” and “contemporary” are both commonly used in folklore bibliography. But they both present problems. The former has become popular partly due to the American scholar Jan Harold Brunvand’s collections and encyclopedias published since the early 1980s. Some authors, however, reject the term claiming that the stories are not restricted to an urban context. In turn, “contemporary”, the term preferred by authors such as Bill Ellis and Gillian Bennett and ratified by the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research – which was created in the early 1990s (Fine 1992: 1) –, could lead to the false impression that the stories are always recent, when actually many of them are rooted in long-lasting traditions. Still, in favor of this latter term there is the idea that any narrative is perceived as contemporary in the time it circulates (Ellis 2001: xiii). I use both alternatives along this article but I privilege the latter, despite its limitations.

apprehensions involving contamination, violence, death… But is that all there is to it?

Are contemporary legends simply a matter of “believe it if you will”?

In this article I wish to argue that such accounts are texts just as worth bringing into the

language class as the “semi-fictional”, “semi-factual” narratives that have become staple

didactic genres. My experience as a Brazilian teacher of English as a foreign language

to Brazilian students – particularly those with a greater familiarity with Internet pop

culture – shows that these narratives elicit a great deal of controversy and debate.

However, these tend to take place in a rather uncritical manner, since the discussion

often gets polarized into a dispute of whether the “facts” do or do not “actually occur”.

Not being able to move beyond this polarization, both students and teachers would end

up disqualifying the accounts, disregarding them as manipulative lies with nothing

about them “worth learning”, at best something to be entertained by.

It is my belief that a Critical Literacy perspective has a lot to contribute to these

discussions in the sense that it provides teachers and students with a practice through

which they are able to question their own naturalized conceptions of culture and truth. It

can help readers to think through the power relations, discourses, and identities being

constructed and reinforced through these texts (Shor 1999). And it may eventually lead

to reading those texts as embedded in broader meaning-making practices in which the

fear of Others in our social relations can take on many forms – of which contemporary

legends could be one – whereby received interpretations and stereotypes of alterity are

enacted. We might then be able to recognize that since texts are constructed

representations of reality and of identities, we as critical readers “have a greater

opportunity to take a more powerful position with respect to these texts – to reject them

or construct them in ways that are more consistent with [our] own experiences in the

world” (Cervetti et al. 2001: 8).

In order to shed a light on – and begin to question – the assumptions that underlie the

commonplace discussions on contemporary legends such as I have been able to observe

in my own teaching practice in Brazil, I draw here upon some philosophical and critical

theory engaging the problem of truth that should allow us to understand why such a

debate is so pervasive. It is my hypothesis that by critically looking into this “moving

force” of the debate we may be able to better understand how and why such stories in

contemporary culture keep being reinvented, then spread and re-transmitted, over and

over, whether or not they are perceived as having actually taken place somewhere

specific, at some point in time. My focus will be, then, on this powerful – if elusive –

thing called truth.

When one looks at contemporary legends, one cannot actually avoid the issue of truth

that hovers over them. It may appear explicitly in the very proposition of the narrative,

in which the narrator claims she will tell something that “really happened” – not to

herself, but typically, to someone known to someone else she knows. It may also be read

into the reactions of listeners or readers of such narratives in the form of incredulity,

doubt or perhaps just straightforward belief. And, to be sure, it may be detected in the

struggle of commentators who aim at establishing the scientifically, technically attested

falsity – or at least, implausibility – of such reports, no matter how plausible these might

seem.

I would join Foucault (1971/1996; 1976/1999) in the claim that every discursive

practice has the capacity to generate effects of truth which are more or less potent and

enduring. Such a possibility of the creation of truth effects in and through discourse

occurs due to an inescapable element that affects the subjects of discourse: the will to

truth. It would seem that the question of whether contemporary legends are true or false

cannot be answered adequately – or at least not beyond a mere factual investigation in

terms of “this one actually took place” versus “this one actually did not” – unless we

consider the fact that legends are transmitted within socially and historically situated

discourse practices in which certain programs of truth are at stake.

