"I had been tricked into believing him, and that was the only thing that mattered. As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true."
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How simply and yet how profoundly Paul Auster spells out the complex nature of fictional truth or should I say the paradoxical fictionality of truth in fiction. In his self-reflexive Christmas fable, 'Auggie Wren's Christmas Story', there comes this climactic point where truth in fiction is defined not in terms of veracity or verisimilitude but in terms of belief.
Literature sides with an open belief and its 'weak' agency of truth with which a more rigid idea of faith in power and power in faith can be resisted. And yet literature seems to demand belief in stories as a truth-making criterion wherein lies its risk as well as its potential agency to critique.
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