Fact or Fiction

I’m planning on going back to America and becoming a teacher of English Literature, which got me thinking that perhaps I should start reading fiction again.  For the past year and a half or so I’ve read nothing but non-fiction, almost entirely popular science.  I’ve read introductions to astronomy, physics, and cultural anthropology.  I’ve read to some depth in evolutionary biology, psychology, mythology, and religion.  I’m familiar with Occam’s Razor, Bertrand Russel’s Tea Pot, Fred Hoyle’s Junkyard and Karl Popper’s (justified) insistence that a non-falsifiable hypothesis is not a scientific one.  I know about the problem of inference.  I believe in the scientific method.  I read some of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on cognitive biases and had to retreat into my room for a week because even though everyone was wrong about pretty much everything, none of them had any idea.

Have you ever heard of the narrative fallacy?  Writers (and readers) of fiction are often wont to talk about the power of story, how we crave it, how it lifts us up, how we use it to transmit wisdom and a sense of belonging from generation to generation.  The stories we tell, they say, shape our lives.  I believe this is true.  The human brain has many jobs, one of which happens to be a storyteller.  Without a running narrative to link things together, the world becomes a mass of billiard balls bumping together for no reason at all.  With a narrative, however, you can see that the billiard balls are bumping into each other because somebody with a stick is momentarily commandeering the laws of physics in an attempt to knock them into a hole.  If you took a couple of steps back, you could probably come up with a compelling story why.

The fallacy is that compelling stories are often wrong.  And not just that.  It’s that utterly bogus, completely compelling stories seem more believable than unequivocally true, dry-as-dirt statements of fact.  The stories don’t even have to be terribly compelling.  They just have to be plausible.  Sports reporting is especially guilty of this.  A baseball player starts hitting well and you get stories about the tweaks he made in his stance or the couple extra hours of batting practice he took the day before or the new eye drops he found at Bartell Drugs.  Maybe some of that helped.  Maybe it didn’t.  The point is that the stories are believable.  They establish a simple cause and effect relationship that harmonizes with our simple cause and effect notions about how the world works.  Struggling baseball player works hard gets better.  Of course.  It’s a good story.  A good story that may be total bullshit.  Maybe his team was playing the Royals.  Or maybe he starting putting a new brand of pine tar on his bat handle.  Who knows?

  Ultimately, who cares about sports reporting.  Those guys need to make a living, too, so let them sling whatever stories they want, and let whoever wants to eat them up.  It’s annoying to have a conversation with someone who slams speculation on the table as if it were fact, but at the end of the day it’s no big deal.  If I were a baseball executive I’d make sure that I surrounded myself with the type of people who knew good stories from hard facts (which, in all reality are simply good stories themselves), but as a baseball fan what’s the big deal?  Sometimes speculation is fun, as long as you’re aware that’s what it is.

  The question I’ve been asking myself recently is whether literature is simply the history of human speculation written in fancy words.  Do we have, here, a host of people who have tricked themselves into thinking the whoppers their brains spat out are true?  If so, how can I teach that?

 The next question is, can I get away with calling the great literary works of human history (as far as we can tell) “whoppers.”  No, probably not.  Why, though?  What exactly is the point of literature?  Is there a point?  Should we all just pull out our calculators, lock ourselves in broom closets and try to come to grips with the geometry of the universe?  Does literature deal in Truth?  Does it have to?

These are questions that I have to answer before I step in front of a group of kids and start talking to them about Shakespeare.  The world, let alone the universe, is a very big place, and there are obviously a lot of different types of things to know.  People often put physics on the iron throne because, as far as we can tell, all things reduce to it.  When you get right down to it, there are the rules of quantum mechanics, and upon that mysterious bedrock that everything is built.  Unless, of course, there is something underneath quantum physics, but that’s beside the point.  In this intellectual day and age (perhaps in every intellectual day and age), we like to think that there is some substance fundamental to the objects and processes that make up the universe, and that is where you find truth with a capital T.  That is where you find, unequivocally, that which truly is.