Speaking of programs of truth implies letting go of a traditional conception of truth

according to which a conscious, knowing subject, free from power relations, can accede

to a truth that is rational and universally validated. In the history of philosophy, one can

trace that belief in its most rationalized form back to Enlightenment – with Descartes at

the forefront. It is only in the late 18 century that this view began to be seriously

questioned; and later with Nietzsche, and throughout the 20 thth century, it was

systematically challenged. A short genealogy of this reviewed approach to truth in

philosophy is what I set out to do in the following sections. For that purpose, and to

back my claim on the relevance of reading contemporary legends, I turn to two major

currents of critical thinking – themselves discontinuous regimes of (philosophical) truth

– which share the aim of deconstructing the belief that truth is one, unique and

transparent. Firstly, I examine Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s views of truth as ‘will to

power’ (and hence ‘will to truth’), and the pragmatist conception of truth as a language

tool, proposed more recently by Rorty. Secondly, I relate these two currents to the

concept of programs of truth employed by Veyne in connection to his analysis of the

different approaches towards myth.

Nietzsche and Foucault: Truth as Will

One of the hallmarks of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the idea that there is no truth as

transparent knowledge of the world “as it is”. He was opposed to the idea of a possible

apprehension of reality by means of language, since there is no single pre-existing (i.e

prior to language) universe of “things to know”. In fact, the German philosopher

proposed that we abandon once and for all any attempt of “knowing the truth”. For him,

we should give up on the idea that language is capable of covering and “representing the

whole of reality” – a reality that is supposedly determinable and determinate and

whose truth we could “unveil” or “reveal”.

How does knowledge work, then? Nietzsche says knowledge is man’s invention, that is,

it is not something which is absolutely inscribed and inherent in human nature just

waiting to be revealed. At its root, knowledge is the fruit of a will to power which

“mines” its object and seeks to annihilate it in all its menacing potential. It is as if one

needed first to reject the object only then to bring it back to one’s domain, already

tamed, already molded. This implies that each and every form of knowledge, including

science and technology, becomes necessarily perspective, partial and oblique.

Thus, if knowledge, which is the outcome of a historical will, leads to what we call

truth, truth is, according to this reasoning, nothing more than the result of contingent

human relations to which we seek to ascribe universal status by means of a will to truth.

Nietzsche’s classical definition, proposed in the essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-

Moral Sense”, perfectly synthesizes this thought:

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (Nietzsche 1873/1977: 46-7)

For Nietzsche, then, truth is interested knowledge, the brainchild of a will which creates

its own opposition between true and false: its own effect of truth. It appears in the

fashion of arbitrary metaphors, which are nonetheless made to become literal, taking on a

conventional and naturalized form throughout history. The original intuitive metaphors

are therefore taken for the things themselves.

But man “forgets” it. He forgets that he has created his own truths, since he has built

himself and things within a paradigm of rationality. He believes that he builds up from an

essence and that language serves merely as a transparent conduit for that essence. He

believes that he can look into the real from the outside. And that is what allows him to

think of science and philosophy in terms of discovery of truths. As Arrojo observes, the

perspective proposed by Nietzsche points to the conclusion that “man does not discover

‘truths’ independently from his will to power or his survival instinct; he rather produces

meanings and hence knowledge which is established through the conventions that

discipline man in social groups” (Arrojo 1992: 54, my translation).

The production of solid and naturalized meanings, however, does not take place on a

rational dimension only; it also occurs in man’s relation with myth and art. Man allows

himself to be tricked by the illusion of finding an ever-reinvented, particular form of

relating to the world of dreams. As long as it does not cause him any visible harm, he

will be “charmed” when he listens to epic tales being told as true, when he sees an actor

play a king more regally than the king himself and, why not say it – adding an example

to the ones Nietzsche proposes –, when receiving and transmitting urban legends over

the Internet.

The Nietzschean notion that truth does not exist as a pre-existing absolute fact of reality,

but that it may exist as an effect – even if necessarily illusory – points to the utilitarian

nature of truth. Nietzsche claims that knowledge, inasmuch as it presents itself as a set of

truthful and reliable beliefs, may serve certain purposes, but not others, and that certain

things can be described as useful to certain kinds of people but not to others. This only

reinforces the author’s refusal of the idea of truth as correspondence. Rather than

corresponding to a factual reality existing outside language and independent of human

beings, truth as conceived by Nietzsche is a cultural construction, a way of meeting

human desires, needs and uncertainties. As such, it is a value.

