by Jake Graham
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry examines whether there is such a thing as “absolute truth.” The novel frequently wrestles with the truth with the conflict between its main character Roseanne McNulty and Dr. Grene. Roseanne writes an autobiography called “Rosanne: Testimony of Herself” which she keeps hidden in the floorboards of her room. Dr. Grene is deliberating over whether patients should be released as he narrates the second half of the novel through his collection of research “Commonplace Book”. Dr. Grene’s narration contains a pivotal point in the story: he reveals that Rosanne has not shared all the information that brought her to Sligo Mental Hospital. The exchange of both characters’ piecing together the information presents an element of mystery which runs through the story. Dr. Grene searches for Roseanne Clear’s “real truth.” But throughout the book, Roseanne’s autobiography reveals the story of her own life. When Dr. Grene becomes the second narrator of the text, the truth the Roseanne’s story becomes distorted frequently.
In the article “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,”Peter J. Rabinowitz, presents a method to account for how the reader deals with “truth” within a narrative, distinguishing a range of different audiences and their relationships as an effective approach. Rabinowitz is ultimately searching for the truth below the surface of fiction as it pertains to the reader. In one section of the text the author claims, “first there is an actual audience. This consists of flesh and blood people who read the book.” Then Rabinowitz follows, “second, the author of a novel designs his work, rhetorically for a specific hypothetical audience. Like a philosopher, historian, or journalist, he cannot write without making certain assumptions about his reader’s beliefs, knowledge, and familiarity with conventions” (126). Rabinowitz is not only claiming that readers project their own beliefs and ideologies into how they interpret the text, but also that this could distort the truth that is within the text of a novel. Thus, the ‘real truth’ can become hazy or hidden within the text, and to interpret the text we as the reader must remove ourselves from anything that can sway how we are receiving the text.
The Secret Scripture’s real truth is distorted by the unreliable narrator of Rosanne Clear who often hides the truth, but reveals it in pieces in her autobiography. Dr.Grene begins to research and challenge Roseanne and create assumptions in his research when he is the narrator. Both Rosanne Clear and Dr. Grene clash information as narrators. This clashing of information hides the real truth within the text. The true element of the text is that, as the reader we are constantly questioning what is the real truth of the novel. In one section of the text, Dr. Grene even questions the ‘real truth’ of Roseanne Clear’s story, which reads:
Well, I suppose all these things. It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our life of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust. (293)
Dr. Grene’s statement rings true to not only Rabinowitz’s text but how we perceive the ‘real truth’ as readers of fiction. The real truth is that we never know the fullest extent of anything. There are always grey areas and holes in all forms of interpretation. The only true way to understand something is to separate all prior knowledge and receive it in its truest form, without any projections or assumptions to be made. That is the truth in fiction, that we should take something for what it physically is and not what we believe it is as a novel.
KKJM Reads 
Like I mentioned in my first blog, the author stated in an interview that this was inspired by his aunt who was locked away in a mental asylum and forgotten about. I agree with you on Roseanne being an extremely unreliable narrator. She seems to take part in two different lives when she talks to Dr. Grene and when she does her own autobiography. Personally, it makes me question what the actual truth is. I think you open up this book to a totally deeper meaning and it makes me want to reread the book to note the truths and lies that come up in the book. I wonder if the author wrote it this way because there are so many unanswered questions about his aunt and what exactly happened to her.
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I think you make a great point when discussing Rabinowitz’s argument of how our interpretations of a text cloud the real truth of it. For example, when I was writing my blog, I projected a great deal when discussing the ways in which women were treated unfairly throughout the book and how that is directly related to the ways that women were treated throughout history. However, it seems almost impossible to me that I would be able to completely remove myself and my thoughts, feelings, and opinions from influencing the way I am receiving the text as Rabinowitz suggests. Even if I tell myself that I refuse to allow my personal feelings to sway my perception of the text, it seems that I would still be unable to be completely objective because of the experiences I’ve had throughout my lifetime. The same goes for everyone else. Each person has had a unique set of experiences throughout their lifetime, which in turn causes them to have a unique set of perceptions. Because of these unique perceptions, even when approaching a text as a blank slate, every person will have slightly different beliefs and inclinations that they cannot completely suppress. For example, even if I withheld all judgement of whether Roseanne was being treated unfairly throughout the novel, the scene where she was looking for a place to give birth still would have brought the Virgin Mary to my mind, which has many automatic connotations of its own.
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As we brought up in our class last week there this no real truth. In a sense, this means that Roseanne is not in fact an unreliable narrator, or unreliable person. People who encounter Roseanne, Dr. Grene, for example isn’t looking for her truth but to see her view point. If more people viewed things like this, that their view points might not be so polarized. In my Writing, Research and Technology we read an article that said “Whether it’s unethical or not is kind of beside the point, because people are going to be wrong and they’re going to believe things on insufficient evidence. And their understandings of the things they believe are often going to be incomplete—even if they’re correct.” So in a way we as readers are going to believe what we want to believe unless we step inside the book and begin to see/ read what is actually happening directly in front of us, the words on the page. So in conclusion, I have to argue strongly that Roseanne is not unreliable biased on the fact that she is in a mental hospital, we would have in what my quote would say is “insufficient evidence.”
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