I don’t really buy that, of course.  The question of whether there is in fact a fundamental substance is an open one, unresolved by minds more well-built than mine, but even supposing there was, and we found it, it would still only exist on the fundamental level.  I can’t begin to guess where that is, but I imagine it would be really small.  Too small for anybody to experience.  The world in which we live is, though perhaps made out of fundamental stuff, entirely lacking in it.  We live on a much bigger scale, and meaningful human truths ought to be rendered appropriately.

And there it is.  There are meaningful natural truths that have little bearing upon human matters except as a condition of our existence (think the strong nuclear force), and then there are human truths that have little to do with nature except as we relate to it (think anything written in a poem).  I think literature is a valid way to explore the subjective interaction between human brains, beings, and the various environments in which they find them themselves.  I won’t say that literature can’t take on cosmic truths.  I would say, however, that it should be very careful when it tries.  Humans are certainly capable of glimpsing bits and pieces of universal truth.  That’s what science does when it’s at its best.  Literature informed by universal truths sifted on the pans of science is great.  Literature runs into trouble, however, when it confuses simply human truths with cosmic ones.  The two are separate and must be kept apart.

  I’ve been reading a little bit of Stephen King recently, and it’s making me think.  Partly about the difference between story-telling and literature, partly about which I think is better suited for what it does.  The book I’m reading is called 11/22/1963, and it’s about a guy who goes back in time and tries to stop the Kennedy assassination.  Like most of Stephen King’s books, it’s full of half-glimpsed magic and veiled supernatural forces.  Occam would slice it into pieces that Christopher Hitchens would then laugh into a garbage can.  It is a carnival game of shoot the logical fallacies.  It is a metaphysical fog and I was lost in it.

That’s when I realized I was doing something wrong.  I started thinking about another story, this one a card-carrying work of literature.  An enigmatic man named Thomas Pynchon wrote a short book called The Crying of Lot 49, and whereas nobody in that story goes back in time to stop anything, it too is full of half-glimpsed magic and veiled supernatural forces.  In King’s world they are real; in Pynchon’s they are almost assuredly not.  Pynchon’s world is probably closer to the way things really are.  Demons in the dark and angels in the clouds are almost assuredly figments of our overactive imaginations.  Our mental lives are cluttered with trash, and Pynchon is in there with a flashlight.  You’re left disturbed by the fact that it’s all bolted to the floor. 

King does something a little bit different.    He approaches the trash in the attic and turns it on.  Causation, probability, agency, intention, all of the things that we fumble with in real life have handles there.  As a description of how the real world actually works it is miserable, but as an example of how we think the world works it is masterful.  

The real world is indescribably complicated and our brains do us a favor by simplifying it.  If they didn’t, we would all be dead from overexposure.  What you see is certainly not all there is.  What you see is all you need to keep going, which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t a lot.  Literature, I suppose, is forced to take this into account.  It has to catch glimpses of truth through tiny, broken windows.  Or, perhaps, as is more likely the case, the reader of literature has to.  After first deciding what are windows and what are walls.  That’s probably why reading literature gives a lot of people headaches.

 Fiction for fun, however, doesn’t necessarily have to do that.  Fiction for fun can tune the boundaries of its world to the pitch of our imaginations.  Even though rocks and trees and buildings almost assuredly don’t have thoughts, we come equipped with the capacity to put thoughts pretty much anywhere.  Fiction for fun can put that capacity to work.  We come from the factory with a tendency to confuse coincidence with fate, and fiction for fun can build a world where prophecy isn’t always self-fulfilling.  It’s kind of nice.  The truth doesn’t lurk in a well arranged string of words, but a particular type of pleasure does.  Good writing doesn’t necessarily get to the root of things, but it is something we want to trust.  When reading fiction for fun, you don’t have to worry too much about whether or not you’re being bewitched by somebody with a silver tongue.  I don’t know what I’m really trying to say except for that reading can be like playing in the theme park that comes pre-loaded into your head.

So what am I going to tell my kids, whenever I get them?  Shit man, I don’t know.