If for Nietzsche every form of knowledge – and, consequently, every form of truth – is

necessarily a perspective, it becomes impossible to aspire to an absolute and final

apprehension of reality. As Mosé summarizes: “by affirming that truth is a value,

Nietzsche wishes to desacralize this evaluative principle, revealing its condition as a

human invention: truth is an idea, a construct of thought, it has a history” (Mosé 2005:

31). It is, therefore, inescapably partial.

Directly influenced by Nietzsche, Foucault finds here the inspiration for one of his most

fundamental themes: the relation of interdependence between power and knowledge.

According to Foucault (1971/1996: 13-21), truth is an important external exclusionary

procedure in the order of discourse which operates by means of the true/false opposition.

When one looks into a discourse, at the level of the sentence or proposition, such an

opposition is neither arbitrary nor violent. It does not vary, either: the proposition is

always true or always false. But when it comes to identifying what has been, historically,

the will to truth that pervades our discourses and what sort of separation rules them, then

truth presents itself as a historical and institutionally sustained system of exclusion.

Major transformations which our societies have undergone over the centuries, including

scientific discoveries, can, to a certain extent, be interpreted as being the result of always

new wills to truth which were gradually imposed on a number of institutional practices,

such as pedagogy, empirical research, or the exploitation of technological resources.

But something peculiar occurs with discourses of truth: by presenting themselves as

freed from desire and power, they simply cannot recognize the will to truth that pervades

them; that is, in order to establish themselves as true, these discourses cannot help but

hide the fact that they are products of the will to truth. Thus, what we are allowed to see

is “a truth that is rich and fertile, a sweet and insidiously universal force”, and not the

“prodigious machinery designed to exclude all those who, time after time in our history,

have tried to evade that will to truth and to question it against truth” (Foucault

1971/1996: 20, my translation).

Truth is not produced as an autonomous error-free entity, hovering above human errancy,

independent from the institutional mechanisms of social action and control, or from

human desire. Truth is inextricably attached to those mechanisms and, therefore, to

power. Foucault reminds us that in any society the multiple power relations which

characterize the social body cannot be established or function outside a regime of truth,

that is, without being sustained by discourses of truth. In the author’s words:

There is no exerting of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which function in, from, and through that power. We are subjected by power to the production of truth, and we can only exert power by producing truth. (...) After all, we are judged, condemned, classified, obliged to duties, destined to a certain way of living or to a certain way of dying as a result of discourses of truth that carry with them specific power effects, truth effects. (Foucault 1976/1999: 28-9, my translation)

Foucault concludes that the will to truth, originated from the historically constructed

division between right and wrong, or true and false, is nothing more than the

exclusionary will to power. “True” discourse is no more than a necessary illusion on the

basis of which social subjects struggle for power. And it is important to understand that

this struggle takes place from inside the very discursive practice: we cannot reach “the”

truth, for we are always-already assigned a circumscribed subject position the moment

we enter discourse, the moment we are assigned a social position in our communities.

The author proposes that in order to analyze the will to power (and knowledge) in

discourse we must gradually build and define our analytical tools – in a practice he calls

“genealogical”. This is done in keeping with demands and possibilities designed by

concrete, contextualized studies (Foucault 1997). Bringing our object of study into this

perspective, I believe we ought to better investigate and understand how the discursive

practices around contemporary legends point to the issue of the truthfulness versus

falsehood of the stories as being the key to those legends – as if the narratives depended

exclusively on scientific-objective verdicts in order for “validation”. Such an

investigation would imply the analysis of the discursive practices which produce these

narratives in their local knowledge dimension.

On Internet discussion lists dedicated to the transmission and discussion of

contemporary legends2, a great number of posts refer specifically to the issue of truth

in/of/around the legends. Different interlocutors often struggle, by means of

argumentation and supposedly legitimate scientific references, to debunk the rumors or

“proto-legends” and re-establish the factual order as soon as these narratives hit their e-

mail boxes. It is as if to prove the stories false were the very raison d’être of such

narrative practices: the “moving force of the debate”. Indeed, one must carefully

examine how those narratives build on the tension between the local, discontinuous (in

Foucault’s terms) and unverified knowledge, on the one hand, and the hierarchical force

of true knowledge on the other – true knowledge which, once available to all by means

of the rational-logical apparatus of science, is taken as something “revealed” or

“explained” by the discourse of those “select few” who possess it.

