The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling
Jijingi is a boy who lives in Tivland as part of the Shangev tribe, a people who were willing to bend to European rule and taxes as opposed to suffering. When Jijingi is 13, a European comes to live in the village, much to the apprehension of the villagers. The man is a missionary named Moseby who is shown to be kind to the villagers. One day Jijingi finds him reading from a book and is shocked by Moseby's use of paper. Moseby introduces Jijingi to writing, the act of transcribing events on paper for future people and shocks Jijingi with a retelling of the story of Adam, which Jijingi can hardly believe is as old as Moseby claims. Upon hearing about this, Jijingi becomes fascinated with the art of writing and asks Moseby to teach him.
The story than skips forward to Moseby explaining how to write to Jijingi who is having trouble. This is due in part to Jijingi not understanding separation of words. Moseby explains that each word you would speak should have its letters, or "marks," spaced together. Jijingi equates this to sentences being like the leg of an animal while words are the bones, and the Moseby leaving spaces is like the joints that bring bones together. This gives Jijingi a better idea of the whole of a sentence because he can finally understand the pieces that make up the whole.
Again the story moves forward to an ambitious Jijingi wanting to record stories told in his village. At first his writing is not nearly fast enough to keep up, but another European visitor named Reiss records the stories just fine and makes a copy for him. In doing this, Jijingi sees the difference in a story on paper and a story told by a story teller. They are of course the same story, but the storytellers in his village bring the stories to life with their voices and motions. Jijingi also notes that Moseby writes down his sermons but the stories he tells aren't nearly as captivating. Moseby explains he does not write down his sermons because he wants to tell an entertaining story but because he carefully chooses his words so that he says exactly what he intends to. Jijingi doesn't understand until he hears the storyteller tell the same story that Reiss had recorded but tells it differently. Jijingi understands that some stories can use different words for the same effect while sometimes it is better to refine what you write for a specific impact.
The Tivland sections in particular exemplify the titular dichotomy, the truth of precise events and the truth that comes from how people remember it.This comes to a front when Jijingi turns twenty and becomes the scribe to his village. In doing so he begins recording the decisions of trials presided over by the chief. He introduces Moseby to the concepts of vough and mimi, or as he relates it what is precise or what is true. To the Shangev, it does not matter if the small details someone speaks are vough if they are mimi.
During this time, the Europeans demand that the many tribes of Tivland join into no more than eight septs for easier communication. Sabe, leader of the Shangev, believes they should join with the Kwande but many oppose him. Jijingi uses his role as a scribe to his village to find the history written down about the decedents who founded his home village by the Europeans. In doing so, he discovers what the Europeans recorded about the family lines that ruled his home and that Shangev descended from Jechira and not Kwande. Despite these facts recorded on paper, his chief refuses to believe this to be true. In doing so Jijingi learns that something can be vough, can be precise, but that doesn't mean that people will accept it as truth. Jijingi accepts Sabe's decision even if he doesn't agree with it, realizing that his search for truth has been disrespectful to what his elders feel is true.
We felt this section relates to the core themes of the story, with it having a major focus on the conflict between what is factually true and what people believe to be true. Writing can help us maintain what happened as it truly happened, but our memory is constantly changing how we remember events and shaping how we perceive things. Sabe was factually wrong to say that they should join with the Kwande tribe, but it was what he believed was right. This section ultimately askes of the reader, "what is right?" And the most interesting aspect is that there is no single correct answer. Any interpretation has a chance to be valid, much like how both the Europeans and Sabe could be 'right' about what truly happened.
Works Cited:
Ted Chiang, Exhalations. The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling
Stratford Link