At 83, Werner Herzog is a living legend who can and does do precisely what he wants. Like the strange, enchanting films for which he is best known, Herzog’s seventh book defies the usual conventions of structure, narrative arc and the delineation of fact from fiction, even as it addresses the very subject of truth.
This slim volume sets out Herzog’s views on truth in a world where technologically enhanced falsehoods proliferate. These appear to be an elaboration of Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration, the 12 statements he made in 1999 at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis. Much like the declaration, The Future of Truth contains strong, gnomic opinions which include despising cinéma vérité because it obscures more than it illuminates, as well as a plethora of surprising sentences such as “rather die than wear a toupee”.
Two principles are central to Herzog’s idea of truth. First is the notion that seeking truth is a greater goal than finding it. As he puts it, “the quest itself, bringing us nearer to the unrevealed truth, allows us to participate in something inherently unattainable, which is truth”. The second is that bare facts can provide little more than a boring “accountant’s truth” that is less useful than what he calls “ecstatic truth” in helping people understand what’s really going on in life.
It’s like listening to a fireside monologue from an entertaining uncle. The weirdest and most compelling tale, among some stiff competition, is the story of the Palermo pig. Once upon a time, according to Herzog, a pig got stuck down a straight-sided sewage pipe in Palermo, Sicily. It remained wedged in there for years, surviving on scraps of food thrown down to it. Eventually the pig took on the shape of its container. It became a kind of translucent block, “ghostly pale … wobbly as a great hunk of Jello”, taking in nourishment from above, ejecting waste below.
Herzog uses this story as an allegory, linking the Palermo pig to the perils of long-distance space exploration. Should humankind embark on a voyage to our nearest habitable planet, it would take centuries. During this time Herzog envisages the intrepid travellers would be forced to inbreed, becoming “mutants” with no comprehension of the purpose of their mission. Eventually the astronauts would morph into pale, maggot-like beings rather like the Palermo pig, capable of little more than eating and shitting.
This morbidly fascinating and unintentionally hilarious handbrake turn from Sicilian sewers to space mutants offers a lesson in Herzog’s concept of ecstatic truth. Because, as I discovered to my dismay after spending quite some time trying to track down any record of this intriguing and biologically implausible cuboid swine, the Palermo pig appears to be apocryphal. I had been pursuing the miserly “accountant’s truth”, a reality grounded in mere facts. What did it matter whether an incarcerated Sicilian farm animal actually turned into a quivering square jelly? The real point of Herzog’s story suddenly hit home: penning animals into small spaces for long periods is unwise and creates monsters.
If anyone else had written The Future of Truth, I suspect they would come under critical fire for odd choices in structure, rambling, contradictory statements, and, to put it bluntly, taking the piss out of the reader. After all, Herzog devotes five whole pages to the histrionic plot of an opera just to demonstrate that when art forms contain concentrated, intense emotion, we “invest this preposterous kernel with the full array of our own feeling, so that it seems mysteriously genuine”. However, because this book is a collection of uniquely Herzogian mindfarts, it resists a panning. Michael Hofmann’s sparkling and inventive translation from the original German – a crypto-zoologist is described as “a ham sandwich short of a picnic” – somehow makes Herzog more Herzog in tone.
While much of the The Future of Truth will be familiar from his previous books, films and interviews, one relatively new element is his meditation on deepfakes. Herzog refers more than once to an AI-generated perpetual conversation between fake audio versions of himself and Slavoj Žižek online. Since his own methods of getting at ecstatic truth have included inventing quotes by famous figures and casting actors in his documentaries, there is a risk of hypocrisy. The distinction, he argues, is that an intelligent mind would be reasonably able to discern lies in older forms of media, while AI is so new and so powerful that our ability to identify them is seriously impaired. “We have grown up with radio and photography. We need to do the same thing now with the internet.”
Conveniently, Herzog rejects the notion that this is either a self-help book or a serious philosophical engagement with the concept of truth. Even so, he does offer advice: cultivate your critical faculties, walk around more and read lots of books. The book concludes with a two-sentence chapter that feels like either a prank or a Zen koan. As with the whole enterprise, I can’t quite decide if it is absurd, profound or an ecstatically truthful mix of the two.
• The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann, is published by Bodley Head (£14.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