One must not lose track, however, of Foucault’s reminder that there does not exist a

simple division between accepted and excluded discourses, or between dominant and

dominated discourses. There is no discourse of power on the one hand, and discourse

against power on the other. Rather, in a given discursive practice, we often observe a co-

relation of forces, a multiplicity of different power/knowledge strategies that co-exist.

And it is this distribution of forces which is to be detected in the analysis: the play

between the things that are said and those that are unsaid or banned from discourse; the

variables and distinct effects depend on who speaks, when, from which

subjective/power position, and within which institutional context.

Rorty and the Pragmatist Approach to Truth

For pragmatists knowledge is a tool, an instrument that must be put to the service of the

conditions of experience. One of the basic principles of pragmatism – shared by its

major representatives, from William James to Richard Rorty, with John Dewey and

2 I am considering here, in particular, the discussion forum hosted by the site www.snopes.com, which provided most of the corpus of my doctoral thesis on contemporary legends (unpublished).

Donald Davidson in between – is anti-representationalism: the idea that there is not a

world “out there”, a reality independent from thought which might be represented by

language in a relation of correspondence or correctness. An idea which was already

present in Nietzsche.

The same holds for the notion of truth, which, already with the first pragmatists, appears

as dissociated from the idea of the representation of ‘things in reality’. The focus here is

on experience, the way people relate to reality. According to this line of thought, truth

cannot be mere correspondence to reality, but rather the contingent product of relations

that humans establish with each other through usage or, in Wittgensteinian terms,

“language games”. In other words, “being true” is not a property which is external to

language, a predicate of things in the world “out there”, but rather a fundamentally

linguistic device, a predicate of phrases, sentences or propositions, produced by

members of social communities through their interactions and inter-relations.

Richard Rorty, arguably the most outstanding name in current pragmatist philosophy,

formulates the questions in the following terms:

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences, there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by the describing activities of human beings – cannot. (Rorty 1989: 5)

This reflection leads Rorty to wonder whether truth even deserves philosophical inquiry

as a relevant and unquestionable concept in itself. He questions the utility for human

society of insisting on formulating a theory of truth, a consistent body of thought that

might account for a concept which, after all, pervades all the transcendental-

metaphysical-epistemological problematic, from Plato to Heidegger, and which

continues to confound and obscure philosophers. Instead, Rorty claims, philosophical

thought should set out to describe the conditions in which “the true” presents itself in

linguistic behaviors, that is, in contingent practices where people do things with

language.

What Rorty values the most in the pragmatist tradition is his precursors’ vocation –

notwithstanding their differences and divergences – to shift the focus away from

questions like “What in the world is true” to questions like “How is the word ‘true’

used?” (Rorty 1991: 132) or, simply, to consider the issue of truth in language in

performative terms, highlighting the necessarily public and hence social nature of language.

In a sort of radical minimalism, what Rorty claims that “everything that can be said

about X is what X is”, there not being to X an occult or “intrinsic” side which eludes

the relational apprehension of X through language. For Rorty, truth cannot be

discovered, for that would be admitting that truth depends on “what the world is like”

in the sense of causal relations rather than descriptive acts.

Broadening this view towards a more specifically political formulation, Rorty argues

that, in an ideally liberal and democratic society, the notion of truth as correspondence

to reality should be replaced by an idea of truth as what one comes to believe over free

and open encounters. For the American philosopher, truth appears as a historical

contingency, and not as a convergence or a rational and universally valid (even if

uncoerced) communicative consensus, such as defended by the likes of Habermas (Hoy

1994). But does that mean one should take Rorty’s view as reducing truth to a mere

pact, a fragile and capricious agreement between “language players”?

The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman could be called on into this debate. He aligns

himself with the pragmatist view whereby truth, rather than symbolizing the relation

between what is said and a determined non-verbal reality, “stands in our usage for a

certain attitude we take, but above all wish or expect others to take, to what is said or

believed” (Bauman 1997: 112). Still, according to Bauman, there is no sense in

speaking of truth if not in a situation of dissent. Truth only comes up as an issue when

different people hold on to different beliefs, making it the object of dispute on “who is

right and who is wrong”. Truth comes up when one claims the right to speak with

authority, or when it becomes particularly important for an adversary to prove that the

other side of the dispute is wrong. The struggle for truth represents, then, the struggle

for establishing certain beliefs as systematically superior, under the excuse that they

have been reached at through a reliable procedure, or one that is “vouched for by the

kind of people who may be trusted to follow it” (Bauman op. cit.: 113).

