Same Same, But Different

You might have heard the 1,000-year-old story of two blind men wanting to know what an elephant looks like: The one who touches the trunk imagines and describes a very different animal than the one who leans on the stomach, pets the ear, hugs a leg. They argue over who is right, though we know they are both simultaneously right and wrong.

The Rashomon effect—the phenomenon of recounting the same event differently—comes from the title of the 1950 Japanese film by Akira Kurosawa, in which four witnesses remember the circumstances around the death of a samurai in four different ways. The samurai’s wife claimed she was sexually assaulted by a bandit, passed out and then awoke to find her husband dead. The bandit claimed he seduced the wife and then killed the samurai in a duel—and so on. The dramatic tension tightens around the fault of memory: Should the viewer side with one story, or are all four part of a single truth? The term drifted into academia in the 1960s after researchers saw that memory wilts under the power of suggestion, assumption or personal history. Different people experience the world in different ways, and so they cannot share in the same objective memories.

Remembering things differently is seed for fiction, poison for courts, scaffolding for gossip. The same event can be endlessly interpreted in multiple ways because reality—so say neurologists—isn’t consistent.

Cousins of the Rashomon effect are staples in fiction: the unreliable narrator; chapter-by-chapter rotating point of views; limited perspectives. There is, for instance, the scene in Ian McEwan’s Atonement when young Briony sees a man bully her older sister to undress and dip into a fountain. Later, we see this same event from the sister’s perspective, showing that she is, in fact, the one in control. The gap in perspective between Briony and her sister will make all the difference in the characters’ lives. Many stories depend on characters getting it wrong. The most famous might be Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: What he sees as a love trip through the American landscape, Lolita might remember as kidnapping and sexual slavery.

But literature suggests that there is an objective reality. You can find the truth of an event simply by looking at how the author represents and leaves the characters. Nabokov shows his narrator’s perspective as a twisted one, full of violence and self-deception; Humbert Humbert will only trick a naive and inattentive reader. Ian McEwan lets Briony’s incorrect recollection plow a path toward sadness, guilt and solitude for all the characters. It’s satisfying to think that there exists a clean memory that can be shared and understood by the characters to allow them—and the reader—a revelation. In real life, however, we must settle for only having the blind certainty of our own conviction.