The way I read him, Rorty would put this issue in other, maybe less “ideological”,

terms. By explaining the relation between truth and justification – related to the

cautionary use of truth discussed above – the philosopher claims that the need to justify

our beliefs and desires to others and to ourselves subjects us to certain norms, the

obedience to which “produces a behavioral pattern which we must detect in others

before we can confidently attribute beliefs to them” (Rorty 1998: 26).

In other words, we enter the language game of the communities to which we belong

with certain beliefs, and we know that those we play with possess, on their side, their

own beliefs. But we must attest to the existence of those beliefs performatively, from

within the linguistic exchanges, and not take them as givens. What Rorty does not

believe, perhaps unlike Bauman, is that the rules of the linguistic game necessarily

imply obeying “an additional norm – the commandment to seek a [final] truth” (Rorty

op. cit.: op. cit.).

Reading Legends, Reading Myths: The Lessons Theory Teaches Us

Bringing our contemporary legends back into focus, we could but only begin, in a

tentative exercise of critical reading, to reassess the issue of truth as it manifests itself

in the practice of transmitting and commenting on these narratives. Rather than taking

to the facile opposition between truthfulness versus falsehood, which would imply a

view of truth as correspondence to a self-sustaining order of reality (i.e. the “facts”, the

truth “out there”), we would do better by using the lessons our philosophers have

offered – and applying them in our language classes – in an attempt to reassess our

common sense interpretations and view the discursive practice with different, critical,

eyes.

We could certainly retain Foucault’s critique of truth, particularly as it is formulated in

the following passage by Barry Allen, one of his commentators: “[f]or truth-value (and

associated values like reference, translation, relevance, implication, identity, and

objectivity) to ‘be determinate’ in any case depends on the effectiveness of historically

contingent practices of evaluation, and on nothing else” (Allen 1995: 110-1). This

amounts to claiming that the difference between true and false cannot be established by

external, context-free parameters. It does not exist apart from a (contingent) local

practice, in which these values are produced and evaluated, and statements circulate as

true, presenting themselves in the form of facts, news, “legends” (legenda, i.e. “what is

to be read”). Allen continues: “Only here have statements currency, the capacity to

circulate, to penetrate practical reasoning, to be taken seriously, to pass for the truth.

These practical conditions situate truth amid all the major asymmetries of social power,

undermining its status as a common good” (Allen op. cit.: 4). Truth then is not common

good. Rather, it is a space for potential dissent, in which power relations will battle their

way towards either debunking or reaffirming the different stakes in the game.

Contemporary legends, more particularly the “practical conditions” in which they are

produced and perpetuated, function as the stage where a number of partial “truths” gain

their currency. In other words, they are the space where different regimes, or programs

of truth, are enacted. Believing or not in certain narratives – in this or that version of a

specific contemporary legend – implies more than a single-minded pursuit of factual

truth. It more likely involves a permanent shift between modes of belief – a shift that is

not unlike the one Paul Veyne (1983) identifies in the complex relation the Greeks held

with their myths.

Belonging to a “time long gone”, in all its wonders, its narratives of gods and men –

and fantastic creatures that one does not come across walking on the streets, at least not

in the “present” –, myth offered itself to the Greeks as an integrally truthful “reality”,

one that transmitted collective memories which could not have been simply invented

lies. As Veyne points out, believing in that body of narrative as a plausible one means

“still being within the true”, but in analogical terms. Myth is inherited information. It is

an accepted tradition. And it is respected. Once the story is over, we can shift to another

mode of truth – that of “real life” – and then back and forth, in an analogical operation.

One may criticize myth from within a historian’s program of truth – rejecting the

chronological incoherence and the improbable cause-and-effect propositions – but one

may also be compelled to read allegorical truths into it. “To the rationalist

condemnation of the imaginary as false, the apologetic of the imaginary replies that it

conforms to a hidden reason. For it is not possible to lie” (Veyne 1983: 62). By

claiming that truth and interest – which I equate with (ever-partial) interpretation – are

inseparable concepts, Veyne echoes Foucault. Both would agree that in the process of

attempting to fix the meanings of a discourse practice in a regime/program of truth,

contingency (as situatedness) becomes a necessity that keeps justifying itself. And, as

we have seen with Rorty, justifying is one more language game one plays with truth.

In that sense, could contemporary legends be some sort of modern-day myth? I would

argue that just as it is impossible to lie about myth, it may be impossible to lie about

urban legends. The force that a legend may acquire in a certain interpretive community

tends to be greater than the evidence that contests its veracity. Whether or not the

narrative is trustworthy does not affect the impact that the force of its message may

cause. As Whatley and Henken point out:

[T]he evidence countering the veracity of a legend rarely carries the weight that the legend does. (...) The impact a legend has on those telling or hearing it may have little to do with whether the story is believed. (…) What may be more important is the ‘truth’ that folklore conveys about the attitudes, fears, and beliefs of a group, which in turn shape and maintain the identity of that group. (Whatley and Henken 2001: 4-5)

Thus, our students may not believe, for example, that someone could have really planted

an HIV-infected needle on their theater seats, but this will not necessarily stop them

from double-checking before sitting. Equally, they may not believe that the long-lasting

use of their cell phones may pose any risk of explosion, but still they will turn off their

devices when pulling into a service station. That is, the most relevant aspect of this kind

of narrative may not be its “objectively attested” implausibility, but rather the “truth” it

reveals about the beliefs and values of the communities in which it circulates.

Finally, we could stick with a lesson that Veyne indirectly teaches about the myths of

“our present time”, and that somehow paves the way toward a more critical

understanding of our object in point. What he says about myth serves just as well for

contemporary legends: in order to engage with those narratives we would do well to

sort through the heterogeneous programs of truth that constitute our imagination –

programs that “tell” us what we, in our communities, are or are not allowed to believe

at different moments in history; programs that intersect or even contradict each other in

our everyday, ever-shifting contingent practices of being “in the true”. And so, “at each

moment, nothing exists or acts outside these [space-defining] palaces of the

imagination... They are the only space available” (Veyne 1983: 121).

This Elusive Thing Called Truth

Agents and advocates of Critical Literacy will have identified in all these discussions

one of the tenets of their own belief system, thus summarized by Cervetti et al. (2001:

10): “Reality cannot be known definitely, and cannot be captured by language;

decisions about truth, therefore, cannot be based on a theory of correspondence with

reality, but must instead be made locally”. Locally in the different interpretive

communities we claim membership to; locally in our classrooms, as we and our

students learn to rethink the often deeply ingrained assumptions we hold on to as truth,

and on what can or cannot be true about the stories we are told.

In view of our theoretical grounding the search for the truth of/in contemporary legends

leads us along the routes of two intersecting tracks. The first one shows that we cannot

possibly learn all the “facts” – and hence “all the truth” – narrated in these stories. That

is, we cannot know with absolute certainty what is a technically, scientifically attested

(or even plausible) fact and what is merely a persistent rumor or piece of

misinformation – and I think here particularly of the abundant narratives surrounding

the “mysterious” powers of not so new technologies, or the risks of yet uncontrollable

diseases. We simply err; we cling to our most “essential” and “mundane” truths: that we

are all exposed to too-close-to-home risks, and that someday we will all die. The second

track teaches us that, albeit incomplete, controversial or merely plausible, facts only

make sense insofar as they belong to an “itinerary of truth”. They are mediated by a

regime of discursive practices that see narrative as a privileged form of manifestation –

narratives of a particular type, dispersed and mutable, such as contemporary legends,

but also other narratives of a particular type, those claimed by the legitimized

institutions of power/knowledge that go by the name of science, politics, education, the

media, etc. Ultimately, narratives of this sort are the stuff that makes up the fabric of our

everyday engagements with reality.

So as to make the most out of these reflections in a critical stance towards contemporary

legends, we could perhaps draw the map of those two tracks in the form of a dialectic

sway: one by which the will to truth in legends simultaneously constitutes on the one

hand, a form of social regulation of, and on the other hand, a fictional reinvention of, the

fears and anxieties of daily life, through narrative. Positioning ourselves as teachers and

learners who can perceive and critically engage with this dialectic will have been the

result of a critical practice: a continual, ever-transitory – but not a bit elusive – exercise

in critical literacy. An exercise which I believe, from my experience, could take place

the moment the agents involved in the language classroom practice venture beyond the

predictable, consensus-aspiring discussion on the falsehood of legends and begin to

think possibly different truths.

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